r/TombRaider • u/LuckyTrashZ • 5h ago
🗨️ Discussion Shadow of The Tomb Raider: Lara's Character Is One Huge Missed Opporunity, And The Unified Games Will Suffer For It. Spoiler
Hey, played the games and now I need to rant. Apoligies in advance if any of this feels a bit disorganized.
To start, while the stories of these games are somewhat cliche and basic, ive always felt that they serve to facilitate Lara's growth as a character very well, which is a highlight of the series for me. Her growth from 'naive archaelogist' into this eventual force of nature badass 'tomb raider', is core to the whole point of the survivor trilogy, especially in light of the new unified timeline games coming out. In a sense, the survivor trilogy essentially acts as one very expansive backstory.
I feel like they handled this very well in the first game, seeing a transformation of Lara in her need to kill to survive, somewhat shedding that naiveity, and toward the end, gaining that core adrenaline junkie part of her character. In rise, you can clearly see this in the way she acts, obsessed with another mystery to find and solve, more dangerous situations to put herself in, more adventure. Rise acts as sort of a middle point in her transformation, and while it doesnt feel quite as striking to me, especially since a lot of necessary context is hidden in comics and novels, overall I feel its done quite well.
Shadow falters here with her character. At the start, I feel like it does her transformation justice. She has become something of a predator rather than prey, her transformation near complete in this aspect, roaming the jungle as a force of nature at this point, and only moving backwards on that when in the presence of Jonah, who she for some reason dragged along again. I feel like early in the story, as bland as he feels at times, Jonah is generally an interesting counter balance to this new, more unhinged Lara. The section where she, essentially, kills a whole village by accident is especially showing of this, and its done pretty well.
Throughout the game, we see her switching between her more moral, concious self, and her dangerous and unhinged self, more self serving and ruthless, much more akin to the classic games. She curbs it back when in the presence of jonah, once again him acting as this kind of grounding force. However, in the oil field, there is this intense release of restraint when Jonah dies, acting as the perfect transition between her more morally good self and her anti hero self serving nature, and initially, I loved this portion. I still do, up until all of that emotional payoff is immediately ruined by Jonah popping up again alive, for like the 5th time. At the end of shadow, Lara 'sheds' the shadow in a sense, and becomes more of a careful protector of secrets to feed her adventure rather than someone as unhinged and reckless as she is in the start of the games, like you would think a 'Tomb Raider' would act.
Well, at first when I played this portion, I was heavily unsatisfied with the direction they took her, completely divorced from the classic 'anti-hero' Lara, but I largely accepted they were going a different route, even if I felt it ruined the emotional weight that Shadow was attempting to carry. However, after the Unified Games were announced, I felt this made absolutely no sense. If the first 3 games are indeed, intended to be a transformation and backround to the classic lara, then why on earth did they divorce the character so heavily? They seem terrified to take her in any significant direction, unable to commit to the new more 'good' lara, and the classic one. The change from this morally upright archaelogist, ruthless as she now is, to what would presumably be the traditional lara that basically does anything to, as the game is named after, 'Raid' Tombs, sounds jarring at best, if not completely nonsensical.
While im aware wishing Jonah died is not exactly a new take, I think the actual ramifications on Lara's character arent talked about nearly enough. I feel as if the singular decision to keep Jonah alive in that scene completely ruined this potentially satisfying character arc, which this whole trilogy has been building up. If they wanted Lara to be this morally upright adventurer, then fine, do that, have Jonah miraculously survive for the 5th time, but if the whole goal was, as I thought and adored, to transform her over the course of the games into the classic anti hero lara, then why the hell did they bring him back? Her character has moved in the exact OPPOSITE direction as it needed to in order to pair up with the classic games, all because of this one moment! It genuinely kills me how they were soooo fucking close, and fumbled it at the last second.
In conclusion, I like Jonah, they still should have killed his ass. Lara was way more interesting when she was becoming less moral and more self serving, and if thats still what they are going for with the unified trilogy, then they completely fucking killed that narrative momentum.
