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Old 28-03-20, 12:13   #301
pharaea
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Originally Posted by SoraSakai View Post
Why you ending your post as if you just dropped some fire diss track?
This just about made my day.

Anyway, as I said — i love all iterations of Lara, and I actually do appreciate her talking to herself (tbh who wouldn't ... I mean, if a jaguar dropped the mangled remains of my pilot before me, i too would say "holy ****"). Her portrayal isn't inconsistent; you just have to read the comics and books to understand it properly. Kind of like y'all said about classic Lara, except Reboot Lara actually changes throughout the games and stories ... which classic lara doesn't. her characterisation is consistent because it never evolved (until aod). she never grew as a person. I've been a fan since 96 and I have no problem admitting that, so stop taking other people's opinions as a personal slight. if you didn't want to hear people disagreeing with you, you shouldn't make b*ll**** threads like this
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Old 28-03-20, 12:26   #302
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And yet there are people who say Classic Lara does and reboot Lara doesn't. They both change and show growth as the games went on. That is a fact. How anyone can have experienced all the eras first hand and not see that is beyond me. More facets of Lara as a person were shown by the time TR4 and 5 came around than when TR1 debuted. That is a fact. Whether you want to deny it or not because the way it is done doesn't fit your remit doesn't change that. I discount anyone'a argument automatically who says the contrary. The only difference is in the 1996-2001 era character progression was not an overt focus. Since the reboot has started it has placed Lara right at the focus of everthing that happens. That is why some people don't think enough growth goes on. Because the focus is different now - so it will attract more critisism. Like I said before, and it got ignored and probably will again, you cannot compare then to now. You have to compare impact then to impact now. I am happy to accept that reboot Lara gets much better fleshing out in the novels and the comics. I read the 10000 immortals book and we saw the PTSD, we saw her skills grow, we saw her knowledge and skills etc. However, you cannot relegate this to side media and be surprised when people don't know about it. The main medium is the games - you must make sure you main media pushes along as well as your side media. Not be separate from it. Reboot Lara in the games doesn't grow as much as she does in the side media. She doesn't grow as overly as she should for an entire reboot trilogy in my opinion. They tried in Shadow but then trapped themselves again with mixed messages in the story.

Ultimately, both of those eras are now over. So regardless of opinons on what has or has not happened we should be thinking about how we want a future portrayal to be. Pretty much everyone seems to agree that there needs to be a happy medium between all eras and all Laras. But what would that mean? I'd like a discussion on that.
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Old 28-03-20, 13:03   #303
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Ultimately, both of those eras are now over. So regardless of opinons on what has or has not happened we should be thinking about how we want a future portrayal to be. Pretty much everyone seems to agree that there needs to be a happy medium between all eras and all Laras. But what would that mean? I'd like a discussion on that.
I agree with this. As I said before, EM is free to steer TR12 in any direction they’d like at this point. They’ll definitely be drawing from the reboot era in terms of characterization, since it is the longest standing one of them all (just doesn’t seem like it in the trf bubble), but they can certainly innovate the mechanics and storyline. Which I’m sure they’ll do.

Last edited by pharaea; 28-03-20 at 13:06.
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Old 28-03-20, 13:13   #304
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I just hope moving forward they pick a vision and stick with it: For better or worse. The reboot era has been such a mixed bag in only two sequels which means that needs to be their basis. Do we want a more driven, PTSD driven Lara who lives life on the edge and does things despite the consequences or do they want hero Lara who is great socially and goes out of her way to save everyone? The reboot era has proven you cannot do both. I personally prefer the former. I think there is more room for growth in characterisation and I feel it's more in line with the original bio Lara had.

I know this is a reboot era but to me a reboot normally just exapands what has happened in a different way. The reboot itself did this perfectly by making Lara someone who defied her family's expectation. But rather than that being going out and adventuring it was choosing to break away from a posh life of assured education and wealth it was making her own way through university. Instead of a plane crash at the age of 21 and a journey to survival it was a boat crash at 21 instead. All they key elements are still there. It's clear that classic Lara had some form of undiagnosed PTSD by needing to live on edge to feel alive. The reboot era by the novel and promo for ROTR was clearly going in this direction too but somewhere along the line got lost with the family drama. Shadow was clearly meant to be a more driven Lara who is more morally grey but only for this to be ruined by the hero story. There is just too much contradictory information. It's like in Rise and Shadow the creators wanted to show two Lara's and two motivations so just slapped them together. The future needs to be decisive. Strip away what is not working: both in terms of characterisation and gameplay mechanics.
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Old 28-03-20, 13:28   #305
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I have to disagree on that. I believe the two sides are complementary in terms of characterization; Lara is morally grey when she is pushed too far, but once things settle she realizes she’s not the hero she tried to make herself believe she was. The Shadow novella really hit that point home for me.

Lara is both self-serving and self-sacrificing. She tries to do good, but only when she has the opportunity to to make herself feel better about the things she does.
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Old 28-03-20, 13:33   #306
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Well then perhaps that's due to how the story is presented in balance with the gameplay. I personally felt Shadow in particular presents an enormous dichotomy in the story and character we see at the start to the one we see in Paititi. For me the story and Lara start of well but the entire socially awkward, driven person trying to stop the end of the world seems to stop for ages for her to become a socially able, politically motivated saviour of the people. It doesn't work at all for me personally. Perhaps if it were told differently or balanced better it would be more appealing to me.
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Old 28-03-20, 13:53   #307
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Well then perhaps that's due to how the story is presented in balance with the gameplay. I personally felt Shadow in particular presents an enormous dichotomy in the story and character we see at the start to the one we see in Paititi. For me the story and Lara start of well but the entire socially awkward, driven person trying to stop the end of the world seems to stop for ages for her to become a socially able, politically motivated saviour of the people. It doesn't work at all for me personally. Perhaps if it were told differently or balanced better it would be more appealing to me.
For Shadow specifically, I think what they tried to do (and could have done better) was to show how she went from hating Dominguez for killing her father to understanding why he'd done what he'd done. Besides, the game's main point is her letting go of her parents by resisting the box's mirage and leaving her mother's bracelet with Unuratu.
She also went from sounding extremely beaten down, tired, and stressed to being genuinely settled. I guess I'm seeing this now because I spent the past week playing the entire trilogy lmao. it's more obvious when you play them back-to-back AND play them to 100% completion.

I agree all of this could have been done better. In order to understand Lara's psyche you have to study all the media they provide (which most people don't, as you said) and collect all files / read all monoliths. If you miss some, or don't sit down at every campfire to listen to her journal entries, you might miss something.

i.e.: I replayed Rise last week, and sat down at a camp I'd never used before (Mainly because I had rushed through the game last time), and her journal entry said more about her character growth than the last ten cutscenes. I think they need to make her base growth / characterization more accessible for those not interested in finding every item in-game, and only add those to give more insight into her character. Things that maybe aren't crucial to know but would interest people like me. If that makes sense.
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Old 28-03-20, 16:16   #308
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Being an archaeologist myself, i have more fun seeing the detail and craftsmanship that went into the design of challenge tombs and crypts (while they may not always be 100% accurate, you can tell some research has gone into it) than pure fantasy, which classic tr sadly is
I am not an archaeologist, but I wonder if that is even true. The devs of the classic games used textures from real-life sources and the youtube series History and Geography in Tomb Raider by CroftManor shows there was some care put into this in the classics too.
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Old 28-03-20, 16:42   #309
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One of my main problems with Reboot Lara is that it feels like the writers want to have their cake and eat it, too. On the one hand, they want her to be likeable and relatable and a goody-two-shoes role model, on the other hand they want her to mow down enemy hordes and try to present her as being selfish and even vengeful. On the one hand they want to portray her as strong and independent, on the other hand they keep making her follow in her parents' footsteps. That's one of the things I love about classic Lara's backstory. She became an adventurer in spite of her parents, not because of them. She went against what was expected of her, she was ostracised by most of her family but still did her thing regardless. She didn't need some melodramatic family story to serve as motivation. She just did what she did because it brought her joy and she was unapologetic about it. She didn't give a **** about morals or rules or what other people thought of her.

With Reboot Lara, I just always get this sense that I can see the writers' motivations and thought processes in her actions and words moreso than Lara's. Like, it feels like I can tell that the writers were more concerned with how something Lara did would be perceived by people than with whether it was in-character for Lara to do it. Like the way they keep having her align with natives in order to make sure people can't accuse her of robbing other people's cultural heritage, etc. when, in fact, that is what Lara has always done. They could explore that issue by simply painting Lara in a less heroic light and leaning more into that moral ambiguity that used to be a major part of her character but no, that would be too risky...

As for the camp fires, that was kinda part of the point I was trying to make on the previous page. If you need to constantly tell me how a character feels and thinks in order for me to understand that character, that's bad writing. I should be able to deduce that from the character's actions during the story without needing constant monologues in order to make sense of their behaviour.
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Old 28-03-20, 16:53   #310
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Yeah I see where you're coming from, there was no clear distinction between her becoming a mass murderer and not being a good, innocent person anymore.
They kind of tried to cling onto good gurl Lara while she was mowing people down by the dozens.

Mathias did point out near the end though. "There is no good or evil there are only survivors"
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