Hunger Games is clean. Context is important. It is a YA novel, written mainly for a female audience, with Katniss being an identifiable heroic protagonist. Yes, first there is conflict that forces her to fight, like in most stories. In fact, there are a bunch of stories wit the exact same plot type, The Running Man, Battle Royale, etc, with male protagonists being forced to fight each other in the same way.
In fact, I would say that even Battle Royale itself is more likely to be sexist against women, after all, there, the male hero's love interest was a wounded gazelle needed to be protected all along, while every second other girl in the class was in love with him, the only major female antagonist was entirely defined by her sexuality.
Compared to that, at lest Hunger Games continues to revolve around the female hero as a three-dimensional protagonist who is the cneter of her own story, makes her own choices, and has her own love interests (as opposed to be her being a love interest).
Abomination said:
Lara, like Hunger Games, isn't a victim BECAUSE she's a woman, she's a victim who HAPPENS to be a woman. The protagonist could have easily have been male and their love interest could have easily been female and the same story could have been told.
There is one problem with that:
"She's definitely the hero but? you're kind of like her helper. When you see her have to face these challenges, you start to root for her in a way that you might not root for a male character."
- Ron Rosenberg, Tomb Raider producer.
Maybe that one guy way just an ass, and the rest of the writers well-intentioned. If he wouldn't have said that, I would agree with you, I would say that we can give the studio the benefit of doubt, that Lara just happens to be female.
But they sure aren't making it easy, with making comments about how her feminity is an important part of her needing to be helped.
As a general rule, it's not individual works that are sexist (unless they are very blatant), but trends. We can talk about how LIKELY a work is to contribute to sexism, based on how much it conforms to trends, but that's not the same thing as "the writers of this are horrible people".
A film is not sexist for failing the Bechdel test (it might just HAPPEN to have a lot of important male characters), but the trend that SO MANY movies fail the Bechdel test is sexist. A damsel in distress is not sexist, she might as well be a dude. But it is a sexist trend when "damsel in distress" is a well-established cliché, while a "dude in distress" is a rare, self-conscious subversion of it. It's not sexist to call out a female public figure for being fat/old/ugly, if you might as well say it about a male (Gabe Newell is fat, lol). But when any less-than-model-like woman appears in the news and there is a flood of comments judging her entirely through her physical attractiveness, that is a sexist trend.
In that sense, The Last of Us is also suspect of following a bad trend. Along with The Walking Dead (game), Taken (movie), and similar stories, that are all about a stubbled, middle-aged hardasses trying to protect a young girl. It seems to be a variation on the romantic "damsel in distress", replacing it with a daughter figure.
It doesn't CONFIRM that either of those are specifically sexist, it's only Tomb Raider that's producer was foolish enough to gloat about how consciously they are using a sexist trend. The rest of them are just suspicious.
