Big deal, Silent Hill had female protagonists get brutally murdered years ago.

How would a truly empowering, non-sexist Indiana Jones rip-off with a female lead work, in your opinion?

I don't remember any Silent Hill games basing their entire ad campaign off of showing nothing but the protagonist caked in mud and gore sobbing as she yanked spikes out of her leg.


Were the old Tomb Raider games really sexist in the first place?

Holy fuck I didn't even read the comments.

I don't remember any old Silent Hills or Tomb Raiders provoking that :(

The designers are being sexist against chicks with huge tits.

"I don't remember any old Silent Hills or Tomb Raiders provoking that :("

Yes, yes they did.

You're new to this whole "ryona" thing, I take it? Well, this is your lucky day! Follow the relateds and enjoy!

Well one of the main gripes people tend to have with Uncharted is that it's too ridiculous what with the guy murdering 300 thousand people and is constantly shrugging it off with a "clever" quip.
This Tomb Raider definitely looks more like an exploitation film but I'm not convinced that it can't also be empowering. I'm not a 15 year old girl but if I were I'd probably think this Lara Croft character was pretty badass, whereas the old one with the big boobs that effortlessly kills dinosaurs was just ridiculous.

I remember the original Tomb Raider was supposed to be "empowering" because she starred in the game and had guns.

I'll let someone else make the obvious joke.

I kinda look at it like a Tarrantino film. Yeah, there's a lot of clips like, well, this surfacing, and a lot of bad shit going down for her, but she's supposed to be someone who overcomes and rises above all that. Assuming the gamer actually wants to. Figures the first person to get an early copy of the game does this shit with it.

On that note, Adham is totally right. Exploiting AND empowering!

One time around 1998 I went to a Funcoland in the suburbs late at night. The two dirtiest adult men I've ever seen (not counting some homeless guys I've known through work, but even most of them were cleaner) were working and, since there were no customers, when I walked in I caught them in the middle of alternately molesting the lifesize, cardboard Lara Croft and punching the similar Duke Nukem* cutout in the face for trying to steal their woman.

I have a pretty hard time imagining Lara Croft being empowering to anyone outside of the jiggle physics business.





*in retrospect, given the year, I have to wonder if that thing was an ad for Duke Nukem Forever.

No. Fuck this. Old Lara was a badass. At the age of sixteen, she survived an airplane crash and months in a deadly jungle all alone. She ran, jumped, climbed and swam without tiring. She fought wild animals, dinosaurs, gun-toting mooks and even GODS without flinching. She never cowered before asshole villains, even if they had her tied up and outnumbered. She stared them down until they blinked then she kicked their asses.

It all started to go wrong with "Tomb Raider: Anniversary". In the original opening scene, Lara responded to Larson's flirtations with some flirting of her own. In the remake, she responded with a pissed-off look and snarky remarks because "strong" women are sexless, humorless and violent.

Say what you will about old Lara's massive breasts and shapely backside, she one bad mother-fucker.

I'm with Binro on this. If snuffing a TRex doesn't empower you, nothing will.

Old Lara was like Elvira. Fun, campy, sass-mouthed, and badass. People on all sides of the social spectrum looked down on her because they couldn't see past her huge tits, but she ignored the haters and kept right on doing what she did best. People need to stop expecting her to be some poster girl for the dour puritan wing of feminism, all hard lines and combat boots, trudging through the jungle to deliver pamphlets on rape culture to indigenous women.

She's a camp gay icon, and that's wonderful.

The boob size thing is insane. Even going by the insane belief that smaller boobs = BREAKING THE SHACKLES, how is this any better? Cartoon barbie figure = insulting sexism, but a 40E 110 lb. photorealistic woman suddenly makes your game respectful and enlightening?

The old games were toned down Elvira as Indiana Jones. This is I Spit on Your Grave with gore and implied rape in place of actual rape. It doesn't really matter either way but the scramble by the press to put forward their best Alan Alda impression is embarrassing.

Just for fun, do an image search for "Tomb Raider 2013" against a search on "Silent Hill 3". Try to guess which one is the realistic non exploitative female character and which one is built entirely around grimy bloody environments.

https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQn3eiAa8 J8jWrnzSMyqEPniuqKWp5FldNaDhwMdlw9LFDBLW_gfQ

http://www.digitaltrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/tomb_r aider.jpg

I agree that the whole exploitation look is intentional, and that the makers are well aware that it may appeal to a big chunk of their perverted male audience (they want to make money off this thing after all). I haven't followed the press or marketing around this too closely, but I definitely believe you.
However, as someone who has enjoyed many exploitation films I don't think an exploitation film has to necessarily be demeaning of its subject. I spit on your grave is a disgusting rape fantasy without any empowering or redeeming qualities, but a film like Kill Bill uses the character's sex appeal both to titillate and to create a powerful protagonist. Many films from the blaxploitation era glorified ghetto figures like pimps and macho men but also created cool action heroes for adolescent black males (Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song).
I'm not convinced this game is an equivalent of "I spit on your grave", or that, on the other hand, that it is somehow some powerful piece of feminist propaganda.
Obviously, I haven't played it, so maybe you're right and this is all about rape titillation and victimizing a sexy female, all I'm saying is "maybe it's not and it manages to walk the line pretty decently". Carolyn Petit of Gamespot seemed to feel it did a good job in that sense, which leads me to think maybe that's correct...

Just going by basic image search, for every Rambo/Predator shot of Laura deftly wielding a bow as Artemis incarnate, there's 5 or more shots of her contorted and sobbing gore caked face.

For a long time the first and only gameplay preview videos were this very skewer scene and a quicktime event where a gang of thugs surround and attempt to rape her (just kidding, they only slit her throat ^__^).

I am trademarking "Tittyanna Jones" though.

Either you haven't seen much about this game or you didn't see the same 80s action movies that I did.

I hated that in Far Cry 3, not because I hate the concept behind that type of character arc, but because it was really poorly done, like absolutely every other element of Far Cry 3's story.

Reviewers are saying that the protagonist's character arc in this game is handled well, so there's that...

I'm guessing this game doesn't open with Laura acting like a trust fund brofrat douche to instantly make you hate her the rest of the time.

Or maybe it's because Far Cry 3 guy didn't go through an EMPOWERING breast reduction.

I loved Far Cry 3, but the story was incredibly stupid even for videogame standards.

I doubt this Tomb Raider is some brilliant piece of fiction, but it would have to try really hard to be as retarded as Far Cry 3.

As far as the boob reduction, I don't know if it was marketed as empowering (which is dumb), but honestly, it seems to me that with today's graphics they would have looked extremely out of place (disclaimer: not that they weren't ridiculous before, but the character was moving in a cartoon world where everything looked slightly ridiculous).

Actually, he completes his arc immediately after the opening credits run. He gets a magic tattoo that gives him manly fighting powers.

I mean, fuck. He is literally a trust fund douchebag that gets a tribal tattoo and then he is so awesome at being a warrior that they decide he's the chosen one. One gets the impression that this is a fantasy that a frat boy came up with after he got a tribal tattoo and somebody explained what cultural appropriation was. The storyline in that game was painful to watch.

It was like reading a racist mentally challenged person's diary. I felt fucking awful and embarrassed for the person that wrote it.

Showing Lara's character arc over the course of an entire game doesn't even compare.

That was supposed to be a reply to the above chain.

wait, theres a third boob in this one?!?

Speaking of that, when's the three breasted hooker from Total Recall getting her own action adventure game? Empowerment ahoy!

There has to be a mod for a Bethesda game that does something like that.