i started watching an LP of that one tomb raider game which starts out with lara tied up then she falls and impales herself and it made me really uncomfortable and i just noped out
it had this weird, exploitative, voyeuristic quality
The stupid thing it is that once she's been impaled by the rod, she goes through a filthy ass island and doesn't get all form of diseases from having a gaping open wound with no way of treating it.
And that's if the game even remembers that she's injured herself.
i started watching an LP of that one tomb raider game which starts out with lara tied up then she falls and impales herself and it made me really uncomfortable and i just noped out
it had this weird, exploitative, voyeuristic quality
literally everyone I have spoken to who played that game has had this same response.
i started watching an LP of that one tomb raider game which starts out with lara tied up then she falls and impales herself and it made me really uncomfortable and i just noped out
it had this weird, exploitative, voyeuristic quality
literally everyone I have spoken to who played that game has had this same response.
im not sure whether i should be glad that this isnt just me, or really concerned
I was kind of repulsed by the game for the same reasons as well; Conan covered it for a comedy bit and I couldn't help but gag at the death sequences because they took things way too far to be OK, IMO
the second one seems like it may have let up on that part of things but I'm still a bit iffy about trying it
It is interesting that there are so many impalement deaths, though. Impalement is the only type of violence I can see as vaguely erotic, which has obvious, uh, Freudian implications.
Nathan Drake and Isaac Clarke aren't women, though.
Well yeah, that's kind of what a double standard is. If Isaac gets a spike through the head it's horror, but when Lara does it's creepy torture porn because vaginas.
Half the problem is that Tomb Raider has historically been pretty bad about sexualized violence, and was one of the franchises that practically codified it. So it's difficult for people not to make that assumption right out of the gate.
The only equivalent to how Lara is treated is probably Spec Ops: the Line, which for one thing didn't linger on Walker's injuries to nearly that extent.
see, but the thing is going into this all i knew was "this is a video game franchise where back in the day the lady had big polygon boobs and i liked the movie"
I mean, guy's got a big metal helmet on his head. You're not supposed to feel for him, you're supposed to be him and feel for yourself.
Drake has a less emphasized but similar sort of feel to him. He's as generic white adventure hero as one gets; and that's supposed to allow the generic white videogameplayer to identify with him (no offense to any generic white people reading this)
Lara, you're not supposed to be Lara. You control her, yes, but she's supposed to be her own character with her own identity and backstory and crap. It is a game about a character rather than a game about you in someone else's shoes/weird laser armor. Therefore, when the plot contrives a way for Lara to get horribly hurt, it has a different tone to it than, say, Nathan getting horrifically killed in some way.
It's not a man/woman divide as much as it is a subject/object divide.
see, but the thing is going into this all i knew was "this is a video game franchise where back in the day the lady had big polygon boobs and i liked the movie"
i had no context on this, tabula rasa
"this is a video game franchise where back in the day the lady had big polygon boobs" is not tabula rasa. It's half the background for why the double standard exists at all, and is so prevalent even outside Tomb Raider. This franchise literally helped codify all the stereotypes we're talking about -- it's not innocent by any stretch.
The only equivalent to how Lara is treated is probably Spec Ops: the Line, which for one thing didn't linger on Walker's injuries to nearly that extent.
Spec Ops didn't have the same kind of heavy survivalism theme. If you just replaced the model with Nate Drake, none of this would be discussion-worthy -- we've certainly seen him get his ass beat to hell and back before. It would just be a gritty shooter where he's slightly less of a Wolverine-esque bullet sponge than usual.
Lara, you're not supposed to be Lara. You control her, yes, but she's supposed to be her own character with her own identity and backstory and crap. It is a game about a character rather than a game about you in someone else's shoes/weird laser armor.
Lara, you're not supposed to be Lara. You control her, yes, but she's supposed to be her own character with her own identity and backstory and crap. It is a game about a character rather than a game about you in someone else's shoes/weird laser armor.
I guess part of the reason I'm making such a point of this is that the game was in the works and just starting to break news while I was interning at a different developer, and we talked about it for quite a while. It really is incredibly difficult to write a female lead in a character-driven super-gritty story without it being potentially seen as sexualized, because audiences are so used to looking at it that way. It's not impossible -- Walking Dead, for instance -- but it's a pretty deep hole the entire industry has dug for itself.
The game's producers didn't really help matters. From the interviews, they clearly did see it in terms of gender disparities, albeit more along the lines of horror than torture porn (YOU HAVE TO PROTECT HER etc). It's kind of sad, because the way the game turned out, it didn't have to be viewed that way, but it was too easy to do so, and the fact that it was Tomb Raider of all things kind of shut down a lot of reflection that needed to happen.
The notion that [character] is female and thus being killed by impalement has a sexual connotation because phallic symbols and shit can be pretty much entirely blamed on the viewer, as long as the death is not portrayed in a sexual way.
I looked at that video and I don't think Lara's dying by impalement is portrayed in a sexual way, so therefore I conclude that the bringing up of this aforementioned notion is something that ought to be blamed on the viewer for trying to read a sexual meaning into something that lacks one.
Comments
it had this weird, exploitative, voyeuristic quality
And that's if the game even remembers that she's injured herself.
the second one seems like it may have let up on that part of things but I'm still a bit iffy about trying it
I must be kind of desensitized or something because very little in this affected me at all.
"That's nothing, I grew up in Glasgow!" ok, that's a good line.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
MY WISH CAME TRUE
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
heapermon, gotta post at 'em all
I looked at that video and I don't think Lara's dying by impalement is portrayed in a sexual way, so therefore I conclude that the bringing up of this aforementioned notion is something that ought to be blamed on the viewer for trying to read a sexual meaning into something that lacks one.