If I like a franchise, I'm rarely a fan
of re-boots.
To me, a re-boot usually signifies one
or both of two things. Firstly, it can signify that a profitable
ongoing story has run its course. However, the brand name is worth
too much to give up so the owners attempt to sell it again by
starting over. Secondly, it can mean that someone has been inspired
to tell a similar story – but rather than compete with their muse
(or be original enough not to get sued) they buy the existing name
and ditch or change whatever they want.
I can't claim to be an unbiased source
on this subject. I'm a historian by training and inclination. Linking
individual stories into an overarching narrative is what I do and it
gives me five times as much pleasure as an average audience member.
But I don't think it's unfair to say that years of back-story and the
motivations it provides strengthens future story-telling. A character
stripped of all their preceding tales is not the same character –
it is a blank-minded clone with the same face and name.
I'm not blind to the advantages that
reboots bring. They are a chance to re-tell the good bits from the
old story whilst discarding the awful mistakes someone put into canon
fifteen years ago. They also allow you to change the tone and tweak
the concepts – potentially coming up with a view of the characters
and setting that many people prefer. Batman has definitely benefited
from this treatment in the cinema. Ultimately though, I feel that
re-boots are a chance to create something that people who weren't
really into the original will find attractive. They rarely service
people who are already having fun – in fact they tell the current
fan base that they are insufficient in number to guide future
production. Worse, their continued support is taken for granted
because it's the only new material they'll get.
I think that the new Tomb Raider looks
fascinating and I like the new direction this re-imagining is taking.
Unsurprisingly, I was never much taken with the old one.
To be sure, I did play Tomb Raider II
when it fairly new. When you're a teenage boy, taking control of the
actions of a half-naked bombshell who expresses herself in grunts and
gasps is rather fun. Yet even at that testosterone-tyrannised age,
such shallow pleasures could only sustain my interest for a couple of
levels. I hate jump puzzles and the combat system annoyed me, so I
went back to the Half-Life series. I'd be unlikely to buy a new game
for the same reason I bought Tomb Raider II, so I guess I feel like
I've grown out of it.
There are always more horny teenagers,
but Lara Croft's unique selling point of 'being a woman' is no longer
unique. There are now a vast number of titles out there which allow
you to make a scantily-clad pixel woman bend down on command. Look at
the shelves right now and you'll see Lollipop Chainsaw, a game
featuring a chainsaw-wielding cheerleader that actually leads its
blurb with the sentence “grab a chainsaw and prepare to grind one
out”. This isn't really a good thing, but the bad news for Lara is
that she's no longer got the market cornered.
On the other side of the gender divide,
female gamers who want a same-gender avatar no longer have to put up
with Lara's absurd anatomy and fan-serving dialogue. There are a
great many female characters to choose from - and a substantial
minority of them can even dress themselves for a fight. The growing
popularity of custom character creation means that they can choose
their appearance and even select their gender from a choice of two –
reducing the amount of gender stereotyping in the script. With the
multiple endings concept evolving into multiple game paths,
characterisation is increasing in the player's hands too.
As a result, the once iconic figure of
Lara Croft is becoming less and less relevant to the diverse needs of
the modern gaming community. If sales figures reflect that, it is no
surprise that the reset button has been pressed and a fresh attempt
is being made to make me buy Tomb Raider.
When they came to re-imagine the
character of Lara Croft, I can imagine the first thing the developers
thought might have been 'what character?' Aside from the obvious
joke, Lara is a bit two-dimensional and unconvincing. She lives alone
(except for servants) in a mansion, experiencing a
wealth-to-responsibility balance most similar to Paris Hilton. She
fills her copious free time with fantastically dangerous
grave-robbing quests, seeking such prize McGuffins as a dagger that
allegedly turns you into a dragon upon piercing your heart. Her
motivations presumably constitute a mix of boredom, greed for more
riches and a profound misunderstanding of how to practice
archaeology. She has always had the agility of the Prince of Persia
and packed more invisible pistol ammo than Milla Jovovich in
Ultraviolet, but her emotional range tends to rival that of
Twilight's Bella Swan.
The developers seem to have decided
that this time around, they are going to make her into a more
believable person. They've also decided to broach the question of
where a civilian woman gets the ability to take down vast numbers of
professional soldiers. Unless you're going to come right out and
admit that you're copying Indiana Jones, that is a question that
needs answering.
There are two main ways to justify such
expertise. Firstly, you say that Lara is psychotic enough to channel
all of her free time and resources into intensive battle training
(see Batman). Secondly, you say that Lara was placed in an isolated
situation where she had to master all of these skills first time or
die. The second option has more potential for a game and is the basis
on which the first instalment of the re-boot is founded.
I was hooked by the first promotional
image I saw. The picture shows a grimy Lara tightening a bloody
bandage on her arm with her teeth. There is a bow on her back instead
of pistols on her waist and a shipwreck behind her on the island
shore. She also has much smaller breasts, but I didn't really notice
because her expression and the composition of the image drew my
attention to her circumstances rather than her curves.
Here was a Lara Croft who owed more to
John Rambo than Duke Nukem – just as unkillable, but likely to
bleed and sweat rather than quipping suggestively all the way. Here
was a Lara Croft whose feelings might feature as a plot point. It was
only a piece of promotional art, but it was enough to make me decide
that I'd probably buy the game when it came out.
Spot the strong female character
Since then I've seen a couple of
trailers for the game (the release date for which appears to have
been pushed back). They pretty much showed what I expected – a
novice Lara barely surviving a series of painful ordeals. The tone is
much grittier, a change that is pretty much obligatory when you
down-power an action hero. At one point during the second trailer, we
see Lara get almost raped by a man she eventually manages to shoot
with his own gun, before staggering off covered in his blood.
This has caused some comment.
Given the franchise's history of
exploitatively displaying the heroine, questioning the decision to
include a scene like this is only reasonable. Marketing under the
Tomb Raider banner carries kind of statement of intent, so there will
always be concern that this is being done to gratify the male
audience. However, most sources seem to accept that the event is not
included as an excuse for an arousing sexual scene.
Other charges are harder to deny.
Critics have argued that presenting an attempted rape within a game
about the character becoming more powerful implies that the event
itself was an ultimately strengthening experience. They point out
that this trauma is often used as the basis of female character
development by male authors, typically in a tired and inaccurate
manner. Official responses to these comments haven't been as
reassuring as they might have been.
Surprisingly enough, I think that the
scene can validly be used as a character development event within the
story. If you think about it, a second event occurs in the scene
which is arguably just as important. This will almost certainly be
the first time that the new Lara deliberately takes a human life.
If the new Tomb Raider game is to have
any resemblance to the old ones, this is a milestone we were always
going to have to pass. Yet if we are to continue to sympathise with
the character the act needs to be very clear cut on a moral level.
Broadly speaking, this means that she needs to be defending the life
and body of herself or of an innocent third party. Given the lone
survivor theme self-defence is more appropriate than swinging in to
save the day. Going for sexual violence over a straight-up murder
attempt was always going to be a dodgy choice, but it is hardly
indefensible if the game is striving for a more grounded feel. In the
real world, 'violent sex attacker' is a far more common foe than
'indiscriminate axe murderer' or 'lost world tribal cannibal'.
In a more highbrow story, the rape
attempt could act a symbolic reinforcement for the truth of being
forced to kill – a savage, horrific event that leaves the survivor
with lasting emotional scars. As it is, shooting a guy with his own
gun while he's attacking you is simply so understandable that we
continue to identify with the character even as she becomes something
most of us will never be - a killer. In a nutshell, that is the
purpose of the game.
A more questionable use of the scene
lies in its skill-building element. If there's one thing we need to
take away from this, it is the fact that Lara can kill a man twice
her weight whilst being wrestled with her hands tied. Once this is
ticked off on her action heroine resume, she can do it any time she
likes. This is how the 'school of hard knocks' storyline works –
put a character in a situation where they have to pull off a
difficult task, then use their success as a precedent to defend
future successes. But why would an author consider attempted rape as
an optimum method to boost Lara's close combat skills? Well, that
gets complicated.
One of the interesting things about
this in a game-based context is that it is probably impossible for
the rape attempt to succeed. If and when I play the game, my
ineptitude with the controller will probably see this lovely young
woman drowned in the dirty waters of a flooding chamber, impaled
through the gut by an ancient death-trap, shot in the face at
point-blank range and eaten alive by large carnivorous predators. But
however badly I miss-time the quick-time event, I'm almost certain
that I'll never have to watch as Lara has her pants ripped off before
someone forces themselves upon her. As a consequence of failure, that
will be taboo – whilst a hundred agonising, lonely and undeserved
deaths are just fine.
Tomb Raider isn't unique here, but
rather exists upon a universal sliding scale. In almost every piece
of fiction which deals with peril, some subjects are just too nasty
to depict. The new game exists in a space where depicting rape threat
is appropriate, but depicting an actual on-camera rape would not be.
It should also be considered that we are asked to project ourselves
onto Lara by playing the game, which would make such an event far
more traumatising for the audience even if it were implied rather
than shown.
Note that what can happen and what can
be threatened are not the same thing here. Again, this is normal.
When you think back to the action cartoons of your childhood, you'll
probably notice that death was a very rare event. On the other hand,
you'd probably be hard-pressed to recall an episode where the
protagonist wasn't either subjected to murder attempts with military
hardware or almost killed by environmental hazards.
Some have argued that such depiction
gives kids a false view of the danger that these things represent. If
kids grow up seeing gunfire every day without ever seeing anyone die,
they won't treat firearms with sufficient respect if they come to own
one later. On the other hand, activists who work for actual change
are unlikely to be impressed if censorship won't even permit
acknowledgement of the things they want to affect – especially in
works designed for a mature audience.
The most important argument, however,
is that stories without peril are just too boring. Escapism is a
valuable thing and we need a certain degree of insulation from
realism for our entertainment to actually be entertaining. Conflict
is the essence of drama, but most works aren't equipped to show how
mush hurt real conflict leaves behind. Realistically depicting the
mental state of a woman who is tortured by fascists before watching
them kill all her loved ones would have been the wrong direction for
Star Wars – but editing out the Death Star and all the explicit
Imperial brutality would also have killed the classic.
As an audience, we have some sense of
where we want these boundaries to be. When the threat is made, we
require the story to get the protagonist out of it by any means
necessary. Many older visual media works – and some modern ones –
resort to outright continuity violations between the two halves of a
cliff-hanger to avert the unthinkable. Whilst these are usually
mocked, we are far more forgiving under these circumstances than we
would be at other times in the narrative.
Because of this, the rape attempt
represents the optimum time to have Lara display improbable skill. We
require her to escape, so we are willing to extend our suspension of
disbelief that little bit further to get her out of it. It's a cheap
trick and one could argue that it panders to our desire to subtly
censor the subject. But it only works because we want to it to, so
it's hard to condemn the story-tellers without also condemning
ourselves.
The thing that will really make or
break this story is how Lara views her 'education' with hindsight –
possibly as late as the ending sequence. Remember, this isn't a tale
of how Lara saves the world, finds God or even meets the love of her
life. Most significantly, it shouldn't be seen as the tale of how she
becomes a stronger person – rather it portrays how the strength she
already had allows her to survive.
Lara will transform from an apparently
normal girl into a computer game action hero over the course of the
story. That's who we want her to be, but it isn't who she wants to
be. For Lara the game is simply about deflecting negative forces so
that she can emerge almost intact. The only reason she could possibly
have for being grateful for the experience is that it arms her to
survive the next, deadlier instalment of the franchise.
It they do it right, the result will be
to turn a normal person into an action game star without decreasing
our empathy. Whilst she will have all the skills we expect, she'll
also be a fully developed character whose personality is familiar and
complex. If this happens, the new Lara will be an iconic character
rather than an iconic character design and might take the medium
forward as a story-telling tool. Nothing I've seen yet proves to me
that that won't happen.
However, there's no margin for error
when messing with this kind of material. If they put even one foot
wrong – most especially if they imply that overcoming rape trauma
leaves someone internally stronger rather than almost as functional –
The whole thing will fall down. The game will be held up as an
example of how poorly females are characterised by games, a sign of
how little things have progressed since merely making the protagonist
female grabbed media attention across the western world. No pressure,
Square...
