This idiot seriously just tried to body-shame Alicia Vikander’s Lara Croft

Alicia Vikander as Lara Croft in Tomb Raider

Credit: Warner Bros

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This idiot seriously just tried to body-shame Alicia Vikander’s Lara Croft

By Kayleigh Dray

7 years ago

PSA: Alicia Vikander’s boobs are not up for discussion. Ever.

There’s no point denying it: videogame-to-movie adaptations tend to get a bad rep. However, the upcoming Tomb Raider film seems set to take the franchise in an entirely new – and empowering – direction.

Forget what you know about the pixelated character of old: this Lara Croft (Alicia Vikander) is the fiercely independent daughter of a missing adventurer, intent on solving the puzzle of his mysterious disappearance – even if it means venturing across a treacherous ocean to a fabled tomb on a storm-tossed island. Armed with only her sharp mind, blind faith and inherently stubborn spirit, Lara must learn to push herself beyond her limits as she journeys into the unknown – and earns her name of tomb raider.

Unlike in the original games, this version of Lara promises to be far more human – which we had hoped would mean that she might finally become a symbol of female self-empowerment as opposed to an object of male sexual desire.

However, we failed to estimate just how awful some people can actually be. 

Taking to Twitter to complain about Vikander’s casting as Lara Croft, a YouTuber named TJ Kirk decided it would be a smart idea to body-shame the actress.

“Do I have to be the a**hole who says her tits are too small for me to see her as Lara Croft?” Kirk tweeted. “Do I have to be that guy? Do I have to be the one who f*cking says it? I guess I do. Sorry.”

It quickly became apparent that Kirk wasn’t sorry, as he continued: “Casting a flat-chested b*tch as Lara Croft is like casting me as Ron Jeremy. It doesn’t work for obvious reasons.

“The only Tomb Raider game I’ve ever played was one of the new ones. I thought her breast reduction was noticeable and distracting there, and done for dishonest reasons. But this new actress is even flatter. It’s very disheartening. Or at least distitening.”

However, when Kirk tweeted out his “solution” to the “problem” he couldn’t get over (yup, he genuinely wasted hours of his life photoshopping bigger breasts onto Vikander’s body), the rest of Twitter came for him.

Some pointed out, quite rightly, that Vikander is based on the modern Lara Croft – as opposed to the pixelated busty explorer of the early Playstation One days.

Others used their own Photoshop skills to great effect:

Some used fire to fight fire:

And then there were those who just burned Kirk alive:

Speaking on The Graham Norton Show last month, Vikander herself addressed the notorious body shape of Croft in the first video games.

“My breasts are not as pointy as the first Lara, but I had a clear vision of how I wanted to play her,” she joked.

“I was a huge fan as a kid and whilst I was too scared to play the games when I was 10, I learnt all her moves… but she had to be brought into our time.”

Of course, it’s not the first time that misogynists have decided their opinions on bust sizes matter – and we doubt it will be the last.

Last year, Brie Larson came under fire for daring to wear a khaki v-neck jumpsuit on The One Show. Delta Goodrem was similarly shamed for wearing a dress on The Voice. Elsewhere, one major fashion magazine announced that “the cleavage is over”, clearly assuming that women everywhere can pluck their breasts off and tuck them away under the bed until they’re fashionable again. 

And, after the first Wonder Woman trailer aired, people decided to complain that Gal Gadot – who famously served in the Israeli army, competed in Miss Universe and gained 17lb of muscle for her role as the fearless warrior princess, Diana – was all wrong for the role.

“Her boobs are way too small to fill Wonder Woman’s perfect body,” wrote one scathingly.

The criticism did not go unnoticed by Gadot, although she admits that the criticism did catch her a little off-guard.

“People were very upset about my boobs,” she said at the time. “They are not ‘Wonder Woman boobs’, apparently.

“I mean, criticism comes with the job… [but] Wonder Woman is an Amazon. 

“[Which means that] I should only have one boob so they are lucky they are getting two small boobs.”

We can only hope that, with women like Gadot and Vikander speaking out against body-shaming, the world will slowly become a better place.

Images: Warner Bros

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