The Jeong-Espinosa Family: Heart, Head, Hands, Hector

As Mike and Claudia transcribe their knowledge for future generations and Kendra and Hector learn their place in the world, we seize the opportunity to sample four slices of Jeong-Espinosa life.

These distinct personalities do have their moments of family bonding,

but easily stand on their own. Let’s get into some heads.

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Claudia

Juan Gabriel serenades Claudia from her computer’s built-in speakers as she lightens her emotional support Stoli by a couple ounces. The only way to fit the bottle on her desk is to set it atop a pile of cocktail napkins covered with pre-cookbook scribbles, with lower strata dating back to before Hector was born, neglected in an ongoing battle between Claudia’s usual anti-worry pro-be-happy mantra and her disinterest in writing. It was so dull, she could hardly focus. Maybe she’ll come up with an optimal ordering for her grandmother’s pupusa recipes if she stares at one particular scratch on the desk trim long enough. When she does make progress, Claudia remembers she actually does have to follow the above-referenced rules for technical writing, and removes several paragraphs complaining about what gringos have done to fruit.

Three hours/one sentence later, she chucks the empty shell of her writing companion into a pile with the others (recycling! Save the planet) and searches for pretty much any distraction. Like Mike’s body! Yes, he wanders off when she wants more, but that’s nothing new.

Mike acts like a cat, and not in a sexy way. He responds to Claudia’s requests for affection by walking away and falling asleep on the couch. He ignores Claudia until she has food. Instead of scratching the couch, he ends up trolling the Sims forums until they require a 15-post minimum for new members.

Mike initially captivated his wife by being entertaining, and his perception of Claudia hasn’t evolved since then: he still sees her as a member of the audience. Romance is a performance. It’s something Mike does to demonstrate what a good husband he is. Serenading her, for example, only works because he’s such a fantastic singer; if he wanders off to post dismissive comments on /r/worldpolitics afterwards, it’s because he doesn’t have enough energy to interact with her. She doesn’t know what it’s like having to be ‘on’ all the time.

Yet this approach works for Claudia. Works of fiction are designed for her to understand; reality is not. It’s easier to keep the streets of a city clean when that city is a set. It’s easier to follow a preset script than to improvise. There would be times when the performance ends, and Claudia processes the difference between fact and fantasy while she lies awake in bed, except she passes out long before such introspection can happen. How do you keep things fresh after nearly 30 years of marriage? Simple: with a reduced ability to form long-term memories, your relationship can be just as magical as it was in the honeymoon phase. Claudia knows how to keep things light.

Hector is the only one of Claudia’s children to have inherited her blind optimism. She’s stoked to finally have a conversation with someone about how nice the sky looks today, not demons, cell physiology, or Mike. Claudia’s omnipresence, however, neatly divided his parents’ roles in Hector’s toddler mind: Mom handles the tantrums, Dad swoops in a couple times to do fun stuff. He used to shut down before she could pose an opinion about which Backstreet Boy that cloud looks like. Now, due to a series of food-based bribes, they’re each other’s favorite person, separated only when he goes to school or she works on her dang cookbook. Claudia’s not sure what’s happening with her other children—but, to be fair, Charlie is never in her direct line of vision and even adult Sims lack object permanence.

If she were to remember she has an adult son, Claudia would be more concerned about her own age. Several of her friends—those in Powerhaus, Partihaus, etc.—have adult children themselves. The implications are clear. Parties. Birthday ones.

Jade Rosa couldn’t age up without throwing a rager, if your criteria for a rager include the number of yogurt parfait servings.

As Claudia fantasizes about planning her own birthday party, she realizes how little she cares about growing older, which strikes her as odd. Isn’t aging supposed to be a universal fear? Isn’t she supposed to be mourning the loss of her youth? And yet, aside from the nagging feeling she’s going about life wrong, none of this matters. Either she’s given up or she’s done the arithmetic and realized some inequitable force prolonged her young-adulthood, so to complain would be ungrateful.

At her “writing” desk, Claudia’s wandering eye is drawn to a year-old cocktail napkin suggesting “Birthday party: yogurt theme???” It’s too late. She crumples it up. Claudia is forced to spend her precious cookbook time coming up with a plan B, which takes several days. Her new theme is The Gym. The idea being, everyone shows up at her house to eat cake, then goes to the gym. Hector can come too.

Gym enthusiasts Xiyuan and Aileen coexist in the same room without partitioning it like a war zone. That type of drama is traditionally reserved for children’s birthday parties.

Sneaking a sip of the tequila that lived behind the bookcase, the birthday girl watched her friends share stories about exercise, laugh at Mike’s antics, be Hector. How lovely. What a nice day she was having.

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Mike

Mike is a great Sim.

Mike initially wanted to be a comedian, which he was. Everyone loved him. His fame predates the existence of a fame mechanic. Then, he easily transitioned to a career in business because he was such a smooth talker, and was promoted to C.E.O. He’s a fun guy, not usually the suit-and-tie type, but he took the job to support his family. It’s just a little something great dads and husbands do.

Mike’s virtues don’t end at a pretty face and a pretty everything else and a silver tongue and passing knowledge of profanity in eight languages, plus knowing all the words to “Despacito,” he’s also a genius. That’s why he left his stuffy desk job (which was an act of self-sacrifice, remember) to explore space as an astronaut. And he excelled there, too, because his universe recognizes an exceptional man when it sees one.

Mike doesn’t have to put a shirt on; all his shirts broke. He goes to the gym a lot. Sometimes, going to the gym once isn’t enough for him, which is the reason he also has a set of weights in his room. Everyone at the gym knows him because he’s there all the time. Here he is kicking toxic masculinity in the face in the style of J.D. from Scrubs.

Mike has been the smartest person in the family and the best at making things since before Charlie was born. The Geek Festival suits him perfectly. He doesn’t have to cosplay because people there recognize him, either from several cameos on cult classic sci-fi shows or as an interplanetary pioneer. He was hoping to test-drive the fancy rocket, but, upon his arrival, two unidentified people co-opted it for banging.

The rocket didn’t come back down for the entire rest of the festival, by which Mike couldn’t tell if he was impressed or concerned; it was more likely to have crash-landed in a different site than to stay in orbit as its operators last for six hours. That is, since Mike isn’t capable of doing so (see third image, above), it’s likely impossible.

His wife won the videogame competition. He didn’t enter, which improved her chances, and congratulated her afterward. People are always whispering about how lucky Claudia is.

Mike is the only person capable of using every skill-requiring item in the house. Sure, the kitchen is Claudia’s domain and Kendra has her monster drawings, and Hector is probably also doing something, but Mike can do all three plus whatever Charlie was trained on. It just comes to him so easily. To be frank, ‘genius’ doesn’t begin to cover it, because he’s just as comfortable with creative/athletic pursuits as he is with chess. He loves similes connecting life and chess. Life’s a game, and once you come to this realization, you’re already one step ahead of all your opponents. Nobody he’s talked to is capable of appreciating the depth he conceals so well behind his expressionless eyes.

Here he is making a drink like he taught himself to do. Mike has no issues controlling his juice intake, unlike some other Sims. He also has no trouble finishing books because he’s good at writing.

Because Mike sacrifices so much of himself for other people and spends so much time focusing on self-improvement, he may have forgotten what day it was.

What?! Clearly Mike shouldn’t have to plan his own birthday party.

He’ll have a talk with Claudia about it when she gets home. He’s not going to yell, because yelling is clearly something only bad people do, but has to remind her of her expected organizational spousal duties somehow. Maybe he’ll call Xiyuan as well. He pushes a well-written friendly notice about it onto his social media profile, displacing several pictures of his food/art creations, documentation of his most recent abduction, and 473 posts wishing him a happy birthday.

Nobody ever appreciates what he does for this family. Nobody.

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Kendra

Kendra has two modes: discomfort and artistry.

Discomfort as demonstrated by her inability to fix a stupid dishwasher, shocking her stupid self and leaving her unable to prevent puddles/piles of unidentified scrap metal from spewing all over the stupid place.

Artistry as demonstrated by her framing of three-quarters of the duofamilial second generation behaving in character.

These modes are non-exclusive—Kendra already spent her childhood operating in a combination of both by drawing monsters until her little hands cramped—here implemented recently as she stares so hard at a painting of a sad clown, an actual sad clown materializes just outside her bedroom door to harass her.

Kendra was delighted at successfully summoning a fictitious being and tried her hardest to befriend the sad clown. Sad clown did not appreciate her questions about the logistics of living in a painting. Sad clown is good at rebuffing advances of friendship.

Kendra’s not thrilled about receiving an invitation to a dance party at the worst nightclub (the one in the neighborhood called Wind Bluff or Tree Stone or two other concatenated nature things. You know, the neighborhood with exactly one Jeong-Espinosa) until both Charlie and Jo show up, giving Kendra a chance to spectate her brother’s love life. She knows his reserved nature would make starting a relationship difficult, as well as prevent him from speaking out if this were something he felt unsure of, so she’s cautiously keeping an eye on the whole thing.

Charlie spent the first two hours sticking to his m.o. of standing one foot from the bar, refusing to sit and trying to figure out whether to attempt eye contact with the mixologist as she prepares his drink. But now he’s approaching Jo! Kendra watches them in her peripheral vision while she pretends to be invested in her response to the eighth consecutive Naruto slashfic sent to her ironically by Wyatt. Charlie lets his alleged girlfriend into his personal space radius—a radius Kendra could clearly picture, having been reminded of its existence several times in her childhood, and having repeatedly perturbed her distance from her brother post-warning in order to estimate its range within a couple inches—and is greeted with a kiss. He even reciprocates!

Kendra sends Wyatt a picture she drew of a reverse mermaid holding a severed arm in its fin. The hand on the arm is giving a thumbs-up.

After a prolonged text conversation with Shu re. Charlie’s relationship status and its legitimacy, Kendra heads to the street fair in case she ever needs imagery for a story set in a dilapidated apartment. Her appreciation turns into excitement as she finds her Holy Grail exposed to the elements on a garage-dust-covered folding table. What’s Marcus Flex doing, giving away this lump of clay?

Kendra shells out 15 simoleons to adopt Clay Jeong-Espinosa. Clay finds a new home collecting lint and finger oils at a rapid pace, given how many Sims change his shape on a daily basis, and continues to trap Kendra’s heart in between his silicate tetrahedra. Along with what she hopes is one of her hairs.

With Kendra’s clear adoption of Bohemian principles, Shu reckons it’s easier to drag her into his entourage than to lay out the merits of each individual party three days in advance to Charlie. Kendra’s since put him in her “hell no” pile, romantically, but Shu is extremely talented at both art and making Sims uncomfortable, and his ongoing fight with decorum is hilarious. Where her brother would stand paralyzed in horror as their friend carries out yet another hypothalamic social interaction with a stranger, Kendra hides her laughter while documenting his actions in her Ideas journal. Tonight, Shu chooses to spend the second half of this dance party repeatedly attacking Braylen for no particular reason. Kendra is there for the inauguration of five brand-new insults, the most offensive being “Rollie fucking Eggmaster.” She’s stoked.

Kendra, a skinny 15-year-old girl, doesn’t hesitate to interject herself into a fight between two grown men. Her doing so calms Shu enough to stop screaming his own interjections.

Without the foresight to send Aileen an invoice for babysitting, our heroine instead goes back home to pencil out a digestive system for a marketing-buzzword-vomiting skeleton, addressing at least one of the practical issues that was bugging her. Maybe tomorrow she’ll illustrate one of Shu’s turns of phrase.

Her phone buzzes from another of Wyatt’s texts linking a piece in which the author inserts an idealized version of themselves into an anime Kendra doesn’t watch. She sends him a drawing of a unipede, a bug with 100 legs that share a single foot. The foot is attempting to give a thumbs-up but you can’t really tell.

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Hector

Hector has spent his childhood osmoting Claudia’s behavior, from her sunny yellow passion to her more thematic liquid-based habits.

He’s ready to end his childhood, but ends up being cheated out of an important rite of passage: Kendra is in charge of planning his birthday party, and prioritizes inviting other teenagers over her parents’ feuding friends. For Hector, this fact is overshadowed by the presence of a third cake.

Hector continues modulating the theme of his mother’s personality, following her Foodieness with Gluttony. The Espinosa culinary traditions are safe.

No teenager goes through school without losing sleep over their own cringey social interactions. As such, Hector chooses to take the quantity-over-quality approach, hoping to numb himself to such mistakes before bending the rules of conversation into something his own. He considers himself “above cliques,” the implications of which involve inserting himself into any conversation at any lunch table, causing the other teens to form the indices of complete graph K_{n-1} with hesitant eye contact acting as the edges. (AN: Sadly, I would have to give WordPress more money to be able to use MathJax.) Hence his starting aspiration, Friend of the World.

The more important issue is whether Hector’s fashion sense will grow with him.

Hector upgrades his signature hat from cap to boater—which he asks his family to call a canotier, actually—and develops the aesthetic of someone who’s really into the idea of Cuba, but not the timely Cuban men’s fashion, just something emulative of a 40-year-old man who traps people in conversation about his recent cruise to the Caribbean.

The kids’ room becomes an attempt at Cuban-inspired interior design which is technically in character, given Hector’s shared lack of decorating sense with his part-time controller. Said controller is a huge fan of the banana leaf wallpaper.

Teen Hector is now allowed near hot stoves. He asks his mom for cooking tips ASAP, which kind of makes her wish she’d finished the cookbook. Mother/son bonding time becomes one endless discussion about where to use different kinds of chili peppers, the correct way to fold empanadas, the sorry state of mangoes in this country, how to fix an online recipe by doubling garlic and spices unless it’s something like hummus. Hector cracks jokes during the lesson. At one point, he lays a book on its side and pantomimes it talking like a puppet.

In the adolescent Sim’s natural environment, Magnolia Promenade, Hector’s amiability starts an I Love Lucy-esque pile-up on the conveyer-belt road which each teen uses at least once daily. Are there no conversations happening? He’ll start one. Are you about to leave the party? Think again.

Leaving Hector to simmer (and Claudia to ferment), we check in on adult Shu and his adorable dads. Hopefully teenage Father Winter won’t buy a bodega in the interim.