Speaking to Kill Screen Rihanna Pratchett, the writer of the recently released Tomb Raider, has spoken out on the need for more diversity within games and revealed she had hoped to make Lara gay.
"Developers themselves are much more diverse than the characters," she said, "whenever anybody talks about a need for more femals protagonists I say: 'There's a need for more female protagonists, but there's a need for characters of different ethnicities, ages, sexual orientation, ability, et cetera.' We are very narrow when it comes to characters.
"But you've also got a situation where female characters do get more scrutinised than male characters do," she commented, "and in some ways can be seen as holding a banner up for female character. A lot gets heaped on their shoulders. Lara Croft gets a lot more scrutiny than (Uncharted's) Nathan Drake does, as a female. No one talks about how well Nathan Drake is representing men, or male characters, in games," Pratchett added.
Earlier this week it emerged that Remember Me was rejected by some publishers because the game has a female protagonist.
"I never set out to just write female characters," she said, "there's a lot of scrutiny of female characters, so I imagine that there'd be a lot of scrutiny of any other ethnicity or sexual orientation – but you have to take risks!
"Certainly with Lara, I wanted to make a human story. But I never wanted to forget she was female either. She is a young woman, so we wanted to make her feel like a real young woman," Pratchett commented, adding "there's a part of me that would have loved to make Lara gay."
The writer went to discuss the evolution of Lara's character within the game saying she gave the character a 'knowing-ness' about her actions and admits that while she would have liked to "ramp-up a bit slower" from Lara's first kill "sometimes combat, or gameplay or whatever, has to win out."
