Hi, Lara.
I know I’m writing you out of the blue. I just saw you were going through some shit right now, and, I just wanted to send you a note.
I’m gonna start with a confession. I was never, like, a fan, back in the 90s. In fact I guess I might have hated you. It wasn’t your fault. It was the fault of the media narrative that surrounded you. See, I was in to Metroid, big-time. And all the noise about you being “the first woman to star in a video game” sort of rubbed me the wrong way. You and I both know you weren’t the first, but that’s the way the mostly-male media wanted to spin it. And you know, when girls are growing up, we have our role models, and mine was Samus Aran.
We know how that turned out.
Anyway.
A few years ago, when I was new to blogging about games, I was musing about a potential Tomb Raider reboot. I thought an adult-oriented reboot would be nice, something for the grown-ups. But by this I meant, it should have more horror elements, maybe some demons or mummies to shoot instead of just tigers and dinosaurs. And I also meant, it should have a sex scene. And here, by “something for the grown-ups,” I meant “something for the ladies.” After all, raiding tombs is a terribly solitary pursuit for a woman of wealth and class. Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone to share that with? Say, an evil tomb-raiding rival with a clever smirk and sinister plans, a sort of frenemy that you could have sizzling chemistry with?
But of course, that’s … not in the cards for you, is it? I totally wasn’t thinking. You can’t have a boyfriend, even in the context of a tragic romance that isn’t meant to be. You belong not to some character on the screen with you, but to the men in the audience. The man holding the controller.
In the early days, it was all about controlling you, as a doll for his amusement. “If I’m going to have to stare at an ass…” ha ha ha, yeah, you’ve heard that one before. But now? That’s not enough, apparently. Now you also need to be protected by that man. He needs to understand that you’re weak, and you need his toughness, his masculinity, his ability to Press X to Avoid Rape.
It wouldn’t be a woman, after all. It isn’t supposed to be a woman, holding that controller, someone who might want a hero to look up to. Someone who might want a glamorous world of adventure, or, even a struggle they could identify with. It’s obviously got to be a man. And the men that inherited your franchise were… well, they were stuck with, saddled with, this idea of a woman protagonist, and what more could they do? They had to hurt you because it was all they know how to do.
This is not what I asked for.
Who asked for this?
Well, I guess I know. And I know there are people who are going to defend it, because heroes go through adversity. It’s part of the job description. And I don’t mind, personally, seeing heroes go through adversity. I like when someone has to fight back and get tough, and I’m okay with seeing a hero struggle. Great with it, even. But the real motivation behind this was absolutely laid bare. It wasn’t to create a hero’s journey, starring you. It was to create some kind of…
“”The ability to see her as a human is even more enticing to me than the more sexualized version of yesteryear,” [Rosenberg] said.
That was the sentence that made me upset. That was the sentence that made me angry, sad, disheartened. Because it shows off the fact that it wasn’t really about making you struggle to make you tough. It wasn’t about creating the contrast of a woman in peril growing strong and finding her own confidence.
It was about the male gaze, again, in a new and different way.
It was about “even more enticing to me.”
Just like it always was.
So what I’m saying is: sorry, Lara. Sorry for anything anyone, or I, might have said indicating breasts, curves, or self-confidence were problems with your character. Sorry for the way that giving a woman a heroic story also means she has to be a toy and object for men, to be beaten up and felt up to make them feel stronger. Sorry that the designers at the end of the day don’t seem to be all that interested in your agency. We can all just hope it’ll be okay by the next reboot.
Good luck out there in the meantime,
AJ
P.S. That old canard about someone “accidentally” setting your chest size to 150 percent. Nobody actually believes that, right? I’m just checking.
Email the author of this post at aj@tap-repeatedly.com
I admit I’ve read almost nothing about the Tomb Raider reboot, but having got the gist of the idea (wanting to capitalize on Uncharted’s success, more or less) I can appreciate your skepticism, Amanda. Battering and bloodying up a woman is unfortunately still apparently the most popular way to create a strong female protagonist, at least in the (prevailing) minds of the folks behind Tomb Raider 2.0.
Great piece!
Lara’s the latest…er, victim…of the fact that it’s sort of in vogue, and has been for a number of years, to make heroines survivors of rape/abuse/whatever. I think at some point this began, maybe, as a way to try to address those issues, but it’s become so much of a trope that there seems to be this idea that *only* these things can drive a woman to heroic levels, if she’s got a survivor’s spirit or whatever. It’s…it’s a thing. Unfortunate.
There’s so much that could have been done right with Lara, and it feeds into the ongoing too-many-men-with-too-many-hangups-about-women-in-game-development situation. Samus Aran is a fantastic character, but she’d have been more fantastic if she spoke or actually was a character… so then they decided to do that and handed development of Other M over to inarguably the worst possible choice of development team. Opportunity lost.
Lara Croft has everything necessary to be so compelling: she’s intelligent, witty, bold, independent, courageous, etc etc. But once again the original developers fumbled the ball, and the new developers seem in the process of doing so. Personally I’ve always been deeply turned off by this upcoming installment – pretty much everything I’ve seen focuses on the hardship she endures to become what she’ll become, and yet that hardship centers (as far as I can tell) entirely around the brutalization of a woman. That modern technology allows her to be smudged and bloody as well as ridiculously malproportioned does not turn me on.
As Dix says, it’s this weird trend that women who become “strong” must first be “weakened.” As we know, rape, for example, is not about sex but control and demeanment. Not only is it not something that should be carelessly tossed around as an entertainment objective, it’s a terrible mechanism to strengthen a character. There are so many ways to build strength in a hero(ine). Raping them is a cheap cop-out, not a tool by which someone rises from the worst to become the best.
“The ability to see her as a human is enticing.” Yeeee. The subtext of that comment is wrong on a lot of levels.
I hope Lara reads your letter, AJ. With luck it won’t be consigned to the bags of “UR prttie will U dayte me??!?!!11?” fan mail she probably gets.
I have never played a “Tomb Raider” game. I have never seen a “Tomb Raider” movie. Like many, from the beginning of this Lara Croft 2.0, I have been a bit wary of the fact that every picture of her always shows her bloodied, scared, bruised, dirty, wounded, etc. I understand that someone who goes through what Lara apparently does in this game would likely be all of those things, but it just gives you a very skeevy “I Spit On Your Grave” type vibe that isn’t good or particularly healthy.
I am going to withhold final judgment until the game is actually released. I likely wont ever play it, but I will see how they handle the character. I don’t have very high hopes.
I got that “I Spit On Your Grave” vibe too.
I’ve only played a little of the first Tomb Raider before putting it down. All I remember was the little Lara sprite hopping around and shooting and I didn’t take much from it one way or the other. On the other hand, the Tomb Raider movies are a guilty pleasure of mine. I think I’ve seen each one twice. The Lara character in the movies is pretty kick ass. Most of the films hinge on contrasting Croft’s entitled aristocratic lifestyle with her ability to mix it up in spooky tombs. Jolie doesn’t play Lara as a victim from what I can remember. More as an uber-competent Brit with amazingly good knees, considering all the falling and jumping she does.
Great piece, Amanda. I really enjoyed it.
Scout: I do have to say that I remember the original Tomb Raider games not being so hot. Maybe another reason I was always Team Metroid. The controls were wonky and I kept feeling like there wasn’t much interesting to do or fight. I remember a moment of hilarity as Lara’s rather pixellated bum got stuck in a cave somewhere and refused to dislodge.
So, if these guys doing the new reboot are making a great game: then, great. I just don’t care for the quotes in that interview.
Despite the focus on when she’s running-and-gunning, Tomb Raider games have always been more about platforming and puzzle-solving. They aren’t exactly incredible for their action so much as the holy-crap-this-whole-room-is-a-damn-puzzle-ness. Which I actually like them for. I’m not a huge TR fan, but I’m a bit worried that 2.0 will just be Uncharted with a different protagonist, whereas I’ve always seen the two as two ends of a spectrum: Uncharted is gunplay with an occasional puzzle, and Tomb Raider is puzzles with occasional gunplay.
Hmm.
I only ever played the first two games and like Scout, only for a while. I loved the exploration of the first game, wandering around old ruins and poking around places which really weren’t meant to be poked around in. Subsequent games seemed to be noticeably more combat oriented which really wasn’t my bag. I wanted more tomb raiding.
I can’t speak about Lara Croft as a character much having not played the games enough, but I’ve never been a fan of Lara’s visual evolution; she’s always seemed more like a caricature to me than somebody to take seriously. For this reason I’m happy to see her design reigned in in favour of a more natural look. To be honest I’d have been happy for the series to swing the other way and have her make the leap into a more exaggerated Viewtiful Joe comic style. The series up until now hasn’t really appealed to me in that it’s occupied an uninteresting middle ground.
Having said this, I’m not overly enthusiastic about the Passion of Lara treatment and even less so with the whole ‘you’re kind of like her helper’ thinking. I’m surprised they didn’t just make the game a Lara escort mission, but then you’d be helping the helper help her which isn’t the same as dealing with the incompetent wet lettuce yourself.
Well known feminist blog Jezebel shares your take, AJ, even lambasting the reboot from another interesting angle:
http://jezebel.com/5918222/the-rapey-lara-croft-reboot-is-a-fucked+up-freudian-field-day
Gotta admit, I hadn’t thought of the “daddy” angle, but that is kind of creepy too.
I have seen everywhere that they’re retracting “rape” now (it’s limited to just the one scene shown). That was never my problem with the interview, though, not really. If that’s gonna be in the backstory – fine – it really isn’t entirely unbelievable and the depiction isn’t terribly edgy or over the top to me. But the “you’re her protector here” part: ew.
“it really isn’t entirely unbelievable”
I was going to say that myself but didn’t want to come off as the ‘she’s asking for it’ asshole.
I’m with you though Amanda, it’s the protector comment that’s irking me the most. Do we really need to bring that sort of thing to the table? I don’t like the thought that, by playing the game, I’d be implicated in ‘helping her’ as if she was incapable without me. While that’s technically true, it’s also true for all other games out there and hasn’t been pulled out of other producers’ asses as a selling point. It’s very icky knowing that Lara is going to subjected to all sorts of ‘gritty’ violence and the player will be viewed as her protector. And besides, what sort of fourth-wall breaking bullshit is that? It doesn’t help anything and damages whatever agency Lara could have had.
Particularly when “gritty violence” for a female character means “rape,” but for a male character it would mean, like, getting hit with brass knuckles.
I can understand rape having a role in certain, very specific narratives. But I’m revolted by it as a standby for “gritty violence.” It smacks of ignorant men who want to make shit tough and can’t wrap their minds around anything without gender inequality coming first.
When I was very young my friends and I were fans of First Edition D&D. There was this creature in the 1E Monster Manual called a Ki-Rin… kind of a small unicorn thing. For some reason we (at eight and nine) found it adorable, so those who ran games sought to outdo themselves with the number of dead Ki-Rins they could include to horrify or infuriate players.
Then we grew up.
All this “protecting” of Lara (when she could kick my ass) and this “humanization” of her character (through sexual assault) reminds me of eight-year-old D&D players showing off dead Ki-Rins.
Yeah, I can conceive of the horror of rape and assault being part of certain narratives, under certain circumstances and with the proper conscience given to it. But to me, more and more – and more still with CD’s retraction – sounds not like an effort to craft horrific narrative, it sounds like bunch of eight year olds with their Ki-Rins. Only bad game-creators are so lazy and so narratively weak that they automatically turn to the worst of the worst to get a small rise out of their audience.
And I’m also upset by the fact that “rise out of the audience” has a connotation.
“Only bad game-creators are so lazy and so narratively weak that they automatically turn to the worst of the worst to get a small rise out of their audience.”
Playing devil’s advocate a little here, I could easily see this as being a marketing/editorial decision that the developers have just had to make the best of. These days I see enough bad decisions at the business level enforced upon the creative one that that’s kind of what I assume when the logic seems as flimsy as it is here: this sounds like the sort of thing you’d think would work if you’re looking at movie sales and thinking of your entire audience as teenage boys, which still, alas, sounds like an eminently corporate thing to think about video games.
And when it comes down to it, that’s where executive producers, like this Rosenberg fellow, often fit: the business and logistics and making the product work (or, at least, doing what you think will make the product work). To me a lot of this, and especially with the response, smacks a bit of a development team being told they had to include elements they aren’t comfortable with for whatever reason, and the marketing team being like, “LOOK AT ALL THESE BATTERED WOMAN CHARACTERS THAT SELL!” It’s the “giant spider in the third act” problem.
Gregg: Exactly. It’s not “she’s asking for it,” but, you know, they’re trying to be a little grindhouse with it I guess, and I really don’t have an issue with grindhouse. I was actually sort of behind this reboot until I read this implication that Lara isn’t really the one with the agency in this story. I actually didn’t dislike the trailer, until I read that. But then it put it in a whole new light that made me feel awful. Like what it’s REALLY about is voyeurism on her suffering.
Cartoonist John Kovalic put in his two cents.
[…] start with Amanda Lange’s open letter to Lara Croft, reflecting on the 90s backlash to the character’s sexualized appearance in contrast to the […]
Overall, I definitely agree with your assessment. However, at the same time, the problem I have with views like these on the new Lara Croft game is the implication that no woman has gone through brutality and came out stronger. It’s as if no woman character should ever be portrayed this way when in fact, it’s quite entirely possible that women can go through such brutality and survive. What’s going to happen in 10 years if every woman character ever created at that time never goes through violent struggle? Are women(and some men) going to complain about the characterization that women can’t be strong enough to come out of such violence alive? Which would be why every woman character has been relatively safe from harm at all times? That’s about the only knock I have on any of these kinds of views. It’s as if people want women to be impervious to the such violent characterization. As if it should never be presented again when in fact, that’s as much of a problem as some of the characterization now.
Anyway, the reasons behind why the developers are doing what they’re doing is definitely very sexist. They don’t want the character to be JUST eye candy for the males. They want her to be even more enticing so saving her gives off a better sense of strength. Because she seems like a real person with real feelings, the male audience can feel like the knight in shining armor. They’re feeding off basic male desire. That’s as much of an insult to males as it is to females.
Hi, Roy!
I don’t think I actually disagree with anything in your comment.
Woman going through violent struggle and becoming stronger for it: OK! “omg it’s gonna be so hawt cuz she’s almost raped but you get to save her!” …not so much.
It looks like some damage control is still being attempted after that first interview. http://kotaku.com/5922228/tomb-raider-creators-say-rape-is-not-a-word-in-their-vocabulary
I hope they don’t change the scene in the game. That would be taking the wrong message from this. I think they just need to be more mature in how they present this.
Welcome aboard, Roy. : )
I agree it’s not inconceivable for anyone – woman or man – to go through brutality and come out stronger. Sexual assault included. It is undoubtedly possible to become stronger through such a thing. And stories of that type have been told.
But as you point out, the use of sexual assault (or threat of it) in this instance has nothing to do with the character growing in strength… it has to do with the player growing “stronger” by providing protection. While I think it may be going too far to call that unhealthy in this instance, I will call it lazy – and careless – and callous – and shortsighted – and stupid – and disgusting – and, in this case, sexist. Basically I agree with you.
This is a situation where any developer at Crystal Dynamics who agrees with what Rosenberg said should be ashamed of themselves, and should really take a hard look at how they feel about women. Because what they created in this idea is so juvenile.
Horrors like child abuse and rape occur, and as such there is a theoretical place for them in fiction and art. Nothing should be banned just because it’s awful, especially since sometimes putting awfulness into art encourages discussion and, hopefully, societal change. It really all comes down to how it’s used, and how carefully. Here it was not used carefully, it was used by small people with small views about other people. That’s what makes it disgusting to me.
By creating this situation, they’ve created a game I would be ashamed to play, not empowered.
[…] a few mentions via the late and lamented Link Drag. When I drafted a rebuttal to Amanda Lange’s Lara Croft piece last year, the online environment had become a lot more… trigger-happy. I'm not interested in courting […]
[…] not centered by default often even when the protagonist is female. This is how you get things like Lara Croft being coded not as you but as your daughter that you want to “protect.” Even if female creators […]