Lara Croft: Feminist Raider

Well the reimaging of Lara with the recent Batman movies as a template it interesting, I’m not so sure it would actually work. The reason they could completely redo Batman as they did was because they were really reimagining him at all. See the producers of the Batman movies had decades and decades of comic lore and stories to draw on. In fact the most recent movies are most heavily influenced by Steve Miller’s run of Batman with his Dark Knight series where he made Batman into a crotchety kickass old man who pissed vitriol. On top of the comics, the movie also could draw on the ten years of really rather good Batman cartoons as well as the sex appeal and incredibly acting power of Christian Bale. Lara does not have all of that background source material to draw upon as you go about recasting her.

But the thing I found most interesting of what they had said was that they want Lara to be more female friendly and attract more women to her games. Now on one hand I am heartened to see some game company execs acting like women are a legitimate marketing segment to go after, and with something much better than another generic Barbie game that’s supposed to attract me because it’s pink and has horses.

Yet even with only having played the Tomb Raider games in passing, and a brief passing at that (they just tend not to be prefered genre) I’m not really sure how exactly you make Lara more of a feminist. She could burn her bra, but given her cup size that would be rather uncomfortable and not conducive to running and jumping. I mean when you get down to it, Lara Croft isn’t actually a bad character, in fact when compared to the majority of women in video games she’s probably one of the most enlightened you’ll find. She avoids nearly all of hte pitfalls that hit the other women featured in video games. She isn’t a stupid wilting flower always needing to be rescued, she kicks ass on par with the boys, she’s independent and wealthy and she’s more than just her boob size and a skimpy outfit. Not that her boobs aren’t overly large or her outfit skimpy, but in comparison to say some of the girls in DOA, Lara is more in proportion with her body size than most others. And while the outfit it kind of lacking in material, it at least has the appearance of more functionality than the scraps of cloth and string barely holding some of her contemporaries in and up.

So I suppose I’m lost as to how exactly you make Lara more appealing to women. Sure you could do what they did to Barbie and downsize her proportions, but that’s only superficial and one look at Barbie sales will tell you that changing the proportions doesn’t actually fool us into thinking you are more enlightened and realistic about women. Sure you could leach all of her personality away so she’s some emotionless, sneering, smartass of a warrior with no warmth and no use for anything with with the male or man in it, but I wouldn’t really see that as a good thing since that is neither something I can full relate to nor envision myself as.

One way that she could be made more female accessible is simply to make her act more like a woman, make me emphasize with her more as a woman. And maybe bring more actual estrogen into the game. There are never any good, and I mean really good, female villains in these games. Yet I think if there was going to be a series that would benefit from a great female villain, or even just a good female rival, it would be Tomb Raider.

Of course the likelihood of this happening is about the same as money raining from the sky.

Tags: girl, opinion, ps3, video game