#atm i am still meditating on finer details of what a veronaville!rosaline should be like. personality and aspiration and all that...

[tank-grunt]

i rlly want to be interested in veronaville but it overwhelms me tbh. but the viola/rosaline sim concept rlly intrigued me, how would u incorporate a rosaline sim?

OKAY SO LIKE... in romeo and juliet, juliet's sole confident is her nursemaid (ostensibly named angelica - if it wasn't intended to be her name in the original play by shakespeare it has become her name in multiple adaptions since) who was mentioned to have been a mother to a daughter. her daughter was named susan iirc, and she died before the play begins - but veronaville takes a lot of liberties with shakespeare so who cares about that. lets add angelica - possibly a teacher at school or a friend of the late cordelia, or even both! - and make rosaline angelica's daughter, alive and well instead of long dead. thus we make her juliette's peer, best friend, and sole confident instead of just her only unseen cousin (who only sometimes gets to physically appear or be focused on in adaptions following the original play)

this would have two implications:

1. she theoretically could have been a simpler, easier choice of partner for romeo monty - associated with the capps but not one of them, and not directly involved in the feud, so no one would object to his pursuit of her. possibly even actively desirable to his family as a potential significant other... but she's not interested! however its through romeo montague's pursuit of rosaline that he even meets juliet capulet - he attends a party to see rosaline, but finds more of a match in juliet.

so imho adding rosaline would add more spice to romeo monty and juliette capp's dynamic, because i think in the context where rosaline could have been the favorable match for romeo in his families eyes it becomes more meaningful that he chooses juliette in the end. and it would give them a more interesting meeting than just happening to know each other since they were little kids - which is fine, childhood friends to lovers is a sweet dynamic and i often love it. i just also crave more spice in veronaville. teehee?

and then 2. this would give juliette, like, more companionship outside of her family and like. puck. no offense to puck but puck is everyone's friend, he's not specifically juliette's friend. but rosaline would be specifically juliette's friend and not specifically a sibling or cousin, not her boyfriend's sibling or cousin, and not Everybody's Friend™. someone fully on her side and her side alone that she could truly confide in and trust about a feud that is actively destructive. with rosaline as angelica's daughter and an unrelated peer also has the added benefit of adding another unrelated household to a neighborhood that only has like. 3 families total.

and thennnn with her as angelica's daughter, translating angelica's role as a nursemaid who partially raised juliet to that of a school teacher and/or close friend of such a wealthy and influential family, there are implicit expectations that would be placed on her - though narratively flexible because one its sims and two the particulars are dependent on finer details we're not going into here, but its an interesting jumping point. and then theres a matter of whether an outsider can truly remain impartial to the feud forever -- would she eventually be forced to pick a side? what would be the consequences of picking a side, let alone one that may be seen as the wrong side? delicious.