Personally when it comes to Terra, I think you should approach her more as "what can I do with her" as supposed to simply going "I can fix her"
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Personally when it comes to Terra, I think you should approach her more as "what can I do with her" as supposed to simply going "I can ...
tHAT SHOULD BE THE CASE WITH WRITING ANY CHARACTER
But the character is broken because while Marv Wolfman says she's an irredeemable sociopath other writers see her as sympathetic seeing how she was minor who was groomed by an adult.
Figuring out what to do with Terra is probably going to lead to fixing her one way or the other.
There have been a lot of opportunities for Terra to be used recently, but writers chicken out, likely because they're afraid of awkward questions about why DC tries to pretend Deathstroke is misunderstood.
On the other hand, Terra not being involved in Dark Crisis (outside of a brief cameo)and Shadow War might be a good thing considering how those played out.
The key to writing Terra is probably nuance. Find a middle ground between both opinions(though I disagree with Marv's opinion) and go from there.
I don't think there is a middle ground to it. Tara was a underage runaway with a mood disorder and it's fricked that Marv thought that made her worse then a 50 year old veteran grooming an underage runaway with a mood disorder to help him kill teenagers indirectly related to his son's death.
>kill teenagers indirectly related to his son's death.
Sometimes I forget how stupid Deathstroke's motivation actually is.
The stupidity goes meta when I remember Grant's motivation to go through this risky enhancement surgery that ultimately killed him was to get revenge on the titans for indirectly being related to his breakup with his girlfriend.
But like of course she broke up with you man, you punchedher literally right after she caught you perving on an unconscious body.
Wolfman has weird tastes. Considering all the excuses and attempts he made to whitewash Deathstroke, it almostfelt like Slade was also a self insert.
Terra being a cynical misanthrope makes sense, considering what happened in comics.
One idea i had was her being a cynical misanthrope who's became that way due to a series of bad events.
And let's even ignore the sexual relationship there, even though Tara is 15 year old who looks even younger, the guy is emotionally manipulating an already emotional imbalanced to see this partnership as something more and usually when that happens that is just used to show the false father figure is a piece of shit.
The real problem is that too many people can't seem to grasp that "victim of a manipulative older man" and "psycho hosebeast sociopath" aren't mutually incompatible. Sometimes bad people do bad things to other bad people, but that doesn't mean bad person 2 is actually a good person.
It's not that they don't grasp it, it's that they rightfully reject it because it's a useless concession to the artificial narrative that Slade and Tara were equally responsible. She's a emotional imbalanced teenager who genuinely thought Slade loved her while Slade is a hired killer who only saw her as a disposable asset.
Honestly, if a writer decided to write Terra as more heroic/ well adjusted, I doubt most reasonable people would complain.
There's also precedent for it, DC has a tendency of shifting characters from villain to hero or vice versa.
To believe the 'Slade and Terra are equally responsible' angle that Wolfman pushed one would have to ignore what Wolfman wrote before he decided Slade was misunderstood/ did nothing wrong.
I remember the Judas contract movie had her opening up to the Titabs halfway through
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They don't have to be equally responsible for Terra to be a Terra-ble person.
In the DC universe, it's not uncommon for teenagers her age to be heroes or villains, so the idea that she's absolved just because of her age is kinda silly.
She was a person who deliberately liked to cause trouble and had serious evil tendencies which she might've grown out of. Slade exploited these already existing tendencies to make her worse. Obviously Slade is more responsible for this than Terra is, but she still played a part and wasn't just passive.
>had serious evil tendencies which she might've grown out of
Oops freudian slip there huh. Yeah you're right maybe if Slade didn't emotionally manipulate an emotionally imbalanced teenager she might've got some help.
>Oops freudian slip there huh
No?
That was my point, Terra was already a bad person to begin with but Slade took advantage of that and made her worse, effectively destroying any possible chance of redemption she might have had.
Marv Wolfman really is not helping you because that's not what happened in the goddamn comic. You have to work from the baseline reality that the same guy who condemned Tara as irredeemable spent the back half of his entire titan run redeeming Slade.
My whole problem is that you're judging for thought crimes and not actual crimes.
Sometimes I see people try to point out she was a social darwinist who thought the powerful should rule but there's no concrete ideology behind it because she had an irrational view of who was "powerful" where seemingly only the guy who was grooming her was the strongest between him and the titans.
You know. I do have a bone to pick with this because "sympathetic=Redeem her" is probably the big issue with Terra as a character when juxtaposed to what her story is.
What everyone keeps neglecting to mention is she was sympathetic even within that completely sociopathic original appearance and one thing she calls out is how the Titans are basically just treating her as a day to be saved.
Imo that's sorta the point of her arc. The audience were teenagers and one of the most bitter things you can go through as a teenager is watching a friend spiraling and refusing to get any help.
That's what her story is at it's best imo. A loss of innocence. A story where there's a person who you want to help but downright can't and a way of telling an audience that trying to be the hero of someone else's situation often ignores that person's actual circumstances and feelings.
If you wanted like, a good ending to the Terra story, even when it's a less sociopathic version of her. It should be one where it's recognized that she needs professional help and shouldn't be on the field which, imo, 2003 was trying to show only for the audience to miss the point in the finale.
>What everyone keeps neglecting to mention is she was sympathetic even within that completely sociopathic original appearance
Because no one actually thinks she's a sociopath, because she isn't. You keeping doing this thing where you keep trying to drag us back to assuming Marv Wolfman was entirely in the right for killing her off, as if that's where her character arc inevitably going to and not just Marv getting rid of the only peeson who could push back Slade's portrayal as a noble soldier.
Anon, that was my first post in this thread. And frankly I don't think the sole option is just killing her off, but I think the part where she sorta needs to be a loss of innocence story like that is important.
Look at what the ultimate conclusion for 2003 was, she makes the call not to come back because she knows she isn't mentally in a position to be trusted on a battlefield and needs to take care of herself.
Also I'll be honest, what's wrong with making her a bit sociopathic. This is where I feel like "mental health awareness" is really performative. She has to be some manageably depressed little angel? Anyone whose met a person whose been traumatized to the extents that she is know that people in situation's similar to hers tend to make toxic and irrational decisions and typically need serious intervention for their self-destructive behavior at times. That doesn't magically erase her sympathy or make her some irredeemable monster but this idea that she just needs a lil love and then can be totally reformed and right back to superhero-ing is where the story just gets childish.
Have a more experienced hero get her mental healthcare, give her a normal life for a while, maybe the others can visit her from time to time but treat her PTSD like actual fricking PTSD instead of sanitizing it because this is precisely why people hated the Young Justice version so much. Seeing them just lazily let her back on the battlefield like that because she's been shown basic love and support is such a condescending take on how this all works.
There are happy endings you can give her without just cleaning all the unsavory parts of her character. 03 did it but had to keep it PG, yet somehow the later pg-13 versions are even more sanitized than that
It also doesn't help Mike Barr wrote her as internally upset she'd have to betray the Titans, which Wolfman said was non-canon since obviously to him she was always against them. For some comparison between the titles, you have Halo having been an innocent alien possessing the body of a teenage sociopath girl Violet who was meant to be "bad to the bone" all herself.
This gives me an idea for a good story
When I'm at DC I'll write it for you
Neat!
>what can I do with her
Here are my two cents : make her an even bigger prostitute
Like she's choking on wiener 24/7
gigabased
the absolute madman priest had it right
What is Cinemaphile's opinion on Prieststroke, anyways?
I read the omnibus last year and I thought the first half of his run was great, but then the back half lost its way and just fizzled out
Probably the best exploration into Slade and why he's fricked up. He's a villain but not entirely evil. Just immoral and has a bad habit of unintentionally making the lives of people around him worse.
Started to fall off as he forced more and more Batman stuff into the run to keep sales up.
Still the only good Deathstroke comic published since the 90s.
Just avoid the character at all costs.
Desperate lonely simps will endlessly white knight for a fictional character because their peepee twitches for them. While Titans fans, that actually read the comics back in the day, don't want the character redeemed because it was so much more interesting to have a bonfide evil teen character.
It's an impasse that will never be solved. DC has finally learned that the only way to win is to not play the game.
Titan fans back in the day loved Tara and was expecting her to get redeemed.
That's simply not true. She was insufferable dull as the plucky good-natured girl, most fans were crying "derivative" at DC until they shocked everyone with the reveal that she was pure evil. That heel turn defined her and resulted in one of the most popular Titans stories of all time.
Agreed. Raven should be gone, she suffers from the Scarlet Witch Syndrome. A character that has turn evil not once, not twice, not thrice but every fricking time. I can forgive one or two storylines where she's possessed by Trigon, or brainwashed by Blood but she's been a villain too many times to be forgiven.
...and before the inevitable cries of misogyny or whatever, let me make it clear.
Frick Slade.
Frick Venom.
Frick Sabretooth.
Frick any "redeemed" male villain or temporary do-gooder that just so happened to be a murderer at some stage.
There's a difference between a bank robber villain like Hawkeye being redeemed and a cannibal like Venom being treated as a good guy.
All those you listed doesn't compare to Magneto and every writer trying to redeem him in some form or another.
Hate him too. Heroic Magneto is so stupid I don't even know what we're doing as comic fans at this point. We were never supposed to cross that line, the whole point was that Magneto SEEMED to have a point but that his actions betrayed and ultimately destroyed his point.
You can't say it's not misogyny when the whole reasoning behind why Tara is less redeemable than Slade is misogynistic in nature. Tara isn't being punished for her violence against the titans, she's being punished for being an emotional underage girl who got groomed by a man who has kids older then her.
I can say it's not misogyny, and I do... because it has nothing to do with misogyny. In fact, I'd argue most people that DEMAND she be redeemed are doing so because she's a woman.
Henry Pym is a man, and he's never been forgiven. Raven, Scarlet Witch, Phoenix are women, and have all been forgiven. The difference has nothing to do with gender and all about perception. Pym's defining moments have become his failures... he slapped his wife, he built Ultron, he got whacked out on "pym" particles becoming Yellow Jacket. These are the moments that he is known for now, it doesn't matter how many heroic tales he led, how many redemption arcs they tried it all goes back to Pym being an butthole. We forgive Scarlet Witch, and Phoenix for genocide because they have other big stories to tell, other defining classics... better PR essentially.
Terra is a relatively insignificant character. She was a cipher, joining a team of sidekicks desperately trying to grow their own relevance ...and her first big storyline was her betraying her new team and trying to kill them. That's her foundation as a character, it's in her Genesis and cannot be removed. Pym had a decade+ of heroic stories and still can't escape it, so how could Terra?
Terra is better as a rare irredeemable character than she would be following in the footsteps of EVERY OTHER redeemed figure. Stop trying to fix every single goddamn villain... we had JLA Lex, and redeemed Two-Face for fricks sake.
Terra and Kole were basically both created to die, one was just a longer con and a villain that Wolfman wanted us to believe was worse than Deathstroke. The other was just cannon fodder for Crisis and so he wouldn't feel bad about only killing off others' characters.
I say it's misogyny because it is. When they showed that Slade was having sex with Tara the intention was to be the point of no return, that we would see her as a bawd and turn against her.
To reiterate, we were supposed to be more mad at the underage girl being groomed then the guy grooming her. That's misogynistic.
And when that underage girl died, that grown men who groomed and exploited is allowed to besmirch her as worse than him, the man with a decades long career of being a hired killer. He was trying to kill the titans just like Tara was but it's ok because it's somehow both personal and just business for slade.
That's all headcanon, though. We're not meant to think she's worse than Slade, we're simply shown that she is in league with Slade. The ONLY unique crime that she carries is that she has zero reason to hate the Titans, she just does it because she wants to. Slade cowardly hides behind the idea that his actions are professional but the comic directly reveals that it's 100% personal. Slade is an butthole, Slade is a criminal.
We're also never asked to forgive Slade, that came later and was/is stupid. Again; better PR is not sexist, many female villains/fallen heroes have been redeemed... there was just more money to be made with Slade than with Terra. Cynical? Yes, but it's the truth.
You didn't address any of my other examples. Sadly it seems like you are not interested in having an actual discussion, and just prefer to throw out insults. Oh well.
>we're simply shown that she is in league with Slade.
She's not even that though. Slade has been an assassin for the highest bidder for years where his entire career as a paid killer is well older than Tara herself is so there's no way she has a higher kill count then Slade. So what's makes Tara evil outside of vibes? Even in the judas contract Slade will still come leagues ahead of him because A) it his murder conspiracy she's following and B) he's having sex with an underage to ensure his control over here, which by the way is a very gracious reading of that.
Even at 15 Terra has culpability for her actions. Sure, Slade's manipulations should be put into consideration, but ultimately Terra willfully went along with an incredibly long con to infiltrate the Titans for the knowing purpose of killing them and at no point tried to stop it. Just because she didn't come up with the murder conspiracy doesn't mean she's off the hook, morally or legally, for her part in the murder conspiracy. A lesser butthole is still an butthole. And the part that bugs me is that's fine. Terra can be some shitbag who got played by another shitbag and you feel bad for her while still being a villain.
You cannot say she willfully went under the actions but she's an emotionally imbalanced teenage runaway being groomed by a adult assassin. I hate to break it to you but no she's not actually culpable for her actions and you have no reason to assume she is.
A couple of major factors in play. Scarlet Witch isn't evil. Even the two events demonizing her are pretty explicit that she's suffering a mental crisis brought on by her treatment at the hands of another. The Phoenix, or Jean Gray at least, had about 8 years of continuity removed from her to the point she doesn't actually appear in her most famous story. And you're about four decades late for the Phoenix entity to be shown as a questionably sapient without a host.
I know that. I was using them as extreme examples to counter the flimsy idea that Terra hasn't been embraced by fans simply because of her gender.
The crimes of SW and Phoenix are far more severe than those committed by Terra, and yes they were compromised by trauma and external coercion... exactly like Terra. Her crimes were less, but the influence applied over her was also less.
SW and Phoenix were forgiven because they are more marketable and existed as characters for a myriad of factors. Terra was created to fulfill a single story... betrayal. There's nothing else to her, she was created to be hated. The fans that ironically rob her of all agency and try to redeem her are misguided fools.
>t. the wolf-man
Simp all you like but Terra won't be redeemed.
To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Tara Markov. Her character depth and potential are extremely subtle unlike that of Starfire and Raven, and without a solid grasp of psychology most of her sympathetic traits will go over a typical reader's head.
Sabretooth is the one that baffles me the most.
>That's simply not true
Tara 2's existence literally prove you wrong. Fans liked her, they liked her abrasive attitude and the whole plot twist for the readers wasn't that Tara was working with Slade because they already lnew but that she didn't get redeemed.
Following that logic, Raven shouldn't be used either. She's more of a liability to the Titans than Terra at this point.
That's something I've always noted, how if Tara is irredeemable then what does that say about the half-demon?
It says that Raven can't be redeemed. Or there's a huge double standard. Both of them were manipulated and used by others, the only differences are that DC doesn't pretend that Trigon is misunderstood, and that Terra only betrayed the Titans once.
Yeah they literally had to write in how Raven didn't say anything about Tara being a traitor in the midst by saying how she was confused if the feeling of pure evil was coming from her or Tara.
Hey Cinemaphile, still virgins?
have a nice day.
>I fricked your dad, shit lips!
yes i am. and you'll be asking me to help you with the various sexually contracted diseases you have acquired using my magical abilities once i become a wizard, and i will say no.
I think the cartoon of all things did the whole Terra redemption the best. She just wanted to do nothing with heroes and villains anymore and live out the rest of her days as a normal girl.
Someone brought up how in there, she was a dark reflection of Beast boy (Robin & Slade, Cyborg & Brother Blood, Starfire & Blackfire, Raven & Trigon) but what made her interesting is that she was also a Titan temporarely.
Found the Terrachad ranter's blog from the Raven thread.
http://historiesofthingstocome.blogspot.com/2010/05/unforgiven-dcu-continuity-for-terra.html
All this time it was a woman going on about Terra good, though she does cherrypick some things and will die on the hill of 1 and 2 being the same entity regardless of different writers' intents.
Another option is not use her.
Yes but how does that placate Taragays?
Terra's fine as a villain
Now I wanna see her convince beast boy to join her in her goals.
> Come on BB, you know I'm right. I've been in your shoes too. I know what its like to feel exploited, used, and treated as an accessory. We can show em we're nothing like that. Make em squirm.
What if Tara is simply an irreconcilable brat? Where even if Slade didn't get to her, she'd still be up to no good and shacking up with some sugar daddy? Ever thought of that?
They did try to push that point with it being revealed she murdered Beast Boy's African king father figure before she even met Slade, but then the same issue has the whole "Does it even matter?" scene where Slade brushes off the question if they had sex.
>same issue has the whole "Does it even matter?" scene where Slade brushes off the question if they had sex.
MMMMMM CHEQUE PLEASE because they did that shit right in front of the waitress.
I could fix her but she's way hotter this way
need evil terra to kick me in the gut then sit on my face when i fall on the ground
I can't help but imagine her with a southern accent.
She works well as trailer park trash tbh
You don't say...
Imma be real and say that I have never once found Terra attractive and I don't think she should look attractuve either. It makes the reveal abour her being a spy and princess impactful.
She isn't really, it's the evil b***h reveal that makes her hot to me. Her persona in the titans is supposed to be more of a little sister shtick and she looks like she's in an awkward puberty phase. That's why her wearing make up and smoking was supposed to be a shock
Personally, I find it really funny how the smoking and make up is her true personality cause it makes her kinda tryhard (i don't mean this negatively)
That's why people go with the groomed route, she's a fricked teenager in a bad situation and I mean, I get it. It's hard to do the reveal anymore since everyone knows it or heard about it
What do you think of Terra II and some writers trying to make her a redeemed version of the first?
She's the bastard daughter of the King of Markovia and spent her early years in some baltic shithole.
Her mom brought her to New York, where she grew up.
Read a comic.
>edgy southern europe brat wears Confederate flag apparel while in the states
>Baltics
>Southern Europe
Read a map.
Oh you telling me you got a Atlas of the DC universe on hand motherfricker? Because check again frickface Markovia is practically a french principality.
I don't even think Slade has romantic or even lustful feelings for Tara, he just did it for his petty vengeance. I wouldn't exactly call him a ephebophile
NORMALIZE AGE GAPS
It's so fricking kino, both done straight faced without queatio and as "tragedy"
I'd like to see her on the Suicide Squad. I'd also like a good Suicide Squad book, but that's unlikely.