Fortune & Romance is a Machinomic made with The Sims 2. It is a prequel to the game's storyline, focusing on the lives of the premade Maxis sisters Dina and Nina Caliente.
The story can be found here
. Character page is here.
Tropes in this work:
- Author Appeal: The author admits that the story makes her come off as a robot fetishist.
- Beast and Beauty: Servo and Nina, but the temperaments are inverted so that the beauty is the one with rage issues.
- Chekhov's Gag: Servo staring at Nina's butt in Chapter 3.
- Chekhov's Gun: Remember Bella's secret cowplant from Chapter 5? As of chapter 10, it becomes a possible murder weapon.
- Color-Coded Characters:
- Dina often wears gold. When she chooses to open up to Mike she's wearing green, an alien color.
- Jennicor and her family are almost always in black.
- The Kaylynns only ever wear white.
- Nina and Don often wear purple, the color of woohoo hearts.
- Circe's always in pink.
- Bella always wears red.
- Does Not Like Magic: Simis Bachelor which led to him abandoning his family, and Micheal giving up magic.
- Doomed by Canon: We all know what happens to Bella and Michael several years later, not to mention the Tricou family and Rainelle.
- Entertainingly Wrong: Mortimer picks up on all the clues to Dina's alien background to the point of figuring out she's a green supernatural creature who accidentally caused Mr. Big's disappearance, yet he still comes up with an entirely wrong conclusion.
- Expy: Probably unintentional, but Mortimer Goth is a fast-talking, occasionally-dickish, flithy rich, witty mechanical genius with a mustache.
- Fantastic Racism: Pretty much all the main characters have to deal with this in some way, Nina and Dina for their alien ancestry, Mike for his witchcraft, Servo for being a robot, etc. Brigit embodies this by being prejudiced against anyone non-human.
- Foreshadowing:
- Michael and Dina's first conversation involves him pointing out that the heroine in a romantic comedy usually chooses love over money in the end.
- In Chapter 3, Bella jokes about someone "dropping dead on the dance floor" and a "banshee foreshadowing someone's death". Guess how the chapter ends?
- Funny Background Event: Something to look out for.
- During the Tricou ball we see Kiernen and Kvornan making out with their wives, then each other's wives, and then each other.
- Girl-on-Girl is Hot: Don regarding Nina/Brigit in the April Fools Day teaser.
- Internalized Categorism: Servo especially struggles with this, while Dina and Mike also show signs of it in regards to their alienism and witchiness respectively.
- Love Triangle: Don/Servo/Nina, Mike/Dina/Ocean, and Jennicor/Jon/Rainelle (which can also be extended to include Elden)
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: There are moments in the story that are clearly a result of magic, however there are also times where it is left ambigious as to whether or not something has a supernatural explanation.
- Mistaken for Gay: Michael and Mortimer, by Dina.
- Polyamory: Most of the Tricous
- Running Gag: Brigit repeatedly running away from things is quite literally this.
- Shotgun Wedding: Bella and Mortimer's wedding, though both were happy about it and it's implied it was Bella's plan to get away from her father.
- Shout-Out: Tons to The Sims 1.
- Teen Pregnancy: The reason Bella and Mortimer got married.
- Title Drop: Chapter 3 - "And after that we headed to Sim City in search of fortune and romance...”
- And again in Chapter 12 - “Well, I hope you’re not coming to me for approval, because I have said all I have to say to you about matters of fortune and romance.”
- Wacky Marriage Proposal: Ocean proposes during a funeral, right next to the open coffin.