Tomb Raider Chronicles - TOMB RAIDER ANIME SHOWRUNNER TALKS EMOTIONAL THROUGHLINE

A new episode of the Act Two podcast has been released, featuring hosts Tasha Huo and Josh Hallman as they answer questions from listeners. In this episode, Tasha discusses the process of choosing the emotional throughline for her show Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft. The episode is now available to listen to on Apple Podcasts and Podbean.

"There are three video-games where the Lara Croft from my show comes from and it's the game in 2013, Rise of the Tomb Raider and then Shadow of the Tomb Raider. My show takes place right after that last video-game." Tasha Huo says in response to a question about what caused Lara's grief over Roth to resurface in the Tomb Raider anime."

"My show deals with Lara being upset over her mentor dying and feeling like she is to blame. That mentor died in the 2013 game, not in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. So if my show takes place right after Shadow of the Tomb Raider, how could she possibly still be grieving this person from the 2013 game? And I understand that there is a sort of time-disconnect."

"However, imagine you are me, starting to write this show, and you want to start Lara from a place of emotion. I wanted to start Lara from a low point. She is a super hero, so what happens when a super hero is broken? And that's who I wanted to start with, because I wanted to build her into the super hero we know from the iconic Angelina Jolie version of herself."

"I could have invented something but I feel like it would have felt forced. It would have felt disconnected from the video-games and who she had grown into. It would have been me inventing my own canon of why Lara is broken right now and I didn't want to do that. I wanted to do something that felt inherent to who she was."

"In my opinion, in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Lara Croft nearly ushers in the apocalypse, because she believes that in doing this she may be able to reverse that fact that her father is dead. All the pain that's happened to her, maybe she could reverse it, and sacrifice the world in the process. She almost decides to do that and in the last minute changes her mind."

"So she's dealing with Dad stuff and as we know from having talked about this on the show before, everyone is tired of Lara dealing with Dad stuff. She's dealt with Dad stuff since we've met her and so I knew we didn't want to do Dad stuff anymore. Well, who did die in her life that was extremely important to her that in my opinion she has not yet gotten over. Well, that's her mentor, who died in the first game (of the Survivor Trilogy)."

"And the reason I feel like she hasn't gotten over that is because she went right into game two and right into game three, so there was a lot of covering up her pain, her original pain. Her original sin. This mentor who died before she really become this adventurer Lara Croft, she was still just a college student at the time. To witness him dying, and to also kind of be to blame for it, is a really heavy thing that feels like Lara was covering up with action, with revenge, with insert adrenaline-junkie thing here."

"So I wanted to meet Lara that a) connected to the video-games and wasn't totally new and bizarrely disconnected to her she was, and b) it was my chance to help her get over something that I don't think she fully felt."

"I really wanted to move Lara past grief entirely, and so by dealing with Roth and she also deals with her Dad in the show, by the end of the series, by episode seven and leading into eight, she makes the conscious choice; 'Oh, I'm not gonna be like my Dad, I'm not gonna be like Roth, I'm gonna be something new,' that's going to jump us off now to season two where she's going to decide to be her own adventurer, unconnected emotionally to the video-games she came from."

"We needed to process of season one to move her through that. So that is my big involved, truthful answer. I hope that it made sense to people who weren't just Tomb Raider fans."

Tomb Raider The Legend of Lara Croft sees British adventurer Lara Croft return home from her solo adventures abroad to find a dangerous and powerful Chinese artefact has been stolen from Croft Manor by a thief with an uncanny personal connection. Her daring pursuit takes her on an adventure around the world and to the depths of forgotten tombs, where she will be forced to confront her true self, and decide just what kind of hero she wants to become.

Tomb Raider The Legend of Lara Croft is available to watch now exclusively on Netflix.