Why Lara Croft's Always Secretly Been A Villain

Lara Croft's status as one of the most popular video game heroines of all time is only good for raising an interesting question regarding the concept of being a hero: just how many innocents do you get to murder before the title goes away? We know Lara's hubris got an entire village's worth of people killed just because she wanted an artifact. Still, a background check reveals further gnarly offenses that she could have at least used her millionaire aristocrat status to conceal, but she forces players to witness it all. It's just all-too-common to see Lara stray away from her supposed path to engage in unnecessary acts of violence that lead us to believe she's the secret villain of her series.

In Tomb Raider Chronicles, the first adventure in the original chronology, Lara is caught barely holding on to a ledge by Pierre, a supposedly evil Tomb Raider. At first, Pierre has Lara at gunpoint but then decides to help her to safety in exchange solely for Lara's promise of not laying a finger on him. He knows that even when he's holding all the cards, Lara is still the most dangerous person in the room. Lara thanks Pierre for helping her by having him fall off the ledge.

In Tomb Raider 3, she celebrates having just saved the world from the final boss of the month by climbing onto a helicopter and just shooting the pilot dead. 

The guy looked at her in a creepy manner, so a bullet to the dick could have been in order, sure, but she fires two! These weren't even evil henchmen, just people cruelly experimented on by the now-dead for the sake of creating monstrosities. Maybe the guy was just happy he was finally free. When she's not straight-up murdering happy helicopter pilots, TR3 Lara can be seen releasing Area 51 inmates to murder its guards. If Lara should be heralded as a hero by anyone, it should be by those weirdos who raided Area 51.

Tomb Raider The Angel Of Darkness is interesting because it dares to switch things up. This is finally the Tomb Raider for those who aren't into either Tombs or Raiding. Luckily, though, it's still great for those who are into pure evil.

At some point in the game, Lara goes to the Louvre to steal an artifact. At first, she either tases or knocks down the guards, but when things go awry, she pulls out her signature pistols and shoots the shit out of them. What the hell? This is the game where she's trying to prove she didn't commit a murder. Also, Lara is literally a world-famous millionaire archeologist. She could have bought the artifact or at least gotten the necessary permit to study it. These guards' only crime was holding on to the few foreign artifacts the British were yet to take for themselves. The real-life equivalent of this would be learning that Elon Musk had just killed 20 people guarding the world's oldest set of anime cat ears.

 With all this, one has to wonder why the devs even bothered cutting the original ending of Tomb Raider Underworld, where Lara shoots a helpless villain in the leg and leaves her to freeze to death.

Top Image: Square Enix