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4.5
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Hey Sugarandfluff! So I've reviewed a few of these lately - old, shitty IPcruft articles that an enterprising editor has decided to adopt and make their own. It's a challenging and often thankless job. Let's see how you did.
- Quotes/lede: 3. Sorry to say, but these quotes really aren't very funny. Clinton's horniness is overdone; Oscar Wilde is overdone to death on Uncyclopedia; the Slipknot thing is very obscure. The UNESCO joke was something I didn't get until I looked up UNESCO, and then I had to think about it a bit, and then I thought, "Okay, not bad." So, not an awful joke there, but probably too obscure for most.
- But really, the main problem with this lede is that it sets up a very, very unclear concept. Is Lara Croft a real, flesh-and-blood woman who inhabits the real world, and the Tomb Raider series partial documentaries of her life? Or is she a fictional video game character who inhabits only the world of her video games? The lede sort of tells it both ways, and I'm pretty sure that that's a dead end. It's got to go one way or another.
- The Early days: 4 Well, we kind of start off with a joke about orgies that isn't a joke. Lara Croft, while certainly a sex symbol, isn't really known for being either promiscuous and sexually deviant or extremely prim-and-proper - so I don't think there's really much satire in the "orgies" bit. I do like "reasons unknown, but seemingly obvious." I don't understand the part about the school burning down. Are we implying that Croft did it? Do her former classmates show up in some of the video games, on tropical islands? Or is this random?
- The Prince of Persia thing is a tough call. The stuff about the lame Heimlich maneuver excuse and solving the problem by killing the princess is actually pretty damn funny. On the other hand, this leaves me grappling even more over trying to figure out what the rules of this article are. Now it seems that Lara Croft is someone who exists in her video games, in all other video games, and also in the real world. We're quickly approaching the point of no return, here: the dreaded "alternate universe in which all pop culture icons are real." Once an article goes there, it never comes back. Generally, it eventually finds its way to VFD.
- The remainder of the Prince of Persia story is, unfortunately, not very funny. It doesn't really include any satire that I can see about Lara Croft or the Tomb Raider series or even video games in general. It's just kind of a silly story. Sadly, I've got to use the R word to describe most of this section: random. The elements in this story don't seem to be selected for any particular comedic reason; they're just there.
- I was hoping we'd have let Survivor die in the last section: mentioning a trendy reality show takes us one more slip down that slope towards "All Pop Icons are Real"-land. JK Rowling only makes it worse. Then we get to something I think we should see a lot more of: jokes about the actual video game series. The idea that Croft has a "blocky" figure which "smoothed out" naturally is very funny. (You could even put something in there about, say, a diet, exercise, and cocoa butter regimen. Trying to find rational explanations for the absurd is often pretty funny). Noticing that her house kept getting nicer is also amusing. A joke about how her house is always full of crates might be funny. The main problem with this section is that it's too short.
- The Downfall: 2 Is Lara Croft "drug-addicted"? I may have missed that. If not, let's get rid of it; taking cheap, random shots at article subjects is a common and never funny technique. This section is badly confusing me. Do you mean that "Lara could not compete with Jolie's natural curves"? If so, it's written backwards; if not, I'm not sure what's going on. You should probably refer to "The Angel of Darkness" rather than "Angel," the spinoff of Buffy, The Vampire Slayer, which wouldn't make sense. Let's lose the references to opium and kitten huffing - squeezing a square in-joke into a round hole is not going to make anyone laugh. And let's lose the name-dropping of random celebrities, another never-funny technique. Bottom line: this whole section needs a total rewrite.
- Legend and Beyond: 5. I got a chuckle out of "Her friends shake their head sadly; the truth is, her mother isn't dead, but simply avoiding Lara." The stuff about being beaten to death with famous art, and having those scenes censored, is funny, but again, it's told in a style where we can't figure out the rules of the universe of the article. If video games are real, how can a game designer remove a "potential death"? Yeah, I know, it's just a bunch of jokes, and I need to learn how to relax - but jokes work better when the readers don't even have to consider this kind of thing because they're comfortable with the concept of the article. This section is also extremely short.
- Anniversary: 8. Keep in mind that the technique of listing a long series of works is often doomed to failure. Articles about musicians, for example, that find it necessary to talk about every album that musician released, usually fail, because there just isn't anything funny about every album that musician released. I see a similar problem, here. If there isn't a good joke or two about each Tomb Raider game, there's really no need to talk about all of them at all. "Improved graphics," linking to boobs, is pretty damn funny. The franchise-milking joke is good. Again, the best stuff in this article is actual jokes about the actual game. And the "attempt at realism" stuff is great. The quote attribution, with the ~ mark, is done a little strangely - this might actually be a good place for that quote template.
- Underworld: 5 "Mayan Calendar... and back problems." That's great stuff. "Silicone leaking" is weak, though - I think the article has lead us to understand that Lara's breasts are a freak of nature, not of surgery. The last paragraph is also weak. I'm not sure how long you've been around on Uncyclopedia, but a common misperception is that everyone who comes here wants to see as many Oscar Wilde jokes as possible. It's not true. We're actually fucking sick to death of them. Again, this is a very, very short section. Consider combining a few of them.
- Violence: 2. Why are we talking about badgers and kittens? Lara arguably commits some incredible animal cruelty in the first games; there are plenty of jokes to be made about that instead of drifting off into *sigh* kitten huffing.
- Clothing: 6. Not too bad. I like the Crystal Dynamics quote. Still a very short section, though, and I get the feeling it's rife with missed opportunities.
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pillow talk 21:30, 14 July 2008 (UTC)