This is a continuation of my reply to @peridotlionheart, who asked about my old sims and gameplay! 💚
This part will be all about Annika (or Anastacia, as she was called back then) and the Latal clan.
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1. Latal Lore
Dang, now there's a name I haven't heard in forever.
The Latals are a VERY old family I used to play waaay back in the day. They were one of the first (if not the first) custom families I made in TS2, and for a while, their brood reigned supreme in my hood. At their core, they were this drama-free, happy-go-lucky bunch that lived their cozy little life in their cozy, cc-free McMansion.
If memory serves, the Latals started out with a dad and his two sons; the sons went on to have families of their own, and then those kids went on to have their own families, and so on and so forth.
One of the two brothers, Jack (I think that was his name??) married a lady called Anette (this is her!)
Anette was a Family sim with the "Have 10 children" LTW, which I was actually crazy enough to attempt (the first and probably last time I'm ever doing the 10-kids LTW, lol). Anette got her LTW, and I ended up with a whole gaggle of Latals.
I actually found this ⬆ screenshot of their family tree, bless Past Me's lil' heart for taking it. It shows one of Jack and Anette's adult kids, Julius, and his numerous siblings. Yes, those are all his siblings in the relationship panel! (And yes, they all had completely different dressing styles. I had to tell them apart somehow!) Here's some more pics I found of them in various life stages.
I sadly don't recall all of their names, but here are the ones I do remember: Clayton, Selena, Julius, Daphne.
The last recollection I have of playing the family was Daphne (one of the youngest kids) growing into an adult & starting her own flower shop. The business was blooming (pun intended, lol), but it took all of my time and energy to maintain and that's how I ended up hating playing OFB businesses. 😆 I likely played them even past that point, because the pic above of the two elders sitting together and discussing death is titled 'Clayton and Daphne'. The Latals sure had a good run!
When I rebuilt Margitaville/Neo Margitaville somewhere around 2012 (due to hood corruption or a PC reinstall, don't remember which), the Latals sadly didn't make the cut. The reason? The sheer size of the family. By the time of the move, the family spun 4 generations and 20+ sims, which was impossible to translate into a new hood. That's how the Latals were left behind, but in a sense, their spirit still lives on, because…
Clayton Latal was good friends with Gabriel Blackbird. Selena, Clayton's sister, married Gabriel, and the couple had a bunch of kids: Marcus (sounds familiar?? 😉), Anastacia, Madelaine, and a fourth sister whose name I can't remember to save my own life. There might have been a fifth sister, but I'm really not sure. Bottom line, the Latals and the Blackbirds were related in the Maggie Town/Margitaville era!
Also, this just occurred to me: Marcus' grey eyes, which I kept in every iteration of him throughout the years, was actually a trait inherited from his maternal grandmother, Anette Latal!
That's a bit of lore even I had forgotten about! Amazing what one can discover by combing through 15 y/o Sims 2 screenshots!
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2. Anastacia VS Annika (And Other Notable Blackbirds)
Now that we've got the Latal family tree all figured out, let's take a look at the Blackbirds!
As I've mentioned above, Selena Latal was the wife of Gabriel Blackbird and mother to Marcus, Anastacia, Madelaine, and one (or two) more sister(s) whose name(s) I can't recall. Worth noting that the Blackbird family had a different surname in the Maggie Town era (it was Blackbrick, don't ask), but the name 'Blackbird' was the standard from 2013(ish) onwards.
Now, about Anastacia. While you correctly guessed that Anastacia and Annika are both the same person (Marcus' younger sister) in different universes, I wouldn't exactly say they're comparable. The Anastacia in the Maggie Town era had a very different life to the Anastacia in the (Neo) Margitaville era, who in turn had a very different life from the Annika we know from the BaCC.
In the Maggie Town/early Margitaville era, adult Anastacia married into this whacky rich family called the Montgomeries:
The Montgomeries started out relatively normal, but quickly devolved into a whole trainwreck. I won't go into too many details, but in short:
The Montgomery matriarch became a chaos-sowing evil witch;
The Montgomery patriarch died and was brought back as a zombie (and then died again);
The Montgomery daughter (Margaret?) got into a fire, became an evil witch, and began turning townies into zombies & imprisoning them in the basement of the House of Fallen Trees, where she lived. She also kept a teen girl in the house whom she may or may not have kidnapped from her real family.
A perfectly normal sim family, amirite? /s
There was a boy in the mix too - a shy, socially inept kid who, I believe, was born after Montgomery Matriarch semi-resurrected her husband and rekindled their romance. This kid later went on to become Anastacia's husband.
Frankly, it was a match made in Hell. The two had clashing personalities to boot - Anastacia was strong-willed, assertive and confident, while her husband was a reclusive loser who spent more time at his robot bench than with other sims. Feeling trapped & miserable, Anastacia started an affair with a man named Phillip Sanders. Phillip was everything Anastacia's husband was not: charming, handsome, and utterly smitten with her. Their affair resulted in a child, a little boy. His name? Godric.
Last thing I remember from playing this incarnation of Anastacia was her kicking her useless husband to the curb and staying behind in the mansion to raise Godric on her own, all the while continuing her affair with Phillip Sanders. We love a happy ending!
In the 2012 (Neo) Margitaville era, I decided to be kinder to Anastacia & give her a happier (if not entirely drama-free) life. The Montgomeries were scrapped for good and Anastacia was free to start with a clean slate. Almost.
The new incarnation of the Blackbird family included Gabriel & Selena, Marcus & Anastacia, and their children from previous partners/marriages: Marcus' son Remus and Anastacia's son Godric.
How those marriages/relationships came to end was not relevant for my gameplay; what did matter to me was that Marcus and Anastacia were free to remarry, which they eventually did.
Coincidentally, both siblings were paired up with Moonfeather elves: Anastacia got hitched with Iziliel, while Marcus tied the knot with Aruena. The unions were harmonious and fruitful, to say the least. Marcus had four children with Aruena while Anastacia had three with Iziliel. Just look at that branched-out family tree!
For the BaCC, I wanted to rebuild Anastacia from the ground up. She got a new name - Annika, a new visual identity (I used an entirely different face sculpt on her), and was aged down to a child. And while some of Anastacia's zesty personality was preserved, the Annika we know from Wyvern's Bay is very much her own sim, free of the relationship drama of her predecessors.
...Or is she? If you follow my BaCC, you know that Annika is currently a teen who's dating a red-haired guy called Phillip (Gladwyn). They're also expecting an oops baby. If it turns out to be a boy… three guesses as to how I'm going to name him! 😉
