We can all agree that Lara Croft has been through a lot in theTomb Raiderseries. From fighting tigers, smugglers, and even a T-Rex, to falling into some horrific traps, there’s a lot that would have taken a toll on her mental health. While she mostly remained unphased in the original series, the 2013 reboot depicted her having a hard time.
However, the recently launched Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft onNetflixactually showed Lara dealing with the effects of what she had been through. Rhianna Pratchett, the writer of the 2013 reboot, was glad to see that the show touched on the subject.
In a conversation withEurogamer, Pratchett mentioned that she hasn’t yet watched Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft, but is “glad to hear the series has touched upon Lara’s PTSD after her experiences” on Yamatai island. She also mentioned that while they wanted to, “was an area we weren’t allowed to explore in the games”.
It seems Pratchett and the narrative team had a few ideas about how to focus on the topic, but were ultimately not allowed to do so in the game. “I had the idea that she could have these scenarios from the first game that had got kind of twisted in her mind,” she saidin an interview last year. “You’d be on the London Underground, or a street at night, and then something would happen that was kind of a merging in her head of real life and what she’d been through on the island. She was kind of reliving the traumatic experiences she’d been through against a new backdrop.”
Unfortunately, Crystal Dynamics was against this idea, and wanted to focus more on her relationship with her father, which Prattchet wasn’t a big fan of.
Netflix’s Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft has been received with mixed reviews. While the show itself was pretty average at best, it seems some people wereoutraged that a woman who performs acrobatic feats and scales ledges would have a muscular figure.
On the video game side of things, Tomb Raider has something to celebrate, as thelifetime sales of the series reached 100 millionearlier this month. Crystal Dynamics revealed that the series hit this massive milestone 28 years after the launch of the original game.
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A young woman to a hardened survivor. Armed only with raw instincts and the ability to push beyond the limits of human endurance, Lara Croft must fight to unravel the dark history of a forgotten island to escape its relentless hold.
