The Violence against Lara Croft in Tomb Raider 2013

[Casual Shinji]

It didn't help that in the beginning logic bells were going off after she started wading through stagnate water with those open wounds...good lord she really should have gotten a nasty infection after that.

Nevermind that the first first injury she receives (the rebar puncture) is one she never bothers to dress. The wound is on her character model throughout the whole game, you'd figure the developers would've noticed this and done something to make it so she's not walking around with an exposed hole through her side the enire game.

 

[Vault101]

It didn't help that in the beginning logic bells were going off after she started wading through stagnate water with those open wounds...good lord she really should have gotten a nasty infection after that.

that made me cringe more than anything else in the game

I thought it was hilarious

Yeah, me too.
At first I went 'eww' at some of the more gruesome deaths (which would have been my reaction even if she was a man), but it happened enough it just became silly and divorced from gameplay.

She gets stabbed through the abdomen and just walks it off.

I don't know what it was...I think it was just the fact..at the very first its a [/i]stick[/i] like game charachters shrug of explosives but holy shit a stick...like nature hated her or something

 

[Eddie the head]

So despite the tone being spot on, why are people shocked? Would they really be if it were Nathan Drake dying in the exact same ways?

I wouldn't say I would be "shocked" if Drake died in the same way. "Overjoyed" maybe. "Fucking ecstatic" more likely.

 

[TheGamerElite33]

I dont really play games where we play as female characters.

 

[giles]

A good example of this happening to a male character would be Dead Space (1 and 2 more so than 3). Isaac gets horribly torn to bits when he dies and I had the same reaction as with the 2013 Tomb Raider: "Owwwww..." and "Hohoho!".
Those were just gory, graphic deaths regardless of the character or gender. Tomb Raider was a little less gory but the overall effect was increased because the setting is more realistic.

I guess if they showed panty shots of Lara's corpse dangling around after getting stabbed in the head I would object, but the fact that she was a woman made no difference to my reaction.
People would rather rush to the woman's aid in most situation because they're the physically weaker sex, but Lara is clearly anything but weak so that's not an issue.

 

[TheSYLOH]

Personally I disliked having to watch Lara get brutally killed,
not because Lara's a woman, not because it's violent, but because it's repetitive.
Seriously, I started a drinking game( Take a shot every time Lara is impaled).

I took it as more of trope of "survival" type games, Dead Space had them, but they used them more sparingly.
Still Dead Space utter incompetence at all non-jumpscare related Horror made them more hilarious then scary.

Spoiler: Personal Favorites(NSFW Sort of)

Yay! I'm the protagonist now!
Woo! Survived! NOPE

 

[go-10]

I think the whole ordeal is getting blown out of proportions. Me and my friends play through the game around the same time (one year later) and we all played it on hard cause we had heard how easy the game was. While I did die a lot there were many death scenes I never saw, just like my friends were surprised about some of the deaths that I saw. All in all the game was violent yes (hence why it's M rated) but really most of the violence is dished out by Lara not towards her. Sure she falls here and there and gets hit a few times, but all the things you can do to enemies is borderline on sadistic (hitting them with rope arrows to pull them off ledges or pushing them to the ground to hit the with a fire arrow so they catch fire, machinegun overkill counter, pickaxe throat impaling, handgun to the temple at point blank, etc.) when it comes down to it the real threat on the island was Lara not the Solari

 

[small]

I think the whole ordeal is getting blown out of proportions. Me and my friends play through the game around the same time (one year later) and we all played it on hard cause we had heard how easy the game was. While I did die a lot there were many death scenes I never saw, just like my friends were surprised about some of the deaths that I saw. All in all the game was violent yes (hence why it's M rated) but really most of the violence is dished out by Lara not towards her. Sure she falls here and there and gets hit a few times, but all the things you can do to enemies is borderline on sadistic (hitting them with rope arrows to pull them off ledges or pushing them to the ground to hit the with a fire arrow so they catch fire, machinegun overkill counter, pickaxe throat impaling, handgun to the temple at point blank, etc.) when it comes down to it the real threat on the island was Lara not the Solari

i found it interesting they start off hunting this "girl" and by the end of the game they absolutely fear her.

All up i found it an interesting story of how the island created lara. going from someone lost and scared to someone capable of surviving anything.

kind of funny i hate the tombraider games and this is the only one i play and actually love

 

[Timpossible]

When the first Trailer was shown I already thought: "Wow. That's an aweful lot of impaling going on. Wonder what Freud would have to say about that."

I can see what CD was going for...but it has some creepy undertone. A bit like: "Oh look how she suffers! LOOK AT IT! LOOK HOW MUCH THIS YOUNG WOMAN CAN TAKE BEFORE HER BODY STOPS WORKING! LOOOOOOOOOK!"

 

[Kittyhawk]

Indeed, its these kind of double standards that pour oil in a certain Anita's points. Its also about the ingrained mindset of society for males. We must always be strong and tough, and if you cry you are called weak and a baby, when crying is a perfectly natural thing to do whatever your gender, in certain situations.

Either we get equal treatment in games or none at all.

 

[happyninja42]

after she suffers an injury that via cutscenes were led to belive is pretty serious....she wades through stagnat water

I was like [I/]Lara? what u doin? LARA STAHP![/I]

Yeah, I was getting sort of annoyed with the game for the level of injuries she was sustaining, and how she would react to them. First off, just the simple fact of how casually she shrugged off injuries that would've seriously impaired her ability to do anything. And then second, how they would amazingly resurface to remind us "by the way, she's really hurt!"

It reminded me of Prometheus, and how the female lead would amazingly forget she had a breached abdominal wall, and go running around, jumping and slamming her stomach into cliff sides, climbing up rocks, etc. And be perfectly fine, but then suddenly remember "oh yeah! I just had a C-section!" *grab stomach and moan for a few moments*, then she was fine, and running around again.

Several times that happened in TR 2013, and it just annoyed me. I actually started yelling at the screen, when they would change her animation to show her holding her stomach and limping. I'd yell out "Oh NOW she remembers she has a breached abdominal wall! Good job!" and then she'd be fine after limping for 20 seconds, and going right back to crazy acrobatics and combat stuff.

It was inconsistent and it annoyed me. And the one thing that will annoy me the quickest in entertainment media, is inconsistency in the setting they present. If you impale my character through the stomach with a rusty, stagnant water covered, bloody bit of rebar, she'd better be that seriously injured through the whole game, because sorry, slapping a bandaid on it isn't going to make it all better. If the game has some kind of super science healing, or you establish that they've got like, battle armor that can quickly repair damage, like in some science fiction game, ok fine, you've at least established that healing from injuries is way easier than real life. But when you are hammering home how "realistic" the game is, and then inflict unrealistic injuries onto a character, and then have them "heal up" using unrealistic treatments, that's when I call bullshit. And this isn't just regarding TR 2013 mind you, this applies to any game/movie/book.

It brought me out of the game, and made the whole experience a frustrating chore, and not fun. Which was a shame, because I really wanted to like the game a lot, but just couldn't due to the writing and unrealistic damage.

 

[votemarvel]

You are severly misinterpretting the reason I'd run to the woman first, though.
Its one guy. One. There is no numerical advantage, and my simple presence might cause the attacker to beat feet. It's the fight I have the better chance of winning, full stop.
After that dust-up is handled, I can then move on to the riskier proposition. Cold Calculus, not sexism.

Really?

If you were really that cold and logical you'd spend time looking who needs the help before rushing in but your first instinct is still to run to the aid of the female. No matter the logic you colour it with.

Now what if it turned out that she was a trained MMA fighter. However the guy being attacked had just recovered from a serious illness and didn't have the strength to defend himself.

Of course it is all hypothetical situations but you say you are cold and calculated in that situation but it still lead you to the woman first.

 

[LaoJim]

Funnily enough, I found the start of the game tough going in terms of the amount of pain that was inflicted on Lara. But then about half way though in one cut scene she fell off a cliff, landed in a crashed Japanese bomber, there was a brief pause, then the windscreen cracked and she continued her descent.

Now while this looked painful, but the timing and sheer cruelty of the universe meant that all I could think of was Wylie E. Coyote. From that point on I started to imagine that all the horrible things were happening to him instead and it became hilarious.

So, anyone want to do a mod?

 

[Kmadden2004]

While I do admit to having a natural knee-jerk reaction to seeing violence against women (especially violence as brutal as what was presented in Tomb Raider), I do feel that the wince-effect this time has as much to do with Lara just being a generally better-written and presented character this time round (and even more so than Drake)... ludonarrative dissonance notwithstanding.

Because, of course, you can't have a discussion about the Tomb Raider reboot without at least one pretentious a-hole dropping the phrase "ludonarrative dissonance" can you?

 

[Kmadden2004]

Indeed, its these kind of double standards that pour oil in a certain Anita's points. Its also about the ingrained mindset of society for males. We must always be strong and tough, and if you cry you are called weak and a baby, when crying is a perfectly natural thing to do whatever your gender, in certain situations.

Either we get equal treatment in games or none at all.

So is the problem that Lara did cry, or that Nathan Drake didn't? Because, unless I'm misreading, it sounds like Anita would agree with you. She wouldn't mind seeing games with more vulnerable males, and strong, stoic females, and anywhere in between.

This just reminds me of the mini Twitter backlash right after the first Rise of the Tomb Raider trailer was revealed. Apparently people were already giving Rhianna Pratchett flack for making Lara (and, of course by extension, all women in the entire medium of video games) weak and pathetic by showing her to have PTSD (and psychiatric help) following the events of the last game.

Pratchett's response was basically a polite "piss off", making the point that her focus was on writing an interesting character and exploring an issue that is rarely touched on in games, and that people wouldn't even bat an eyelid if it were a burly marine sitting on that psychiatrist's couch.

 

[Me55enger]

I think the horror film comparison is inaccurate because that is a genre that traditionally follows a very specific format when it comes to characters (a tradition that it follows, ironically, when circumventing itself).

I was impressed at some of the events she had to endure, and I raised a rather large eyebrow to some of the ways she died if you cocked things up.

Was this because she was a woman? Yes. Is this because I'm a sexist misogynist hyper-male? No.

It affected me because Pratchett's modern incarnation of Lara Croft is one of very few woman characters in video games that is, in my mind, represented in a wholeheartedly mature manner. It is because of the sheer rarity of this sort of portrayal that is the reason why I found myself affected.

The entire feminist/anti-feminist war raging right now is a transition. It shows that the industry is growing up in a healthy way, and that there are many within it who have yet to grow up with the industry.