Dear Internet: Calm Yo Tits On Tomb Raider

There are times when I don’t march in formation with internet feminism. I don’t think Mako from The Legend of Korra is some kind of bending Don Draper. I see nothing wrong with Power Girl’s costume. And I don’t find Justin Timberlake attractive.

We come now to the new Tomb Raider game. The internet’s given it a “wtfuckery?” response, which I think isn’t warranted. If you don’t like it, I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I do think the situation’s open to more debate than “You raped Lara Croft, motherfuckers!”

In case you missed it, this Tomb Raider is yet another reboot of the franchise, this time a dark and realistic origin story in the vein of, you guessed it, Casino Royale and Batman Begins. It shows how Lara Croft goes from being a stupendously-bosomed college student to a stupendously-bosomed badass tomb raider, and perhaps why someone would label themselves a tomb raider in the first place. We already have a name for that. Archaeologist. Maybe you could add an adjective there to suggest the number of death-traps and rabid animals she evades, but you don’t have to ditch the word altogether.

Now, there are a couple of controversies to this game, sort of like the rape (yes, this is one of those fun articles) was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Or like people are just piling on once they’re looking for a reason to dislike something. I’ll be looking at them in order, so let’s make like a Terry Goodkind novel and get that rape out of the way.

I actually heard about this from multiple sources. There was a Jezebel piece (they’re like our website, only larger and updated more often and with more readers… okay, they’re nothing like our website) saying that there would be an attempted gang rape and a post on tumblr about a quick-time event rape scene.

Which is, you know, provocative. You hear that, you picture “Press X to have a rape kit done!” or a game over screen that looks like the poster to a Lifetime movie.

It got one of those M. Night Shyamalan adaptations.

Then you actually watch the trailer:

It’s basically one guy who displays poor etiquette for a Hooters. I thought you had for a gang rape to have two men, or at least one guy who’s really good at it. He attacks Lara and dies shortly after. So: What’s the problem here?

Is it just that there’s an attempted rape? Because I remember when Arkham City came out, there was a controversy over how many sexual threats and gendered slurs were in the game. That was the issue people took with it, “there’s just too much.” Now here’s a game where there’s exactly one (1) sexual threat and it’s too much.

Maybe it’s just the notion that an origin story for how Lara Croft became a badass has to involve rape, even an unsuccessful one. I’m kinda down on this criticism, since I first saw it in an article which also took pains to point out how common rape was in the real world. Which just seems odd to me. So rape is so common that in a Tomb Raider trying to be gritty and realistic, none of the savage, murderous criminals should think to attempt it. Doesn’t really track with me.

But why would rape be necessary to a Tomb Raider origin story? I thought about it and it all comes down to Lara’s spear counterpart, Nathan Drake from the Uncharted series. One of the common criticisms there (that also doesn’t make much sense to me) is that for a protagonist who gets a lot of facetime as a quippy, lovable everydude, Drake kills hundreds of people. Obvious reasons there: it’s a long game, killing people is fun, there you are. While in a Bond movie, Bond might kill a dozen guys over the course of thirty or so minutes of action scenes, a video game is basically wall to wall action over the course of several hours, so the player kills correspondingly more guys.

There, Drake is some kind of action movie ex-Marine whatever. If Lara Croft is meant to be an average college student who “literally goes from zero to hero,” how do to justify her going into a headspace of “it’s them or me” almost immediately? I gotta think your average person, much less the kindly soul who rates their own videogame, would respond to killer pirates by trying to hide or at most incapacitate an attacker. They tell me that’s how non-sociopaths act.

It's this whole code of Harry thing, you wouldn't understand.

Yet that’s hard to both play or code for in a satisfying manner. How would you get a gamer to play Lara as not taking a human life? Boot them to an “no, I’ve taken a human life!” game over if they don’t shoot bad guys in the knees? Yeah, that wouldn’t get frustrating. So we need an extreme event to launch Lara into take-no-prisoners mode. And an attempted rape fits the bill. That’s pretty much the reasoning given by creative director Noah Hughes in an interview with Destructoid.

As she becomes the Tomb Raider, she needs to start shooting people, and to come out and just be like I’m 21, and I’m just out of university…we needed a motivator for her. What does someone have to go through to change them into that person?

But why wouldn’t an attempted murder do? Well, I’m sure it will, since after the controversy Eidos has released comments about there not being a rape in the game, so I’m sure at this moment they’re scrubbing the code of any sexual threats and inserting a scene where Lara overhears two guards talking about their staunch commitment to consent. And here’s where we enter the realm of this bothering me, since this is after all what’s being asked for. Censorship.

See, there’s another debate that’s raging all the time, and that’s over whether video games are art. We know film is art. Even in a movie meant as mass entertainment like The Dark Knight, the director and writers are using their craft to provoke thought in the audience, lead them toward a conclusion, feel certain ways, in addition to the usual thrilling heroics. This merits, more so than the usual “it’s just cool/dramatic/interesting” justification, numerous scenes of people being stabbed, blown up, set on fire, shot, hit by Batmobiles, killed by debris from bazooka explosions, cut open and implanted with a bomb and then blown up, tortured for information, dropped off buildings, attacked by rabid dogs, taken hostage, forced to make sadistic choices, hit by buses, taken captive and stripped to the underwear, dressed as nurses, dropped off higher buildings, dangled upside-down off buildings, falsely accused of murders, killed in high-speed car crashes, dosed with hallucinogenic fear gas, and shocked by booby-trapped Batsuits.

I have watched that movie way too many times.

Is the new Tomb Raider game art in the same way? I’m not sure. It definitely seems to have a coherent mindset behind it, with the developers talking about players at first empathizing with Lara’s vulnerability and “helping” her grow into a badass Tomb Raider (yes, I know, I know, more on that later). Obviously, we won’t know until the game comes out, so why the comparison? Do I just like thinking about Batman? Sure. We all do. But let’s think—would The Dark Knight be the same if we excised the scene of the Joker threatening Rachel Dawes?

You remember. Sure, the movie could’ve just gone from the Joker threatening an elderly male guest to Batman interceding, since the previous scene specifically showed Bruce Wayne rushing to change into costume, but it continued on for a few minutes to show the Joker repeatedly leering at Rachel and calling her ‘beautiful,’ exaggeratedly prettying himself up for her as if to flirt, invading her personal space, grabbing her, threatening to put a knife in her mouth, telling her “I like that” in response to her kicking him. All in all, not behavior that would constitute a pleasant working environment.

Well, nothing sexually threatening about this!

There’s the obvious entertainment value of it being a tense and well-acted scene, but it also establishes the Joker’s awareness of Batman’s protectiveness towards Rachel, furthers his multiple-choice backstory, etc, etc.

Now, maybe in context, the Tomb Raider scene isn’t handled as tastefully or maturely. I don’t know. The point is, if anything offensive or controversial were removed from art, it wouldn’t be art, it’d be Thomas Kinkade.

That brings us to another criticism I’ve heard a lot. Lara Croft does not have an easy time of it in this game. She gets impaled on a length of rebar, slammed into rocks, falls from great distances, slams into trees, covered in dirt, and all while she moans and cries out in pain at her injuries, so much so that it’s worthy of commentary. Alex Cox of Bitmob says:

I hear the victimization of a young woman. I hear a vulnerable girl breathing heavily, in pain and in fear. I hear unpleasant overtones and associations. And what I hear makes me squirm in my seat uncomfortably, cringing, while I watch it to write this post — because the way I hear it, I can’t tell if the player is meant to feel the desperation of Lara’s position, or to fetishize it.

I feel another trope is at work here. In most action games, like Max Payne and Uncharted, our heroes get banged up and bandaged as the narrative progresses, some times limping around like Frankenstein’s monster. X-Men Origins: Wolverine takes this to the extreme of Logan turning into your average CSI corpse, since he can just heal it away.

Walk it off, Weapon X.

But Lara, as a woman, falls under another heading. Namely, Beauty Is Never Tarnished, which even has an entry on the new Tomb Raider game:

Lara Croft can die in fashions most people would see in a Mature rated game, but the worst that comes out of it is blood loss, if any. Starting to be averted with the 2011 reboot, in which the game’s trailers have shown Lara getting progressively messier and more injured as the games’ plot progresses.

See, in previous games and movies, Lara sustained wild animal attacks, gunshot wounds, near-drowning, and hard falls without a hair ever out of place. She wrapped up the forces of darkness looking like, well, Angelina Jolie.

The first aid treatment for those cuts is licking at them during a bout of kinky sex.

It all feeds into a weird sort of nostalgia for the prior incarnation of Lara Croft. I always thought Lara Croft was widely seen as something as a joke, propelled to stardom by novelty value. Sure, she had her fans–she was one of the first and certainly the most famous heroines in gaming, but she was also sexualized to a pretty ridiculous extent. And it didn’t take long for the gameplay to stop cashing the checks her (very well-rendered) ass wrote.

Well, ya know… feminism.

Without the crafty puzzles and sense of exploration that fans liked about the first games, her star quickly fell. People stopped anticipating a new Tomb Raider game the way they might a Mario or a Resident Evil. It was just something developers kept making. Yet the Kotaku piece starts:

In the past, Lara Croft didn’t need protecting. She was a fearless daredevil, a crack shot in short shorts with enough attitude to scare off a pack of bloodthirsty gorillas.

This is the character who, in every modern game, has had to have her proportions reduced? Who was a strong female character, embraced by feminists? Yet who also was so problematic that the developers felt the need to reboot her as an A-cup who wears long pants? The Jezebel piece vacillates between the two extremes with every sentence:

A new revamped version of the iconic Tomb Raideraims to explain how Lara became the scantily clad badass fighter teenage boys rubbed one out to in 1997, but if you were expecting a similarly fun romp of Croftian ass kickery this time around, you’ll be sorely disappointed. […] Rosenberg told Shreier the days of Lara running around being a terrifying badass are gone. Gone also are her giant protruding breasts and short shorts; Lara’s midriff will be covered and she’ll more or less have the proportions of a normal woman who is in excellent shape rather than a Barbie masturbation fantasy body.

So which is it? Did Tomb Raider used to be a terrifying badass or teenage masturbation fantasy? I’m not criticizing either approach. I think there’s room for insanely beautiful badasses who at most get a few aesthetic-looking cuts and scrapes (hey, it works for James Bond). And there’s room for rough-and-tumble badasses who come out of adventures looking like they’ve been through a meat grinder (that also works for James Bond!).

Oh, how it works.

It just seems odd that in one of the few instances of a female protagonist getting as down and dirty as the guys, suddenly the internet calls sexism. How does that work? Under those rules, the developers can’t win. If they try to do a realistic Lara Croft, they’re sexist. If they try to do a fantasy Lara Croft, they’re sexist.

Finally, you have how the developers are relating the character of Lara Croft to a male audience. Guess what? It’s sexist.

“When people play Lara, they don’t really project themselves into the character,” Rosenberg told me at E3 last week when I asked if it was difficult to develop for a female protagonist.

“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.’”

So is she still the hero? I asked Rosenberg if we should expect to look at Lara a little bit differently than we have in the past.

“She’s definitely the hero but— you’re kind of like her helper,” he said. “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 Jezebel article runs with this, referring to the player as Lara Croft’s dad, which is “weird and awkward.” News to me. After all, audience’s relationships to a work’s protagonist have never been cut-and-dry “I am he.” Many female gamers play Assassin’s Creed enjoying the relationship between Ezio Auditore and Leonardi da Vinci, not seeing themselves as Ezio. On TV, you have tons of unsympathetic protagonists, like Don Draper and Walter White, but ones that you’re interested in because you want to see what happens to them and the people around them. And then you have movie characters that you don’t emphasize with, but are just cool, like Blade and the Terminator.

When he was programmed to protect John Connor, I felt like *I* had been programmed to protect John Connor.

Audiences approach texts in different ways, otherwise there’d be no fandom for Loki, the Lannisters, or the Cylons. People engage with characters as sex objects, surrogates, objects of derision, woobies, and magnificent bastards. There’s no “you’re doing it wrong!” for experiencing fiction. If a guy wants to play Tomb Raider because he’s concerned about Lara Croft and wants to protect her, that’s fine. If a girl wants to play Tomb Raider because she sees herself as Lara and wants to blow away some wild life, that’s fine too.

I know it’s a lot to ask of people, to wait and see when the impetus is to rush to judgment, when you think you have all the evidence. But Crystal Dynamics is at least being upfront about the kind of story they intend to tell. I don’t begrudge anyone who takes a look or a listen and decides it’s not for them. But everyone, let’s at least judge by the finished product instead of a trailer.

After all, it’s not like this is The Amazing Spider-Man.