This post is intended as a response to the video above, but I'll supply the original tweet that has garnered so much controversy (for whatever reason) here:
TJ, on his Twitter, has since revealed that he has only played the newest incarnations of the franchise and none of the originals by Core Design. So he couldn't be considered a fan and doesn't appear to do so himself anyway. However, that's not really important here, it just goes to prove my point that he's not a fan of these games. If he were, he'd be such because of the gameplay and, you know, the actual game design, and not because of the simple visual design of the main character. And really, given that you play from a third-person perspective in all of these games, you don't usually get a look at her breasts anyway unless some camera angles permit it, so the size of her tits is mostly portrayed in marketing materials. And that latter point is really important to understand, given that that's how Lara Croft became considered such a sexy character at all.
I do think that TJ is missing the point of contention many people have/have had with the above tweet, and that's the following: he's basically body-shaming Alicia Vikander, the lead actress in the starring role of Lara Croft, which is based on her current incarnation of the character. And why's he doing that? Because her breasts aren't big enough to match the promotional and marketing materials that have, through the 22 years of the franchise, through thick & thin, made her into (among other things) a sex icon in the videogame lexicon.
However, as a fan of the franchise (especially the Core Design era), I didn't much care for the big boobs aspect of Lara Croft. In fact, aside from her being a bad-ass, stone-cold (with a few exceptions) killer out to add to her collection of artefacts and treasures, and wealth, of course, I didn't pay attention to anything else about her. She was rather flat personality-wise and had undergone no character development in each game. The few exceptions, of course, being the odd gasp or disgust at the antagonists & their devious plans. The development of her character was left to the current era. No, I was a fan not because of what the marketing was trying to do, but because of how the games played. You know, the reason why we play games? If you play a game so that you can look at it, either because it has nigh photo-realistic graphics (Crysis was hailed for this aspect for years) or, in this case, because a character, no matter how few pixels could be derived from her polygons and textures, has big tits, then you're just not a fan.
I liked the adventure, the puzzle-solving, the trial-and-error, and the thrill of success that was derived from the games. I liked that they were distinct in this regard: they were designed with a deliberate, and stand-out (but not always for the right reasons) grid-based movement system. The gameplay and the movements you made in order to complete the games were designed entirely around this system of tiles. If you mastered how it worked, you mastered most of the game itself. And that works in helping you enjoy the game even more. Because I still know plenty of people who can hardly even play, let alone enjoy, the games for how they are designed.
The main reason for her being considered a sex-icon of gaming is due mostly to the marketing around the franchise. Yes, her in-game model did have (progressively with each instalment) bigger and bigger tits, but it still wasn't central to the games, even to the character. And considering you said this:
It was never the intention to create some kind of 'page 3' girl to star in Tomb Raider. The idea was to create a female character who was a heroine, you know, cool, collected, in control, that sort of thing. The problem with those other games is that the female characters are actually there for purely exploitative purposes. I know you could argue that Lara with her comic book style over-the top figure is exploitative, but I don't agree. I think it's ridiculous to say that portraying stylised people is degrading. You can represent an over the top hero figure by augmenting characteristics like a jutting jaw, wide shoulders, thin waist etc. and that is not degrading to men. It may well be a stereotype, but it seems to me that people are overanalysing this whole thing. It's pretty simple, if women in a game are only there to be the equivalent of quiz show floozies then they are being portrayed in a sexist way. When it comes to Galleon there are all sorts of women in the Galleon world, just as there are all sorts of men.You could argue that Toby Gards' words support yours when he argues about how people were 'overanalysing' the portrayal of her figure, but it's his opening statement that shows he never intended Lara Croft to be so overly sexual in design in the first place. He wanted her to be bad-ass, stone-cold, unflapping in her drive to achieve wealth & fame. And to save the world while doing it, because other people want those same artefacts that she chases, but for nefarious purposes (destroying the world in some way) instead of simply putting them on display for fame & fortune. She's a cold-ass bitch who'll kill you without shedding a tear if you get in her way, but if you intend to use those same artefacts to rule or destroy the earth, she won't stand for that either.
As he explained later in the interview, he left Core Design (in part) because of his creative control over the franchise, which he co-created, by the way, was being taken from him. What did Core and, by extension Eidos Interactive, want for the creative department for the franchise? Why, to fixate on her sex appeal, because they felt it was an ace way to garner more and more money. And indeed, it was. But the co-creator did not agree with it, so it was one of the reasons for his departure.
So you trying to justify your crappy views by ignorantly stating that she was designed to be sexually appealing falls flat on its face, because of the very words of one of the minds behind the creation of the franchise as a whole.
Source: Gamasutra - Interview with Toby Gard (Oct. 23, 1998)
Then you said:
You are partially wrong with the above statement, and I am being generous here. The notion that Angelina Jolie's tits were as unrealistically large as they were in the videogames (and most prolifically, the marketing material) was debunked. How did they get her tits to appear so large? Why, have you not heard of the myriad ways women make their tits look bigger than they actually are? Wire bras, for instance, raise the breasts because ordinarily, gravity makes them seem smaller due to what is commonly derided as "sagging." According to some sources, like this one, in particular, the studio used "...padding to bring her from her normal 36C to a 36D. (The videogame Lara is estimated to wear a 36DD bra.)" Oh, and those C's and D's mean something, too. It makes all the difference from breasts appearing to "sag" to them appearing to be protrusile & firm.
So the studio had to use trickery (no CGI, thankfully) in order to make Jolie's portrayal seem closer to the videogame character, as she was being portrayed in the then current spate of Tomb Raider titles. Which, by the way, was only attributed to the progressively-increased polygon count and not necessarily to those same breasts somehow getting bigger and bigger in proportion. They just appeared more realistic with each new release. This, as mentioned before, was one of the issues Toby Gard disagreed with and left the same studio over. Even Angelina Jolie, who portrayed Lara in the first run of adaptations, wasn't as "buxom" as Lara Croft, even though the studios played up the character's sex appeal as much as they possibly could. And by the way, the sex appeal might've worked for you, but it didn't for me; indeed, the tits were cartoonish and ridiculous, distracting from what was far more interesting than a couple of tweaked breasts succumbing to the laws of physics before my very eyes (some would call this "boob physics").
You may argue that her big breasts defined her as a character, but going by the statements made by her co-creator, and by what I found to be more important to each game personally, I wholeheartedly disagree. And I definitely disagree with your body-shaming an actress for her (less sexually-appealing) portrayal of Lara Croft, who was only made sexually appealing because of marketing in the first god damned place. If she wasn't intentionally created just to be treated as a sex goddess, then I agree with her creator and not with people like you, who lack self-reflection and cannot concede that perhaps they're off the mark on this subject.
I do agree that you got far too much exposure for this because, in the end, this was really another case of you trolling for attention. I already knew that about you, and I have for years, but the media clearly didn't. So that's the only reason I can forgive them at all for granting you this much-undeserved attention because you took part in body-shaming an actress for not matching the marketing that has surrounded her character for so many years. That same marketing that saw the character's co-creator resign from working with the character Funny, now I know that marketing works more easily on you than it does on me, it appears that it is you who isn't fully capable of thinking for themselves. Amirite?
