But it Was Such a NICE Horrible Tomb!

Tags

character, morality, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, story, theme

Spoilers for one of the tombs in Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Butch:

OK, talked to the blind guy, did the tomb, talked to the blind guy again and I want to talk about the blind guy.

So what did you make of all that? There was a lot to make. I sort of read it as more evidence that Lara, in her desire to do the right thing, relies very much on self delusion. Or just lying. She says to the guy “Let me be your eyes….let me see it for you….” and then she, well, doesn’t LIE so much as gloss over. She says “It was amazing…the machines still worked!” all breathy and excited, and leaves out the dead bodies and the smell and the eels.

It’s really good storytelling that they left it vague as to whether or not she’s INTENTIONALLY doing that. Is she thinking “You know? It was kinda shitty down there, but if I tell the guy ‘Dude, it was TOTALLY shitty’ he’ll be so sad….”? Or does she REALLY remember it that way? Does the thrill of discovery and defying danger color her own memories?

Because I certainly got the sense that Manu’s memories were glossed over. When he was tomb raidin’, it must’ve been just as stinky and deadly and eely, and yet he remembers it the way Lara described it. They are the same in that regard, and many others.

Which is why it was SUCH a nice touch that he was blind. He’s the one in the game the most like her. And he’s blind. Hmm.

I also think there’s some wink at the player here. When we play games, we remember all the “cool” stuff we do. We forget the dead bodies. We remember the cool machines and forget the smells. Our own self delusions and blindness.

Good stuff. And something I’m still turning over in my head. I think there’s a lot of ways to read this….how’d you read it?

And what do you make of the fact that the reward for this side quest, the reward given by the character who was the most like Lara, was useless? No new gun. No new outfit. Not even jade we could sell. Nope. Just a skull with some gems in its teeth. Something with sentimental value, yes, but no practical value at all.

And that, as I can remember, is the ONLY side quest where that’s true. Every other one had a practical reward.

Lot to unpack.

Feminina:

This is interesting. I think I interpreted it almost exactly the opposite from you. I don’t think she was lying about how great the tomb was. Maybe playing up the positive a bit–the fact that she never mentions all the times she could easily have died is a bit telling–but I think she genuinely remembers it primarily as this fascinating archaeological experience. Also, I got the sense that there was an implied passage of time there while she was talking, that we were meant to understand that what we heard wasn’t all she told him, so I sort of assumed there were more details in the part we didn’t hear (because be honest, we’d get a little antsy listening to a long, detailed description of a thing we just did).

It’s also pretty much human nature, I think, to gloss over the boring or uncomfortable parts of an adventure to focus on the highlights. The adventure is in the exciting battles and the cool things you discover, not on the time you tripped and got covered with corpse-rot from all those bodies.

I’m also not sure this is even really self-delusion for Lara: I think she does in fact experience these creepy dank tombs as fascinating archaeological moments and cool adventures and amazement at the fact that these ancient machines still work (an amazement I share). I don’t think she’s all that perturbed by the dead bodies and eels, to be honest. She certainly never really complains about them.

Which, to your point of how this scene makes her kind of like us, the players–I completely agree, you’re totally right that the way she tells the story reflects our experience as much as hers, but I would argue it reflects not so much our experience of FORGETTING about the bad stuff, as it does our experience of not even being particularly bothered by the bad stuff. I mean, all those dead bodies were gross, yeah, but I’m sure neither of us for a single second imagined not proceeding because they were there, or even took any particular pains to avoid getting too close to them.

It’s all a fun adventure for US, no matter how grisly the dead bodies and annoying the eels, because…well, duh, because it’s a game and we’re not in any danger of being drowned by eels, or even having our clothes get all mucky with corpse grease.

And Lara as a character is a lot more blase about the dangers and the grossness than an average real person would be (but then, she’s not meant to represent an average person), but she kind of has to be if she’s going to stand in for us in the game’s environments.

If she got all “oh man this is so disgusting, I hate this, this is awful, ugh, another horrifying dead body” all the time, we’d probably get tired of listening to her. “Why do you even do this if you’re going to spend all your time whining about how gross it is?” we’d reasonably wonder.

So I guess I thought she wasn’t lying to either him or herself, she really thought it was amazing and that he would think it was amazing, and I thought the fact that he gave her an object of no combat value represented the fact that he shares her passion for the pure adventure of exploring old crypts. No one else in the game really seems to get that, no one but her has any interest in poking around half-flooded underground caverns full of bones just for the hell of it (I mean, we get rewards, but come on, she’s not doing it because she wants some ancient moldy outfit), but this guy, he knows! And so instead of giving her something that will help her in some practical way, letting her kill people or avoid being killed, he gives her something that symbolizes the impractical rewards of exploration for its own sake.

I can certainly see your point about glossing over things, and the fact that he’s blind and maybe she is too in the sense that she doesn’t see the grimy REALITY, only the exciting ideals in her own mind…it’s a good observation.

I thought he was blind mainly as a narrative device to explain why he hadn’t gone there himself and/or didn’t just go with her now, because while poking around in tombs alone is framed as a passion no one else shares, it’s also a part of the game that we (at least, speaking for myself) don’t really WANT to share. These are solitary puzzles, and it wouldn’t work the same way to have Jonah or somebody tagging along while we wander through these tombs and crypts.

So yeah…I see your point. It’s a good argument. I didn’t read it that way at all, but it’s a good one.

Now that I think of it, though…our two interpretations aren’t actually mutually exclusive, it’s just a matter of whether you focus on the positive (she gets to share her tomb-raiding passion with a fellow exploration-nerd! it’s like that moment of finding a member of your own fandom in an unexpected place!), or the negative (both of them are imagining/remembering this whole tomb-raiding business to be a lot more exciting and wondrous and a lot less dirty and dangerous than it really is).

Hm. Good discussion!

Butch:

Yes…true…but this particular story, or the telling of it, isn’t just a telling of an adventure. This isn’t some dude who says “Hey, Lara Croft, who is easily recognizable in this mission for some reason, regale us with a story of adventure!” This was a promise Lara made to “be his eyes,” to recount it accurately so that this man who, like her, is an expert can experience what he used to experience again. Recreating something for a blind expert who’s been there, done that is different from shooting the shit to a bunch of laymen and kids.

Except…I had this thought as I was typing….Manu IS shooting the shit to a bunch of kids, isn’t he? He is. And he’s the one that was RIGHT! The “experts” were all “Yeah, Manu’s full of stories,” but he was correct! Hmm.

But anyway, she promised to be accurate. Not interesting, not exciting, not fun, accurate.

And she may not be “lying” per se, but that breathless “it was so great” telling wasn’t accurate.

As for her not complaining all the time, again, true (though I avoided the bodies cuz the damn fish were clustered by them, practical, me), but the game, specifically, in this tomb, made her notice icky stuff. It starts with her saying “Ugh…what is that SMELL?” So, while you’re right that she/we can’t/don’t want to dwell on every icky thing, when the game goes out of its way to have Lara go “eww,” then that place must be “EWW.” The game threw that in as if to say “Yeah, yeah, yeah, she sees corpses all the damn time, but this particularly icky, ok?”

And then that was followed by a breathless, inaccurate telling of it.

Cuz there were lots of tombs that DID have cool decorations and working machines and, really, no bodies or even traps or stink. This could have been a tomb like that, in which case the breathless telling would have made perfect, accurate sense. So the fact that the game brought attention to the fact that this tomb was icky resonates.

But we come across dudes all the damn time who have reasons for not going to, well, every single place a side quest tells us to go. No one is up to getting Uncle Bart’s hand axe. It’s the very nature of the side quest. Blindness is not a reason we see all that often. “I’m too old now,” or “I got hurt” or “I have more responsibilities,” these come up a thousand times. But “blind?” Blind is something. This totally could have been a “This was the one I never got to see, and now I’m old, but you, could you finish my life’s goals and tell me all about it?” Not “I’m LITERALLY blind here.”

There just seem to be a lot of details in this one that seem very intentional. Or maybe I’m just grasping cuz this game is light on themes.

Every so often we do good discussion!

Helps when I actually play. And helps when the game gives us some decent themeage, which, while I have liked this game, has been lacking.

Feminina:

It’s true. They did make a point of her noticing that this tomb was particularly unpleasant.

Which, again, can easily be taken to support either perspective: as you say, this is a nasty gross tomb full of nasty gross corpses that even Lara can’t completely ignore, but she makes it sound all great.

Or–as I might say, arguing my side–she knows that what the guy wants to hear about is not the mundane details of how it smells, because you can smell gross stuff anywhere, it’s the cool, unique details of exactly what’s in this tomb that you wouldn’t experience anywhere else.

As you say, he’s an old explorer himself, so she doesn’t have to downplay the hardships because he’s been there…but she also doesn’t have to play up the hardships to impress him with how dangerous and difficult it was. He just wants to know what cool stuff was in there.

Skipping over the not-cool stuff is glamorizing the whole thing, sure, but on the other hand it’s also getting to the point. And, as I said, I feel like she’s meant to have told him a lot more than we actually heard, and I assumed that a lot of the less exciting details, potentially including the horrible smells and the disgusting corpses, were in that longer conversation. And I do have a tendency to read between the lines and cut slack based on what I imagine is there, sometimes with admittedly minimal support from the text, but in this case, I think it was pretty clear that there WAS in fact supposed to be a longer conversation.

There was a sort of ‘time passing’ camera shift, wasn’t there? In addition to the fact that there is literally no way the couple of lines we actually heard from her would be considered a satisfying summary of an adventure by anyone, let alone a fellow tomb-enthusiast.

So I personally think she probably did give him all the nitty gritty unpleasant details, and he probably listened with interest because he’s been in similar situations and it brings back old memories and so forth, and they talked about all the grossness the way a couple of nurses will sit around talking about the ulcerating sores they saw the other day, or whatever, totally unperturbed while everyone else at the table cringes in horror, because they’re both experts in this topic.

It’s still absolutely fair to note that we don’t SEE any of that, and that the incredibly condensed version we actually hear must represent either her personal takeaway impression of the whole experience (in my read) or at least the one she wants to give the guy (or to give us).

We could ask why the game wants us to have that takeaway as opposed to one where she sits down and talks about disgusting muck and moldy bones with a fellow expert. Again, my interpretation was that we’re meant to believe that the enthusiasm IS her takeaway, that the disgusting muck is just something she slogs through to get to the wonder of ancient machines that still work, and that’s why she does this.

But arguing that this kind of almost childish wonder demonstrates a certain shallowness in her approach to the stuff she does…I can certainly see that too. We could say it shows she’s just another outsider looking for something to marvel at in an ‘exotic’ culture, ignoring (‘blind to’) all the grit and death and real-world consequences.

Hm. I dunno, man.

Butch:

Nice transition, cuz I wanted to talk about the “outsider” “exotic” thing, too.

One theme that we have had to talk about in this game is the idea of Lara confronting (or having to confront for Lara) the fact she is a plundering, colonial naughty white person. She’s just a pillager, too! But here we have her finding a kindred spirit, a dude who shares her views on things (he, too, seems to have a childlike wonder, and a desire to marvel) who isn’t a naughty white person. You get a sense that he’s lived there a long time. He’s a native, but he’s like her.

Or is he a native? He speaks Spanish. He’s in the mission. So maybe he was born here, but where’s the line between invasive plunderer and native? You could say this dude is an invasive plunderer, too. Christian, speaking Spanish, etc. After all, the artifact he gave her wasn’t Spanish or Christian at all. It was Mam, and ancient. So this nice, not white dude is really just another level of plunderer, right? A nice twist on game tropes.

It also ties to something that has had me wondering for a while (and maybe this will make more sense when we finish the game): When we do get the box, we take it, plunder it, whatever, from someone who ALSO took it, plundered it, whatever. We didn’t remove it from its rightful place, the way plunderers so often do. We stole it from the guy that stole it.

And I don’t know if that dynamic, especially with the Lopez story, is there to make Lara/the player off the hook (Hey, Lopez was nuts and a thief and a killer and we’re taking this back for the people of Paititi, yay us) or to, once again, say Lara is also icky (Lara’s doing the exact same thing as this killer, thieving missionary, naughty Lara). Certainly Manu is an interesting counterpoint to Lopez.

Feminina:

That is indeed an interesting question in this game, where we have a few levels of invasions. The Spanish (especially the guy who originally stole the box) came charging in with their Christianity, poking around, sticking crosses everywhere and apparently repurposing existing tombs and structures. Manu, a descendant of that intruding culture, was exploring the artifacts of the previous inhabitants–but he doesn’t seem like an outsider himself, having presumably been born in the Mission and lived his life there. The Spanish were outsiders when they first got there, but they aren’t anymore, really.

Lara feels different in the sense that she definitely still is an outsider, but she’s an outsider at a different level of threat than Trinity, which, while taking careful steps not to be recognized as foreign, have basically taken control of Paititi for their own ends.

And then, some of the old murals about the founding of Paititi talk about wars between the people who were there then, so maybe it was just their good luck that (as far as is recorded) there was no one living there when they arrived that they had to fight with about it.

Butch:

That’s true! There were wars just to see who could be the “first real” Paititians!

Nice job to the game for going there on all this. Most games don’t.

It’s funny because this game didn’t really do themes all that much, but when they did, they did them well. It’s even more amazing when you notice they did them well against a backdrop of a totally absurd story.

Very erratic storytelling and themes in this one.

Feminina:

Yes, there’s some stuff there but it feels very secondary to the action. Or maybe the story feels secondary to the action and the themes feel tertiary to that.

I mean, it’s a very old school pulpy adventure melodrama type story, there’s nothing really WRONG with it, it just doesn’t do a whole lot that’s novel or thought-provoking. It serves the sidequests and the exploration and the action and the puzzles, and that’s about what it seems to be there for.

And themes, we can usually dig themes out of pretty much anything, but we just haven’t found that much to work with (though when there’s something there, it’s good for some solid discussion).

Meh. It’s a fine game. I enjoyed it. I think in terms of stuff to talk about, there was more in the first and the second, but this wasn’t a bad conclusion to the new Lara Croft saga (if they do end it here).

Butch:

Oh it ain’t over. I don’t even know how it ends and it ain’t over. It could end with her dying, her ashes being scattered across the continents, her soul destroyed by archdemons and her very sensible tank top zapped with an anti-sequel ray and it STILL won’t be over cuz shit, Femmy, it’s Tomb Raider.

Feminina:

I’ll drink to that.

Butch:

And there we go. Friday arrives early this week!

I’ll try to finish up this week, but who knows, what with this family of mine.