malymin

One thing about the Sims franchise is that it has always been pretty aggressively abelist?

Mostly an ableism of absence. I can't make a blind sim, a deaf sim, or a sim who uses a wheelchair, or any number of other physical disabilities. Walking canes exist, but only elderly sims are allowed to use them, and even for them it's purely aesthetic. I struggle to find a way to represent developmental disability, or traumagenic illness. Sims, more often than not, feel deeply allistic to me as an autistic person, no matter what traits I give them to try to model how I or other autistic people think. You can't really make any kind of plural sim, at all - but then again, I don't trust the Sims to handle that.

Because the Sims also has a pretty bad history of making psychosis and other divergences labeled as "insanity" a punching bag. The "insane" trait in the Sims 3 is so deeply, deeply rooted in abelist ideas of mental illness, of severe mental illness as both morally depraved and a hilarious laughingstock. Look at how the list of "lifetime wishes" that "insane" sims naturally roll are largely associated with villainy. The "erratic" trait in the Sims 4, originally also called "insane" at launch, is at best slightly better, for not explicitly aligning "erraticness" with the concept of evil... but I don't think it's by much.

I can't speak for the Sims 1 or Sims 2. But I doubt it's much better there. And you know, the Sims has never had a way to adjust a Sim's height, so of course you can't make a sim with dwarfism or gigantism, either - because you can't even make someone at the "typical" extreme ends of short and tall.

The closest I've ever felt the Sims 4 has gotten to modeling what disability feels like is its take on werewolves, where they end up skipping from work and ruining their social lives because of meltdowns, developing individualized "temperaments" that make anything from loud noises to being indoors to intellectual pursuits more stressful and draining. And that's... a fucking werewolf. I love werewolves, I love monsterhood as a metaphor, but if the only way I can make my sim feel disabled is by making them nonhuman, something is... wrong.

No matter how much the series tries to improve with regards to race and queerness, disability gets left behind in the dust.