Strangetown, Here we Come is a The Sims 2 Machinomic started in 2007 by the pseudonymous Strange Tomato. The story tells about the lives of the characters from The Sims 2's premade neighborhood Strangetown, focusing on a trio of friends: Johnny Smith, Ophelia Nigmos and Ripp Grunt. As the story has gone on, characters from other neighborhoods have stepped into the story, too.
Not to be confused with The Smiths' 1987 album Strangeways, Here We Come.
The story can be read here
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Provides examples of:
- Alliterative Name: Zoe Zimmerman, Beau Broke, and Chloe Curious.
- Ambiguously Gay: Buck to Jill and the audience for many chapters. He turns out to be straight and in love with her and they eventually get together.
- Anal Probing: Subverted. It's commonly assumed by Sims that the aliens use a probe, but Stella explains (and demonstrates) that their approach to reproduction with Sims is more physical.
- Arranged Marriage: Pollination Technician 9 tries to set up one between Jayne and Johnny in order to preserve their alien genetics. She's all for it, but he has doubts, and ultimately rejects it to be with Ophelia instead.
- The Artifact: Jayne Doe started out as something of a main character (or as much as you can get in an ensemble series), even being the focal character of the prologue.
Word of God implies that she was originally supposed to be Johnny's love interest after he broke up with Ophelia (who would then date Ripp) but as the series focused more and more on Johnny, Ripp, and Ophelia as a trio, she got less and less screen time. She was eventually put on a spaceship when it became clear that the original plot for her character would not work with the direction the story was going. - Big, Screwed-Up Family: The Worthingtons have their share of real issues, including a mother with addiction issues.
- Binge Montage: Ripp has several of these. One is shared with Jaxy Rai, who has similar issues with substance use.
- Boomerang Bigot: Dina Caliente has a deep hatred for aliens, despite being 1/4 alien and wouldn't mind if retribution against the aliens destroyed her and her family.
- Bizarre Alien Biology: Aliens, including hybrids, are strictly vegan out of necessity as they can't digest foodstuffs like eggs. They also have hybrid genitalia and can produce "pollen" that has the power to impregnate both male and female Sims.
- Breakout Character: Frances just started off as a Satellite Character to Tank, but turned out popular and interesting enough to become one of the most important characters with plotlines of his own.
- Chivalrous Pervert: Ripp loves nothing more than having sex with as many women who will have him, but he makes a point of never disrespecting any of them unless they want him to pretend like he is. He just likes women too much.
- Coming-Out Story: Frances J. Worthington comes out at his big sister's wedding.
- Convenient Miscarriage: Buck has one in Chapter 35, after getting pregnant by Jill, and he didn't even know until the miscarriage.
- Creator Cameo: Strange Tomato's Simself can sometimes be seen as an extra in the background.
- Do You Want to Copulate?: Stella is a pure alien, with no prior knowledge of Sim sexual conventions. As a result, most of her pickup lines are very direct.
- Driven to Suicide: Opheila as dreamt by Nervous after Ripp and Johnny both disappeared from her.
- Embarrassing Middle Name: Frances is embarrassed by his, and Edie uses it to affectionately rib him.
- Erotic Dream: Later on, Tank starts having heaps of these involving Lucy. It freaks him out enough to make him see a psychiatrist. Also, Ripp apparently has these involving pretty much all of his friends.
- Exotic Equipment: Full-blooded aliens have combination genitalia.
- Expository Hairstyle Change: Used on Ripp, Jill, Frances, and Tank to show character development.
- Fantastic Slurs: The aliens are sometimes referred to as "ass babies."
- Friends with Benefits: Ripp and Stella had sex in order for her to better study human reproduction and ended up becoming good friends in the process, but love never resulted and they parted amicably.<
- Greek Chorus: The Grunt family's fishes in Chapter 23.5.
- Half-Human Hybrid: Johnny, Jill, and Jayne.
- Hello, [Insert Name Here]: Ripp was given this option when he initialized Kendall's servo, resulting in her unfortunate name, Sugar Tits.
- Heir Club for Men: The reason the Worthington family had three daughters before Frances.
- Hypocritical Heartwarming: When Ripp screws up Kendall's servo and so hits her Berserk Button causing her to rain verbal abuse, Tank defends him, claiming that while he might not act too different at times, at least he knows that he does love Ripp deep down.
- Incest Subtext: Doesn't happen in canon, but Strange Tomato made a female Sim to represent Tank and Ripp's absent mother based on their personality and appearance. However, because she didn't come with the game, she didn't register as being related to Ripp. Not only was he attracted to her, but when Strange Tomato did a test to see who he had the most chemistry with, guess who popped up?
- Incompatible Orientation: Frances and Tank.
- Kissing Under the Influence: Ripp and Frances kiss while the former is drunk and the latter is seriously upset due to having been turned down by Tank. They have no interest in one another, though, and the event mostly serves to bring Ripp's bisexuality out of the realm of subtext.
- Love Chart: One is provided here.
- Love Dodecahedron: Although there aren't a lot of love interests, they tend to overlap a good deal. For example, Ripp, Johnny, and Tank all have things for Ophelia at some point, Johnny also considers marrying Jayne, who eventually falls in love with Stella, who studied sex with Ripp for a while. Ripp is to blame for a lot of it, but not all of it.
- Love Triangle: The main trio end up with Johnny and Ophelia going out and Ripp being in love with her, segues into Ophelia beginning to go out with Ripp as well as Johnny, and then Ripp also ends up in love with Johnny with hints that it would eventually become Polyamory.
- Making Love in All the Wrong Places: Beau and Frances end up having sex in a public garden.
- Musical Allusion Title: The title is a play on The Smiths' album Strangeways, Here We Come. The creator is a fan and makes other references to the band in the story. Mr. Doe, Jayne's father, is a Sim based on Morrissey.
- My Sister Is Off-Limits: Johnny is somewhat like this when someone expresses interest to Jill.
- Oblivious to Love: Tank had no idea that Frances had a crush on him. It helped that he had no idea he was gay, either.
- Odd Couple: Tank and Frances appear as this from the outside, but they end up being surprisingly similar, both being rather socially awkward Neat Freaks with a dedication to pleasing their fathers.
- Out of Focus: Once Ripp, Johnny, Ophelia, and Tank go off to college, the characters back in Strangetown get this increasingly, especially once Buck and Jill leave as well.
- Parental Abandonment: The Grunt boys, Ophelia, and Nervous Subject. This is lampshaded by Ripp in chapter 28.
- Perma-Stubble: While he is sometimes shown shaving, Ripp's stubble seems to mostly mirror his mental state and always magically drifts back to just the right amount.
- Pointy Ears: The aliens, or at least the full-blooded ones.
- Polyamory: Eventually, Johnny, Ripp, and Ophelia get into a relationship in which both Ripp and Johnny are going out with Ophelia. It is implied that the relationship might end up with Johnny and Ripp going out as well.
- Post-Kiss Catatonia: This happens to Ripp after Johnny kisses him.
- Power Trio: Johnny = Superego, Ripp = Id, Ophelia = Ego.
- Quirky Household: The Curious and Smith clan is over half alien and their family tree has some interestingly tangled branches, causing them to be viewed as a Big, Screwed-Up Family by some, but they are mostly functional, despite all this.
- The Summerdreams are extremely quirkly, yet extremely functional.
- Recursive Fic: This fic is often considered the standard for Strangetown characterisation, so it's not uncommon to see other The Sims fic written based on it, if not in the same universe altogether.
- Robosexual: Because he's a romance Sim and servos take on the traits of the Sim who activated them, the activation in question between Ripp and Sugar Tits ends up feeling like an orgasm and he almost takes it further before he's interrupted.
- Second Love: Beau for Frances and Buck for Jill.
- Shout-Out: The story gives frequent reference to the gameplay of The Sims 2, works that the author is inspired by, and other Sim stories (simgaroop's The Broke Legacy is one example).
- Smitten Teenage Girl: Jill toward Ripp. She gets over it.
- Their First Time: Between Buck and Jill. It goes well.
- There Is Only One Bed: This is the case in the cabin Johnny books for him, Ripp, and Ophelia in a later chapter. Ripp assumes Johnny and Ophelia will be sleeping in it together and that he'll have to sleep on the couch. In reality, Johnny was okay with them all sleeping together in it.
- Title Drop: The title is used as the last line in chapter 28, from Johnny's point of view. It is in reference to his complicated relationship with both Ripp and Ophelia, which he compares to all the other aspects of his life that are less than perfectly normal. The expression is more figurative than literal in this context (Strangetown is used generically, much as "crazytown" would be), though both could apply.
- Troubled Sympathetic Bigot: Tank and his father when it comes to aliens. It helps that the aliens don't turn out to be so squeaky clean, after all, and in fact the General's conspiracy theories were actually pretty accurate.
- Unfortunate Name: Sugar Tits. In Ripp's defense, he didn't realize it would be permanent...
