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.
Remember when joss whedon liked writing strong female characters so he could put them in increasingly terrible situations and everyone thought it was feminism for a while? This reminds me of that
Yeah Yahtzee did a video about this issue with the reboots, as well as female protagonists in AAA gaming generally, a bit back. His observation was that when male characters get banged around in action games, it’s presented as something they shrug off, a good grunt in pain and then off to beat up more baddies. Whereas with games like the Tomb Raider reboots, it’s presented, as he put it, as “lingeringly traumatic.” Thus developers make the characters more victimized by the banging around than heroized by it like their male counterparts get.
The way injury is handled especially again in the 2013 one is weird as fuck because it shifts wildly from having your liver impaled by a stick of rebar is hindering at most to who gives a fuck at all
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I can’t remember if twas Rise or Shadow, but you visit old gulags in Siberia. One of your obligatory Ubisoft Third-person Open World collectable tasks is to lower USSR flags around the area. Another is to burn propaganda posters of USSR space travel. They do a little history blurb collectable thing too and make the gulag seem like Auschwitz.
It’s Rise, basically half the game plays there. Also you can’t lower the USSR Flags until much later when you get the knife so it’d require purposeful backtracking to tick off some boxes.
I wouldn’t take the plot too seriously on account of how the fuck did nobody take any interests in the random lush valley clearly visible from satellite imagery that is in the midst of siberia
This was definitely a thing that was in the creative zeitgeist at the time. The one that stands out the most to me is Heavy Rain, where the female co-protagonist can’t just be solving a mystery and dealing with dangers related to it like the other characters, she has to get randomly accosted by every serial abuser and killer in the entire city in sexualized ways that the male characters never experience.
I think that’s more convergent evolution because that happened in David Cages 1999 Omikron, 2005 Fahrenheit / Indigo Prophecy. By Beyond: Two Souls it’s the entire game and for Detroit: Become Human the woman is also a robot
I’ve been saying this before but I’ve always hoped they’d bring Lara back to her roots as just some glory-seeking, kinda amoral treasure hunter who mostly goes on adventures for the sport of it, just lean into fun pulp
For some reason they always try to make her into a blandly noble and heroic character who wants to make her dead father proud or whatever
focused on showing Lara getting penetrated by spears and sharpened sticks. It is not at all subtle.
But consider how much easier it is to gaslight you that actually you’re the pervert if you think this has a sexual element.
I don’t even think they did that. Mostly because from what I remember the “problem” was mostly the average capital G-Gamer complaining lara wears too much clothes with about a 20% share of those being hype for it because they made her younger. I swear to god I learned the word neotenic from the Tomb Raider subreddit due to this reason.
the word neotenic
Here I am knowing that word because of axolotls. The funny frills they have are external gills most species (of salamander) lose in adulthood.
Unrelated, How the heck do we have no axolotl emotes?!?
resembles a salamander but evolves from wooper which is based on an axolotl… probably the closest we’d get
I’d advise you not to click on anything related to the new Tomb Raider Announcements. I did and now my every social media feed is dominated entirely by the most normal people on earth having the most normal conversations as per Tomb Raider
Yeah, I’m mostly just talking about a general trend in how some freaks try to defend these things while maintaining a normal or progressive veneer. I’ve only seen it specifically applied to Tomb Raider maybe once.
All of this is true and as someone mentioned it’s definitely to do with the gritty feeling everything had to have in the 2010s
Like oh this Laura Croft game will be GROTTY AND REALISTIC (of course never answering the question of why the hell do I want my fantasy adventure games to be realistic anyways).
To make it realistic we gotta add sexual assault andremoved and torture! Like no dude you’re game with magic temples and dinosaurs and ancient treasure isn’t realistic because you added that. It’s just fantasy butremovedy.
I enjoyed the games back then but definitely eyebrow raising when you think about it.
2013 definitely feels like the last of the video games to me before everything became The Last of Us if you catch my drift and I don’t even mean that with hostility to either franchise or all other games
That’s also around the time I stopped playing most AAA games because everything felt like the same “We want to make this video game into a generic hollywood movie” kind of vibe, so I think you’re onto something.
Omg yeah I remember playing the 2013 one when it came out. I recall the game just being a sequence of Laura being put through gruesome violence (the developers barely disguised fetish) as the main focus, with generic action adventure game as the thin excuse to deliver said violence to the audience of freak treatlerites who eat that shit up.
I’ve been saying this, the most recent tomb raider games had some insane levels of torture porn happening to a what, 16 year old girl? it was gross.
21 in the first game and 25 in the last I think, albeit in a “this is a 900 year old 12 year old” way especially in the first game
I’ve seen a lot of woman gamers still stan old school Lara Croft even with the cheesy sex sells polygon titillation.
Yes, the old Lara was a real badass who had basically zero love interest (if we don’t count Kurtis lol), almost all her human antagonists were men (with an exception in Tomb Raider 3). Legends Lara is also pretty cool.
It was my favourite ps1 one game. She was so badass and the only gaming character that wasn’t a dude.
it’s white liberal feminism. they made the white aristocrat wear more clothes while she murders people and steals their cultural artifacts
That issue comes up in Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of the Tomb Raider much more. The first one you can’t really blame her for shooting 2000 dudes in the face because they all dserve it. in Rise it gets iffy, in Shadow it gets REALLY bad
Theyre all very problematic games but… damn if theyre not my favourites. Uncharted doesnt scratch the same itch cos i find john uncharted (forgot his name) very annoying. Also naughty dogs only purpose should be giving me crash bandicoot.
However saying that the latest india jones game is a fucking masterpiece and a perfect tomb raider replacement and you get to punch all the nazis
I remember really not liking 2013 tomb raider. Pretty sure they also removed her dual pistols, feels like they toned down a lot of the stuff that made her cool. They even made a movie based on the 2013 game and it was not as good as the original tomb raider movies.
The 2013 era is like a prequel, she gets the akimbo pistol and the more classical outfit after the Shadow of the Tomb Raider(the third game)
Apart from the feminism stuff one of the most “are you fucking kidding me” moments in gaming history I’ve had is when in 2013 Tomb Raider you shoot the final bad guy with akimbo pistols, become THE Lara Croft in a heroic save the world moment and then you start Rise of the Tomb Raider and it’s back to one pistol
I didn’t know that happens. That does seem like a fun way to conclude the first reboot game and it’s a shame the devs were cowards after.
It’s such a hype moment in the first reboot prequel game. Like it genuinely hits, it’s good. Absolutely baffling to me that they just didn’t do shit with in the sequel
The sequel suffered from “the first game was successful so let’s do it again” IMO, which unfortunately meant rewinding Lara’s character growth so that they could hit all the same beats again.
i absolutely get your point, but find i struggle to understand why you would need to stretch it to use ‘woke’
they made a misogynistic torture porn out of lara craft, end of story.
throwing a term that has been poisoned by the racist conservative right will just extend that ill-fated redefinition.
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.
what else would you use here. If they actually made the new tomb raiders woke that would gather compliments from me but they sure didn’t, allthough I think they thought they did
i did play through them all and i much prefer any femslash fanfic between Lara and Sam (LIKE WAS THE ORIGINAL PLAN
) that skips the first game and starts in the aftermath, or is just an AU
