Lara Croft's Tits Are Too Small

[Favea]

Anyway, Lara Croft's big boobs were not an exploitation, nor did they necessarily represent a "sexualization" of the character. Nope... Lara's original, voluptuous figure simply added another dimension to the character, which can never be a bad thing within a work of fiction. Sex appeal, when handled adeptly, can produce a character who is far more complex and interesting than she would have been otherwise. And it is guaranteed to sell more units of the game.

Given the documented reason why Lara Croft's boobs grew that big, that's a somewhat bold claim to make. It was, in modern speak, the "sex appeal" slider being mishandled, after all. Not adeptly, but ineptly, so to speak. And I'm not exactly sure how bigger boobs make a character more complex and interesting. Particularly not as compared to all the of other female pop culture characters that have complex and interesting big boobs.

Still, Lara Croft was a late 90s Western action heroine. Quite a bit like Buffy and Xena. Anyone who thinks sex sells wasn't part of the marketing concept for these three is a fucking moron. But so is anyone who failed to notice that for the most part, so was their usually being kick-ass in control (okay, Buffy's crawling back to her vampire boys was a bit cringeworthy at times, but that's a different story). That was pretty cool and way ahead of its time. I mean, the Noughties gave us fucking Bella Swan. That's what the PC age tells young girls to be like!? FUCK THEM!

As for Lara's breast redux because PC, that's not something I'm into. It is a highly transparent marketing ploy to garner positive PR with a clientele that, from my experience, doesn't much care about games. Or, in choicer words, it simply tells us Square Enix management are cheap publicity whores. Yeah thanks, I'd rather be old-school Lara than them.

That said, uh... some of the posters here certainly sound like extremists on the other end of the spectrum. Now I remember why i only check in here every couple of years. Entirely comfortable, I don't feel.

[perez007usa]

I guess she was not part of the Wonder Woman age circa  late 70's and all of the comic books thats out there were she is big and short shorts.

[Tessera]

Now I remember why i only check in here every couple of years. Entirely comfortable, I don't feel.

I'm sorry you feel that way. I am quite certain that everyone here has always
been very kind and polite toward you, so perhaps you have other issues.

[spidey360]

Ok...

I got the main reason right here for these changes...

Tomb Raider visionary Toby Gard—the animator who created Lara Croft and came up with the initial concept for the game—was unhappy.
"The idea was to create a female character who was a heroine, you know, cool, collected, in control, that sort of thing," he told Gamasutra in 1998.
But Eidos emphasized Lara's sex appeal in marketing, putting her in provocative poses and revealing outfits on posters and advertisements.
She went beyond a simple comic-book-style caricature of an attractive woman to appear something more carnal and sleazy.

Toby Gard wanted Lara Croft to be sophisticated and unattainable, but Eidos marketing often portrayed her solely as a sex symbol.
Marketing in those days was loud, laddish, and barely in touch with the video games it was tasked with selling. It was also detached from the processes within Core.
"Marketing was seen as this invisible bunch of imbeciles that always kept asking these idiotic requests that we couldn't fulfill," recalls Sandham.
"I don't think we ever met anybody from marketing. Marketing was this invisible thing that would just be there to irritate us when we were in the middle of a crunch."

Gard had his own visions for how Tomb Raider would be marketed. His idea for Lara, which he wanted to get across in movie-style posters and slick marketing material, was more sophisticated.
"He presented these ideas to Eidos, and the Eidos marketing guys basically went, 'What? Go away, little man,'" says Rummery.
"'We're not interested. What are you doing here? This is our job.' And he was so pissed off about that. He couldn't let that go."

Oh, and the first "size changes" happened in the first reboot: Tomb Raider Legend(2006)

Sorry for the long post



Thanks and regards
spidey360

[Tessera]

The actual story... as I understand it... is that one of the devs who was creating the original model for Lara Croft "accidentally" made her breasts very large. He then showed the results to the rest of the dev team and they all loved her sexy, big-breasted appearance. So Toby Gard decided to keep it, even though the double-D cup Lara didn't exactly fit with his original concept for her.

But regardless of how she was initially created and why, the fact remains that Lara's original appearance quickly became iconic and it should never have been changed.

I personally never took Lara Croft any less seriously, just because she had huge boobs. She was simply even more entertaining and engaging that way -- which can only be a good thing.