- cross-posted to:
- vgartwork
- cross-posted to:
- vgartwork
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I remember the controversy around the first reboot. The trailers had Lara getting banged around by painful injury after painful injury, and there was that one encounter with an islander that everyone immediately assumed was a rape-scene.
They still toned it way down for the next two games… I found the first one morbidly entertaining and went out of my way to find every gruesome way to get Lara killed. The sequels were still fun but I kinda missed that aspect of mistakes leading to unusually brutal game overs.
I think it started the bow and arrow craze that games had there for a while? Still kinda sad she only gets her pistols at the end, and then even the sequels never really have her dual wielding handguns.
“and there was that one encounter with an islander that everyone immediately assumed was a rape-scene.”
This isn’t an assumption. Here is a video of the scene broken down to every possible consequence.
"When people play Lara, they don’t really project themselves into the character. They’re more like ‘I want to protect her.’ There’s this sort of dynamic of ‘I’m going to this adventure with her and trying to protect her.’ She’s definitely the hero but— you’re kind of like her helper. When you see her have to face these challenges, you start to root for her in a way that you might not root for a male character. The ability to see her as a human is even more enticing to me than the more sexualized version of yesteryear. She literally goes from zero to hero… we’re sort of building her up and just when she gets confident, we break her down again.
In the new Tomb Raider, Lara Croft will suffer. Her best friend will be kidnapped. She’ll get taken prisoner by island scavengers. And then, Rosenberg says, those scavengers will try to rape her.
“She is literally turned into a cornered animal. It’s a huge step in her evolution: she’s forced to either fight back or die.”
- Ron Rosenburg, Executive Producer (Source)
I mostly enjoyed the 2013 Tomb Raider series but the first game’s heavy use of questionable camera angles, gore porn, and threat of sexual violence is unignorable. The sheer amount of rape SFMs on PornHub is ample evidence the scene was not mistranslated.
The controversy was around how this new Lara would go through hell to become the Tomb Raider, and how for a moment there it was assumed that a full-on as-bad-as-it-gets-rape was to be a canonical experience that she has to deal with along with the physical injuries she receives on the island. The encounter is obviously sexual, but nowhere near to the extent the trailer made people think at the time.
When it comes to the brutality, I enjoyed the game because of it. It made me uncomfortable in ways other games didn’t. Art for me is about the how it makes me feel, and playing a game where failure meant death in a way that genuinely made me feel something negative, something that actually made me wince, was different.
In Deus Ex I’ll get Adam killed dozens of times just probing for the best way to clear a room, but in Tomb Raider I much more closely identified with Lara’s desire to survive, and didn’t want to fail except to see each way it could happen, once.
I missed that in the sequels.
Art is about feelings, and I usually roll my eyes at people who consider causing certain responses to be off the table, like disgust or arousal.
I’ll still get behind criticism of any narrative chain that’s in bad taste, such as the idea of severe sexual trauma being a canonical component of Lara becoming the Tomb Raider.
I know in interviews the developer’s spoke about how they wanted to make players feel protective of Lara, and that’s a bit lame. But for me the game succeeded in a different way, in that it made me identify with her very closely.
I don’t really know why there seems to be thing where depending on the gender of the player character, when male they are the player, and when female they are “helped” or “protected” by the player. No, when I play a game, I am that character, who/what they are doesn’t matter.
Maybe that’s why I’m never picking up on the “fanservice” and “camera angels” with characters like Lara and 2B, I’m too busy being the character to be turned on by what is essentially myself in my mind.
I absolutely agree with you. The fetishization in this game was just particularly ick so wanted to point it out.
Was it really that bad?
I don’t really remember it that way. To me it was a uniquely gripping game because it evoked feelings by pushing buttons some would consider distasteful. And it never ended up doing so in a way that would have made the pre-launch controversy warranted, IMO.
By the second half of the game Lara’s deranged rage at the islanders was echoing my own.
Maybe some of the stuff in the game was supposed to please the sadists playing, but as someone who becomes the characters I play as, the unpleasant things that happen to Lara put me even more firmly in her shoes, and the sequels never managed the same.
My first playthrough of it was around when it came out and I didn’t really notice any issues and believed the controversy was blown out of proportion. In a recent playthrough, it became clear this game did not have well-written female characters in mind and it is hard to ignore that the execution of these topics was not in good taste.
Oh yeah no it’s hardly a thoughtful exploration of anything. The entire remake trilogy was a complete disappointment in that regard.
Games with some cool stuff but also glaring flaws that by the third I was quite fed up with. I wanted the new Tomb Raider games to be more better, and they just weren’t. Fun, but not “I’d wear that on a t-shirt”-good the way the Horizons or new GoW games are.
Exactly. It’s a fun romp but I don’t go out of my way to recommend it.
![[Official Art] Tomb Raider Box Art](https://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/65c5a1fd-f7bc-496b-bcdb-52d05228d0ec.webp){kind=link}