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thatkindofcroftUser Name/Nick: Naomi
User DW: N/A
AIM/IM: metonumia
E-mail: asyndeta@gmail.com
Other Characters: Toshiko Sato, Merlin, Poison Ivy
Character Name: Lara Croft
Series: Tomb Raider (2013 reboot)
Age: 21
From When?: The last scene of the game, after the Endurance survivors are picked up by the cargo ship.
Inmate/Warden: Warden. Lara will, admittedly, not be a great Warden from the offset; she doesn't have the sort of life experience that offers much wisdom or insight beyond the academic. However, she is extremely determined to see things through and has seen first-hand what greed, selfishness and sheer desperation can do to people.
Item: Her handheld radio.
Abilities/Powers: Lara is an extremely talented climber, a very competent gymnast, and has terrifyingly good aim. She's also fairly well-versed in Japanese (including at least one ancient dialect) and probably a couple of other languages. She's also decent at first aid and Macguyvering with recovered scrap material. She has no superpowers unless you count her ability to Fall Off All The Things and not die.
Personality:
Lara's character needs to be considered in terms of what she was before the voyage of the Endurance, and what she became afterwards. Previously, Lara was physically and academically very talented but bookish and a little asocial - while exploring Europe, she was more interested in the ancient history than the social scene and had to be dragged out of her shell by her best friend Sam. Her passions centred around artifacts and ancient history more than people and she didn't have much of the life experience of others her age (the game going so far as to describe her earliest character model as 'Innocent Lara'). She seemed to live her life on a fairly theoretical basis, choosing to study and hypothesise about long-dead cultures rather than seriously engaging in the living ones. However, unlike her father, she chose to keep her feet firmly on the ground and never indulged in ideas of ancient myth having anything more than coincidental basis in fact.
The wrecking of the Endurance and her subsequent experiences in Yamatai caused someone very different to emerge, as she was forced to draw on a reserve of inner strength she was previously unaware of. Her academic dedication became a fierce determination to survive, even at the cost of the lives of others; not long after apologising to a deer she had to kill for food, she described to Roth how frightening easy it was to take the lives of several men in self-defence. As her motivation changed from simple survival to Sam's rescue, she grew fiercer than ever, eventually reaching the point where the well-armed and highly trained men she was fighting were more afraid of a lone 21-year-old woman than she was of them. Though Lara never enjoyed killing these men, she definitely adjusted to it, and would no longer hesitate for a second to get as visceral as necessary in her own defence or that of her friends. By the time she reaches the climax of events on Yamatai, she was no longer an inquisitive academic but a force of nature, and she'd realised that her father may have had a point. She then elected not to go home but to pursue other mysteries in search of their hidden truths.
So this leaves the kind of person Lara is now. Nothing she was previously has gone away, although any social anxieties she may once have had have been burnt into irrelevance and replaced with some deeper issues regarding trust and guilt. Of the seven other survivors of the Endurance wreck, only three left the island alive - since they were there in the first place on Lara's insistence, she feels a deep survivor's guilt that may make it hard for her to form any other close friendships. On top of that, her recent betrayals - by Dr. Whitman, the expedition leader who planned to find fame and fortune at the expense of the entire crew's lives, and Mathias, the Yamatai cult leader who initially presented as a mild-mannered academic so he could kidnap Sam - will make it difficult to invest much trust in strangers for some time. Having spent a brief but intense period of time in a place where literally every native inhabitant wanted her dead, she'll also be jumpy and defensive until she relearns how to live somewhere with a lock on the door where everyone isn't actively trying to kill her. Her interest in ancient history has, if anything, intensified - along with a renewed passion for those cultures' myths and where the line between fact and legend might blur. Her lifetime motivation, so to speak, is still the truths of the distant past but she's now also (maybe even predominantly) seeking truths that others would dismiss as fantasies. She considers her former self naive for dismissing such ideas out of hand and resenting her father for pursuing them.
Self-sufficiency is one of Lara's watchwords. Although she grew up in a very wealthy household and now has access to that money, she keeps it tied up in trusts and investments and worked throughout her time at university - partly because dipping into her inheritance would be an acknowledgement that her parents are really gone, but also because she wants to make her own way in the world instead of simply being her father's daughter. On Yamatai, much of the time she spends alone isn't by choice, but she soldiers on with little thought to the fact she's going solo; when Roth dies, she insists she can't go on without him, but then goes on to prove herself very wrong. Even when her remaining crewmates are swayed to her point of view and offer to accompany her (where previously they had no faith in her ideas), she refuses to put them at risk. While some of this can be attributed to survivor's guilt, it speaks to her belief that she needs to be able to stand on her own two feet and survive by whatever means necessary even when no-one else has her back. While this can be a strength, it also means she's reluctant to ask for help - not out of pride but because it feels like a personal failure.
In day-to-day behaviour, Lara is very British - that is, polite but reserved and sometimes a little dry. With friends she's warmer and more honest; she's not the more detached smooth talker of previous incarnations. When it comes to conflict, she's unlikely to back down. If she's certain she's in the right she'll cling to her argument even if she doesn't have empirical evidence, and isn't afraid to act alone when she's sure she's on the right path, even if it's massively dangerous to do so. She doesn't show pain, physical or emotional, very easily for fear of being seen as vulnerable; for example, when a crewmate Reyes comments (after the third Endurance survivor dies) that being around her is dangerous, Lara doesn't betray her guilt and instead says 'You'd better keep your distance then.' Having been reborn as a survivor, someone able to keep going no matter what, Lara is determined not to let her more sensitive feelings show to anyone but those she holds dearest - and sometimes not even them.
Barge Reactions: Lara has just come from having her world blown wide open by the very real mystical goings-on in Yamatai; as such, she'll be less fazed and more curious about the Barge's role as a multiversal junction (having particular interest in mythological figures like King Arthur and Loki). Though she'll be on the Barge to work, being very focused on her deal (the lives of Roth, Grim and Alex), she won't pass up the opportunities for study and exploration.
She'll naturally be disturbed by the floods and breaches - anything that makes her lose control over her behaviour - and will be struggling for some time with the long-term impact of what happened on the island. Although she's been hardened by her experiences and emerged from them a stronger person, she'll need time and (though she'll be loath to ask for it) help to recover from her post-traumatic stress and reconcile the introverted academic she was to the woman she is now - who's killed dozens of men, faced death countless times and seen three of her friends killed so that she could keep going.
History:
There's not much confirmed about Lara's early history, most material coming from interviews with the writer and the Art Of Survival artbook. It's known that she was born into wealth, to Earl Richard Croft and Lady Croft (their presumed deaths would make Lara a countess now). She was fascinated by ancient history from a very young age and her father indulged this - his former guide and Lara's mentor, Conrad Roth, mentions that she made her first find at one of his digs when she was only five years old. Her formative years involved a great deal of world travel and study; she also went on climbing and orienteering expeditions with Roth, and practiced gymnastics and archery (and probably marksmanship).
It seems that her parents both disappeared on an expedition and are now presumed dead; since no foster family or other care arrangements seem apparent, this probably happened when Lara was at least 16. A long-time believer of the sorts of stories that most would dismiss as fairytales, it seems that Richard Croft vanished in pursuit of one of these legends, along with his wife. Later, Lara attended University College London alongside her best friend, Sam Nishimura, and graduated with a degree in archaeology. Shortly after this she joined the crew of the Endurance to seek out the fabled lost island of Yamatai.
Her history over the course of the game is detailed on Wikipedia here.
Sample Journal Entry: Taking place after a theoretical historical-type port.
[Lara's sitting at her desk in her room, which is large but fairly plain - or it would be if the walls weren't densely papered with photos from various dig sites, photocopies from books, and maps covered in pins and notes. There's a stack of books in shot, most of them bristling with page markers.
She looks a bit battered around the edges and her left arm in a makeshift sling which suggests she's should probably have visited the Infirmary by now.]
Cicero said that 'history is the witness that testifies to the passing of time: it illuminates reality'.
I think archaeology is the same. It's the things individual people leave behind - their homes, their writings, their possessions - even their bones. They saw everything, did everything, and a thousand years after they're gone it's up to someone else to interpret the story they leave behind.
It's a huge responsibility, and sometimes we miss things - look at this -
[She digs out a book from the stack, flips it open to one of the page markers and holds it up to the lens, showing a photograph of a weathered brass coin.]
This is a yongle tongbao coin, minted in the early fifteenth century. It was carried by envoys of the emperor Chengzu to give as gifts or use in foreign trade. This was found on the north coast of Kenya in 2010, and it indicated that what we thought for centuries was wrong - East Africa wasn't opened for trading by European explorers. They were beaten to it by almost one hundred years. DNA testing proves that there are local people with Chinese ancestry.
[She pauses, thoughtful.]
History is a witness. But sometimes it's biased. The Chinese came bearing gifts and hoping to trade - the Europeans came as a colonial power, seeking more land. One story became a folktale and the other persisted for over four hundred years. That's why archaeology is important - artifacts don't lie. They don't have a political agenda, they're not trying to justify anything. It's just the truth. And that's all that matters.
[There's a brief pause as she realises that this post had a point she hasn't made yet.]
It was a privilege I never thought I'd have, to see that truth for myself instead of piecing it together centuries later. To see the past when it was still the present. I still feel like I was dreaming.
[She half-smiles and rubs her slinged arm.] Though it would have been nice if they were as happy to see us.
Sample RP:
By and large, Lara manages fairly well on boats (and trains, planes and automobiles) - a childhood dotted with world travel tends to have that effect. She doesn't succumb to cabin fever easily so long as she can stay busy. Having said that, what normally stops her going mad is the fact of an eventual destination - and here, on the Barge? There is none. Except in the metaphorical redemptive sense, and she doesn't even have an Inmate yet.
The CES, then, is a mixed blessing. Being able to climb and run and breathe fresh air keeps her sane, but having to go back below decks every day is a little more depressing every time, the small annoyances a little more aggravating.
She has her deal at the forefront of her mind, and it keeps her centred. More or less.
Today the CES is a dense, cold forest (Scotland highlands, if she had to guess) and there are deer running the natural trails. She's not really planning to actually kill anything - it takes an ethical nosedive once you're not starving to death - but she doesn't want to get rusty, either. The CTS and firing range are all very well but they don't compare to the reality of being out in the open.
She finds a doe just below the rocky incline she's climbed, drinking from a stream, and she reaches back for an arrow. It's all muscle memory at this point, drawing back, taking aim -
A noise from somewhere behind her alerts the deer and it leaps into the undergrowth, and almost as quickly Lara ducks and turns in one movement to re-aim at what her base instincts insist will be a threat.
Special Notes:
This is a few days early, but as the game broke street date on the 1st in Australia, Rei ruled that that counts as its earliest international release date.
User DW: N/A
AIM/IM: metonumia
E-mail: asyndeta@gmail.com
Other Characters: Toshiko Sato, Merlin, Poison Ivy
Character Name: Lara Croft
Series: Tomb Raider (2013 reboot)
Age: 21
From When?: The last scene of the game, after the Endurance survivors are picked up by the cargo ship.
Inmate/Warden: Warden. Lara will, admittedly, not be a great Warden from the offset; she doesn't have the sort of life experience that offers much wisdom or insight beyond the academic. However, she is extremely determined to see things through and has seen first-hand what greed, selfishness and sheer desperation can do to people.
Item: Her handheld radio.
Abilities/Powers: Lara is an extremely talented climber, a very competent gymnast, and has terrifyingly good aim. She's also fairly well-versed in Japanese (including at least one ancient dialect) and probably a couple of other languages. She's also decent at first aid and Macguyvering with recovered scrap material. She has no superpowers unless you count her ability to Fall Off All The Things and not die.
Personality:
Lara's character needs to be considered in terms of what she was before the voyage of the Endurance, and what she became afterwards. Previously, Lara was physically and academically very talented but bookish and a little asocial - while exploring Europe, she was more interested in the ancient history than the social scene and had to be dragged out of her shell by her best friend Sam. Her passions centred around artifacts and ancient history more than people and she didn't have much of the life experience of others her age (the game going so far as to describe her earliest character model as 'Innocent Lara'). She seemed to live her life on a fairly theoretical basis, choosing to study and hypothesise about long-dead cultures rather than seriously engaging in the living ones. However, unlike her father, she chose to keep her feet firmly on the ground and never indulged in ideas of ancient myth having anything more than coincidental basis in fact.
The wrecking of the Endurance and her subsequent experiences in Yamatai caused someone very different to emerge, as she was forced to draw on a reserve of inner strength she was previously unaware of. Her academic dedication became a fierce determination to survive, even at the cost of the lives of others; not long after apologising to a deer she had to kill for food, she described to Roth how frightening easy it was to take the lives of several men in self-defence. As her motivation changed from simple survival to Sam's rescue, she grew fiercer than ever, eventually reaching the point where the well-armed and highly trained men she was fighting were more afraid of a lone 21-year-old woman than she was of them. Though Lara never enjoyed killing these men, she definitely adjusted to it, and would no longer hesitate for a second to get as visceral as necessary in her own defence or that of her friends. By the time she reaches the climax of events on Yamatai, she was no longer an inquisitive academic but a force of nature, and she'd realised that her father may have had a point. She then elected not to go home but to pursue other mysteries in search of their hidden truths.
So this leaves the kind of person Lara is now. Nothing she was previously has gone away, although any social anxieties she may once have had have been burnt into irrelevance and replaced with some deeper issues regarding trust and guilt. Of the seven other survivors of the Endurance wreck, only three left the island alive - since they were there in the first place on Lara's insistence, she feels a deep survivor's guilt that may make it hard for her to form any other close friendships. On top of that, her recent betrayals - by Dr. Whitman, the expedition leader who planned to find fame and fortune at the expense of the entire crew's lives, and Mathias, the Yamatai cult leader who initially presented as a mild-mannered academic so he could kidnap Sam - will make it difficult to invest much trust in strangers for some time. Having spent a brief but intense period of time in a place where literally every native inhabitant wanted her dead, she'll also be jumpy and defensive until she relearns how to live somewhere with a lock on the door where everyone isn't actively trying to kill her. Her interest in ancient history has, if anything, intensified - along with a renewed passion for those cultures' myths and where the line between fact and legend might blur. Her lifetime motivation, so to speak, is still the truths of the distant past but she's now also (maybe even predominantly) seeking truths that others would dismiss as fantasies. She considers her former self naive for dismissing such ideas out of hand and resenting her father for pursuing them.
Self-sufficiency is one of Lara's watchwords. Although she grew up in a very wealthy household and now has access to that money, she keeps it tied up in trusts and investments and worked throughout her time at university - partly because dipping into her inheritance would be an acknowledgement that her parents are really gone, but also because she wants to make her own way in the world instead of simply being her father's daughter. On Yamatai, much of the time she spends alone isn't by choice, but she soldiers on with little thought to the fact she's going solo; when Roth dies, she insists she can't go on without him, but then goes on to prove herself very wrong. Even when her remaining crewmates are swayed to her point of view and offer to accompany her (where previously they had no faith in her ideas), she refuses to put them at risk. While some of this can be attributed to survivor's guilt, it speaks to her belief that she needs to be able to stand on her own two feet and survive by whatever means necessary even when no-one else has her back. While this can be a strength, it also means she's reluctant to ask for help - not out of pride but because it feels like a personal failure.
In day-to-day behaviour, Lara is very British - that is, polite but reserved and sometimes a little dry. With friends she's warmer and more honest; she's not the more detached smooth talker of previous incarnations. When it comes to conflict, she's unlikely to back down. If she's certain she's in the right she'll cling to her argument even if she doesn't have empirical evidence, and isn't afraid to act alone when she's sure she's on the right path, even if it's massively dangerous to do so. She doesn't show pain, physical or emotional, very easily for fear of being seen as vulnerable; for example, when a crewmate Reyes comments (after the third Endurance survivor dies) that being around her is dangerous, Lara doesn't betray her guilt and instead says 'You'd better keep your distance then.' Having been reborn as a survivor, someone able to keep going no matter what, Lara is determined not to let her more sensitive feelings show to anyone but those she holds dearest - and sometimes not even them.
Barge Reactions: Lara has just come from having her world blown wide open by the very real mystical goings-on in Yamatai; as such, she'll be less fazed and more curious about the Barge's role as a multiversal junction (having particular interest in mythological figures like King Arthur and Loki). Though she'll be on the Barge to work, being very focused on her deal (the lives of Roth, Grim and Alex), she won't pass up the opportunities for study and exploration.
She'll naturally be disturbed by the floods and breaches - anything that makes her lose control over her behaviour - and will be struggling for some time with the long-term impact of what happened on the island. Although she's been hardened by her experiences and emerged from them a stronger person, she'll need time and (though she'll be loath to ask for it) help to recover from her post-traumatic stress and reconcile the introverted academic she was to the woman she is now - who's killed dozens of men, faced death countless times and seen three of her friends killed so that she could keep going.
History:
There's not much confirmed about Lara's early history, most material coming from interviews with the writer and the Art Of Survival artbook. It's known that she was born into wealth, to Earl Richard Croft and Lady Croft (their presumed deaths would make Lara a countess now). She was fascinated by ancient history from a very young age and her father indulged this - his former guide and Lara's mentor, Conrad Roth, mentions that she made her first find at one of his digs when she was only five years old. Her formative years involved a great deal of world travel and study; she also went on climbing and orienteering expeditions with Roth, and practiced gymnastics and archery (and probably marksmanship).
It seems that her parents both disappeared on an expedition and are now presumed dead; since no foster family or other care arrangements seem apparent, this probably happened when Lara was at least 16. A long-time believer of the sorts of stories that most would dismiss as fairytales, it seems that Richard Croft vanished in pursuit of one of these legends, along with his wife. Later, Lara attended University College London alongside her best friend, Sam Nishimura, and graduated with a degree in archaeology. Shortly after this she joined the crew of the Endurance to seek out the fabled lost island of Yamatai.
Her history over the course of the game is detailed on Wikipedia here.
Sample Journal Entry: Taking place after a theoretical historical-type port.
[Lara's sitting at her desk in her room, which is large but fairly plain - or it would be if the walls weren't densely papered with photos from various dig sites, photocopies from books, and maps covered in pins and notes. There's a stack of books in shot, most of them bristling with page markers.
She looks a bit battered around the edges and her left arm in a makeshift sling which suggests she's should probably have visited the Infirmary by now.]
Cicero said that 'history is the witness that testifies to the passing of time: it illuminates reality'.
I think archaeology is the same. It's the things individual people leave behind - their homes, their writings, their possessions - even their bones. They saw everything, did everything, and a thousand years after they're gone it's up to someone else to interpret the story they leave behind.
It's a huge responsibility, and sometimes we miss things - look at this -
[She digs out a book from the stack, flips it open to one of the page markers and holds it up to the lens, showing a photograph of a weathered brass coin.]
This is a yongle tongbao coin, minted in the early fifteenth century. It was carried by envoys of the emperor Chengzu to give as gifts or use in foreign trade. This was found on the north coast of Kenya in 2010, and it indicated that what we thought for centuries was wrong - East Africa wasn't opened for trading by European explorers. They were beaten to it by almost one hundred years. DNA testing proves that there are local people with Chinese ancestry.
[She pauses, thoughtful.]
History is a witness. But sometimes it's biased. The Chinese came bearing gifts and hoping to trade - the Europeans came as a colonial power, seeking more land. One story became a folktale and the other persisted for over four hundred years. That's why archaeology is important - artifacts don't lie. They don't have a political agenda, they're not trying to justify anything. It's just the truth. And that's all that matters.
[There's a brief pause as she realises that this post had a point she hasn't made yet.]
It was a privilege I never thought I'd have, to see that truth for myself instead of piecing it together centuries later. To see the past when it was still the present. I still feel like I was dreaming.
[She half-smiles and rubs her slinged arm.] Though it would have been nice if they were as happy to see us.
Sample RP:
By and large, Lara manages fairly well on boats (and trains, planes and automobiles) - a childhood dotted with world travel tends to have that effect. She doesn't succumb to cabin fever easily so long as she can stay busy. Having said that, what normally stops her going mad is the fact of an eventual destination - and here, on the Barge? There is none. Except in the metaphorical redemptive sense, and she doesn't even have an Inmate yet.
The CES, then, is a mixed blessing. Being able to climb and run and breathe fresh air keeps her sane, but having to go back below decks every day is a little more depressing every time, the small annoyances a little more aggravating.
She has her deal at the forefront of her mind, and it keeps her centred. More or less.
Today the CES is a dense, cold forest (Scotland highlands, if she had to guess) and there are deer running the natural trails. She's not really planning to actually kill anything - it takes an ethical nosedive once you're not starving to death - but she doesn't want to get rusty, either. The CTS and firing range are all very well but they don't compare to the reality of being out in the open.
She finds a doe just below the rocky incline she's climbed, drinking from a stream, and she reaches back for an arrow. It's all muscle memory at this point, drawing back, taking aim -
A noise from somewhere behind her alerts the deer and it leaps into the undergrowth, and almost as quickly Lara ducks and turns in one movement to re-aim at what her base instincts insist will be a threat.
Special Notes:
This is a few days early, but as the game broke street date on the 1st in Australia, Rei ruled that that counts as its earliest international release date.
