Final Fantasy VI Character Tribute: Terra Branford

Diving Directly Into the Deep End

Hello my friends, and welcome back to Gogo’s World of Ruin!

I’m in the mood to kick off the new World of Ruin subsection on Final Fantasy VI—which I have decided to name War of the Magi—with the first of the new character profiles. I’ve already done one on Gau, which I penned in honor of my first teacher, Matt, and I’ve explained the connection of the name “Gogo Bordello” to the character of Gogo in the game. I began the Gau post with a quip about judging people based on their favorite Final Fantasy VI character (I know you do it, you absolute…human being, you), and sort of made it a point to mention that neither Gau nor Gogo are my favorite characters. So who’s mine?

It’s Terra.

I’d like to stress that I also decided it only makes sense to start covering this game at its beginning and to cover all of the characters in order, and that Terra does appear first, and that’s the only reason I am writing about her right off the bat. Nonetheless, it is what it is.

Warning: MAJOR SPOILERS for Final Fantasy VI from this point forward.

Main Character Energy

Who is the protagonist of Final Fantasy VI? I have identified its antagonist in previous posts, and will be addressing him again here, but does this game even have a main character?

Technically, no, but the general consensus in the community is, “kindasorta,” and that if it did have a definitive protagonist, it would be Terra Branford. There are a few details to which I can point to support the assertion:

1. In the introductory post to this series, I shared a YouTube clip of the opening scene of the game, and it stars Terra. I described a highly emotional response to its background music, which works out well for our purposes here because that song is also Terra’s Theme. So her theme song provides the core of the initial emotional context of the game as a whole. Another version of her theme song also serves as the overworld music throughout the entire World of Balance, so you’ll be hearing it a lot as you play the game and travel the world.

2. The first half of the game pretty much revolves around her, even when she isn’t present on-screen. There’s a point at which she’s taken out of commission entirely, and somehow still manages to be the hinge of the plot for the most part. As I develop the description of her character here, the reasons for this will make more sense.

3. Related to point #2, Terra’s very nature places her in the crossfire of the game’s central conflict (in both of its main forms, prior to and following “the cataclysm,” respectively). One of the main themes of her character arc is how divided her loyalties feel to her because of who she is.

As the game opens, Terra is one of three soldiers approaching the town of Narshe riding some kind of walking mechs—Magitek Armor. Two of the three are clearly Imperial soldiers named Vicks and Wedge, and the third is an 18 year-old woman with green hair to whom the others refer as a “witch” upon reaching Narshe. They recount the tale of how this witch “fried” about 50 soldiers in under three minutes, but that they would be safe due to the slave crown on her head, which makes her compliant to their orders.

The trio advances upon the town, fighting occasional guards. Why are they there? To retrieve a so-called “esper,” found frozen in a chunk of ice in Narshe’s mines. They’ve brought the girl because they need her to communicate with the esper. Why? We don’t know.

All we’re given to understand at this early juncture is that it’s got something to do with the Magitek armor the three soldiers are riding. In the battles, the girl stands out for one other reason: She has access to a greater number of attacks than Vicks or Wedge, some of which are much deadlier than theirs.

Oh, and she can also cast magic. Like, directly. With her hands. That’s how she fried those 50 soldiers.

Upon reaching the frozen esper, electricity arcs between Terra and the esper, Vicks and Wedge disappear, and the screen goes dark. Terra wakes up in a house in Narshe, meets an old man, and can’t remember shit because that’s another side effect of the slave crown she had been wearing. She does come up with her name—which seems to impress the old man, as it usually takes people longer. She has no idea who she is, but pretty soon, Narshe soldiers are at the door looking for her, and she has to flee. She knows nothing but her name, that dangerous people are after her, and that unlike everyone else around her, she can do magic. This is how things remain for the next several hours of the game. She is whisked away from the old man’s house by the next main character we meet, named Locke, and taken to the nearby kingdom of Figaro to meet Edgar, its king. By nightfall, General Kefka pays Figaro a visit, along with a contingent of Imperial soldiers. Edgar talks them down while Locke hides Terra.

It isn’t long before Terra is put in a rather sore spot: She has no idea who she can really trust, but she knows she first showed up in Narshe with those soldiers. In other words, for all she knows, that’s where her genuine allegiances lie even if she’s been told differently by the people who, for the moment at least, appear to be aiding her. You know, against the people she came to town with, who are trying to take her back by force.

In the fullness of time, Terra does eventually learn more about who she is and comes to rest in trust of her newfound friends. Nevertheless, Terra deals with identity and trust issues for most of the game, and as we learn where she came from, that’s…entirely understandable. Thus, most people have a big soft spot for her; she’s been through a lot, but everything we do in this game incidentally makes a happy ending for Terra more and more plausible. She’s an underdog for whom we can happily cheer.

Conveniently, Terra’s origin story also cuts to the quick of this series’ over-arching theme and in-game namesake; it’s something we see mentioned in the game’s opening sequence, even before we meet Terra, Vicks, and Wedge.

The War of the Magi

Why is Terra the only person who can naturally use magic? How did she get the power that the Empire so covets that they chase her all across the countryside in order to recapture her? Why did Vicks and Wedge need her to communicate with the esper in Narshe?

As we learn partway through The World of Balance, it’s because Terra is, herself, half-human…and half-esper.

So what even is an esper? The game doesn’t ever get a whole lot more specific than calling them “beings of magic,” but as the subject of this blog is esoteric initiation, we can go with comparisons that magic(k)al folk like real-world witches and wizards will appreciate: They’re kind of like “angels” or “demons,” but really have a more ambiguous character of light and spiritual divinity, but with a marked dark streak running through it. So they’re kinda like the Fae. They look like all sorts of different things: Sprites, dragons, cats, horned djinn, etc. Human beings don’t really see them around, though.

Roughly 1,000 years prior to the events of the game, magic was brought into the world by three deities (I referred to them as “goddesses” in the previous post because I swear I can remember Kefka referring to them that way. Maybe it was in the original Ted Woolsey translation of the game, but apparently they are referred to as “gods” otherwise.) Very soon, the three deities began to fight among one another, thus earning the name of “the Warring Triad.”

A certain number of humans ended up somehow getting swept up in the battles of the gods, being used somewhat as pawns in the same and being transformed into “espers” in the process. Eventually, the gods realized the chaos their feuding was causing, and so locked themselves away after petrifying themselves. Before doing so, they returned the free will of the espers and commanded the espers never to awaken them, lest their power threaten the world anew.

Humans and espers lived in peace for a time, but soon the humans grew power-hungry and tried to seize the power of the espers for themselves. Some of them did manage to become magically empowered through their contact with the espers, and these humans became known as Magi. Of course, such a peace would never last, for the same humans who attempted to dominate the espers also vied against the Magi.

A great battle took place in an Ancient Castle wherein the leader of the espers—named Odin, after the leader of the Norse pantheon—was himself petrified.

As the war wore on, it very nearly destroyed the planet, tearing civilization apart. Soon, the espers made the decision to seal themselves away in a place called The Sacred Realm, taking the statues of The Warring Triad with them, to depart this world and leave human beings to their own devices.

Once the espers were gone, the humans focused all of their ire on the Magi, hunting most of them down and killing them. A small group went into exile and managed to establish the town of Thamasa, where they hide to this day.

Aside from them, however, magic by and large faded in the world, becoming the stuff of legend. The fate of humanity was soon shaped by technology rather than magic.

Eventually, it came to pass that the kingdom of Vector arose on the Southern Continent, its Emperor, Gestahl, coming into power. Soon, he would discover the secret that allowed him to reawaken the power of magic in the world, albeit in a dangerous, adulterated form wedded with technology: Magitek, which came with disastrous results. Because the game makes it a special point to explore this story in detail, I will bring the focus back to Terra and cover that when the time comes.

However, to make a long story short, a human woman—originally named “Madonna,” which it is thought was meant to associate her with The Virgin Mary in symbolism that casts the whole family as a trinity—found her way into the world of the espers. She fell in love with an esper named Maduin, and had a child with him: Terra, who fell into the hands of the Emperor and was raised by he and General Kefka Palazzo. The rest, as they say, was history. From that day forward, Terra was used as a living “weapon” by the Empire.

That’s My Girl

Terra is not just my favorite character; I relate to her immensely, to the degree, at this point, that she feels like a part of me. The connection was fairly straightforward at first, but has only gained depth over the years since I was first introduced to this game. Even now I am working out new aspects of my connection with her. Some of this, like a lot of my content here, gets deeply personal—but it also connects to the bigger picture unfolding here not only in The War of the Magi / World of Ruin, but at Dark Twins as a whole. As I said, I see this game reflecting the entire Aeonic situation planet-wide. It’s why I do all of this.

However, the initial point of connection, at first, was pretty simple:

Magic.

I held this game in common with the person who first taught me that magic(k) exists, my Initiator. It was even more true back in 1996, when it was a bit harder to find information about it than it is today, that learning magic(k) is an Initiation. Most of the world tells us magic(k) isn’t real, never was, and that everyone who ever thought so was misguided. When you begin to take magic(k) seriously enough to learn and practice it, you enter a whole new world beyond what most people experience.

I had done so at a very young age, as well, and had basically no one to share it with other than Matt himself; and in this game that he and I spent so much time playing and discussing, the closest thing to a “main character” deals with identity issues because her magic makes her so different from the people around her. In her case, it wasn’t something she kept secret, but in mine, it was. This caused it to build a charge, and this made the association with Terra quite strong because she became a symbolic figure that meant something very particular and idiosyncratic to both Matt and I, and to no one else.

But for me, it was deeper than this still, though even at the time, I knew well enough even to be ashamed of the nascent notion beginning to take seed within: It wasn’t just the magic use that I related to, the fact of casting spells or having been put in touch with a power not wielded by most others: It was the being…”magical.” It was…the esper thing. I dunno, I just…sometimes I didn’t even feel human. I felt like I must have come from somewhere else.

I didn’t talk to anyone about that. Not even Matt.

I wasn’t sure he’d sympathize in the least, even with the stuff he had begun to whisper to me about the “spiritual war” brewing, which he did say we had both been born to join. You should understand, even as I let this guy teach me magic(k), I did not uncritically believe everything he said. I wrestled with a lot of it. I was a serious Catholic when he first showed me magic(k), and this ended in me leaving the Church eventually, but that took deliberation. And it took seeing some shit. I write about the Initiation ceremony Matt gave me and I called that post The Wind Rose because, I mean, when the guy raised his staff into the air and told the wind to rise, the goddamn wind rose.

Of course, the narrative only deepened over time; I also said that when Matt first started teaching me, he said I would eventually come into contact with spirits, like him. It never happened while I knew him, despite considerable efforts…but once it did and I started talking to spirits, Matt and his ideas were among the first things I asked them about. I get very detailed about this material in When They Talk Back, where I make it pretty clear why I relate so much to Terra as the “fey” being that she is.

Now I need to parse some things just so this post doesn’t get too far out of hand. I have come to learn that I am not the only person to have a similar response to becoming acquainted with Terra. I have plenty of woo-laden ways of interpreting all of this, such as taking it pretty darn literally, but there are other ways of looking at it.

Yes, it’s true that Terra has trouble trusting people, or even trusting herself, trusting in her own better judgement, in her own ability to love and ever feel connected to anyone. We can point to her being not fully human as an explanation, but it’s hardly necessary. Even if she were entirely human, being raised the way she was would have much the same result. She had no nuclear family and wasn’t ever really “safe.” She was fitted with a slave crown that robbed her very identity and her memories. She doesn’t know what real community even feels like.

Every struggle of hers is a perfectly normal response to that kind of trauma.

So, on one level, Terra’s story is a story about magic, and on another level, it’s a story about trauma. I can tell you that these two things are far more closely linked than they seem. They don’t just align, they’re deeply connected. They might even be described as two sides of the same coin.

There may have been times when I fully and literally believed that I am a normally “magical” being living in a human body, but that doesn’t need to be taken literally in order for it to apply very well nonetheless as a symbol of magic and Initiation in general. In other words, from an Initiatory perspective, no person is “merely” human; all of us are powerful divine beings who have lost our memories and our identities about the fact, and one of the whole points of Initiatory work is to restore ourselves to our state prior to taking that particular fall. If we make a link between espers and angels/daimones, then Terra’s esper nature is an allegory for the hidden spiritual nature of our own daimon, “Holy Guardian Angel,” or what-have-you. In the game, Terra is literally born that way and it makes her very special, but symbolically, it is through the process of Initiation that we make our divine/fey/”other” nature conscious; once this is done, we have effected a transformation of our own and from that point on, like Terra, we are “different” from the others around us, too. Like Terra, living in such a state of being brings an expansion of power, and also an implied expansion of responsibility. Part of our work in developing as Initiates is deciding how we want to approach that implied responsibility; how we want to relate with the world around us.

To make a long story short, you could say that Terra is a symbol of the “type” of the Initiate, like a feminine “Hermes Trismegistus” with green hair.

All characters have a special ability, and Terra’s special ability is called “Trance.” It takes a little bit of explaining.

In the beginning of the game, Terra is the only one who can use magic. Later on, as the plot develops, the other characters gain access to it as well, but no matter what, Terra will pretty much always be the most powerful magic-user on your team; her stats are designed that way, her whole character class is based on it. Her offensive spells simply hit harder and her curative spells heal more. This is true across the board.

There comes a point in the World of Balance at which the Returners decide to bring Terra back to the esper in Narshe to see what happens, as they want to see if she can get it to help them in the same way that she had previously come in league with the Empire. When Terra interacts with Valigarmanda (the new name after it was changed from “Tritoch”) again (and in the process, we learn how closely this esper resembles a “feathered serpent,” which recalls the symbolism of the caduceus held by Hermes, further reinforcing the connection between Terra and Hermes as reflecting the archetype of the magician/Initiate. At any rate, she has another violent reaction, and this time transforms into a furry, glowing, screaming being of light; she takes her esper form, and it’s unstable. The entire next two legs of the game involve first finding her, then getting her stable enough to rejoin us. It is after we find her in Zozo that we meet other espers and learn how they can teach magic to other characters.

In the meantime, Terra still needs to put work into her esper form, which can now occasionally be activated in-battle via the Trance command; Terra takes her esper form once again, and enjoys a huge increase in Magic Power, above and beyond her already considerable stats. At first, this ability is very unstable, fleeting, and unreliable.

Eventually, of course, the cataclysm occurs and Kefka destroys the world; in The World of Ruin, the second half of the game, we find Terra living in the village of Mobliz, one of only three adults in a village otherwise full of orphans. Having lost her will to fight, Terra can no longer access her magic power. She won’t leave the village, which is also being attacked every so often by a monster called Humbaba, who was released when the world was torn asunder. She can barely fend him off and needs the help of other party members.

She has lost faith in herself, can no longer see herself as a protector or stand in her own worth; she can only see herself as useful insofar as she can mother the children of Mobliz. This is an interesting turn in her arc, because from the perspective of trauma recovery, that wouldn’t be the worst ending in the world. Still; Terra has special gifts that can help the entire world even more. She can do things other people can’t. Good mothers are hard to come by too, and such a bond is important to a child once established, but let’s also be realistic: There are still people who can mother these children. The world is not so full of people who can threaten Kefka and save everyone.

This is a symbol of Terra’s higher calling, mirroring the higher calling that is issued to Initiates as well, who, like Terra, are able to aid the entire world in ways unique to Initiates; ways inaccessible and unknown, even unknowable, to all others.

The party comes back to check on Terra later, and after she’s done some work on herself, she faces Humbaba down once and for all, vanquishes him, and from that point forward, gains access to a stable version of her esper form; the Trance command can be used in pretty much every battle, where it lasts long enough to Terra to pretty much clean up the battlefield most of the time.

Terra’s relationship with her esper form is an allegory for the relationship of an Initiate with one’s full development; we become aware of it and can access it in fits and starts, where we get a taste of what it can do; and practice helps us hone it as well, but what all Initiates learn eventually is that there is no substitute for the inner work, the facing of our own doubts and inner Shadows, even if we can occasionally call forth our “esper form,” our highest initiatory potential. It takes time and often great inner peril to anchor ourselves in our daimonic nature to an extent that we can consistently bring forth our best, most integrated self.

Inner Trans Formation

There’s one other interesting aspect to Terra’s symbolism that, as luck would have it, is also pertinent to themes that have previously been raised here at Dark Twins. It’s certainly not a secret, though my longer-term readers know it’s something I’ve backed away from for a while after a bit of a kerfuffle with some groups. Where this aspect is applicable to a given person, it’s actually pretty difficult to separate from the above associations with Initiatory work.

Apparently, it is through an abnormally deep affinity with the character of Terra that a number of JRPG-loving trans women have come to terms with their trans identity. Terra helps break peoples’ eggs, probably because of her situation at the center of a really cool, popular, immersive game and the prevalent themes of transformation that run through her character arc.

Look, I sign my posts as Gogo Bordello, “Priestex” of Hermekate; it’s written in Gogo’s character introduction:

A man shrouded in strange clothing... Or perhaps a woman? Perhaps not even human at all...

And look, if you’re a trans Initiate, it’s unavoidable that integrating your trans identity is going to be an important part of your Initiatory work. Like Terra, being a trans person is frightening, forcing you to live in a world where certain people are indeed hunting you down in one way or another. Trans people struggle with identity, with belonging, with trusting others and most definitely with self-trust. All of the themes are there.

And one or two loving, caring friends have gently pointed out to me that it’s not very normal for cis boys who have questioned their gender to feel so connected with Terra Branford. And yeah, that has taken up a fair portion of my more quiet, less written-about Initiatory work of late.

The timing is interesting to say the least, especially given how I see everything covered in this post thus far as being connected (and the big picture is really something else); I discussed the timing as it relates to impending political change in the United States in the previous post. The need for solidarity will be great in times to come, and I do believe I have aid to lend of a kind that is uniquely tied to my Initiatory status. I’m certainly not the only one, and I am eager to join others. It is time to leave my comfortable little village; Humbaba’s outside and will not simply be asked nicely to leave.