Lara Croft is a Sociopath
from IndigoMoontrue@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world on 27 Sep 21:17
https://lemmy.world/post/36563644
from IndigoMoontrue@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world on 27 Sep 21:17
https://lemmy.world/post/36563644
Here I am playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider, when it dawns on me. Lara is a sociopath. She is a killing machine who barely even speaks on it, it’s nothing to her at this point. She doesn’t care about her health, injury nor pain. She just wants artifacts and to uncover ancient mysteries. I like her character but damn she is actually low key the villain of the story when i think about it. Trinity are bad guys but Lara is the boss villain slaughtering all in her way to get to her goals. Lol anyone else notice that?
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You’ve just described the protagonists in most games.
Check the manual for Super Mario Bros. The original on NES.
Mario is described as “The hero of our story (maybe)”
Which is kind of a weird way to describe the main character.
In a time when a lot of children’s media was focused on “eco warriors” and fighting against pollution and stuff, you had a game with an Italian plumber stomping on turtles.
Perchance.
Keep it up, baby
Beautiful.
Why are we saying this?
This was hilarious.
The synopsis in the manual also states that Bowser turned the residents of the Mushroom Kingdom into “stones, bricks, and field horse-hair plants.” In a given playthrough, most players probably smash a lot of bricks. Bricks which used to be Mushroom Kingdom people, who are now dead. Because Mario killed them.
It’s a big maybe on Mario being the hero because he may or may not actually succeed in reaching Bowser and rescuing the princess depending on how much the player happens to suck, and/or of Luigi winds up being the victor instead.
Actually, if Luigi wins, Mario still wins. There’s 3 Marios. Mario Mario, and Luigi Mario.
Who’s the third one?
Mario.
I mean, pretty sure getting turned into a brick killed them first
I think the implication is supposed to be that when you beat Bowser they’ll be turned back.
Did anything actually imply it or just wishful thinking?
It’s just making a joke about the game being challenging (he’s only the hero if you win). Game media used to be a lot more playfully antagonistic back when many games weren’t necessarily designed to be won.
(And while I’m here, that manual has other odd stuff in it that predates Nintendo setting global standards. It has multiple uses of the word “kill”, and it has an “ask your parents” bit about the domino effect).
It’s my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of 'em was one kinda sombitch or another.
One example: the early-80s arcade game Elevator Action, in which you play a secret agent who abseils to the top floor of an enemy building and has to grab secret files and make his way down to a getaway car on the ground floor. Well, that’s how it’s described. In reality, you’re a spree shooter rampaging through an office.
I remember a comic where one character says “Why are there so many monsters in this dungeon?!”
The other says “because they live here.”
And the first character says “oh. …ooooooohhhh…”
I believe The Last of Us II actually portrayed this one thing oerfectly. At the beginning you can feel some of Ellie’s hesitation as she comes upon death, but the more the story unfolds and the more she becomes psychopathic. It’s hinted and it’s shown. The last Act of the game is her giving in to her PTSD. I think that, for once, this is absolutely brilliant.
But she’s the Hero™ fighting against the Bad Guys™. Branding is everything.
But yeah, viewed objectively from a third party perspective, a lot of heroes in games and movies are actually borderline villains. Inserting themselves into a situation they don’t need to be involved in, and then the end justify the means. They may murder tons of no-name henchmen, but a greater threat to society has been eliminated!
I actually find it interesting that a lot of superhero characters came from healthy, sane family environments and fight to protect the Status Quo™, while most villains come from hardship and trauma and attempt to change the Status Quo™ that allowed their injustice of a life to exist, so others don’t suffer the same fate.
But some happy-go-lucky hero always comes by and stops them because their plan changes the Status Quo™. And we can’t accept changes to our structured social environment!
DC’s Poison Ivy is always one of the best examples of this.
I want to say she is from the 70s? And “evil lady eco terrorist” is both sexy and evil. Except, as time went on, more and more of the readers/viewers started to REALLY like the lady who murders the patriarchy while destroying chemical factories and oil refineries to protect the planet. So she became more of a plant monster and DC Editorial learned how many of us are into bondage and so forth. Which has led to the modern day where she is basically an anti-villain, at best, alongside her lesbian lover Harley. Although the Harley Quinn show did a great job of playing with that with everyone more or less thinking her an annoying goodie two shoes even though she is torturing and murdering children and whatever else her background atrocity of the week is.
But a lesser known example that might actually be one of my favorite movies at this point is Donnie Yen’s Raging Fire. Yen plays the hero cop, as he always does, who is older but has morals and butts heads with his bosses who are too political. Except that, years prior to the movie, he was on a case with his protege and partner and they were told to do whatever it took to find a rich business man. Oh noes! His entire unit accidentally kills a suspect and now then Oh Noes, Donnie narced on them because of his morals so they went to prison and had a REAL bad time.
And now they are out and killing the corrupt cops and business people who betrayed them. Also it is basically Heat (right down to getting caught because the psycho killed a hooker) and the movie does a REAL good job of showing why Tse’s criminal is the way he is and why Yen’s cop is pushed to his breaking point and outright fighting the system he is supposed to uphold when his loved ones are in danger.
Until the final sequence which is the bank robbery from Heat. Except the writers realized the CCP is REALLY not going to like a movie that is this anti-cop so suddenly they are mowing down civilians left and right and lobbing grenades everywhere just to make sure you understand these ex-cops are actually the bad guys. And Donnie Yen and his CCP mouthpiece ass still has it.
Its a deeply problematic movie, like most of Donnie Yen’s post 2010s work, but it is also incredibly fascinating when you think of it from the perspective of sympathetic villains and state mandated “tone”. Also, like ALL of Donnie Yen’s work, it is a beautiful spectacle of martial arts coming from a guy who is even more frustratingly charming than Tom Cruise.
I don’t read many comics, but there was a Wonder Twins run by Mark Russell that was amazing.
The villain had a plan to scramble everyone’s identity on Earth, so one day you could wake up and be in a horrible economic situation. His thinking was that with the deadline approaching, people would have to work to make the world more fair for everyone.
Spoiler
The world leaders are so relieved when he’s finally caught, because they can stop wasting money on improving the lives of poor people.
That’s why I like Wolfenstein and Doom games. You only kill bad guys there, and it is expected that you should have no mercy for them.
One of the most unhinged archeologists ever
“We named the dog Indiana”
Along with Nathan Drake for exactly the same reason.
Nathan Drake is a treasure Hunter not an archeologist. He KNOWS he’s not the good guy
Maybe. The bad guys show up with a lot of guns to take whatever they want. She shows up for archaeology first, and ends up having to stop the objectively bad guys.
The third game of the reboot trilogy starts with her tracking this evil organization that’s been screwing with her family, finding the item they’re trying to steal to trigger an appocalypse, stealing it first, and almost triggering that same apocalypse because she doesn’t know what she’s doing, thinking she’s doing good. Second game also started with her tracking the same organization to figure out what they’re doing, and from that, she stumbles into some archaeology. It’s a long character arc, she was looking for unrelated answers, but she learns that she can be good at figuring out ancient stuff, and she finds out the hard way that she can also fuck up badly when she doesn’t know what she’s doing. It’s supposed to end at the point where she’s mature enough to do better. We just see all the “fucking up” parts.
The real sociopath was us all along.
The real treasure was the personality disorder we developed along the way
I’ve never seen Lara sitting for therapy. I, on the other hand, have sat a few times. 👍
The second game of the reboot trilogy starts with Lara in therapy session about how she became a thrill addict from her survivor’s guilt from the first game and how she’s liking it.
Now that’s interesting
I’m looking up the opening scene for Rise of the Tomb Raider and I can’t find the therapy session itself. Maybe it was only in the trailer and they cut it from the game, I remember people thought it was weird when they released that trailer because it was unexpected at the time that this was the direction they were taking? But the game does have you find tapes of Lara’s recorded sessions talking with the therapist, like how she’s having control issues and it turns out she has become a different person in a bad way.
Shadow definitely went off the deep end as it tried to up the stakes. Most of her personal motivation (frantic survival and then the mystery of her father’s death) were out the window and it was just a nebulous “I want to stop the bad guys”. And… it plays with it but it is very clear the intent is that she is unleashing the apocalypse as she steals these artifacts before the Bad Guys can. Whether the Bad Guys would have still done it without her is, of course, up to the viewer. It’s Indy and the Ark/Grail.
But I think the game overall does a good job of getting to the status quo and establishing Lara as having a Very British reason for looting everything and shooting every dinosaur she ever sees. If she doesn’t steal it, err, have it gifted to her, then somebody much worse will and they’ll be a lot meaner about it.
On the scale of “it belongs in a museum”: She is definitely much more psychotic than Indiana Jones. But she ain’t got nothing on Nathan Drake.
Personally? I loved the first of the reboot trilogy (actually strongly disliked every Tomb Raider up to that). I felt the second wore out its welcome by the end. And I actively disliked the third but it was short enough I finished it. But I think that is also why I will probably never bother to play Uncharted 4. I am just done with humping walls looking for yellow paint and waiting to see when my character reaches for something so I know to hit the jump button.
Stopped right before Uncharted 4? But that one has the “jump off a high ledge and punch a guy in the face to break your fall” move. It always felt so good.
I think the writers pretty much admitted they had no plan for Trinity, seeing how their goal completely changed from immortality to apocalypse between Rise and Shadow. They were just the reason for Lara to track them across the world and stumble on ancient stuff.
Yeah. In Tomb Raider 2013 she goes from crying about killing a deer, to wiping out hundreds of people with families, in the space of about an hour. 😬
Yeah, it was funny how they tried to create some narrative arc about how she reacts to killing, and it just made the whole thing even weirder
That was very clearly on purpose, she starts panicking about the first guys she kills to survive (and there’s a very obvious rape vibe when she gets ganged up on), and near the end she’s screaming I’m gonna kill you all. That is the narrative arc. Welcome to trauma stories?
And I really liked that! In this story I want to add, not irl of course!
I couldn’t keep playing that game after the first few hours. It felt like some kind of Lara Croft torture simulator fetish thing and made me feel icky.
It bothers me because TR2013 didn’t have to be like that. The dogs were challenging and scary. The puzzles were good. The bow and melee combat was tense. Hunting and exploration could’ve played a bigger part, the game so rarely took you off the rails and it was good when it did.
The game could’ve been made with killing humans being rare dramatic moments, with the guns being tools of last resort.
oh man I think there is a video somewhere on youtube where the dev talks about Lara’s “growth” from the first game to the third like lmfao I think this was intentional.
Are they talking about her physically modelled breasts?
She’s a wealthy British lady …so yes, a sociopath.
Also, you don’t want to know what she thinks of trans people
Don’t worry. She’ll make sure you know.
Just give her some time to finish her book series.
“As I stumbled upon the dinosaurs in the lost valley. An army of trans women showed up and gunned down all the dinosaurs…….and several of the local villages……and looted all the precious historical artifacts that were destined for the British Museum.”
If you think you have it bad, just remember - Laura Croft’s entire life has been in ruins.
Well, you don’t get many kind and gentle shooter protagonists just dripping with empathy.
Well THERE’S an interesting idea!
BANG! “I did it again, I hate myself. Poor guy was minding his own business and hadn’t done anything to me.”
When you loot them, instead of finding ammo and health packs, you find pictures of their kids and elderly grandma.
Have you not seen those movies that end up saying “if we kill the big bad, we’re no better than them” after mowing down countless faceless mobs
Some protags have “selective empathy” that only kicks in when a character has more than a certain number of dialog lines.
They should make a parody action movie where the protagonist in the end lets the antagonist live, because of moral reasons. Then they walk away and the camera zooms out and you see them walk over hundreds of dead bodies. Maybe Austin Powers or Naked Gun did this already.
It’s (from the era of) Quake with extra Earth lore & special triangles.
It’s like in the movies where the main hero chooses to not kill the bad guy at the end “because that would make him as bad as them” … yet he killed 1000 poor henchmen throughout the movie with no issues.
You’ve discovered ludonarrative dissonance!
I’ve always thought it was funny how fast she goes from crying over a deer she had to kill to remorseless murdering machine.
My flatmate used to call that Tomb Raider (the first of the new trilogy) “PTSD Simulator”. It’s as you say, the first few deaths are entirely survival-driven, with her constantly crying and then she becomes an emotionless one-woman army.
I don’t know I just want to bang her
The unfortunate fact is, the conceit of most action games relies on some pretty dumb ideas.
People have pointed this out for everyone from Mario to Nathan Drake, etc. Some games even try to base a “moment of introspection” around it, and it sort of falls flat.
In Halo, you can kill an elite squad commander and the grunts will run and cower. Halo wins once again.
And it’s still fun to go hunt those little bastards down.
uncharted is the worst for this because the fights add basically nothing. the games are great humourous adventure serials occasionally broken up by obligatory murderous rampages. after my first playthrough of uncharted 2 it showed that i had done over 200 headshots alone. friend of mine had something like 1500.
Didn’t someone get a comment from a dev or read in a manual that Nathan never dies. He just runs out of “luck” or something?
i think so. i don’t really have a problem with that. as the narrator says in the stanley parable, what kind of story has the main character die halfway through
Yes
Looks like it was on twitter so here is a blogspam article instead, but Jonathan Cooper and Amy Hennig both effectively confirmed this
screenrant.com/uncharted-game-nathan-drake-luck-m…
Basically the idea is that only the last shot matters. Nathan isn’t actually getting shot by a full magazine from a FAL. He is getting grazed and shitting himself. And when you finally die? THAT is the bullet that hit. Which actually makes a lot more sense since the damage indicators (aside from Nate face tanking a 50 BMG…) tend to line up more with how video games portray suppression and the like. And it is why a single pistol shot to the leg in a cutscene leads to 20 minutes of slow walking and a time skip.
In Uncharted 4 there’s an achievement called “Ludonarrative Dissonance” which is awarded after killing a number of enemies lol.
don’t make me tap the sign
Not parody, but still amusing.
the game would have been better if they took the combat out entirely, save for some one-on-one fights. it’s a shame that they’re done with the series, it was finally approaching “playable indy film” territory.
the achievement means they knew, and put the monster closet shit in anyway.
I think it’s pretty cool this issue is actually addressed in the witcher (action rpg). At the very end you get confronted by Death (personified). He blames you for all the pain and suffering you caused and that he has to follow your footsteps wherever you go and asks you to give up as the world would be a better place without you. You can decide to give in or to fight him, if I remember correctly. It’s really one of my favourite moments in video games history and really worth considering the good you as the witcher have done vs the pain you caused. If you think it’s moral to measure life vs life you can definitely share Deaths opinion.
The witcher still holds up today and I think is worth playing if you haven’t yet.
In metal gear solid snake eater there’s a scene where we cross a river seeing every enemy we killed.
Trepang2 still has you killing guards like a blender, but adds a fear mechanic to the enemies. Makes you really realize you are a monster.
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At least in some stealth games you can avoid confrontation and killing.
yeah but she has triangle tiddies
Lara sneaking around a camp. Finds a letter one of the mercs wrote to his little daughter. He just wants to come home to her and only took the job to pay for her expensive private school.
She slams her climbing pick into his eye socket.
Is this for real? Never played the game.
It’s just a joke because that’s exactly the kind of thing you can expect to find/do.
In the first reboot especially, since it’s on a Bermuda-Triangle-type island off Japan where everyone who’s landed there ends up marooned because of a magical storm/hurricane that keeps it hidden, so you’ll find letters and whatnot from soldiers of all different eras including the very soldiers you fight in-game.
There is a shitty 2007 TV movie by ČT Studio Brno (at this point, “shitty” is redundant) Kája a Zabi, where the protagonist, little boy Kája, mashes his keyboard in frustration, causing an off-brand Lara Croft to appear IRL. I haven’t seen the movie but she allegedly speaks broken Czech in a weirdly modulated voice, and keeps asking who Kája wants her to kill (“zabít”, hence the nickname she gets). I assume she is just about as psychopathic as Lara.
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Have you played Nier (the first one, not automata)? It relates to your observation
I haven’t. I’ll check it out
Are you NerdCubed?
Did you play the first one in the reboot trilogy?
There’s a bit where she has to kill somebody in self defence and then breaks down over it, before spending the entire rest of the game plonking arrows through people’s skulls.
Yes, I played the first video game. She was slowly becoming a sociopath in that one. By the third one, she is a sociopath.
The originals were much better. Lara Croft was a jet-setting dilettante with Girl Power from the era of “Cool Britannia” and the Spice Girls.
Comparatively, the reboots are utterly po-faced.
I ironically never got into the old Tomb Raiders and it wasn’t until the reboot of the trilogy that I started to play them. I like the games overall but I just noticed she was a sociopath lol.
I don’t think about that stuff. If it’s a game or movie involving killing I suspend my disbelief. It’s only annoying when they suddenly do care about it.