Player Name: Random Personal Journal:elementalhero E-mail: random_idiot_v2@yahoo.com AIM/MSN: dishonor4honor Timezone: US Eastern Time Current Characters in Route: n/a
Character Name: Terra Series: Kingdom Hearts Timeline: Taken from directly after he leaves Destiny Islands, having passed the Keyblade on to Riku, but before he spots Ventus traveling ahead of him in the Lanes Between. Canon Resource Links:Bio at The Keyhole
Personality: KINDNESS Terra is the reason people invented the phrase “gentle giant.” The first thing you might notice about Terra is his physical size and strength, but the second thing you will notice is that he rarely ever uses his size or strength to intimidate others, especially not at a first meeting, and probably not ever unless they wind up on his shitlist. (It’s very hard to get there, but once you’re there, you will never, ever get off of it. But more on that later.) He speaks softly and carries a big stick; he approaches others respectfully and doesn’t cross their boundaries or crowd their personal space; and he isn’t often eager to pick a fight over diplomacy (keyword here is “often”).
From a young age (we’re not sure how young, but considering Terra doesn’t seem to have biological parents and considers his Master like a father, we have to assume near-infancy), Terra has been raised to be something of a paragon. Keyblade wielders use weapons of great power, and are charged to use them for the protection of the worlds—he describes himself once as “a peacekeeper, not a tyrant”—and therefore they have to train not only their bodies and minds for this task, but their hearts as well. Terra is kind, thinking first of how to not only protect others, but comfort them as well. He is especially drawn to the small, young, and/or weak: for example, after a mixup about some kids and the proper ownership of a pirate’s ill-gotten treasure, the kids spill the chest out by accident and lose the gold inside. Terra gets down on one knee to the children’s eye level, puts a hand on each of their shoulders, and suggests that they put their own precious things inside the chest, and that can be their treasure. no really that’s actually what he says what a mom I can’t belieeeeeve
Moreso than simple kindness, Terra’s greatest strength of character is his empathy, a trait he sometimes shows even more than his friends Aqua and Ven. Terra is always acutely aware of the ways in which he has failed, or come up short, and because of that, he often reaches out to others who are in despair or who have lost faith. “Strength of heart will carry you through the hardest of trials,” he once said to a distraught young girl who had had her one dream taken away from her, and his encouragement to her was returned when she stood by his side and refused to run away from the monsters harrying the ball-goers. With few exceptions, Terra assumes the best of everyone he meets.
Of course, that’s a trait that can get you into trouble, and boy does Terra get into trouble. Having grown up in an isolated environment learning how to be a dramatic samurai Keyblade Master, Terra doesn’t have a great deal of experience with people other than his friends and Master, and this has given him a very un-nuanced sense of the world. He tends to assume that any given person he meets has the best of intentions, especially if that person is in a position of authority. Since he comes from a tradition where a person would only become a Keyblade Master (an authority figure within the order, in other words) if they are not only strong but also a paragon of morality and wisdom. Throw him into the outside world, where lots of Disney villains are also persons of authority and power, and you can probably see exactly how his faith in others becomes a dangerous naiveté.
MORALITY Terra’s morality is black and white, and when faced with moral ambiguity, he has a tendency to try and forcibly recategorize that experience into Good or Bad, Light or Dark. Most of Terra’s character arc and revolves around his struggle to reconcile himself and his goals and ideals with the fact that there is darkness inside him, as there is in every human being (who isn’t 1. a Princess of Heart, or 2. the victim of dangerous experimentation on the heart).
One of the most important things to understand about Terra is that he is harder on himself than he is on any other person. His dream is to become a Keyblade Master and to that end, he expects nothing less of himself than absolute perfection. This very obviously sets him up for failure. When Terra fails to live up to his own astronomical expectations, he internalizes it and blames himself, and becomes afraid that he really is a bad, unworthy person after all, and that he is disappointing everyone who loves him and believes in him. This causes him to be afraid of failing, and to doubt and hate himself, which are bad emotions that produce darkness in the heart. Rather than seek help and guidance from the people who love him, Terra convinces himself that he MUST conquer his own darkness alone, which is basically impossible because the source of his darkness is his own unattainable self-image.
If you read his character history above, or played the games, you already know that Terra does not ultimately succeed in his struggle against the darkness. His fall begins when he fails his Mark of Mastery exam due to his very fear of failure manifesting as darkness, which freaks Master Eraqus out so badly he decides he cannot yet name Terra as a Master. This failure rocks Terra to his core, not only because he failed to achieve his dream, but because the reason seemed to be linked to his absolute and total inadequacy as a person. Enter Master Xehanort. Xehanort convinces Terra that darkness is not something to be feared, but something to be sought out. (This is obviously Bad and has Bad written all over it, but Terra’s never been to TV Tropes.)
Terra’s oversimplified view of morality presents this logic puzzle as a choice between two options: 1. Master Eraqus is right, and Master Xehanort is wrong. Darkness is always bad, and you should feel bad. Terra’s failure to control his own darkness is proof that he is not only unworthy to be a Keyblade Master, he has failed his friends and his master, and is overall unworthy of their love and support. 2. Master Eraqus is wrong, and Master Xehanort is right. Darkness is a vital piece of keeping the world in balance, and it is no shame to succumb to such emotions or to seek such power. Terra is therefore a good and valuable person who ought to disregard Eraqus’s concerns about darkness.
Believing in option 1 means abandoning his dream and sinking into depression, so Terra starts floating over towards option 2, vacillating between both scenarios until these diametrically opposed worldviews rip him apart like a planet sheared in two by opposite gravity wells. Sadly, he never even considered that the real answer is option 3: Both Masters Eraqus and Xehanort are a little wrong and a little right. It’s possible for good people to have flaws, as well as for bad people to do some good things. Terra should probably stop beating himself up and start paying attention to his friends a little more, and this obsessive overfocus on his own flaws will stop being the source of that very darkness that he keeps beating himself up over.
With other people, Terra’s policy runs to “assume good until proven evil,” which, as stated above, has gotten him into trouble. That said, it’s also given him the chance to touch the hearts of others for good, such as introducing the concept of “friendship” to Experiment 626, overriding his destructive programming; or saving Zack Fair from being controlled by the dark powers of a god.
DARKNESS As the story of Birth by Sleep progresses, Terra becomes more and more confused about what it is that he has to do to be a better person. The character flaw that specifically continues to drive him away from his friends and further into the darkness has been outlined above, but there are other flaws as well. Terra is particularly single-minded: when an issue presents itself, he will focus on it almost to the point of tunnel vision. It means he will obsessively pursue a goal or mission once it is brought to his attention, which is good in terms of determination, but it also means he may become blinded to details or to subtleties that might let him know there’s something wrong.
At the canon point from which I’ve taken him, Terra hasn’t yet been completely consumed by rage, but there lies within him an underrealized capacity for anger and vengeance. He has, at one point, grievously injured an opponent out of rage because he feared for the safety of someone he loved and respected – that error has caused him to believe he can never go home, because Master Eraqus would never have him back. To harm someone out of anger or a desire for revenge goes against everything Master Eraqus ever taught him. The festering resentment within him, against himself and his own failures, could easily be goaded into manifesting as displaced anger under the right circumstances, now that it’s happened before.
Terra is fiercely protective of his friends because he loves them, but he can sometimes fail to respect their own capabilities, especially in the case of Ventus, who grew up with him for the past five years while recovering from, effectively, this canon’s version of brain damage. Ventus has since made a tremendous recovery in large part due to Terra and Aqua’s care for him, but Terra has failed to recognize that Ventus is now as capable as he is of protecting and defending himself. Terra tends to see himself as a protector of the weak, and in so doing can blind himself to the fact that they might not need help in the form of a bodyguard or parent, but in the form of an equal partner.
When Terra gets angry, he tends to lose control of that anger—but it takes an astronomical effort to actually push him to anger. He’s very patient with others, and his single-minded pursuit of his goals can make it difficult to get a rise out of him even when you harm him. Example: Terra knows that the Queen (from Snow White) has a magic mirror that can give him information he needs. He also has figured out (contrary to what fandom would tell you) that she’s sort of evil. Instead of fighting her, he pretends to go along with her plan so that he can speak with Snow White and determine what kind of person she is. When he returns without having murdered Snow White and stuck her heart in a box like the Queen asked (because duh), the Queen flies into a rage and curses her mirror to trap Terra in a world of illusions and try to kill him. He overcomes the Mirror’s magic and returns to the world, finally getting the Queen to agree to give him the info he needs so he’ll go away and quit bothering her.
After all that nonsense, Terra thanks her, quite sincerely, and leaves. He’s not particularly mad that she nearly killed him and tried to get him to kill someone else. He’d already slotted her into the “Bad People” category, and figured he would just get what he needed from her and get out. Her trying to hurt or kill him was, at that point, totally expected. And he couldn’t just kill her because that would be meddling in the affairs of a world, especially if she herself wasn’t directly confronting him. (Also it’s bad to kill people.)
The point here is that to elicit real anger from Terra takes a lot more than just doing something horrible to him, or being a horrible person. He doesn’t waste emotional energy on people who aren’t important to him. Rather, it takes betrayal, or cruelty to his friends (or both combined), to get Terra in a rage. But once he is good and enraged, he will probably not come to his senses until he’s already done something absolutely irrevocable.
Terra | Kingdom Hearts | No reserve
Name: Random
Personal Journal:
E-mail: random_idiot_v2@yahoo.com
AIM/MSN: dishonor4honor
Timezone: US Eastern Time
Current Characters in Route: n/a
Character
Name: Terra
Series: Kingdom Hearts
Timeline: Taken from directly after he leaves Destiny Islands, having passed the Keyblade on to Riku, but before he spots Ventus traveling ahead of him in the Lanes Between.
Canon Resource Links: Bio at The Keyhole
Personality:
KINDNESS
Terra is the reason people invented the phrase “gentle giant.” The first thing you might notice about Terra is his physical size and strength, but the second thing you will notice is that he rarely ever uses his size or strength to intimidate others, especially not at a first meeting, and probably not ever unless they wind up on his shitlist. (It’s very hard to get there, but once you’re there, you will never, ever get off of it. But more on that later.) He speaks softly
and carries a big stick; he approaches others respectfully and doesn’t cross their boundaries or crowd their personal space; and he isn’t often eager to pick a fight over diplomacy (keyword here is “often”).From a young age (we’re not sure how young, but considering Terra doesn’t seem to have biological parents and considers his Master like a father, we have to assume near-infancy), Terra has been raised to be something of a paragon. Keyblade wielders use weapons of great power, and are charged to use them for the protection of the worlds—he describes himself once as “a peacekeeper, not a tyrant”—and therefore they have to train not only their bodies and minds for this task, but their hearts as well. Terra is kind, thinking first of how to not only protect others, but comfort them as well. He is especially drawn to the small, young, and/or weak: for example, after a mixup about some kids and the proper ownership of a pirate’s ill-gotten treasure, the kids spill the chest out by accident and lose the gold inside. Terra gets down on one knee to the children’s eye level, puts a hand on each of their shoulders, and suggests that they put their own precious things inside the chest, and that can be their treasure.
no really that’s actually what he says what a mom I can’t belieeeeeveMoreso than simple kindness, Terra’s greatest strength of character is his empathy, a trait he sometimes shows even more than his friends Aqua and Ven. Terra is always acutely aware of the ways in which he has failed, or come up short, and because of that, he often reaches out to others who are in despair or who have lost faith. “Strength of heart will carry you through the hardest of trials,” he once said to a distraught young girl who had had her one dream taken away from her, and his encouragement to her was returned when she stood by his side and refused to run away from the monsters harrying the ball-goers. With few exceptions, Terra assumes the best of everyone he meets.
Of course, that’s a trait that can get you into trouble, and boy does Terra get into trouble. Having grown up in an isolated environment learning how to be a
dramatic samuraiKeyblade Master, Terra doesn’t have a great deal of experience with people other than his friends and Master, and this has given him a very un-nuanced sense of the world. He tends to assume that any given person he meets has the best of intentions, especially if that person is in a position of authority. Since he comes from a tradition where a person would only become a Keyblade Master (an authority figure within the order, in other words) if they are not only strong but also a paragon of morality and wisdom. Throw him into the outside world, where lots of Disney villains are also persons of authority and power, and you can probably see exactly how his faith in others becomes a dangerous naiveté.MORALITY
Terra’s morality is black and white, and when faced with moral ambiguity, he has a tendency to try and forcibly recategorize that experience into Good or Bad, Light or Dark. Most of Terra’s character arc and revolves around his struggle to reconcile himself and his goals and ideals with the fact that there is darkness inside him, as there is in every human being (who isn’t 1. a Princess of Heart, or 2. the victim of dangerous experimentation on the heart).
One of the most important things to understand about Terra is that he is harder on himself than he is on any other person. His dream is to become a Keyblade Master and to that end, he expects nothing less of himself than absolute perfection. This very obviously sets him up for failure. When Terra fails to live up to his own astronomical expectations, he internalizes it and blames himself, and becomes afraid that he really is a bad, unworthy person after all, and that he is disappointing everyone who loves him and believes in him. This causes him to be afraid of failing, and to doubt and hate himself, which are bad emotions that produce darkness in the heart. Rather than seek help and guidance from the people who love him, Terra convinces himself that he MUST conquer his own darkness alone, which is basically impossible because the source of his darkness is his own unattainable self-image.
If you read his character history above, or played the games, you already know that Terra does not ultimately succeed in his struggle against the darkness. His fall begins when he fails his Mark of Mastery exam due to his very fear of failure manifesting as darkness, which freaks Master Eraqus out so badly he decides he cannot yet name Terra as a Master. This failure rocks Terra to his core, not only because he failed to achieve his dream, but because the reason seemed to be linked to his absolute and total inadequacy as a person. Enter Master Xehanort. Xehanort convinces Terra that darkness is not something to be feared, but something to be sought out. (This is obviously Bad and has Bad written all over it, but Terra’s never been to TV Tropes.)
Terra’s oversimplified view of morality presents this logic puzzle as a choice between two options:
1. Master Eraqus is right, and Master Xehanort is wrong. Darkness is always bad, and you should feel bad. Terra’s failure to control his own darkness is proof that he is not only unworthy to be a Keyblade Master, he has failed his friends and his master, and is overall unworthy of their love and support.
2. Master Eraqus is wrong, and Master Xehanort is right. Darkness is a vital piece of keeping the world in balance, and it is no shame to succumb to such emotions or to seek such power. Terra is therefore a good and valuable person who ought to disregard Eraqus’s concerns about darkness.
Believing in option 1 means abandoning his dream and sinking into depression, so Terra starts floating over towards option 2, vacillating between both scenarios until these diametrically opposed worldviews rip him apart like a planet sheared in two by opposite gravity wells. Sadly, he never even considered that the real answer is option 3: Both Masters Eraqus and Xehanort are a little wrong and a little right. It’s possible for good people to have flaws, as well as for bad people to do some good things. Terra should probably stop beating himself up and start paying attention to his friends a little more, and this obsessive overfocus on his own flaws will stop being the source of that very darkness that he keeps beating himself up over.
With other people, Terra’s policy runs to “assume good until proven evil,” which, as stated above, has gotten him into trouble. That said, it’s also given him the chance to touch the hearts of others for good, such as introducing the concept of “friendship” to Experiment 626, overriding his destructive programming; or saving Zack Fair from being controlled by the dark powers of a god.
DARKNESS
As the story of Birth by Sleep progresses, Terra becomes more and more confused about what it is that he has to do to be a better person. The character flaw that specifically continues to drive him away from his friends and further into the darkness has been outlined above, but there are other flaws as well. Terra is particularly single-minded: when an issue presents itself, he will focus on it almost to the point of tunnel vision. It means he will obsessively pursue a goal or mission once it is brought to his attention, which is good in terms of determination, but it also means he may become blinded to details or to subtleties that might let him know there’s something wrong.
At the canon point from which I’ve taken him, Terra hasn’t yet been completely consumed by rage, but there lies within him an underrealized capacity for anger and vengeance. He has, at one point, grievously injured an opponent out of rage because he feared for the safety of someone he loved and respected – that error has caused him to believe he can never go home, because Master Eraqus would never have him back. To harm someone out of anger or a desire for revenge goes against everything Master Eraqus ever taught him. The festering resentment within him, against himself and his own failures, could easily be goaded into manifesting as displaced anger under the right circumstances, now that it’s happened before.
Terra is fiercely protective of his friends because he loves them, but he can sometimes fail to respect their own capabilities, especially in the case of Ventus, who grew up with him for the past five years while recovering from, effectively, this canon’s version of brain damage. Ventus has since made a tremendous recovery in large part due to Terra and Aqua’s care for him, but Terra has failed to recognize that Ventus is now as capable as he is of protecting and defending himself. Terra tends to see himself as a protector of the weak, and in so doing can blind himself to the fact that they might not need help in the form of a bodyguard or parent, but in the form of an equal partner.
When Terra gets angry, he tends to lose control of that anger—but it takes an astronomical effort to actually push him to anger. He’s very patient with others, and his single-minded pursuit of his goals can make it difficult to get a rise out of him even when you harm him. Example: Terra knows that the Queen (from Snow White) has a magic mirror that can give him information he needs. He also has figured out (contrary to what fandom would tell you) that she’s sort of evil. Instead of fighting her, he pretends to go along with her plan so that he can speak with Snow White and determine what kind of person she is. When he returns without having murdered Snow White and stuck her heart in a box like the Queen asked (because duh), the Queen flies into a rage and curses her mirror to trap Terra in a world of illusions and try to kill him. He overcomes the Mirror’s magic and returns to the world, finally getting the Queen to agree to give him the info he needs so he’ll go away and quit bothering her.
After all that nonsense, Terra thanks her, quite sincerely, and leaves. He’s not particularly mad that she nearly killed him and tried to get him to kill someone else. He’d already slotted her into the “Bad People” category, and figured he would just get what he needed from her and get out. Her trying to hurt or kill him was, at that point, totally expected. And he couldn’t just kill her because that would be meddling in the affairs of a world, especially if she herself wasn’t directly confronting him. (Also it’s bad to kill people.)
The point here is that to elicit real anger from Terra takes a lot more than just doing something horrible to him, or being a horrible person. He doesn’t waste emotional energy on people who aren’t important to him. Rather, it takes betrayal, or cruelty to his friends (or both combined), to get Terra in a rage. But once he is good and enraged, he will probably not come to his senses until he’s already done something absolutely irrevocable.