I feel genuinely kind of guilty for being so hard on Tomb Raider, because it was actually a really well-designed game. The gameplay was put together meticulously and even the plot was at least serviceable for the kind of story it was.
It's too bad the game took the role of reinventing one of the biggest female icons in the industry, especially in a time when this discussion is extremely hot in gaming circles, otherwise I might had been kinder to it. Not that the problems with the writing wouldn't stand; a step-back is a step-back, but the thing with Tomb Raider is that it tries to cram so many ideas for strong subtext in its story without ever thinking any of them through and realizing them properly.
So, I'm pretty adamant about the lack of agency stuff and the misguided changes I mentioned in the review, but let's quickly go over a few more things I'd like to point out.
Lara's change into a weak animal that's forced to survive, as long as she doesn't wear shorts, is not the only pro-woman effort in the game. The story is set-up so that it's mainly woman-centric, with both the main hero (Lara) and the main villain (Himiko, the Sun-Queen) being of the female gender, while all male presence is reduced to the supporting cast, which is usually met with horrible death, courtesy of either party.
So it's one of *those* stories, where in order to empower a group of people, you need to put that one thing that makes them somewhat different at the forefront and make it their only defining trait. It's a cop-out trying to empower women by putting Lara in a woman-centric story, as if that's the only type of context where the character could've worked, but on the other hand it'd be just infuriating doing it through a setting that exclusively inhabited by evil men. The story is already unintentionally misandric as it is.
I know even using the word "misandric" in these socially butt-fucked Internets is a sure-fire-way to have your credibility blown to bits (the spell-checker doesn't even recognize it as a real word), but it's kind of hard to miss here.
All the bad guys Lara sends to bloody deaths are exclusively male and even they are reduced to the Sun-Queen's pawns without any sense of agency themselves. Both the armed thugs that hunt survivors on the island and the ancient zombie Samurai are knowingly (though unwillingly) swearing undying loyalty to her.
Add insult to injury, the island is *filled* with dead bodies, entire rivers of them, from skulls and bones to the hung decaying corpses of World War II soldiers and they are ALL men. I wouldn't find this in the least bit problematic, if not for the glaring double-standard: you can argue that women in games are required to "show tits or GTFO" till the cows come home ["they have no agency (in regards to what they can wear)" as Jim Sterling stupidly put it recently], but I've never seen anyone laying their mutilated bodies by the hundreds on the floor just for shock-value.
In fact I'm pretty sure if anyone even suggested doing it, they'd be hunted out of the industry and into a cave, with a rope on one hand and a terribly unstable stool on the other.
The whole thing would've been easier to digest if there was any sense of structure in these themes. The idea of the woman-centric story could've worked if viewed under the lens of irony, where the hundreds of victimized men are stand-ins for women exploitation in media (though that'd be a bit far-fetched in and on itself) while Himiko is the metaphorical oppressor, the male designer that makes these decisions without regard for stereotyping.
It would definitely work, considering the abuse Lara goes through in the game, where she's burnt, impaled, bound and hung time and again, with the game almost lingering on these moments to the point of being somewhat creepy if you read too much into it.
But the story plays it straight and doesn't break the mold, instead creating a mess of its own message. This is a woman-centric-story, where evil men kill or recruit other men and kidnap young women to put them through the Sun-Queen transformation ritual. This thinly disguised metaphor for Patriarchy and Rape Culture is shot down, since as it turns out they all act, contrary to their desires, under the orders of the Sun-Queen (a powerful woman) themselves.
The metaphorical Patriarchy is a literal Matriarchy.
To make matters worse, this is a female-empowerment story that comes with its very own damsel in distress, Lara's side-kick Sam, who needs rescuing every fucking time she shows her goddamned face in the game.
One has to wonder at this point, why was Sam in the game at all, since her entire purpose was to be captured for the ritual? Is there a statement the game tries to make by having Lara rescue her, just like Mario rescues princess Peach? Wouldn't it be a better, albeit more formulaic, empowerment story for Lara to be the eligible vessel for the Sun-Queen and let her rescue herself and bring the house down just 'cause?
By the time the whole thing ends, the story just doesn't seem to do either gender any favours. Men are expendable and their lives unimportant, a view that's not far-removed from other games (shooters in particular) or a society where the primary victims of violent crimes and war are men (but we don't talk about that).
Women on the other hand come off worse than one would expect in a female-centric story, with the protagonist becoming a hero out of necessity without any say in the matter (she's a victim of somebody else's oppression), the female supporting cast being in dire need of saving all the time and the main antagonist being the worst possible face of a matriarchy without any alternatives presented to offer some balance in the subtext.
The agency stuff I mentioned in the review hurt the overall subtext just as much as they hurt Lara individually, because they undermine the juxtaposition between the protagonist and the antagonist. In a story where two powerful women are supposed to clash, one is an elusive figure that gets defeated in a cutscene and the other is a victim of circumstances that wins by killing the same legions of bad men she'd been killing throughout the entire game. The final encounter between these two characters could've been written out entirely and not a single thing would've gone missing-- thematically speaking.
A mess is a mess and the writing of Tomb Raider makes a big one. In its effort to revolutionize female presence in gaming, it put together a very sloppy story with a subtext that flip-flops on its message, however unintentionally and even though the game is still strong thanks to the solid gameplay, it fails to deliver where it promised the most.
 |
| Empowerment...as taught by Disney's "Pocahontas". |
So, I'm pretty adamant about the lack of agency stuff and the misguided changes I mentioned in the review, but let's quickly go over a few more things I'd like to point out.
Lara's change into a weak animal that's forced to survive, as long as she doesn't wear shorts, is not the only pro-woman effort in the game. The story is set-up so that it's mainly woman-centric, with both the main hero (Lara) and the main villain (Himiko, the Sun-Queen) being of the female gender, while all male presence is reduced to the supporting cast, which is usually met with horrible death, courtesy of either party.
So it's one of *those* stories, where in order to empower a group of people, you need to put that one thing that makes them somewhat different at the forefront and make it their only defining trait. It's a cop-out trying to empower women by putting Lara in a woman-centric story, as if that's the only type of context where the character could've worked, but on the other hand it'd be just infuriating doing it through a setting that exclusively inhabited by evil men. The story is already unintentionally misandric as it is.
I know even using the word "misandric" in these socially butt-fucked Internets is a sure-fire-way to have your credibility blown to bits (the spell-checker doesn't even recognize it as a real word), but it's kind of hard to miss here.
 |
| Female empowerment means rotting men and bound women. |
Add insult to injury, the island is *filled* with dead bodies, entire rivers of them, from skulls and bones to the hung decaying corpses of World War II soldiers and they are ALL men. I wouldn't find this in the least bit problematic, if not for the glaring double-standard: you can argue that women in games are required to "show tits or GTFO" till the cows come home ["they have no agency (in regards to what they can wear)" as Jim Sterling stupidly put it recently], but I've never seen anyone laying their mutilated bodies by the hundreds on the floor just for shock-value.
In fact I'm pretty sure if anyone even suggested doing it, they'd be hunted out of the industry and into a cave, with a rope on one hand and a terribly unstable stool on the other.
The whole thing would've been easier to digest if there was any sense of structure in these themes. The idea of the woman-centric story could've worked if viewed under the lens of irony, where the hundreds of victimized men are stand-ins for women exploitation in media (though that'd be a bit far-fetched in and on itself) while Himiko is the metaphorical oppressor, the male designer that makes these decisions without regard for stereotyping.
It would definitely work, considering the abuse Lara goes through in the game, where she's burnt, impaled, bound and hung time and again, with the game almost lingering on these moments to the point of being somewhat creepy if you read too much into it.
But the story plays it straight and doesn't break the mold, instead creating a mess of its own message. This is a woman-centric-story, where evil men kill or recruit other men and kidnap young women to put them through the Sun-Queen transformation ritual. This thinly disguised metaphor for Patriarchy and Rape Culture is shot down, since as it turns out they all act, contrary to their desires, under the orders of the Sun-Queen (a powerful woman) themselves.
The metaphorical Patriarchy is a literal Matriarchy.
To make matters worse, this is a female-empowerment story that comes with its very own damsel in distress, Lara's side-kick Sam, who needs rescuing every fucking time she shows her goddamned face in the game.
One has to wonder at this point, why was Sam in the game at all, since her entire purpose was to be captured for the ritual? Is there a statement the game tries to make by having Lara rescue her, just like Mario rescues princess Peach? Wouldn't it be a better, albeit more formulaic, empowerment story for Lara to be the eligible vessel for the Sun-Queen and let her rescue herself and bring the house down just 'cause?
 |
| That's how we used to do it. |
By the time the whole thing ends, the story just doesn't seem to do either gender any favours. Men are expendable and their lives unimportant, a view that's not far-removed from other games (shooters in particular) or a society where the primary victims of violent crimes and war are men (but we don't talk about that).
Women on the other hand come off worse than one would expect in a female-centric story, with the protagonist becoming a hero out of necessity without any say in the matter (she's a victim of somebody else's oppression), the female supporting cast being in dire need of saving all the time and the main antagonist being the worst possible face of a matriarchy without any alternatives presented to offer some balance in the subtext.
The agency stuff I mentioned in the review hurt the overall subtext just as much as they hurt Lara individually, because they undermine the juxtaposition between the protagonist and the antagonist. In a story where two powerful women are supposed to clash, one is an elusive figure that gets defeated in a cutscene and the other is a victim of circumstances that wins by killing the same legions of bad men she'd been killing throughout the entire game. The final encounter between these two characters could've been written out entirely and not a single thing would've gone missing-- thematically speaking.
A mess is a mess and the writing of Tomb Raider makes a big one. In its effort to revolutionize female presence in gaming, it put together a very sloppy story with a subtext that flip-flops on its message, however unintentionally and even though the game is still strong thanks to the solid gameplay, it fails to deliver where it promised the most.
TGG "Tomb Raider" Review
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