Genderbend Challenge

The final interim challenge I’ll be doing is the Genderbend Challenge. No one actually nominated me for this, but I did it anyway. Very presumptuous of me, I know. But I know I loved seeing it on other people’s blogs, so I guess my hope is that some of you will be interested in seeing what my characters look like as the opposite sex, too.

I didn’t do a pretty photoshoot like a lot of people I’ve seen, because I absolutely loathe posing sims and find it really tedious, lol. So here is the Gen 3 family, in all their unedited glory!

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First up, we have Dion. 

He looks… pretty much as I would have expected, really. Sims 3 is really terrible at a lot of genetics-related things, one of which is how proportions are converted when switching from male to female, or when the sim ages. Ever had a child sim that was super cute, then when they aged up they looked like a duck? Yeah. (Cody from Gen 1 is my worst example of this – comparison here and here so you can see what I’m talking about.) As a rule, I don’t like to edit sims who are born in-game, but the way my female sims look does not tend to translate well to the male face. So lately I’ve taken to editing my sims a bit to make up for it, which to me feels like cheating and I feel really guilty about it. But my poor male sims deserve a fair shot. Otherwise, they just end up looking like that. ^

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Next is Dion’s wife, Lucy. 

This is basically what my female sims look like if I try to edit them so that their male children won’t be ugly. Objectively, she looks okay, but I’m personally not a huge fan. Side note – that’s another thing I’m trying to work on, introducing more genetic diversity to my sims, mainly through the looks of the spouse-to-be. There’s more than one way to skin a cat, as they say, and there’s also more than one way to make a sim look pretty. We’ll see how it goes.

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This is their eldest daughter, Gabrielle.

She’s kind of a weird mix of her parents, but mostly she looks like Lucy. Except somehow… worse. To be fair to poor Gabrielle, if this was someone else’s sim, I’d think she looked fine. But I’ve always known that Gabriel wasn’t as good-looking as Hugo. I guess I thought he’d look better as a girl?

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Next up is the middle child and eldest twin, Hopper.

Damn, what a cutie! The suit jacket doesn’t hurt either. Makes sense though, because Hope is basically the girl version of Luc. Personally, I don’t think she’s as pretty as most of the other girls I’ve had in my game, but I guess she can take comfort in the fact that her alternate-universe self is fine af.

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And finally, we have the youngest, Helga.

She’s actually pretty cute, but not at all what I was expecting. I thought Hugo looked so much like Diana that Helga would basically just be a clone of Di. I guess Helga’s genetics are more mixed than I gave her credit for. I honestly wouldn’t mind having an actual sim that looked like this. I took these screenshots before I decided on the heir, and honestly Helga’s looks as opposed to Gabrielle’s was a strong element in Hugo’s favour.

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So there we have it! I’m all caught up now. Stay tuned for chapter 4.2, and the continuation of “Gabrielle”‘s story.