The developers of the upcoming 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tomb Raider game, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Crystal Dynamics and fellow Embracer studio Edios Montreal, have announced plans to💫 release 🥂five triple-A games in the next five years. This most likely inꦡcludes the next Tomb Raider, which will be published by Amazon Games. Amazon is apparently with the intention of creating an interconnected &ꩵldquo;Marvel-like franchise”, developing a new film, as well as a new TV series reportedly helmed by Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
Is Fleabag one of my favourite shows of all time? Yes. Do I want to see a TV series about Lara Croft? Absolutely not. Tomb Raider is one of the most colonialist game series around (and inspired most of its competitors, like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Uncharted), and without a massไive overhaul of the source material, anything 🌳based on it is going to reek thoroughly of white nonsense.
Put simply, Lara Croft is the epitome of a white saviour, especially in the latest game, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Her being a rich, aristocratic British archaeologist and therefore stealing everything in sight to keep for her own private collection꧃ (hey, just like the British Museum!) is part of the problem – the inherently colonial aspects of a🧸rchaeology as a field are expressed quite directly in the game. Lara seems perfectly happy to pilfer artefacts from every setting she goes through, which the game incentivises you to do by giving you achievements to fulfil.
It’s pretty typical that Shadow opens with Lara stealing something and triggering an apocalyptic event that she must stop. The game tells you that she didn’t have a choice but to trigger this apocalypse, that if she hadn’t then the bad guys would’ve done it. It bends backwards to make Lara Croft look like a good person who unintentionally does bad things. She has to do them, for the greater good! All the killing and stealing has to happen! It’s almost like we forget that real people made these games and every mechanic was a choice. Real people 🌌wrote this plot and tried to justify the character’s actions.
A small change from previous games is that after triggering this apocalypse, Lara feels really bad about it, realising her complicity in almost destroying an ancient Inca lost city. After the events ofౠ the game, she chooses to stay behind and help them rebuild. You can tell the game was trying to acknowledge the franchise’s past and present problems with racism here, showing that she has at least enough self-awareness to recognise the impacts of her actions, but I must ask – why do this at all? Why make a racist game and then try to reckon with its racism, when you could just… not🐈 make it racist? I know the devs are working with source material that’s already racist, but it doesn’t matter if you acknowledge how problematic it is if you’re gonna keep making racist games.
Lara Croft first became popular because she was a strong, smart, female character, though that was largely watered down by marketing turning her into a sex symbol. Now that the reboot is focused on reversing her oversexualisation and may turn her once again into a symbol of female empowerment, we have to ask: who does this empow💃er? Because the character of Lara Croft is a rich, white woman – a traumatised one, but a rich white woman nonetheless. She displays her prowess to the detriment of real-life people of col൩our who have to watch their cultures commodified so the series can make money.
The game will come anyway – it is now a matter of whether the devs fix the problems apparent in the game’s predecessors. Considering that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:leaks of the next game suggested Lara Croft is heading a whole team of Tomb Raiders, it doesn’t seem likely that we’ll see any increased self-awareness on the part of the game’s creators or its protagonist. I want to have hope for the series – Lara’s development into a kinder, more empathetic character has made me want to like her, but I fear t𓄧he next game and ensuing adaptations will disappoint me ℱgreatly.