@Dany said:

@huser: Video games. They all don't have to be the same and have the protagonists be rugged and tough.

I don't feel anything about lara's potrayal to be of any issue.

That's fine, you said as much in your first post. You said some other stuff I took issue with, but whatever.

@TentPole said:

@huser said:

Realistically, an unarmed presumably untrained young woman doesn't have much hope against dozens or hundreds of armed men. Realistically, BATMAN wouldn't be favored under those odds.

Realistically she would just be raped and murdered. Thank goodness it is a videogame.

she was nearly raped in that other trailer, so...

@huser said:

@TheSouthernDandy said:

@huser said:

@TheSouthernDandy said:

@Dany said:

I have no issue with it. People having issue with it need to get over themselves.

What do you want her do do? Laugh and giggle when she falling/being attacked? God some of you.

Thats what I find strangest about this. If I got the everlovin shit beat out of me i'd be moaning too.

But action heroes don't or very rarely do, certainly not to the degree Lara has been shown to be. That's the point.

Yeah but they've talked about trying to take the game in a realistic direction. Realistically, if any person, i don't care how awesome they are, went through what she's going through they would respond in an audible fashion. If you're trying to make an immersive game you don't show someone taking bullets and bouncing off the ground after a huge fall and show them just bounce up and skip off. It's dumb to get upset about her expressing how much falling off a cliff hurts.

Realistically, an unarmed presumably untrained young woman doesn't have much hope against dozens or hundreds of armed men. Realistically, BATMAN wouldn't be favored under those odds.

Dude cmon. It's still a video game. You're just being obtuse.

The voice actress is just doing a poor job of sounding like she is in pain. That's all it is. There is nothing is meant to be sexual or suggestive about it.

I didn't know this was a thing. I will continue not caring about this or what weird people think about it.

@Animasta said:

@TentPole said:

Realistically she would just be raped and murdered. Thank goodness it is a videogame.

she was nearly raped in that other trailer, so...

Yeah, but instead she fucking gutted that dude. Videogame.

I think the real question is, would people complain if Lara was the ugliest women alive?

@TentPole said:

@huser said:

Realistically, an unarmed presumably untrained young woman doesn't have much hope against dozens or hundreds of armed men. Realistically, BATMAN wouldn't be favored under those odds.

Realistically she would just be raped and murdered. Thank goodness it is a videogame.

Given a trailer touched on that very thing I'm not exactly sure how that helped your argument.

@TheSouthernDandy said:

@huser said:

@TheSouthernDandy said:

@huser said:

@TheSouthernDandy said:

@Dany said:

I have no issue with it. People having issue with it need to get over themselves.

What do you want her do do? Laugh and giggle when she falling/being attacked? God some of you.

Thats what I find strangest about this. If I got the everlovin shit beat out of me i'd be moaning too.

But action heroes don't or very rarely do, certainly not to the degree Lara has been shown to be. That's the point.

Yeah but they've talked about trying to take the game in a realistic direction. Realistically, if any person, i don't care how awesome they are, went through what she's going through they would respond in an audible fashion. If you're trying to make an immersive game you don't show someone taking bullets and bouncing off the ground after a huge fall and show them just bounce up and skip off. It's dumb to get upset about her expressing how much falling off a cliff hurts.

Realistically, an unarmed presumably untrained young woman doesn't have much hope against dozens or hundreds of armed men. Realistically, BATMAN wouldn't be favored under those odds.

Dude cmon. It's still a video game. You're just being obtuse.

Hey you were the one that brought up the panacea of realism. I don't see why one is valid and the other is "dude it's a video game."

I've seen Martyrs. At this point nothing seems like misogyny to me anymore.

@huser said:

@Subjugation said:

People always find something to complain about.

Always.

I think it's time for them to develop their own games so people can take a piss on it the whole way.

This comment and the others taking the same thesis are insanely ironic.

You can call it whatever you want. It doesn't change the fact that it is completely illogical for people to be pissing and moaning about a game or a character not fitting their narrow, idealized imagining when realistically they couldn't ever hope to achieve the satisfaction of everyone if they were given the reins themselves. What exactly would you do?

@Marokai said:

@Dallas_Raines said:

@Marokai:

God, it was so disturbing when John McClane had an earth shattering orgasm as he pulled glass shards out of his feet in Die Hard. Also, the new trailer and demo feature her murdering a helluva lot of guys.

The level of misunderstanding in this thread has reached critical. I'm not complaining about her getting the shit beat out of her, I'm complaining about that being almost entirely all we have ever seen of this game in public venue, and how she's had very little personality in the process. As another commenter earlier in the thread said, if this was Nathan Drake, he'd end with standing up, wiping off his shirt and saying something stupid and witty. Lara just gets beat up and thrown into the next avalanche in waiting for her. It's not misogynistic to want to see this character, not treated in a nicer way, but simply showed off in a better way.

But Drake is an action hero who's spent years getting his ass kicked and walking away w/ a grin. This is Lara's first foray into any kind of danger, so she's not going to be spouting many quips while fighting for her life or falling off a cliff. She's just trying to survive.

@Subjugation said:

@huser said:

@Subjugation said:

People always find something to complain about.

Always.

I think it's time for them to develop their own games so people can take a piss on it the whole way.

This comment and the others taking the same thesis are insanely ironic.

You can call it whatever you want. It doesn't change the fact that it is completely illogical for people to be pissing and moaning about a game or a character not fitting their narrow, idealized imagining when realistically they couldn't ever hope to achieve the satisfaction of everyone if they were given the reins themselves. What exactly would you do?

Not my job nor my inclination to make games. More to the point, this is no basically the if you can't do better you can't comment type defense.

I hope this means you never ever disparage any music, TV show, movie, really anything that you yourself cannot do better.

@huser said:

@TheSouthernDandy said:

Hey you were the one that brought up the panacea of realism. I don't see why one is valid and the other is "dude it's a video game."

Because it is not one or the other. You can humanize a character without having a story that is 100% within the realm of realism and I personally view Nathan Drakes resiliency as one of the very few issues I have with the Uncharted games.

@stryker1121 said:

@Marokai said:

@Dallas_Raines said:

@Marokai:

God, it was so disturbing when John McClane had an earth shattering orgasm as he pulled glass shards out of his feet in Die Hard. Also, the new trailer and demo feature her murdering a helluva lot of guys.

The level of misunderstanding in this thread has reached critical. I'm not complaining about her getting the shit beat out of her, I'm complaining about that being almost entirely all we have ever seen of this game in public venue, and how she's had very little personality in the process. As another commenter earlier in the thread said, if this was Nathan Drake, he'd end with standing up, wiping off his shirt and saying something stupid and witty. Lara just gets beat up and thrown into the next avalanche in waiting for her. It's not misogynistic to want to see this character, not treated in a nicer way, but simply showed off in a better way.

But Drake is an action hero who's spent years getting his ass kicked and walking away w/ a grin. This is Lara's first foray into any kind of danger, so she's not going to be spouting many quips while fighting for her life or falling off a cliff. She's just trying to survive.

We saw Drake as a little kid, didn't seem much different.

@huser said:

@TheSouthernDandy said:

@huser said:

@TheSouthernDandy said:

@huser said:

@TheSouthernDandy said:

@Dany said:

I have no issue with it. People having issue with it need to get over themselves.

What do you want her do do? Laugh and giggle when she falling/being attacked? God some of you.

Thats what I find strangest about this. If I got the everlovin shit beat out of me i'd be moaning too.

But action heroes don't or very rarely do, certainly not to the degree Lara has been shown to be. That's the point.

Yeah but they've talked about trying to take the game in a realistic direction. Realistically, if any person, i don't care how awesome they are, went through what she's going through they would respond in an audible fashion. If you're trying to make an immersive game you don't show someone taking bullets and bouncing off the ground after a huge fall and show them just bounce up and skip off. It's dumb to get upset about her expressing how much falling off a cliff hurts.

Realistically, an unarmed presumably untrained young woman doesn't have much hope against dozens or hundreds of armed men. Realistically, BATMAN wouldn't be favored under those odds.

Dude cmon. It's still a video game. You're just being obtuse.

Hey you were the one that brought up the panacea of realism. I don't see why one is valid and the other is "dude it's a video game."

Good lord. Yes they're making it more realistic. A more realistic "video game", as in, it is more realistic relative to the other games in the series. As in, it still needs to be fun to play. If you got shot once and died, that would suck. If you fell from further then ten feet and broke your leg and sat there till you were found and killed, that would suck. If you got cut by an enemy and bled out and died, that would suck. I'm going to assume you're a reasonably intelligent individual, you must be able to understand this.

To directly answer your question: no, people wouldn't complain about misandry, but that doesn't prove the point you think it does. Genders as a social construct have all kinds of traits assigned to them, and yes, the same scene but with genders swapped can elicit entirely different emotional responses from people. And no, that isn't anybody's cue to go "SEE! Political correctness means we can't do or say anything bad to women". It's a double standard, but only in the sense that human beings are almost incapable of thinking of things as equal, and will assign different traits/prejudices to the various groups/tribes/races/genders they encounter in everyday life. That's always in flux, and it's really never going to magically be balanced.

The fact of the matter is that women have had such a raw deal in terms of having little to no influence or standing throughout most of human history, so it can still be rather hard to write a strong female character who also has human vulnerabilities. If you try to sell the vulnerabilities too hard, people just think you're writing the woman as "helpless", and that you're just using the same old tropes of women being useless in a lot of actiony adventurey fiction.

Sure, they could've made Lara Croft into female John McClane who cracks wise anytime she gets hurt, but it would clash with the tone of the game. Some men still prefer women to be submissive, so I can see why people have issues with the trailers, because she is constantly in a weakened, whimpering state. I don't think it's what the developer intended, and I get that they want to show her eventually kicking ass despite all this adversity, but seriously, they need to change the ratio, because it's like 90% adversity, then a quick montage of explosions and ass-kicking. Whoever has been conceiving of these trailers has been doing a bad job.

The other part of the problem is that all the enemies in video games are pretty much all male, and it's kind of preposterous that you could make a bunch of pirates/mercenaries all female, because that just doesn't match up with the real world makeup of violent criminals and hitmen. So unfortunately, if you make a female protagonist, it's inevitable that she will mostly be fighting men, unless your game is sci-fi/fantasy and can just make up how society works.

@Marokai said:

@stryker1121: Completely fair point, but that's something I only know because I have previous knowledge of the franchise and of the character from outside of these advertisements. If I was some sort of Tomb Raider newbie, gleaning my information exclusively from these advertisements, I would see absolutely nothing but a character getting beaten up over and over again with nothing else going on. Even if it was a male character, that would just be sort of dull. I don't feel the trailers are misogynistic, just that they don't do a suitable job of fully showing off what the game is about. That's all.

You sound like that lady who tried to sue the makers of Drive for it's advertising. Trailers don't exist to tell the whole story, they exist to tell you enough that you will hopefully pay for the full story.

@rebgav said:

@Marokai said:

Even if this was a male character, I'd just think it was sort of boring and I wasn't getting much information out of what was going on or any insight in to the character. In fact, I'd argue the opposite in that, the only reason it works for some people at all, is purely because she's a woman.

The first sentence in the quote is a perfectly valid statement. I would say that the reason that origin stories are so popular currently is that they represent the greatest amount of change to a character over the shortest period of time, it's the moment when your storied franchise character actually has an arc and is allowed to change from being one thing into being another thing. As such, the character is defined over the course of the story so in this case to present Lara in her triumphant state would require you to "skip to the end" somewhat, which doesn't seem to be how they want to present this game. You want to see Spider-Man but this is Peter Parker's story.

The second sentence in the quote is indicative of why there is a backlash against the backlash already; It's one thing to be disinterested in the game or dislike how it's presented, it's something else to then lash out at people who do like it - especially if you're basically accusing them of misogyny. People are going to get upset.

Reasonable. But read the very first post. It wasn't accusations of misogyny. It was preemptively calling out anyone that had an issue with it to begin with.

I'm all about equal opportunity

BEATINGS FOR EVERYONE!

@Marokai said:

@stryker1121: Completely fair point, but that's something I only know because I have previous knowledge of the franchise and of the character from outside of these advertisements. If I was some sort of Tomb Raider newbie, gleaning my information exclusively from these advertisements, I would see absolutely nothing but a character getting beaten up over and over again with nothing else going on. Even if it was a male character, that would just be sort of dull. I don't feel the trailers are misogynistic, just that they don't do a suitable job of fully showing off what the game is about. That's all.

You sound like that lady who tried to sue the makers of Drive for it's advertising. Trailers don't exist to tell the whole story, they exist to tell you enough that you will hopefully pay for the full story.

Hard asses are sexy no matter the sex.

She is pretty much taking the same beatings as Nathan Drake but its a girl so people react differently.

They can make the game however they want. I'm not going to stage a protest or anything.

But I personally really don't like seeing women get beaten up. It's a double standard, I know, but that's just the way I feel.

@TheSouthernDandy said:

@huser said:

@TheSouthernDandy said:

@huser said:

Dude cmon. It's still a video game. You're just being obtuse.

Hey you were the one that brought up the panacea of realism. I don't see why one is valid and the other is "dude it's a video game."

Good lord. Yes they're making it more realistic. A more realistic "video game", as in, it is more realistic relative to the other games in the series. As in, it still needs to be fun to play. If you got shot once and died, that would suck. If you fell from further then ten feet and broke your leg and sat there till you were found and killed, that would suck. If you got cut by an enemy and bled out and died, that would suck. I'm going to assume you're a reasonably intelligent individual, you must be able to understand this.

Eh, the Arma2 zombie mod is about that punishing. Different strokes and all that.

Why don't people complain when Isaac Clarke from the Dead Space games moans like a girl and cries in pain every time he gets hurt?

@TentPole said:

@huser: Name some character based action adventure games that don't exceed the bonds of realism in order to make a better game. Go on I am listening.

Not sure, wasn't thinking specifically about action adventure, more character studies like say Silent Hill Shattered Memories or in certain spots Heavy Rain. Then there are always things like the Arma2 zombie mod.

Either way I'm done here. I commented on the first post which I DID have a problem with and have now spent the better part of an hour not getting anything done.

@huser: You never told me how you would handle it. Usually when people have criticism they indicate what they don't like and what they would like to see done to remedy it. I want to hear your viewpoint. I'm not even being sarcastic.

@sb5k said:

I think the real question is, would people complain if Lara was the ugliest women alive?

Assuming that people only feel sympathy towards a woman if she is attractive probably says a lot more about your views of women than it does about anybody else's.

Wait, people were actually saying that? All I remember was people saying "it's Lady Uncharted." (Even if it was pretty much me.)

@Vorbis said:

Someone, somewhere, will complain either way.

Let's make them transgender then.

The thing is that Tomb Raider and the character of Lara Croft have a history of some very reasonable accusations of sexism, and so has the video game industry as a whole. I think that when the video game business collectively grows up in terms of how it chooses to depict women, people will no longer be so quick to alleging misogyny at every prominent female game character at times when it's not completely warranted.

@huser said:

@TentPole said:

@huser: Name some character based action adventure games that don't exceed the bonds of realism in order to make a better game. Go on I am listening.

Not sure, wasn't thinking specifically about action adventure, more character studies like say Silent Hill Shattered Memories or in certain spots Heavy Rain. Then there are always things like the Arma2 zombie mod.

Either way I'm done here. I commented on the first post which I DID have a problem with and have now spent the better part of an hour not getting anything done.

Those are different genres and are not applicable at all. They want to have a more down to earth game within this genre. Saying that they are failing to do so is a valid opinion. But you are saying they should not try to have realistic characters in this genre unless they turn it into a sim game such as Arma. That is just idiotic.

@Subjugation said:

@huser: You never told me how you would handle it. Usually when people have criticism they indicate what they don't like and what they would like to see done to remedy it. I want to hear your viewpoint. I'm not even being sarcastic.

Frankly it's probably a problem with how they decided to do their vertical slice. Wanted to make clear what was different without context or nuance, so it comes off as all or nothing, as can be seen in the comments so far. Barring that obvious real world solution (better, more self aware ads), if you want real violence with real consequences, then don't have a waifish unarmed girl try and go up against the mercenary army of the week while running around with a jagged rebar sized hole in her side the entire time (which alone would likely have killed her from shock). Most Dangerous Game that isht and make it as unforgiving as Dragon's Lair without the complete bullshit (ie fail states that are actually predictable). Two, maybe three bad guys at most. Survivorman has already shown me just staying alive is hard.

If that doesn't sell then do something else. But it kinda was what I was hoping for with I am Alive.

@rebgav said:

@Video_Game_King said:

Wait, people were actually saying that? All I remember was people saying "it's Lady Uncharted." (Even if it was pretty much me.)

Capcom should make Dude Raider X Lady Drake. It's 12 hours of crawling away from the camera on all-fours in a tight corridor and then fist-fighting a tiger.

If you add the word "as" in there, it pretty much describes my Skyrim experience.

@huser: It is kinda shitty how you are trying to pigeon hole genres into what they should and should not be.

@Phatmac said:

Why don't people complain when Isaac Clarke from the Dead Space games moans like a girl and cries in pain every time he gets hurt?

I actually did find that a little excessive, and not particularly entertaining. Even in Dead Space 1, I remember one part of the final boss fight where the boss grabs you by the leg and slowly pulls you closer to its mouth, and if you don't free yourself in time, instead of just immediately crushing you in its jaws, it forcibly ripped off Isaac's leg (or maybe arm?), then the tentacle just kind of swings Isaac around for like 5 or 10 seconds while he howls constantly in a pretty convincing display of horrendous amounts of pain.

It's one thing if you do Evil Dead 2-style dismemberment where dude chops his hand off, but it's so silly and over-the-top that it's no big deal. And a lot of the violent deaths in Dead Space (and say, Resident Evil 4) are immediately fatal, so whatever, at least it was quick. But in Dead Space 2 (and the boss fight I mentioned earlier in DS1), it really draws out Isaac's death, forcing you to watch as he endures the most terrible trauma a human being could experience. It's like it expects you to be amused or gain something from it.

I know it's all for fun and not real, but it just seems weird to be entertained by someone in that kind of horrible pain, when there are regions of the world (say, Central Africa) where psycho warlords will hack off somebody's hand or arm. It seems weird to make it into a video game spectacle.

@TentPole said:

@huser: It is kinda shitty how you are trying to pigeon hole genres into what they should and should not be.

If you say so.

@Marokai said:

@rebgav said:

@Marokai said:

I find it kind of unsettling because of all the unnecessary moaning and whining.

Yeah, typical woman, won't shut her mouth even when she's being stabbed or shot or falling out of the sky. UNNECESSARY!

I don't have a problem with reacting to pain, obviously, my problem is that that literally all they have shown from this game is her getting the shit beat out of her and Lara sounding as if she's in a constant state of climax. I would have no problem with these aspects of the game if they showed anything else to go along with it.

God damn son, do you beat your girlfriends with a fucking bike chain when you fuck them?

@BisonHero said:

@Phatmac said:

Why don't people complain when Isaac Clarke from the Dead Space games moans like a girl and cries in pain every time he gets hurt?

I actually did find that a little excessive, and not particularly entertaining. Even in Dead Space 1, I remember one part of the final boss fight where the boss grabs you by the leg and slowly pulls you closer to its mouth, and if you don't free yourself in time, instead of just immediately crushing you in its jaws, it forcibly ripped off Isaac's leg (or maybe arm?), then the tentacle just kind of swings Isaac around for like 5 or 10 seconds while he howls constantly in a pretty convincing display of horrendous amounts of pain.

It's one thing if you do Evil Dead 2-style dismemberment where dude chops his hand off, but it's so silly and over-the-top that it's no big deal. And a lot of the violent deaths in Dead Space (and say, Resident Evil 4) are immediately fatal, so whatever, at least it was quick. But in Dead Space 2 (and the boss fight I mentioned earlier in DS1), it really draws out Isaac's death, forcing you to watch as he endures the most terrible trauma a human being could experience. It's like it expects you to be amused or gain something from it.

I know it's all for fun and not real, but it just seems weird to be entertained by someone in that kind of horrible pain, when there are regions of the world (say, Central Africa) where psycho warlords will hack off somebody's hand or arm. It seems weird to make it into a video game spectacle.

I think comparing an alien tentacle boss attack animation to real life tragedy is far grosser and more tactless than anything actually in Dead Space.

@Marokai said: I'm gay, so there's definitely no issue of me getting off on the trailers. 

@Marokai said:

@TooWalrus:

@Marokaisaid: I'm gay, so there's definitely no issue of me getting off on the trailers.

Does not make his actual point any less valid or hilarious.

...Yeah? I don't find it appealing to watch anyone get the shit kicked out of them. I admit, it's more uncomfortable when it's happening to a woman, because my parents raised me with the idea that if you hit a woman you are a worthless piece of shit. That said, replace Lara with a dude in these videos, have him get hurt that much and whimper the whole way through, and you bet your ass I'd be uncomfortable with it. I don't play games to watch someone get fucking torn up and beat to hell. If you do, I've gotta ask what is wrong with your head.

I would, I don't need to see CONSTANT NON STOP SUFFERING out of someone to get the idea that the game is about survival, and survival is hard, especially with all of the vocal whines, grunts, and pauses to show just how bruised and broked their ribs are.

@TentPole said:

I think comparing an alien tentacle boss attack animation to real life tragedy is far grosser and more tactless than anything actually in Dead Space.

I disagree.

@BestUsernameEver said:

@Vorbis said:

Someone, somewhere, will complain either way.

Let's make them transgender then.

but she'd still look like a woman or a man (I assume they wouldn't put an unpassable trans person in there, protagonists have to look pretty after all) and we'd still have the same argument.

If a dude was moaning that much I'd be uncomfortable... If he stepped in bear traps and fell down as much as she has I'd call him a moron. I'm glad they are finally showing her kicking some ass though. That was my only concern really..that she came off like a victim.