on Nessa Phoenix and Sim cancer

I realize now that I never blogged about the gameplay tidbit that prompted Nessa's cancer storyline, which I promised I would write about after her story was finished.


Back in the TS2 LH, Nessa was about 34 years old when it was first mentioned in the story that she was sick, which I figured was already well into her treatment at that point, since it was only a couple months later that I'd given her the first "all clear". She's 38 now in TS3 LH, and four years cancer-free. Of course she is, since she exists in a completely new body and game, lol!

But what prompted the cancer storyline? Besides morbidity and my habit of letting personal fears and past traumas seep into my storylines, I mean...

In TS2, there was a short but terrifying time that her Sim was glitched. It was an awful, awful glitch, and I had no idea what was causing it. It made her Sim unusable. She was literally "pixel-sick". All I knew at first was that she could interact with some Sims, but not others. With some Sims, any interaction at all would cause a snap-reset, even autonomous interactions.

I took out all my hacks and CC. I tried everything I could think of. I put her Sim in an awful CC hair that looked like a fake wig. And for a whole winter, story time (about a week in real time) I was faced with the gut-wrenching prospect of having to lose her. I was so, so sad. She had a two year-old son, a husband of twelve years who loved her dearly, and she was working toward the top of her career. Not only that, but as bad luck would have it, Jack's brother, Hayden also lost his wife a few years earlier (tragic roll of the ROS). Brutal as I am to my Sims sometimes, I couldn't stomach the idea of having both brothers lose their wives so young. I know they're just Sims, but you know how attached we can get to our Sims sometimes, after watching them grow up and live their lives. The idea of having to lose her, especially her, tore me up.

But my game couldn't go on with her glitched the way she was, causing snap-resets with half the Sims she ever came in contact with. If I couldn't fix her, she would have to die. :(

Finally, after reading pages upon pages of Google searches, I stumbled upon the reason for her "sickness".

She had the aspiration bug glitch -- which happens when a Sim, for unknown reasons, will lose her aspiration assignment. Where she was once a Fortune Sim, she was now just blank. It doesn't seem like it would be such a big deal for a Sim to be aspirationless, but it caused one very serious problem: the game couldn't calculate an attraction score with other adult Sims (straight men and lesbian women), which is something the game tries to do with every interaction a Sim makes with another Sim of potential attraction. Thus when an interaction was prompted, whether autonomously or manually, the game glitched out and caused a snap-reset.

The "cure" was fortunately very swift and effective. I just had to stick her head in that "head fryer thingy" (ReNuYou Orb or something...), and reset her aspiration. She was cured.

Of course I could have just ignored it all, but I felt such a powerful story there, and who am I to pass up a good story idea when presented? ;)

She had a terrifying "pixel-sickness" that could have been fatal, but luckily was swiftly cured = early stage cancer, an effective round of chemo, and now four years cancer free.

Mostly I felt pulled to tell her story in its relation to Hayden and Summer and the rest of the Phoenix family. Jack and Nessa were always secondary characters compared to Hayden and Summer, so Nessa's sickness could have easily been pushed aside. I push aside gameplay nonsense all the time when I'm trying to tell stories. Except that it felt too important for this family. I'd gone there in my mind already. I'd imagined how their lives might have played out if they lost her. All that fear of losing yet another loved one, having suffered one terrible loss already, and then the epic relief of finding out she would be okay after all. I saw them each dealing with this new health scare in their own individual and important ways -- some positively, like Summer; and others less positively, like Hayden and his mom, Sophie -- ultimately bringing them to a point where they could unbottle some long overdue emotions and finally move on.

So I put my big girl panties on and wrote a cancer storyline in a Sim story.

And I gave Nessa the happy ending that my own loved ones weren't so lucky to get.

Four years later, she's healthy, happy, and alive. She's tearing up the business world again. She and Jack are still happy and in love as ever. Aaron is in school now, and they've added a second child to the family, a little boy named Rowan. And best of all, there's no foreseeable "pixel-sicknesses" in her future.

How's that for a happy ending to a very heavy story? I may write sad stories a lot of the time, but I've always had a soft spot for happy endings. :)