Friendly reminder that Terra had no precedent for distrusting strangers growing up like he did and that he especially had no reason to not trust Master Xehanort. (◕‿◕✿)
THANK YOU SO MUCH THIS THIS FOREVER
no but seriously, alright i’ll joke with the best of them over what a potato Terra was for who he chose to trust and the like but in all seriousness almost (i say almost for a reason) all of it is VERY defendable. Lets look at some of the bigger ‘offenses’
Master Xehanort: Okay, yes as a viewer Old man Nort suffers severely from the ‘OBVIOUS VILLAIN IS OBVIOUS’ syndrome but thats just it- we as a VIEWER know he’s evil, because we know what happens. /we/ can look at him and go ‘wow he LOOKS evil’ if you did that to actual people i assure you it won’t be long before you get slapped upside the head for profiling among other things. That and its in his title *master* xehanort. He was respected as a teacher, and more so then even Aqua or Ventus- Terra kept himself to a very strict sense of respect, just look at the way he interacts with Cinderella, or Yin Sid for examples of what I’m talking about. Not to mention its not like he right away jumped the train the moment xehanort said “hey yo, everything you learned, throw it out the window you’re fine as is.” Terra asked a mentor for advice, he listened to what he had to say, and thought it over, like anyone in his situation would. Hell even in Radiant Gardens he didn’t instantly jump onto everything he was saying, once again he listened and tried to learn from him. Point is, this was a man that he respected as an equal to Eraqus and was betrayed by not just some person who showed up and he went ‘yeah i like what he’s selling better’ like alot of people would argue.
Maleficent: Oh boy do i see this one a lot to. The fact that he was an idiot enough to take Maleficent’s word about things. Okay first of all this is the FIRST WORLD he’s ever been to besides his home- ever. Likewise she is the first person he runs into in this world. Putting aside her issue being the same as Xehanort’s (obv villain is obv) for all he damn well knows this is just how people look/act here. Not to mention when he shows up the very first thing he hears:
“What’s this… Why aren’t you asleep, boy? That fool Flora cast a spell to put everyone in this castle into a deep, deep slumber.”
Yeah okay anyone whose seen this movie knows the situation but put into that context I’m sorry but Flora sounds pretty freaking fishy.
Not to mention the moment she showed her true colors to him, yeah he called her out on it, he realized what was up, unfortunately too late.
Braig:…okay. This one, I’ll give a lot of people. This is really the only one I have trouble defending him on. As much as I love Braig/Xigbar his ‘lying’ skills are absolute crap. His whole act of kidnapping Xehanort…have so many holes in it.
1- I kidnapped Xehanort (you expect me to believe Nort lost to you? Admittedly Terra DOES doubt that point at first and only comes to investigate because it couldn’t hurt to be sure) Unless you expect me to believe that he grabbed the old man while he was napping aint no one should believe that
2- The reason for it doesn’t fly. Im going to fight you, a young well abled far more physically fit teen, to get YOUR keyblade, instead of finishing off the old man that i supposedly subdued to this point and could easily off since I apparently have him chained and at my mercy to get his instead.…Yeah no theres more holes then ship to his story and the fact that Terra didn’t suspect crap here…I…got nothing against that one.
Hades: Okay so, first and foremost about this one Hades didn’t do anything to trick Terra. He straight up said “HEY YO! DARKNESS! IM ABOUT THAT SHIT!” Frankly it wasn’t so much a matter of why did terra buy this, because honestly he just repeated to Terra everything Xehanort had been telling him up to that point.
’“Okay, stay with me here – darkness is inside… everybody. Nothing to be ashamed of. You play nice with it, and darkness will be your best friend. But if you go and get all self-conscious and refuse to face it, the darkness will run over you like a debutante at a toga sale. And then where are you? Nowhere. Now me, I look at you and I see potential. That’s right, kid. You got the potential to conquer the darkness inside you. And I’ll even give you some pointers. I mean, believe me, if anybody knows conquering, I know conquering.”’
Hades didn’t device Terra so much as reach out a hand offering to pull him forward, something Terra felt he desperately needed at that point after being jerked around (not really but how it seemed by that point) so much.He feared losing, something that had always been a clear thing about him, and this was someone offering to show him how to do what he’d been being told to do by what seemed to be the only person giving him the time of day and trusting him (nort) because by this point he’d already felt like Eraqus and Aqua had turned their backs to him.
TL:DR- yes Terra had a potentially bad sense of judgement, but almost all of it is a very understandable misunderstanding due to lack of information on his part.
The queen: Once again that whole “we know she’s a villain” thing and I think Terra caught on pretty quick after the whole “bring me Snow White’s heart” thing. I mean if you wanna talk about Terra being a potato here talk about how the Queen used the Japanese word for the physical heart but for some reason Terra assumes she’s talking about the Kokoro (the not physical heart). One of those weird instances where the scene makes more sense in a different language. I mean English has the excuse that we use the same word for both.
Jumba: Can’t really defend him on this one to much since he met Jumba in a jail cell but then again lots of people get thrown in jail who don’t deserve to get thrown in jail in our world so yeah.
Captain Hook: Hook is a captain so yeah Terra’s gonna be respectful (and Smee called Hook captain so Terra would be aware Hook had that title). Also Captain Hook was just carrying around a chest which isn’t inherently evil or anything.
The only time I was annoyed with Terra was during his last fight. I was yelling at the screen “Terra you know what he is capable of, do the smart thing and run away, you will not walk away from this battle if you don’t leave now”.
Anyway, in short, Terra’s at the forefront of a shit ton of dramatic irony. Cut him a little slack XD.
(Dramatic Irony: When the audience knows something that the character doesn’t)[i’m not sure how old this is but i’m gonna weigh in here because holy shit i’m ready.
master xehanort: yes all of that, and also THE FACT THAT ERAQUS RESPECTS AND SUPPORTS XEHANORT IS KEY. i can’t overstate that enough. terra wants to believe that xehanort’s on his side, especially since xehanort is the only authority who HAS EVER accepted terra as he is. xehanort twisting vanitas around to be something else was kind of a genius scene, and you could feel terra’s anxious horror that xehanort was a bad guy and so terra was still broken somehow, and his relief when xehanort very deliberately manipulated him to a different conclusion.
maleficent: YES EXACTLY but also minor detail. maleficent does something really clever when she first meets terra that i don’t think a lot of people caught; terra asks her if she knows anything about the unversed, and maleficent just answers with “oh they’re nothing, who would even care about them,” and terra’s like “yeah i guess they’re pretty weak” and then……..terra just lets it go. and you might be going TERRA C’MON but that was a very smooth bit of manipulation; maleficent was testing him to see how important her regard for his strength was, and the verdict was Super Important. terra didn’t dare bring it up again because he didn’t want to seem like he was wasting his time with something minor and unimportant, because that would imply he wasn’t strong enough to deal with it without input. this gave maleficent a social advantage that she used later, but terra also turned on her the INSTANT, friend, the INSTANT, she spoke about the keyblade that he knew she shouldn’t know about. points for my busted up cinnamon roll, give ‘em.
braig: dw i got this. sure, terra should’ve seen through braig–and he did. but after that, xehanort was tied up and shouting for help so the logic went away and instincts took over. think about it: somehow the master that you trust, who has in turn entrusted you with the terrible truth of his “mistake,” is in danger. you’re not thinking “he’s screwed me over and he’s in cahoots with this clown,” you think “i’ve underestimated the hell out of this clown, because clearly he was clever enough to take down someone i know to be powerful and trustworthy.” braig being a competent fighter who took terra out of commission until terra started to seriously fight back served to heighten this illusion.
hades and the queen and hook you guys got, i will just also point out that terra thinks he’s more cunning than he is. when he recognizes villainy, he expects the bad stuff to be super obvious; he has never been betrayed in a way he expected to be betrayed, because he kept looking for the obvious villain instead (queen wants him to do a bad thing, easy, just don’t do that thing and everything will be fine; hades wants him to fight, easy, just don’t accept the extra darkness and what could go wrong; hook wants him to protect a box, easy, sounds like that boy who is probably vanitas is the villain here anyway).
but lastly, jumba also obviously manipulated terra. jumba immediately sensed that terra was sympathetic towards 626 and used this against him; terra at no point was helping jumba for jumba’s sake, but because he empathized with the story about how 626 was being locked up for aspects of himself that 626 couldn’t control. terra’s own battle with the darkness reflects this exact same struggle and he mistakenly trusted jumba to tell him the truth about 626′s condition as soon as jumba appealed to that.
SO TY FOR BRINGING THIS UP and good points, i love when these posts show up.]
Tl;dr (even though I hate the acronym)
Given the circumstances it makes sense that Terra, being the naive; trusting person he is, would trust these people. He’s not stupid because when one of them does something that raises a red flag he catches on pretty quickly. The problem is most of them don’t immediately raise red flags outside of how they look.
And just to be contradictory, here’s a post defending all of Terra’s actions (though it’s in the vein of “yeah Terra mucked up but it’s understandable why so don’t give him to much crap for it”. It’s not trying to make Terra blameless so much as being understanding towards him).
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