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?
Lara Croft is a Sociopath
Submitted 11 hours ago by IndigoMoontrue@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
Comments
Grimy@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Burninator05@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
You’ve just described the protagonists in most games.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
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.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
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.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 10 hours ago
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.
TheDoozer@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
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…”
AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space 7 hours ago
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.
CIA_chatbot@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
It’s my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of 'em was one kinda sombitch or another.
SolSerkonos@piefed.social 6 hours ago
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.
Jrockwar@feddit.uk 10 minutes ago
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.
Katana314@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
The unfortunate fact is, the conceit of most action games relies on some pretty dumb ideas.
- Every opponent is committed to ending your life, even to the point of fighting on when 80% of their unit is dead.
- Your hero is skilled enough at combat to win hundreds of fights without any permanent injuries
- The “light, casual” quests you’re put on like retrieving a child’s missing doll are important enough to for enemies to relentlessly guard with their life.
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.
lime@feddit.nu 56 minutes ago
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.
JesusChristLover420@lemmy.sdf.org 1 hour ago
In Halo, you can kill an elite squad commander and the grunts will run and cower. Halo wins once again.
DarkCloud@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
She’s a wealthy British lady …so yes, a sociopath.
AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space 7 hours ago
Also, you don’t want to know what she thinks of trans people
Omegamanthethird@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Don’t worry. She’ll make sure you know.
meejle@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
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. 😬
Pxtl@lemmy.ca 4 hours ago
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.
merdaverse@lemmy.zip 10 hours ago
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
Uruanna@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
That was very clearly on purpose, she starts panicking about the first guys she kills to survive, and near the end she’s screaming I’m gonna kill you all. That is the narrative arc. Welcome to trauma stories?
cybervseas@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
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.
JandroDelSol@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
yeah but she has triangle tiddies
asmoranomar@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
If you think you have it bad, just remember - Laura Croft’s entire life has been in ruins.
cobysev@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
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!
Matriks404@lemmy.world 40 minutes ago
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.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 10 hours ago
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.
Zombiepirate@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
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 system. 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.
Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.club 7 hours ago
It’s (from the era of) Quake with extra Earth lore & special triangles.
ordnance_qf_17_pounder@reddthat.com 6 hours ago
I don’t know I just want to bang her
fluxion@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
One of the most unhinged archeologists ever
nogooduser@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Along with Nathan Drake for exactly the same reason.
CIA_chatbot@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Nathan Drake is a treasure Hunter not an archeologist. He KNOWS he’s not the good guy
Bonesince1997@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
We named the dog Indiana
sundray@lemmus.org 7 hours ago
Well, you don’t get many kind and gentle shooter protagonists just dripping with empathy.
Uruanna@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
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
sundray@lemmus.org 4 hours ago
Some protags have “selective empathy” that only kicks in when a character has more than a certain number of dialog lines.
undrwater@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
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.”
BradleyUffner@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
When you loot them, instead of finding ammo and health packs, you find pictures of their kids and elderly grandma.
the_q@lemmy.zip 10 hours ago
The real sociopath was us all along.
JackLSauce@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
The real treasure was the personality disorder we developed along the way
Bonesince1997@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
I’ve never seen Lara sitting for therapy. I, on the other hand, have sat a few times. 👍
Uruanna@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
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.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 10 hours ago
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 original. 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.
J92@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
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.
Uruanna@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
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.
CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
At least in some stealth games you can avoid confrontation and killing.
Acidbath@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
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.
AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space 7 hours ago
Are they talking about her physically modelled breasts?
frongt@lemmy.zip 10 hours ago
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.
Uruanna@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
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 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.
justsomeguy@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
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.