Everybody’s playing Bioshock: Infinite, and I’m just sitting here physically abusing a teenager. Tomb Raider, people, get your mind out of the gutter. With luck, I shall have Bioshock: Infinite in the coming days, but for now, some Tomb Raider stuff. Cuz no one on the internet has been talking about that at all. Nope...
Everyone involved in gaming, from well respected developer to lowly controller jockey is presently embroiled in an age old debate as it applies to video games. It's been around for years, but it's been popping up a lot lately:
- Games with exclusively female heroines don't sell
- No gun toting Ellen Page on the cover of Beyond: Two Souls
- Remember Me... protagonist had to be a female
- And this ridiculous piece of shit from a pillar of journalistic integrity: 40 Hottest Women in Tech
I have a rather long winded article on this subject that will have Tomb Raider woven into it (coming soon!), but I have a few thoughts to go with your second or third cup of coffee this morning. Or your afternoon beer. Or evening shot of heroin. Whatever, I’m not here to judge.
First, a broad point: This isn’t just an issue for video games. How many action movies star a tough female lead? How many recently? I can only think of Haywire and that was a fucking amazing flick because Steven Soderbergh can do no wrong. But it took a star that was a former UFC fighter to tie the whole thing together. There aren’t many professional fighters that make good movie stars, and just by the numbers, even fewer professional female fighters. Gina Carano is a special breed. Gorgeous by the Americanized standard of beauty (she can do/be this), and capable of beating my ass, your ass, and just about any ass she deems in need of a beating. Oh, you don’t believe me?
Before I dig myself into a hole with a blog I write before I’ve had enough coffee to think clearly: We (society, the planet) have a set list of things that we categorize as badass, and this list carries with it stereotypically masculine traits. Women, therefore, have a rough time of it. Nobody likes an unattractive movie star (especially in the heightened reality of the action genre), but big tough women don’t normally meet an admittedly ridiculous standard of beauty born from years of misogyny and half-dumb, slack-jawed consumer focus groups.
The need for heroines that look like models and fight like Wolverine in a cage match is representative of a societal issue, and not exclusive to the sphere of video game development. Art imitates life in spite of arguments to the contrary. The debate moves forward at the glacial pace it moved in our own country: How long before an LGBT hero/heroine other than a FemShep controlled by a drooling teenaged boy? Without using Google, how many black or middle eastern or hispanic game heroes can you name? Lead character heroes; on the cover heroes.
This brings us back to Tomb Raider, a game with a modernized but still admittedly idealized Lara Croft. Everyone has mentioned her bust size, and while they aren’t nearly the traffic cones they were in the late nineties, the world moved past a love for silicon basketballs around the time Baywatch was cancelled. According to shitty mens magazines I don’t read, the focus seems to be the likes of Megan Fox and Jennifer Lawrence. A far cry from Pamela Anderson.
And while Lara remains an unrealistic representation of the feminine form, and while her character development falls apart after the first hour of gameplay, she embodies many of the advantages of a female action lead: She can be emotional without being histrionic, she can be tough without being “masculine,” and she can brutally slaughter wave after wave of baddy without need of space armor or a chainsaw bayonet. Specifics aside, she is a fucking action hero and little mention is made of her gender past one-liners from bad guys:
“It’s just one girl!”
“Well that one girl is kicking our ass!”
Tomb Raider is a gritty reboot action title on par with the best in the business, and the hero happens to be a heroine. As a guy that’s controlled every roided-up space marine this side of the Oort Belt, I must say I’m really enjoying my controller time with a strong female lead. The world could use more of them.
And dat ass. Jesus.
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