The old tomb raiders were obviously hugely based on sex sells. the ads had half-naked 300 polygon lara and all that. So for the reboot trilogy starting 2013 they seemed to have wanted to scale that back a bit, make it more “woke”.

It feels so much more misogynistic to me than the old titles with her scantily clad outfits because it changes the dynamic from “Lara Croft is a badass who kickshoots a T-Rex to death wearing hotpants” to “Lara Croft ends up in weirdremovedy sex and/or torture situations a lot while wearing cargopants”.

I’m not going to claim the old Tomb Raiders are like bastions of even good examples of feminist media but the 2013 Tomb Raider is especially bad at this. Lara as a charcter does beat the odds but my god is half that game women torture porn and all the payoff it might have had at the end is basically thrown overboard entirely by the time the sequel starts. I mean you end up that game showing a lot more skin than you started out with but not because Lara the character figures hot pants and a crop top is a pretty good outfit to go spelunking in old aztec temples in but because it is literally torn apart from a combination of enviromental hazards, animals and human enemies. The sequels at least turn down the gruesome death animations which in the first reboot one are insanely focused on showing Lara getting penetrated by spears and sharpened sticks. It is not at all subtle.

  • TraschcanOfIdeology [they/them, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    23·
    3 days ago

    but find i struggle to understand why you would need to stretch it to use ‘woke’

    I see your point, but also I remember coverage of the game at the time making a lot of hay about “remember the sexist drivel Tomb Raider? It’s come back, but now it respects women!”.

    Of course, this was right in the middle of “what if franchise but DARK AND GRITTY”, so everything had to have torture porn to be considered “mature” or worthwhile at all. A known vice of that kind of media is that it loves putting women in thinly veiled torture fantasies, while still claiming to be progressive or feminist.

    If I had to guess that’s what OP meant by “woke”, because at the time it was considered to be woke when compared to the original games.