Was Lex Luthor right forty times?
Jun. 29th, 2012 02:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficDear Internet: Calm Yo Tits On Tomb Raider (new title: my original was the more respectful "Y'all gon crazy about this Tomb Raider shit"). Tries to sum up the controversy and how/why it's overblown. Sidenote: Is it just me, or is the weird nostalgia for Old!Lara that I mentioned really weird? Correct me if I'm wrong, old-school gamers, but wasn't Lara Croft something of a joke? The game was good, but the way she was marketed with magazine covers of Duke Nukem grabbing her breasts and Lara Croft models running around and Angelina Jolie wearing boob padding to play her... no one was confusing her with Mario Mario, were they? Then Crystal Dynamics rebooted her and I played those; they seemed to be trying to have their cake and eat it too, still having Lara be a sex symbol but giving her more of a backstory and at least giving the player the option of putting her in people-clothes instead of short-shorts and a tanktop. Nothing wrong with that, but it's sort of the difference between the Sean Connery Bond and the Daniel Craig one. Connery is 90% fantasy, while Craig is more 50/50.
Now they seem to be going all the way to just having the cake--wait, why can't you have a cake and eat it? Isn't having a prerequisite to eating? Are you supposed to steal cakes?--by making Lara a 'girl next door' figure who spends most of her game bloody, bruised, and covered in filth. I don't think they're cynically going after the lucrative "likes 'em bloody, bruised, covered in filth" market so much as they're legitimately trying to transition Lara from Angelina Jolie to Jennifer Lawrence. So in that context, I don't see an attempted rape characterization tool as 'flippant' as a "look how bad the villain is, he's rapey!" scene in a more conventional Tomb Raider game.
Speaking of fun rape discussions, has anyone ever brought up that the biggest issue with J.J. Abrams' Superman script is actually that someone tries to rape Martha Kent and a young Clark beats him half to death, traumatizing Clark to the point of spending half the movie as an introverted child abuse victim? Because holy shit, is it just me?
Now they seem to be going all the way to just having the cake--wait, why can't you have a cake and eat it? Isn't having a prerequisite to eating? Are you supposed to steal cakes?--by making Lara a 'girl next door' figure who spends most of her game bloody, bruised, and covered in filth. I don't think they're cynically going after the lucrative "likes 'em bloody, bruised, covered in filth" market so much as they're legitimately trying to transition Lara from Angelina Jolie to Jennifer Lawrence. So in that context, I don't see an attempted rape characterization tool as 'flippant' as a "look how bad the villain is, he's rapey!" scene in a more conventional Tomb Raider game.
Speaking of fun rape discussions, has anyone ever brought up that the biggest issue with J.J. Abrams' Superman script is actually that someone tries to rape Martha Kent and a young Clark beats him half to death, traumatizing Clark to the point of spending half the movie as an introverted child abuse victim? Because holy shit, is it just me?
