Remaking Canon

Making your favourites kiss in The Sims 2

- Aimee Hart

"If you don’t like it, why don’t you make something else that you do like?” is one of those questions that many inside fandom spaces have heard, especially when directed towards minorities, and will continue to hear probably until the end of time. It’s a crappy retort that, at its heart, pushes aside real, troubling issues in favour of the artist’s vision.

My favourite character in The Walking Dead, Andrea, met a grisly end in the third season finale. So, like any other reasonable person, I decided I was going to change the ending completely. Not by petitioning a complete rewrite of the season, I’ll leave that to Game of Thrones fans, but by making a new one by myself in The Sims 2.

As I found out, I wasn’t the only one who handled my love for a certain media turning sour by turning to The Sims, specifically The Sims 2. There were others like Shannon, who told me they used the game in order to change what had occurred in media that they liked. These weren’t just changes like “I didn’t like the ending of a show”, sometimes, they were to rewrite aspects that they felt were completely negligent to the media’s minority audience.