Lara Croft: Sexual Assault Survivor. (Possible Triggers!)
Hey, let's "evolve" Lara Croft by having people try to rape her!
How's this for timing? The day after the hoo-hah over Anita Sarkeesian's project to expose stereotyped women in computer games, and the makers of the new Lara Croft game are ready to assure you that she's not just a walking jiggle any more. Oh no, she is a sympathetic lady who will engage you emotionally.
How are they going to do this? By having her beaten and subjected to an attempted rape.
Ron Rosenberg, executive producer, explains:
"When you see her have to face these challenges, you start to root for her in a way that you might not root for a male character . . . When people play Lara, they don't really project themselves into the character. They're more like 'I want to protect her.' There's this sort of dynamic of 'I'm going to this adventure with her and trying to protect her' . . . The ability to see her as a human is even more enticing to me than the more sexualised version of yesteryear. She literally goes from zero to hero... we're sort of building her up and just when she gets confident, we break her down again. . . She is literally turned into a cornered animal. It's a huge step in her evolution: she's forced to either fight back or die."
WHOA THERE, RON! Did you just say that "gamers" don't identify with Lara Croft? Did you just say that "gamers" only like female characters when they get to protect them? Did you just say that "gamers" would find a woman being beaten and raped "enticing"? It sounds a hell of a lot like you did.
(Helen Lewis)
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Lara Croft and rape stories: breaking down the bitch
Why is rape seen as a reasonable way to "strengthen" female characters?
A few weeks ago, a viral blog served up a refreshingly compassionate interpretation of privilege for the Portal generation. If life were a video game, the writer John Scalzi explained, "straight white male" would be "the lowest difficulty setting there is".
"This means that the default behaviours for almost all the non-player characters in the game are easier on you than they would be otherwise," wrote Scalzi. "The default barriers for completions of quests are lower. Your leveling-up thresholds come more quickly. You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for. The game is easier to play, automatically, and when you need help, by default it’s easier to get."
Keep that in mind, because we’ll be coming back to it. For now, let’s talk about the shit storm broiling over the pre-release material for the next Tomb Raider game, in which the protagonist, Lara Croft, is retconned as a survivor of sexual and physical assault. This experience apparently made her the hypersexualised, mindlessly violent killing machine - sorry, "strong woman" - we know today.
This is a story, like so many epics, about being, and about becoming. What’s made pay dirt so far for the small horde of pop-gender-crit writers commenting on the topic is the question: why does Lara Croft, like so many female heroes, need to be re-imagined an assault survivor in order to be a strong character? The equivalent tempering experience for male heroes is normally violence done to family members, often female family members - parents, sisters, wives and girlfriends. Rape and sexual assault, however, are the default traumatic-but-ultimately-salutory past experiences grafted on to fictional women when male creatives can’t think of anything else to do with them.
It’s almost as if sexual assault were understood as an immutable part of human culture, painful but inevitable, rather like a young man’s first experience of heartbreak - unfortunate but ultimately benign and probably a learning experience for everyone. What makes a woman develop as a person? Sexual violence, of course! What makes her a believable, empathetic character? Rape! Women can’t just be born tough and cocksure - that has to be fucked and beaten into them, female violence as a response to and reflection of male violence.
(Laurie Penny)
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Source: http://www.newstatesman.com Article 1 Article 2