Lara Croft.  She’s a fiery one, huh?

I didn’t quite miss the franchise–I played very little of the very first game on my high school’s computers–but I was taken aback: this thing isn’t all that great, I thought.  Much of this stems from preferring the anti-aliasing and other digital gadgetry that the N64, your prototypical PS3, boasted.  I could not miss the franchise beyond even that since she was on computer magazine covers and everything in between.  A lot of pent-up sexual energy got diffused through characters like Lara, courtesy of the advent of 3D model graphics and the reinforcement of sensibilities that the Japanese studios already boasted in the eighties with Samus Aran  of Metroid and other Croft-esque characters such as manga’s Ghost Sweeper Mikami.

But Lara Croft is Sonya Blade on crack.  She is meant to be an Ice Queen–physically apt, but not necessarily sexual. She isn’t supposed to be a straight-up villain, narcissist, sociopath, or antagonistic broad. Instead, she is the daughter of a British lord, thus loaded with cash and affluent to a fault, believing she’s the best lady for the impossible jobs due to how she trained herself and how that and her connections default her to the limelight and forefront since nobody else can do what she can. It’s expected that she does not feel it as she steps on toes under a delusion of pragmatism–she has to choose battles and consider a greater good.

It’s rough, even depressing, but that’s how she is and it carries a certain level of ironic sex appeal. A product of her time, when the comic books had scads of Bad Girls (or those marketed as such) like Marvel’s Domino, Top Cow’s Witchblade (who crossed over with Lara in the tie-in comics), the Goddess Dawn for obscurity and everyone from the cast of Danger Girl, possibly even Tank Girl and abject lunatics as DC’s Rose & Thorn–a time when everyone would ogle a plethora of polygons dressed in a Gucci bikini with an automatic submachine pistol in one clutch and think, “Yeah, she’s got what we need and want despite us not deserving anything she deigns to ever give!”

For many an impressionable teen, in a spiritual sense, Lara was his (or her) “first one”, outclassing a number of other UK-born top-heavies like Black Orchid of Killer Instinct, anyone from John Smith’s stable such as Dejah of Thunder, Storming (these two were created three years apart but had the same super-power–controlling the weather), or Fantomah, or Mark Millar’s Vixen and Scream Queen. I would put Neil Gaiman’s Death of the Endless as an ironically wholesome alternative, even though she isn’t top-heavy (like she needs to be).

Angelina Jolie isn’t the best actress, nor does she aspire to go that route since looking the part is often enough in terms of Hollywood standards, but not having the cleavage doesn’t quite mean she’s insufficient.  She seems to have gotten Lara Croft’s attitude, rendering herself a sex symbol by proxy.  You have to be more than look good, in other words.  Point is, regardless of how the marketing went haywire, Lara was not shouldered with being a hero or villain–instead, she was molded in part after pulp-informed adventurer figures such as Indiana Jones, a guy who doesn’t start out as a true hero before he grasps the ramifications of what treasures he is racing to acquire before the real bad guys do. Lara’s character should be edgy and world-weary from the start to invoke her capabilities, but her actions should theoretically lead up to her becoming a heroine.

Of course, there’s nothing heroic about Sony, if Razorfist’s assessment of their mistreatment of the King of Pop is any indication.

Appa’s other hooplas are somewhat uninteresting to me. But, of course, Sony fans are eating it. At the Flea Market, a big tech savvy gent was debating with others over whether he should just use the XBox Series X that he proposed I should purchase. I made countless purchases for my booths that day and didn’t feel up to it, even after a few weeks’ worth of paychecks, but we got to talking. I did buy a PS4 Pro on the odd chance a game was featured that was easy to set up (consoles have that strength at least; PC still needs massive setting up and my graphics card can barely tolerate AA), but that’s as far as I’ll go. We finally agreed (as Razorfist had pointed out in many instances) that the PS5 has no real purpose courtesy of having games, yes, but with fleeting exclusivity and inability to branch out and provide more experiences than XBox & even Switch, which has practically everything despite being relatively underpowered.

That is a severe knock, especially since Square-Enix has opted to ditch several woke-infested American wings of its operations and commit to multi-platform gaming from hereon out due to poor sales and embarrassing attrition-enforced business decisions. Before their output beyond Final Fantasy XIV (my mother and brother’s favorite current pastime since City of Heroes folded and World of Warcraft’s batch of successors in the company lost its luster) returns to “Sex on the Beach”, I will not hold my breath. By the way, Aerith is supposed to be a true nineties anti-heroine in the sense that she is far more streetwise and savvy than her present-day characterization as Princess Diabetes. She laughed and suggested that Cloud dress as a chick to infiltrate a pimp’s brothel. What more needs to be said? That the tits went to her spiritual counterpart Tifa, only after the developers decided to sugarcoat the scheme of killing off a main character for shock value?

The nineties in America were when everyone challenged the previous decade’s frankness about the sexes and depictions of heroism that verged on the jingoistic. Elsewhere, we had Metal Hurlant. Sufficed to say, Lara Croft was born from an artists’ attempts at subverting expectations, to toy with the idea of a villain protagonist. Appa has no illusions about her being one, but the current rights holders, after multiple cloying attempts at appealing to people who don’t get the culture but are very prone to being offended by it, either fail to grasp or flat-out disregard the dimension wherein Lara becomes more sensible about and sensitive towards the stakes. Also, she’s independent, meaning any attempt at turning her into a drill sergeant for a pack of posers more or less illustrates a certain kink fetish for being bossed around by a woman. Lara is many things, but a fuck-sling dominatrix isn’t one.

At any rate, Tomb Raider isn’t necessarily a dead franchise so long as it continues to influence people and foment controversy. It might fall short these days only because Core Design defaulted and THQ-Nordic keeps falling for consultants’ insufferable suggestions. How else could the Saint’s Row reboot clash with reality so hard? Of course, going back to hyper-sexualizing Lara would defeat the purpose behind her initial incarnation–to be the Ice Queen that even the girls want, to be or otherwise–and it would sugarcoat the angle of sheer ruthlessness that a woman of her position is meant to invoke. If you really wanted to shake things up and create a bewildering measure of mass market appeal, then do this abjectly impossible nuclear option:

Have Lara Croft wind up pregnant and give birth to a child.

That would unravel fans’ minds.  Lara and a kid?  Two-For-One Special.  Hilarity at its core.

Thank you.  I will not be answering questions.  I see you have other things to attend, anyway.

Good hunting.