Lara Croft and Buffy, Is There Anything Better?

           Finally, a girl does not have to be half naked to get respect in films!  The concept of sex sales is always regard as the way to make money in the film industry. However, sometimes sexiness can be the power a women possesses. As I read the article The Buffy Effect by Rachel Fugde, Fugde gives an insight of women taking on a stereotypical man’s role (When I say man, I mean the action star protagonist, the mocho action star). The article makes a few very good arguments about these roles. The first is that the writer decided to make the Buffy role because he felt that the blonde women stereotype that we see in horror movies were a bad portrayal.  For example, if usually is she enters a dark alley, we know they are most likely going to die. In result of that, the writer wanted to make a character that the audience cheers for when they are in a time of danger rather then a self-fulfilled prophecy. It is very coincidental that the lead character in the Buffy television series played the blonde victim in the film I Know What You Did Last Summer, the very stereotype they were trying to avoid. However, it is interesting the sacrifices that must be made in order for that to occur. Fudge talks about the description of the Buffy character that she must be physically attractive to make her marketable. She continues to say that what makes the audience relate more to this character is that she is still a member in society. In other words, she must still do her homework and go to class on top of killing vampires. 

I also have recently read an article called The Phenomenon of Lara Croft by Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, I really got to identify with this article because I played and owned the first three Tomb Raider video games in my teen years. Deuber-Mankowsky really brings into light how revolutional this character was. I remember reading in an article that the makers of the game wanted to have a female version of Indiana Jones. In addition, the makers of the game desired to conceive a character that men would care about and would bring in a female audience. That is why in the first Tomb Raider there is so much knowledge that is given out about the character such as blood type and birthday.The writer then continues to look at the progress of the character throughout the video games and the film. It literally got to the point of being a social phenomenon.The character Lara Croft also opened a lot of doors for female characters in video games. The example that really stands out to me is the Resident Evil series because at first it had a male character, the second game had both a female and male lead, and the third game had a lead women. In addition, the films have a women as a lead. The company that released the Resident Evil video game, Capcom, has since then release other games that are female leading, like DinoCrises.  It will be interesting to see how many female lead characters will be present twenty years from now.