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Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and Queer Icon (Part 2)

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Part 2: Lara and the ladies So evidently an old euphemism for lesbians was “ female adventurer .” Who, in the whole of Popular Culture, is more of a poster child for those two words than Lara Croft? Disregarding her own mysterious sexual orientation (to be covered in Part 4 of this blog post), no wonder she is an icon for queer women. On a more serious note, it would be easy to dismiss Lara’s appeal to ladies who like ladies as simply a mirror of her appeal to heterosexual men. In other words, it’s purely about sexual attraction. Whichever version of the character is your favourite, Lara is intimidatingly intelligent, gorgeous, and sports a smokin’ hot body. So queer women just want to get into Lara’s shorts. Right? Uh, no. Evidently, even if queer women are sexually attracted to Lara Croft, admiration trumps objectification every time. As already mentioned (in Part 1 ), Lara Croft is held in high esteem by fans for the qualities she embodies as opposed to her many undeni...
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Is the rebooted Lara Croft gay? Evidence for and against...

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As some of you know, I’ve been fangirling hard over the new Tomb Raider , the first entry in the video game series since 2008, and ostensibly a reboot for the entire franchise . Taking the form of an origin story, Tomb Raider 2013 depicts the events that transformed a beautiful, if bookish, archaeology graduate into a pistol-packing adventurer with a devil-may-care attitude. We meet Lara Croft as a pretty, fairly ordinary 21 year old, brooding over her work notes, listening to her mp3 player and very much confined to the shadow of her male mentors. By the end of the game, however, she’s taken charge – she’s had to! – and, battered, bruised and bloody, she’s both a survivor and hero, right down to rescuing the princess and carrying her away in her arms. Yeah, this is probably the best point to mention that there will be some Tomb Raider 2013 spoilers in this post, so read ahead with caution. Anyway, I loved the game. Technically it’s near faultless, it looks beautiful, the ov...
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Grant Morrison’s Supergods... and my Superman

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Last week I finished Grant Morrison ’s Supergods ( Guardian.co.uk review here ), a non-fiction look at how the evolution of the superhero in popular culture mirrors Western society’s own concerns and aspirations. For example, the optimistic Kennedy/Space Race Era of the mid 1950s/early 60s produced clean-cut, conservative, “science” heroes like the Silver Age Flash and Green Lantern , who later were seen as authoritarian squares. Supergods is the acclaimed comic writer’s highly personal look at superhero history, peppered with analyses of iconic comics, and mixed with chunks of Morrison’s own biography and experiences within the comics industry. Honestly, the book could have done with less of Morrison’s dabbling in mind-altering drugs, the occult and weird adventures in extra-planar enlightenment – particularly in the later chapters – but there are enough fascinating insights to make a read of Supergods worthwhile for superhero lovers. Even if the book has the potential to m...
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