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Jake

Idle Thumbs 96: Historical Beef

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He seemed more positive on the bombcast. At first I thought that one day between the bombcast and Idle Thumbs had made him less positive on it but then I read his review just now.

 

Funny enough I had 100% the opposite interpretation. On the Bombcast, he sounded like 3 Star Brad, he was being positive overall but was making a lot of reservations. On Idle Thumbs he sounded like 4 Star Brad and specifically said as he got through the middle chunk of the game it grew on him well. As I was listening yesterday I said to myself "You can tell the secret connecting timeline when the Bombcast and Idle Thumbs were recorded, because Brad is closer to the end of Tomb Raider and likes it a lot more now!"

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whatever happened to speedydesiato? He was a class act.

 

 

Who's this pabosher guy?

Yooooooooooou are both the worst.

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That video you linked to is properly creepy, as are the comments following it.

 

You are not lying.

 

Too bad you can't make fall with the rod up through her gut. I'd love to se her die, tits up and crying.

 

:spiraldy:

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@shivoa I wish I understood the underlying architecture, basically all I got out of the Blender discussion was "man programming GPUs sure is weird". Apparently the OpenCL standard is implemented differently by every vendor too which is weird.

@everyone else: people can be gross, that comment in particular is pretty egregious. I don't really know how the game specifically treats it, but in the snippets I've seen--never having played a Tomb Raider game in my life or even seen an ad for a Tomb Raider game--It feels to me like on the one hand there's a bunch of gross teenage boys with torture fantasies, and then on the other hand it seems like a lot of you are completely incapable of viewing violence against women as equivalent to violence against women, in any context. The bits and pieces I'm hearing sound like, if this was a male hero, it'd be an interesting, albeit poorly executed, story about a dude who winds up in a crazy adventure, but instead of jumping across chasms with feline grace, he misses and scrapes his knees, which is what makes the stories interesting. Getting impaled was one of the key exciting moments in Conspiracy Theory, stepping on glass was critical to the plot of Die Hard. It sounds to me like the problem is just that the story didn't follow through with the small tragedies. The fact that when the hero is a woman you think it's a torture fantasy sounds like a fault in your perception.

But I don't know about this particular case. I'm seeing a lot of generalizations and the word "problematic"--a vague code for "makes me uncomfortable if I imagine a pervy kid jerking off"--which rustles my jimmies.

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the word "problematic"--code for "makes me uncomfortable if I imagine a pervy kid jerking off"

Mh, either that or it is 'code' for all the explanations that are given in this thread (and in at least one case right after the use of said word) about how she gets sexualised in the game as a whole and seemingly in the violence-bits as well which, together with the cultural context of women in media and the mix of violence (against women) and sex and all the other things we talked about in many threads here, are the part that makes it 'problematic'. Oh, and I don't see it as proven, or black, or white, just something that merits talking about.

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Except, as I feel like we've covered countless times before, men and women aren't simply interchangeable because we live in a world with history and context. John McLane is subjected to male gaze, and I don't know how you could not see that Lara Croft is.

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Also, for the conversation about reusing levels, the one that comes to mind is Castlevania 4, which kind of blew my mind at the time.

 

Dragon Age 2 almost got it right. I really like the idea of a game being about 10 years in a given city, and how your actions affect it, but I don't think they did quite enough to differentiate the eras, especially the outdoor zones you needed to traverse several times. 

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Jake I had the same amused reaction and chortle to "Iron Frog" mode.

 

I have played a number (a much smaller number than 125) of hours of Zuma on YAHOO GAMES PORTAL or whatever, and I think the noise you're referring to at the level complete is just them yelling "ZUMA!!!"

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Seems like a grossly limiting attitude to me. I don't feel at all disingenuous in saying that I don't see Lara Croft/Sarah Connor/whomever as a sex object, and it doesn't bother me to see any of them act interchangeably to male heroes. The fact that you imagine that someone's ogling their boobs--or for that matter, the fact that somebody almost certainly is--seems completely irrelevant to their value as characters.

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Jake I had the same amused reaction and chortle to "Iron Frog" mode.

I have played a number (a much smaller number than 125) of hours of Zuma on YAHOO GAMES PORTAL or whatever, and I think the noise you're referring to at the level complete is just them yelling "ZUMA!!!"

The frog itself doesn't really make a noise, I think. It just has the wackiest fucking face so when it pauses for a second at the end of a board and then just goes sproinging into the camera, I always imagine it making the most excited goobery nerd sound as it flies outta there.

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Seems like a grossly limiting attitude to me. I don't feel at all disingenuous in saying that I don't see Lara Croft/Sarah Connor/whomever as a sex object, and it doesn't bother me to see any of them act interchangeably to male heroes. The fact that you imagine that someone's ogling their boobs--or for that matter, the fact that somebody almost certainly is--seems completely irrelevant to their value as characters.

 

Luftmensch, you always do this, man. It's great that you have liberated yourself from history and can now see characters without any preconceptions, but that's just not how the world works. You can't depict a woman receiving violence in a fictional work without engaging, even implicitly, with the centuries-old culture of violence against women and the sexualization thereof. If you create a character that fits into that discourse in any way, you are responsible for the consequences and can't just call it a "fault" in the perception of others. Art cannot exist without context. To say that it can and should is the grossly limiting attitude, to me.

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Fact is, both Lara Croft dying a horrible death on player failure and people jerking off to it are not new things. They have been a fixture of the series since day one, the main difference being that now that we have interwebs and youtubs it's a lot more visible.

 

'Course, just because it's not new isn't really a defense of it, but Lara dying and Lara being a sexy action-lady are mainstays of the series so whatever. I think what bothers me more is the whole ill-advised, trite, and unnecessary gritty reboot approach. I actually wrote a thousand words about this on my bloog when the whole dumb controversy broke, but my basic take on it is that it's a stupid approach that makes no sense as an origin story and I would have liked to see something more in the direction of Venture Bros than Passion of the Christ for the new game. I'm rereading it now and it's actually pretty funny. Good for me.

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You say creating fiction that might arouse pervs is bad, I say being butthurt is bad. Its a quality judgement either way and necessarily subjective. The fact that my iPhone, without any manual programming on my part, just autocorrected butthurt for me is awesome. That has nothing to do with Lara Croft at all, it's just wonderful. More on topic, so what if there's a difference? You can acknowledge the difference and make it meaningful and still treat the roles as roughly equivalent. Kill Bill's a swell example of that. She gets beaten and brutalized constantly through both movies and that's the point and it's great storytelling. Tip-toeing and never letting your precious heroine come to harm because that could be titilating is the wrong response. Blanketing over the entire notion of female action heroes as sexist is wrong. I don't think that it's always handled well, but that's a fault of individual portrayals, not a mystical product of the Male Gaze™

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The frog itself doesn't really make a noise, I think. It just has the wackiest fucking face so when it pauses for a second at the end of a board and then just goes sproinging into the camera, I always imagine it making the most excited goobery nerd sound as it flies outta there.

So I was curious if I remembered correctly, and I didn't remember the crazy frog jumping off the screen. So I looked up a gameplay walkthrough on YouTube (of course there are gameplay walkthroughs) and I was please to find out we're both right. Hidden Incan people do shout ZUMA and the frog does jump wackily from one board to the next, with the added bonus of apparently an earthquake ripping apart each level to reveal the next one.

 

Since you are now Zuma-indoctrinated you know this, but everyone must see and know for themselves.

 

 

 

That frog really does have the wackiest face.

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You say creating fiction that might arouse pervs is bad, I say being butthurt is bad. Its a quality judgement either way and necessarily subjective. The fact that my iPhone, without any manual programming on my part, just autocorrected butthurt for me is awesome. That has nothing to do with Lara Croft at all, it's just wonderful. More on topic, so what if there's a difference? You can acknowledge the difference and make it meaningful and still treat the roles as roughly equivalent. Kill Bill's a swell example of that. She gets beaten and brutalized constantly through both movies and that's the point and it's great storytelling. Tip-toeing and never letting your precious heroine come to harm because that could be titilating is the wrong response. Blanketing over the entire notion of female action heroes as sexist is wrong. I don't think that it's always handled well, but that's a fault of individual portrayals, not a mystical product of the Male Gaze™

 

Dude, I don't even know how to respond to this post. You put a bunch of words in my mouth, then gaslight me. So not interested in having this conversation anymore.

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Kill Bill is very much about The Bride being a woman. Her womanhood is core to her quest and motivation. In that way, it's the exact opposite of what you're saying, because she isn't just a male action hero swapped out with a woman. QT was thoughtful about how making a film about a female changes things, and adjusted accordingly, starting with not sexualizing her. Nothing about her depiction is designed for titillation. You can't say the same about Tomb Raider.

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Cool, I respect that Tomb Raider might be and probably is terrible at that. Based on what I've seen there's no way I could jump to that conclusion.

I looked up that frog and it's a whacky frog when he goes GYEEEEUWW (Jake: feel free to correct my spelling) towards the screen. I dig it.

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Kill Bill is very much about The Bride being a woman... Nothing about her depiction is designed for titillation.

Disagree. I actually think one of the charming things about Kill Bill is Tarantino's crazy fetish bullshit, but I think that's because it tends to inform the action rather than justify it. You'd still have a movie without hot chicks stepping on eyeballs, but it would be a less personal (read: hilariously insane) movie without it. It can be a difficult difference to pick out, but has to do with where the heart of a piece lies.

 

Unfortunately, the heart of Tomb Raider, as with most games, likes with "hey this worked in this other game so let's do it here without actually thinking about why it worked." Or, such is my perception, as someone who has not played it or, indeed, any Tomb Raider game.

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Disagree. I actually think one of the charming things about Kill Bill is Tarantino's crazy fetish bullshit, but I think that's because it tends to inform the action rather than justify it. You'd still have a movie without hot chicks stepping on eyeballs, but it would be a less personal (read: hilariously insane) movie without it. It can be a difficult difference to pick out, but has to do with where the heart of a piece lies.

I forgot about the occasional foot shots (which I would still not qualify as mainstream sexuality), but they hardly inform her character. My point is there's a ton of places where showing off The Bride's body could have been narratively justified (notice how he shoots and edits around the attempted rape she wakes up to, or how the camera glides away when she's changing in the bathroom stall) but he forgoes that because it would muddle the meaning of the film. Tomb Raider, on the other hand, has a ton of cleavage and ass-shots because Hey, what's the point in having a beautiful woman be our star if there isn't a little fan-service.

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Right, I wouldn't argue that there's no creepy fetishization of Lara Croft, but I would argue against the idea that having ones weird fetish brain involved in creativity is inherently creepy and ugly.

 

TBH, I think a lot of what makes Lara unnerving is that as far as we can tell there isn't a Tarantino there pushing the sexy violence just because that's his thing and it's his game, it's a product of a design by committee and yet somehow they were all okay with this. That's kind of, uh, weird, right? I mean, people find Rapelay kind of weird and unnerving and gross, but mostly understand that it's just a crazy japanese fetish project and not intended for mass consumption, but if EA makes a game like that...

 

Not that I intend to draw any direct parallels between Rapelay and Tomb Raider. I just want to be clear that, basically, the fetish stuff gets creepier the more people involved in its creation and, even more importantly, the wider the audience it's supposedly intended to serve.

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See I must be missing something, because all I saw was a video of Lara getting impaled, which is gross but didn't seem at all like a rape torture fantasy. As a design by committee product, it looks pretty innocuous (beyond the face value part where someone gets impaled on a chunk of rebar).

It is weird though, I can't think of any time I've played a major mainstream game an my character actually suffered real meaningful personal harm. I bet that happens more nowadays and I'm just not playing mainstream games (fact), but it's kind of a staple of traditional storytelling.

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I don't think anyone is claiming that it's a rape torture fantasy, but it is an intersection of sexiness and violence which is kind of weird, all the more so for it seemingly being unaware of being weird. Personally, I don't have a problem with the violence or the sexiness or the combination of the two as long as it's done in an aware and intelligent way, but I'm really not sure what they were going for here.

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