Sigh. So much for no-research, no-planning, write-this-quickly. I'm working on a chapter where the main protagonist mulls over some life-changing incidents from her past. I'd considered and rejected an event from one of the alternate chronologies available.
Over the past week I realized that event could actually be worked in, thought about how it would need to be written, contemplated trashing the draft and starting a new one, then finally decided the incident might be canonical but needs to be glossed over to fit the flow of the existing story.
The biographical details given within the Tomb Raider games are sparse and contradictory. And that is before you get to the problem of multiple canon; the character was consciously rebooted for both the first Crystal Dynamics games (concisely but uninformatively know as the "Tomb Raider Trilogy") and the 2013 reboot by the same team. The Angelina Jolie movies are yet another alternate chronology (and that's without considering the various comics, cartoons, fictional depictions, and hand-held games).
Such is history. If you can put up with Herodotus, you can put up with this.
At various times a biography was also released as part of supplementary materials. The first one that appeared gives the following synopsis; Born in Wimbledon in 1968, received private tutoring until age 11 when she entered the Wimbledon High School for girls. At age 16 entered Gordonstoun Boarding School in Scotland, and was in Swiss finishing school from age 18 to 21.
She took up rock climbing and shooting at Gordonstoun. While still enrolled in finishing school she spent a skiing holiday in the Himalayas and ended up sole survivor after an airplane crash. This got her permanently bit by the adventure bug and although her parents waved the Earl of Farrington at her she had no more interest in polite society.
By the fourth game (which introduced Werner Von Croy to her back story) the details had changed enough to require a revised official biography. Her adventure with him in Cambodia now takes place before Switzerland. Her parents were also less forgiving of her life choices in this revision, cutting her off after she refused the Earl's hand.
The fifth game pushes things even further back; a "teenage" Lara fights the Sea Hag (!) on the Black Isle in Ireland. Or so claims Father Dunstan, who relates this story (but then, the player experiences it first-hand, just as they did the tutorial-level Cambodian temple with Von Croy in the previous game).
The Tomb Raider Trilogy was a conscious reboot. This one has her born in Surrey and educated at Abbingdon Girl's School before the plane crash in the Himalayas -- this time the casualties include Amelia Croft, her mother. And oh yes; in this version she is nine.
The official biography (released with Tomb Raider: Legend) goes on to have her accompanying her father for the next six years, with him vanishing when she is fifteen. There was a bitter feud over her inheritance with Lord Errol Croft; in this version, she is again estranged from her surviving family but this time she keeps the money. This is the basis for the character I am using.
And, yeah, the official biography plays pretty strange with the in-game material. The biggest problem being the biography suggests she never attended University, but in-game you meet classmates and follow a younger Lara on an expedition with some of them.
The 2013 reboot has of course an official biography of it's own, but it was also intentionally kept quite vague. She is described as traveling with her archaeologist parents until they vanished, and this time she's actually graduated university. Conrad Roth was a friend and frequent hire of her father, and within the game various characters/diary fragments describe the pair getting in trouble in hotspots across the world. Oh, yes, and Roth was around as a father figure, helping to teach Lara various arts of survival.
I have no copy of an official biography released with either of the Angelina Jolie movies.
So as you can see, it is pretty much pick-as-you-may even if she is countess of Croft or of Abbingdon. Or Surrey, for that matter! I disbelieve that her lifestyle is supported by her travel writing (the way the early games claim) but in any case I'm using the Trilogy as the backbone.
A little research was unable to discover a school called Abbingdon, but a well-known one in Abingdon. Yes; the spelling there is intentional. That school, unsurprisingly, doesn't take students as young as she was claimed to have been. So that kind of goes out the window. A better solution is to have her home-schooled (or, rather, given tutors and the Grand Tour) until shortly before the plane crash.
There's a clash here between the "inseparable" and my desire to have her go to Gordonstoun. Weight on the side of the latter is revelation during the third game of the trilogy that her dad had started working for Jacqueline Natla; the treacherous, powerful, one time Atlantean Queen and Big Bad of the trilogy. So it makes sense dad would want the kid somewhere safer than at his heels.
So my original scheme was send her to Gordonstoun a few years early so she's there when dad vanishes. She continues on at finishing school until she reaches her majority, only to discover (in the usual Gothic plotline) that the executors of the trust fund she's been living on are reluctant to let the inheritance part from their branch of the family.
Of course title and wealth are far from the same thing. Nor are title and lands necessarily the same thing. And, yes, I read a bunch of articles on inheritance and the peerage and realized I really didn't want to go there. So for the purpose of the plot, there's backstage legal squabbling, she is led to contemplate a marriage of convenience (more convenient to them than to her, but at least the guy is cute), and when the wig powder has settled she's got the house and car anyhow.
And then I realized Von Croy is still possible. In the canon of TR4, Werner lied to Lord Croft about the expedition Lara wanted to join, painting it as far safer than it was. In the game he callously endangers her to get to the prize -- which unfortunately for him causes the place to collapse around him. He vanishes for a number of years, and surfaces later as the villain of the game. Well, actually, a pawn of the main adversary, but he is far from faultless.
I'd rejected this as going sideways from the arc I was establishing at St. Katherine's; that following the crash and Amelia's disappearance/death Lara is sent off to school and the next years are solitary and academic. Von Croy seemed too lighthearted an adventure -- and it was, in the original context.
But it works with a few spins. First is that she's coldly and consciously training herself to go after her mother -- and when dad isn't willing to let her risk her neck with him, she takes on training with Werner. Second is that Werner is using her and his expedition is a mounting set of unhappy revelations. So he is using her, putting a young woman at risk to get him closer to the treasure, and she in turn is accepting that risk, rising to the challenge and becoming stronger for it. And proves herself in the end superior as his greed causes him to trigger a trap that she escapes (the above is essentially how that sequence plays out in the game).
And to add frosting to the cake; I could have it so she returns to find that while she was playing around with Werner her dad vanished...so a nice dose of self-blaming.
As against this, although I see her finishing her academic studies (and waiting for full access to the bank account) I don't see her flirting with polite society and allowing herself to be wooed. Not after that. And I really want to try to give her a Disney Princess experience and be tempted one last time before rejecting that and becoming the Croft we know and love.
So...pages of research, days of pondering, and it is better to mention the Von Croy expedition in passing, as another flirtation with danger from her rebellious years, but the full story too long to go into now.
And I get to keep most of the scenes I've already written.
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