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.
this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2025
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I don't know I just want to bang her
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.
Well, you don't get many kind and gentle shooter protagonists just dripping with empathy.
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."
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
She's a wealthy British lady ...so yes, a sociopath.
Also, you don’t want to know what she thinks of trans people
If you think you have it bad, just remember - Laura Croft's entire life has been in ruins.
You've just described the protagonists in most games.
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.
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.
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.
Why are we saying this?
Beautiful.
Keep it up, baby
It's my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of 'em was one kinda sombitch or another.
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. 😬
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.
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 near the end she's screaming I'm gonna kill you all. That is the narrative arc. Welcome to trauma stories?
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!
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.
The real sociopath was us all along.
The real treasure was the personality disorder we developed along the way
I've never seen Lara sitting for therapy. I, on the other hand, have sat a few times. 👍
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.
Now that's interesting
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.
Are they talking about her physically modelled breasts?
One of the most unhinged archeologists ever
Along with Nathan Drake for exactly the same reason.
Nathan Drake is a treasure Hunter not an archeologist. He KNOWS he’s not the good guy
"We named the dog Indiana"
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 first of the reboot trilogy (actually strongly disliked every Tomb Raider up to that). 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.
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.
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.