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?
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.
Are you NerdCubed?
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.
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.
Have you played Nier (the first one, not automata)? It relates to your observation
I haven’t. I’ll check it out
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.
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.
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.
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
pointing out that you’re doing a thing does not qualify as parody of that thing
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
In Halo, you can kill an elite squad commander and the grunts will run and cower. Halo wins once again.
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.
yeah but she has triangle tiddies
You’ve just described the protagonists in most games.
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…”
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.
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).
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.
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?
Actually, if Luigi wins, Mario still wins. There’s 3 Marios. Mario Mario, and Luigi Mario.
Who’s the third one?
Mario.
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.
a game with an Italian plumber stomping on turtles.
Keep it up, baby
Why are we saying this?
Beautiful.
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.
It’s my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of 'em was one kinda sombitch or another.
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.
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. 😬
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.
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.
If you think you have it bad, just remember - Laura Croft’s entire life has been in ruins.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
