A Slap in the Face

I said once in an earlier post that I was thankful Sims never had fertility issues or miscarriages. I never considered child death to even be a possibility. I knew that if you didn't take care of the children, social services would come and take them away, but I never knew that the children could actually die. Even pregnant women seem to have a sort of immunity against death.

I say all this because the other day, I watched one of my Sim children drown. No, I did not trap him in the pool intentionally. In the Sims 3 you have to actually build walls around the pool to trap them in, since simply removing the ladders does not prevent them from exiting the pool (they are able to climb out of the sides of the pool). No, he just floundered and died.

Truthfully, I didn't even know he was in the pool. I was on the other end of the house, watching Fedaykin teach baby Marcus how to walk, and occasionally glancing over at Caspian painting in the living room. It was an otherwise calm and collected Sunday afternoon. Suddenly, the event camera jerks me over to the pool, just in time to see Pye slip beneath the water. I paused the game to stare in shock at his corpse, just suspended in the water. The knowledge that there was nothing I could do, that he was dead, that I had played for several hours without a save so I couldn't reload, that all the plans I had made for him were now useless. Pye was gone.

 I un-paused the game and watched as the Grim Reaper showed up and most of the family ran outside to mourn and cry in shock. I have decided that this shot is one of the saddest and most horrifying screenshots I have ever taken in any of my Sims games. Pye, the child, begging for his life from the Reaper, who watches coldly while the child's grave lies between them. I will admit, I cried a little bit, not because I particularly liked Pye or anything, but because he was a child. A child.

Forgive me if the deaths of children hit me particularly hard.

Forgive me as well if the idea of a child, who for whatever reason must die, dies by drowning - is also particularly painful - I had a close brush with drowning as a child and was narrowly saved by one of my little sisters and my dad.

I suppose I had been living in this dreamworld where I felt the Sim children were immortal, unable to be harmed by fire or flood or famine, and that the worst thing that could happen was to be placed into state care. It was quite the slap in the face to learn otherwise.

Not something I ever wanted to see.