Out of blatant curiosity, why do so many people feel sorry for Dustin Broke? I mean, I understand that he comes from a poor family and his father died, but isn't he just another textbook example of a common criminal who had a bad childhood, who, in the real world, would likely convert his naive, goody-goody girlfriend into a criminal rather than Angela cleaning him up as EA suggests?

Not judging anyone, I'm just curious to see what others have to say on the matter.

Mostly because he's not really that way-in my view, he drifted into crime on a whim and a bet from his friend Gordon, (who is a criminal Townie) and hasn't been able to break away from it so easily. He just wants to have his own life, and money figures pretty heavily in that picture.
Actually, he wants to do better and be a better person, but there's nobody around who is able to guide him properly. His father dying so suddenly didn't help at all-and his mother is useless.
His family has always been poor, and considered the 'lower class' by the rest of Pleasantview-which made him feel like an outsider. That he has a girlfriend from one of the richest families in the town is considered outrageous and unacceptable.
So he determined from the beginning to 'show them all' who he was, by making as much money as possible by any means available-and crime seemed to be the only way for him.

Since when is it bad to feel sorry for someone because they're a criminal?

You don't have to agree with or condone someone's actions to feel sorry for them and what led them to those actions.
As for Dustin i've never actually played PV so I have no idea though I do plan on playing PV eventually.

I mostly have the same POV as FranH. To me he seems like a nice but clueless kid who got stuck in hopeless situation after hopeless situation, and as a result he is at a loss at what to do with his life now. If you couple in the fact that his mother has no job despite their poverty, I also think Dustin mostly went into the criminal career because he was desperate to support his family. He does have a fairly good relationship with his family, so besides wanting to get himself out of poverty to improve himself, providing a better environment for his little brother is also a factor. His bio does say he wants someone to tell him what to do, so I'm sure he'd be in a better situation if someone had stepped up to guide him in a better path. Since Brandi seems to ignore him, it seems he went by his friend's advice instead, who is a criminal himself.

I agree with a lot of what has been said here. I feel bad for people who had bad childhoods. And I guess the feeling extends to Sims. Dustin has a bad mother and a dead father who probably wasn't father of the year when he was alive. He hasn't done anything that bad yet and there's still time for him to turn his life around.

It's not, it's just a lot of people don't.


That's pretty much how I see him, but then again, isn't that how a lot of criminals start out? Broken families, little money, the wrong friends, the wrong place at the wrong time. Although he does actually have a lot of nice points; I had two store asset protection employees pushing and shoving Angela and Dustin and it was Dustin that freaking cried over it, so I made Angela get into a fight instead of Dustin. How many people steal from grocery stores out of desperation? How many people get into the drug trade because they can't find any other way to feed their family?

I think he has potential. He looks like a great guy on the inside, and it's clear that he has good intentions. He's been through a lot for youth to handle - a sudden death of his father, his mother pregnant and partially ignoring him, severe financial issues in the family... etc. Since nobody was there to help him through, he fell into a life of crime, not because he was evil (Who is, really?), but because he was trying to help his own family. If you could, you can go into the lives of "dangerous criminals" and learn that they weren't necessarily born a demon in disguise, but because of what happened in their lives that made them end up where they are now. Take Hitler, for example. He wasn't born a Jew-hating dictator - but his abusive father and all the universities rejecting him made him feel lost, which was a contributing factor to his taking over Germany. Same with Dustin Broke - he wasn't born with the intention of smoking crack and running away from a looted store with a few thousand Simoleans tucked underneath his shirt. He's just been through too much, and nobody came in to his life to counsel him.

I see Dustin as a gang member, not because he wants to be, but because he feels he has to be. This would explain the memory of getting into a fight with his friend Gordon King (initiation). He isn't really friends with anyone in the gang other than Gordon. The gang he is part of probably goes into big box stores and steals things to sell on the black market (that's the retail employee in me, seeing it that way), hence Dustin's position as a street hawker. As for his girlfriend Angela, I think he really cares about her, and he really admires her, but I don't see the shy and naive girl turning him around, especially when her family is determined to put a wedge between them. Being that Angela comes from a dysfunctional family, I can actually see her wanting to tag along with her boyfriend and do something delinquent together. He probably thinks he is good at what he does, but he really isn't, and therefore he will likely get caught easily (he can't even sneak out with Angela without getting caught, how can he survive very long in a life of crime?). That could be a bittersweet situation for him though; having a juvenile record is never a good thing, but it could show him the error of his ways, kind of like on the show Beyond Scared Straight. At the same time, if he's in a gang, it won't be easy for him to separate himself from the gang. I see his relationship with Angela coming to an end when he gets caught, especially if he somehow brought her down with him (like if they went on a shoplifting spree together); I see her family sending the two twins off to boarding school (since they're rich) to separate them from Dustin. Dustin will probably never have an easy life; the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Yeah, we're supposed to feel sorry for him. Its just that, there's something about his facial features that makes him look sad/trouble-minded/worried. And, about him being with Angela; you don't really need to change him, he can stay a criminal and hide the fact from Angela. In my game though, he'll most probably stay in the Criminal career until he goes to college.

Reminds me of Dexter Morgan dating Rita. In my game last game though (and more than likely in my next), he wasn't hiding the fact from his lover.

In my current uber-'hood run, he's still in the crime career and living in one of the warehouses in Belladonna Cove.

During my last Pleasantview round, he went on a crime spree alongside Angela. They kind of turned into Bonnie & Clyde.

Because he's thirteen or fourteen, and we don't see in Western culture thirteen-year-olds as being adults, with adult moral judgement or adult consequences for their wrong-doings, unless the wrong-doings are so horrendous that we have no choice, and even then we're more likely to see mental illness than evil. For juveniles we have special separate detention facilities, special courts, names can't be made public, and the records are sealed.
Add to our cultural beliefs Dustin's nice points, his nature hobby and the odds are he'll roll a non-criminal LTW, and it's easy to see how he gets viewed as having been pushed into his job by his circumstances.

It probably helps that The Sims 2, like The Sims before it, treats the criminal career track like any other. This makes all the criminals more sympathetic (except for those the player chooses to make unsympathetic, and NPCs such as the Unsavoury Charlatan and the burgulars). So the thing that would make Dustin a villain in the real world (i.e. the crime career) is "normalised" in The Sims 2. Once that's taken away, you have a young man from a bad background, and the crime is simply one more feature of him that a player can use to add nuance to his character.

Different players will, of course, characterise differently, because they regard the information they are given about Dustin differently. That is one of the fun things about the pre-made characters - most of them have several alternative ways they can be perceived, while still having definite and distinct characters.

In my own game, Dustin got adopted by the Hick family after Beau got taken away by social services and Brandi left SimHampton to get a better life for her unborn child elsewhere. Nobody's adopted Beau yet because there's been little demand for toddlers in SimHampton. Nathan Hick, the family patriarch, noted Dustin's unfortunate job situation, noted that it is difficult to extricate oneself from the crime scene in SimHampton, and hatched a cunning plan. He ensured that Dustin studied hard to become a top student instead of a low-performing one, while letting him keep a minor criminal position to avoid his bosses suspecting anything. The plan worked, Dustin was soon admitted to university and the crime scene lost a promising young talent to more respectable pursuits. Better still, the Hick family got extra kudos from both legal and illegal sectors of the neighbourhood for its well-applied cunning.

Dustin is now a successful sophomore (I think he's studying literature) and the co-founder of SimHampton University's fraternity with Gavin Newson. With his newly expanded horizons, is unsure where he wants to take his career. All he knows is that his adopted family would be disappointed if he returned to crime (its senior members are all good friends of the town's movers-and-shakers, and are order-orientated). He's not currently in love with or dating anyone, and Angela Pleasant died of cybersickness quite some time ago, early in her adulthood (she wasn't scholarly enough for university).

Merry Christmas!

Never having played Pleasantview, I have got to know Dustin Broke mainly through freefalldreams' posts in the What's happening in my 'hood right now? thread, and I can't help feeling very sorry for him there. I'm a few posts behind in reading that so I'm not even sure if he's still alive, but I know he's in mortal danger. He comes across as a bright intelligent boy in an impossible situation. Any misdemeanours of his own pale into insignificance compared to crimes committed against him and his family. In fact he comes across as a highly moral character, desperately trying to protect Angela even if he can't save himself. I do hope freefalldreams feels sorry for him too!

If I ever play Pleasantview, I'm sure I'll try to reform him, because I always try to make things better for my Sims. For the last few months I've been trying, with some limited success, to make the Capps and the Montys like each other again, so I must have some chance with a 13-year-old! I'm sure, with Angela's help, I can help him make good!

My Dustin totally changed.He's now an elder,and married to Angela.
But,i never felt sorry about him.Maybe because he is a sim,and he cheated on his wife. xd

I've played Dustin numerous times, and he isn't nearly as bad as you've painted him to be. As much as I like the Broke family, Brandi is pretty much useless (at least for me), when it comes to maintaining a job and taking care of her family. Dustin was just dealt a bad hand. In every situation I've played, he always turns his life around (goes to college, marries a nice girl...not always Angela...one time he even married her sister), and ends up taking care of Brandi in her old age, and helping to raise the final Broke boy.

I've never pitied him. There are plenty of REAL people in the exact situation. I've always seen his family as a challenge is all.

He's an underdog, and almost anyone can identify with that. And he can play out the whole self made man trope rather well to if you choose. Good character.

Yeah, I do tend to side with the underdog in situations.

Dustin never reformed in my neighborhood, he just used his talents more productively by becoming a business mogul.

I think we feel sorry because he's a sim and we sort of associate ourselves with him.

In my hood Dustin had a wish to marry a rich sim and he just happened to have three bolts with a local millionaire sim! After marriage, he had no need to continue following his criminal career. Incredible luck.