Your daily moment of nerdraeg
Jun. 12th, 2012 04:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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fengi: New Tomb Raider prequel gives us Lara Croft's backstory, and surprise! It's rape!
Because there was clearly a shortage of Strong Female CharactersTM whose backstory involves rape.
I've never played Tomb Raider, but I do appreciate the character a bit. Yes, she's fanservice, but she's also fun. She gets to run around and do stuff, and, sad to say, there are still very few female characters in mass culture who get to run around and do stuff in a traditionally male dominated field simply because it's fun. I don't even see why she needs a backstory, any more than the backstory we get for Indiana Jones (difficult relationship with father, snake trauma, moving on to the adventures now). Lara Croft is basically Indiana Jones with boobs, and that's just fine, really.
But enough with that. On to the justifications!
Right. I forgot the bit where John McClane gets raped, despite having seen Die Hard more times than I can count. Maybe because John McClane doesn't need a rapey backstory to be seen as a hero or for the audience to identify with him.
You know what else I missed? The part where Bruce Wayne gets raped. James Bond got some electrodes to the balls if I remember correctly, but I don't think he got raped either. And somehow they both managed to become kickass without a rapey backstory. In fact, I can't think of a single male pop culture character whose backstory involves rape. But pick a Strong Female CharacterTM, any Strong Female CharacterTM, and someone's gotten rapey with her somewhere. Because obviously no woman can be Strong without trauma in her background, and there is no trauma but rape.
I didn't read the comments but I bet they're full of neckbeards defending this, er, creative decision. Am I right?
ETA: A couple of you raised a good point, which is that most women experience some form of sexual violence in their lifetimes, and why should SFC be exceptions? My objection to this line of reasoning:
1) My problem is not with saying that rape happens (otherwise I wouldn't be hugely obsessed with Game of Thrones right now), it's with rape as a motivating factor. I spent a miserably large percentage of my early adolescence being groped by horny boys on the playground. This did not make me into a superhero. It made me self-conscious about my developing body.
2) As a motivation, rape is incredibly cliché. Want to create a heroine? Can't she be motivated by, I don't know, concern for poor people being forced out of their homes because of gentrification? Or maybe she's a fangirl who wants desperately to be a superhero, so she deliberately alters her body until she has incredible abilities (okay, this idea was already used in The Authority, but I still think it's fantastic). Or, like, anything other than rape. Male heroes have all kinds of motivations, from the death of their parents by violent crime, to getting bitten by a radioactive spider, to girlfriends getting fridged, to loyalty to queen and country, to coming from a family in the hero business, to rationally thinking about it and deciding that it would be a good idea. Why can female heroes be only motivated by one thing?
3) If we're going for realism, why is it always violent stranger-rape? Most rape victims know their attacker. It's usually a family member, friend, or lover. If you want a rape story because it's realistic, maybe make the rape a bit more like what most women experience.
4) But I don't want realism because this is a videogame. Videogames are for escapism and wish fulfillment. Just like I don't want to see a movie where John McClane gets shot in the face by Hans Gruber in the first 10 minutes because that's what would happen in real life, I don't want to see the character I'm pretending to be get raped.
5) So if videogames are about wish fulfillment, then why include rape? I can only conclude that those playing aren't identifying with Lara Croft; they're identifying with her attackers and getting off on it. And that's frightening and disgusting.
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Because there was clearly a shortage of Strong Female CharactersTM whose backstory involves rape.
I've never played Tomb Raider, but I do appreciate the character a bit. Yes, she's fanservice, but she's also fun. She gets to run around and do stuff, and, sad to say, there are still very few female characters in mass culture who get to run around and do stuff in a traditionally male dominated field simply because it's fun. I don't even see why she needs a backstory, any more than the backstory we get for Indiana Jones (difficult relationship with father, snake trauma, moving on to the adventures now). Lara Croft is basically Indiana Jones with boobs, and that's just fine, really.
But enough with that. On to the justifications!
Rosenberg brings up Die Hard, another movie where we begin a relationship with a human, vulnerable character and through an intense experience he emerges as a hero. It was important to show her as an innocent, vulnerable character at the beginning of the game. “People really identify with that,” Rosenberg said.
Right. I forgot the bit where John McClane gets raped, despite having seen Die Hard more times than I can count. Maybe because John McClane doesn't need a rapey backstory to be seen as a hero or for the audience to identify with him.
“I would say that the outcome is closer to something like Batman Begins or Casino Royale, where the character at the end is certainly Batman or James Bond, but not necessarily the one from before,” he said.
You know what else I missed? The part where Bruce Wayne gets raped. James Bond got some electrodes to the balls if I remember correctly, but I don't think he got raped either. And somehow they both managed to become kickass without a rapey backstory. In fact, I can't think of a single male pop culture character whose backstory involves rape. But pick a Strong Female CharacterTM, any Strong Female CharacterTM, and someone's gotten rapey with her somewhere. Because obviously no woman can be Strong without trauma in her background, and there is no trauma but rape.
I didn't read the comments but I bet they're full of neckbeards defending this, er, creative decision. Am I right?
ETA: A couple of you raised a good point, which is that most women experience some form of sexual violence in their lifetimes, and why should SFC be exceptions? My objection to this line of reasoning:
1) My problem is not with saying that rape happens (otherwise I wouldn't be hugely obsessed with Game of Thrones right now), it's with rape as a motivating factor. I spent a miserably large percentage of my early adolescence being groped by horny boys on the playground. This did not make me into a superhero. It made me self-conscious about my developing body.
2) As a motivation, rape is incredibly cliché. Want to create a heroine? Can't she be motivated by, I don't know, concern for poor people being forced out of their homes because of gentrification? Or maybe she's a fangirl who wants desperately to be a superhero, so she deliberately alters her body until she has incredible abilities (okay, this idea was already used in The Authority, but I still think it's fantastic). Or, like, anything other than rape. Male heroes have all kinds of motivations, from the death of their parents by violent crime, to getting bitten by a radioactive spider, to girlfriends getting fridged, to loyalty to queen and country, to coming from a family in the hero business, to rationally thinking about it and deciding that it would be a good idea. Why can female heroes be only motivated by one thing?
3) If we're going for realism, why is it always violent stranger-rape? Most rape victims know their attacker. It's usually a family member, friend, or lover. If you want a rape story because it's realistic, maybe make the rape a bit more like what most women experience.
4) But I don't want realism because this is a videogame. Videogames are for escapism and wish fulfillment. Just like I don't want to see a movie where John McClane gets shot in the face by Hans Gruber in the first 10 minutes because that's what would happen in real life, I don't want to see the character I'm pretending to be get raped.
5) So if videogames are about wish fulfillment, then why include rape? I can only conclude that those playing aren't identifying with Lara Croft; they're identifying with her attackers and getting off on it. And that's frightening and disgusting.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-13 09:23 pm (UTC)Middle Ages Literature is VERY different than Middle Ages history and social settings. Most of the Middle Ages literature was written as a way of endorsing a misogynist worldview in which knights were able to dominate the poor and men were able to dominate women under the bullshit excuse of "courtly love". So many of these stories involve the knight being all passionate and obsessed that the woman's viewpoint is not even mentioned. Hell, Chaucer's Miller's Tale is a feminist narrative by comparison.
And right now I am reading La Morte D'Arthur and I usually am not shocked by much but there's a very cheerful acceptance of rape culture in the book that is way more disturbing than anything today. One of the stories concerns a farmer's son who seems more noble than everyone else and it's revealed that his mother was raped by King Pellinore before she was married. So that's why he's of noble lineage.
And since it happened before she was married, it wasn't adultery. So everyone is happy.
Seriously. The kid is just happy that he's a knight now and he's not terribly concerned with the fact that King Pellinore raped his mother.
But OF COURSE people don't cite LOTR as an example of Middle Ages brutality because it's a ROMANTICIZED version of the Middle Ages in which kings were noble and wonderful unless their servants got to them first, everyone lived in tune with nature, wars were fought with swords and it was all so much cleaner than the trenches of WWI. And women were shuffled off to the side until it was time for them to kill Wrights based on the technicality of having vaginas - only to be then promptly shuffled off stage so the boys can be the big heroes.
Game of Thrones depicts misogyny. It does not endorse misogyny. It depicts a world in which everyone is brutal and playing at power games. I'm not "excusing" Game of Thrones because I get off on a social order in which women and men are trapped in shitty gender roles and I'm getting off on the rape culture that it depicts. I'm respecting it for being honest in its portrayal of the horribleness of this social milieu even as I'm enjoying the ways that the female characters are able to negotiate, subvert and oppose the rampant misogyny.
Of course, I also love the fourth book precisely because that's the one that is most concerned with gender politics (introducing an egalitarian kingdom of Dorne, giving the perspective of Cersei, Briene and Arya, etc.) and most seem to think that one is the "boring one." So I can't really speak for others.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-13 09:51 pm (UTC)I haven't read the link yet, but I agree with this sentiment. That's not saying that it's completely unproblematic or feminist, but I also don't think it's unproblematic or feminist to depict only happy utopian worlds where women are equal and rape never happens.
The difference between something like ASoIaF and Tomb Raider, IMO, is twofold. First, we are not asked to identify with the rapists or get off on the rape or other violence in the former, whereas I'm increasingly convinced in the latter, we are. That's a major issue with video games that I think exists less (though still exists) in books and film. We are expected to see things through a character's POV in books and film, but in video games we enter the world and become those characters.
Second, ASoIaF, while one can debate its literary merit, is Serious and Dark, and treats rape as a Serious and Dark thing. It's not simply a hurdle to be overcome; it traumatizes characters over books and lifetimes. It has the gravitas to pull off these storylines and is meant as art, not simply as entertainment. TR is silly fun and can't be trusted to treat rape seriously, as evidenced by the creators' comments. /GoF defensive neckbeard