on this hc/au, tara lives. and it's also part of the "terra and robin as slades apprentices at the same time", thats why they're besties
also, in this au, raeterra are married, and beast boy and nightwing were the best mans and starfire and donna were the maids of honor
ALSO
in this au, she's part of the birds of pray, and has a very close relationship with dinah (black canary), like mother and dauther (she took her to the altar at raeterra's wedding)
(the idea for the bop came from a fic i read some time ago)
(english isn't my first languege sorry for any mistakes)
Really liked your top Teen Titans ship post. That Harley/Batman one has me all kinds of intrigued and you are more than right on Dickkory. But. I gotta know. How in the world are Terra and Raven the same character??? I've been puzzling over this for like half an hour and I know it's gonna drive me crazy. 😂 Thanks.
They are the same person, this is the hill I'll die on. I understand why you can't really see how they are the same character, because their relationship is literally all just subtext. SO basically text is what's written and directly stated, subtext is what you as the reader infer it's interpretation. Reader interpretation is really important though, and good comic book stories will build on subtext that's originally present in the stories intentional or not and add to it. The Harley and Ivy gay relationship started out as subtext, it's text now, stories change over time etc. etc.
Comic books are also an adaptive medium, cartoons make adaptations of these comics based on the show creators interpretation, then those adaptations are sometimes cycled back into the comics too. I mean, there's a reason that there are two Judas Contract interpretations Teen Titans 2003, and the solo Judas Contract movie and Terra has big interactions with Raven in both.
ANYWAY, Terra and Raven are the same person in different fonts explanation underneath the cut!
In the original comic, Terra and Raven's relationship does not have nearly as much interaction as in the cartoon adaptations. However, there is something there. It is basically this, Raven is the only one who notices that something's off with Terra, because her empathic senses detect the isolation and emptiness inside of Terra. Raven points this out several times to Terra and other people, avoids Terra when the rest of the group welcomes her, in, later on Terra wants to take on Raven herself because she sees her as self-righteous and stuck up.
This is why I say subtext, when you read between the lines and look at both characters they actually are incredibly similar.
They are both bastards, in the sense they are unwanted children conceived out of wedlock that their parents didn't try to raise and handed off to someone else. Terra is half-princess, her life is controlled by the fact she's connected to the Markovian bloodline, but they're ashamed of her and don't want her around (all except for Brion).
Capes on the Couch's Terra Episode, does a good job on how a child basically being punished by the decisions of their parents they had no control over can both hurt their developmental years, and also due major damage to their self esteem. It's a horrible thing to teach a child they are basically unwanted when they're not the ones who made the decision to be born into this world.
Neither Terra or Raven wanted to be born, and yet they are essentially punished their entire childhood for this fact, either by neglect by Terra (the royal family only wanted her around to experiment on her then sent her back to America when her behavior shamed them and they found her unsavory) or Raven who like had no choice in being born and yet the society she was raised in told her she was an innately an evil person (when she was like five) her emotions were evil and if she didn't continually fight against them she would be exactly like her father. Raven's mother joined a cult and tried to marry Satan, Terra's mom decided to have an affair with a king, however they both take no responsibility, hand their kids off and it's Terra and Raven who have to deal with this. Terra and Raven basically also never had parents or a childhood. Terra's sixteen and she acts like both more mature than everyone around her, and a miniature adult, and she's convinced she's this cunning manipulative mastermind and I'm like hmm I wonder if that's a survival mechanism because no one ever bothered to raise her and she had to take care of herself.
They both are born with powers they don't want
Terra has incredible powers to move the earth that are hard for her to control, and in several continuities literally result in her death when she loses control and drops the entire earth on herself and crushes herself. Raven was born the daughter of a demon and the only way she was taught to control her emotions was to suppress them entirely.
They are both given these huge powers that they didn't really ask for, and those powers changed the course of their lives. If Terra didn't have geokinesis, she'd probably just be a slgihtly unstable runaway kid and not a mercenary. Raven's entire life is defined by trying to control her powers and use them for good.
So, then the difference between them is that Raven decided to use her powers for good, and Terra made the selfish decision to use her powers above herself. Raven is a better person because she rose above her circumstances, instead of just using her circumstances as an excuse to hurt others. Au contraire, mon friend.
Repression / Expression, Selfish / Selfless, and the Dark Phoenix
A huge part of Raven's character arc that almost everyone ignores is that Raven was heavily abused, not by her father, but by the monks of Azarath. Raven was raised in a cult. Raising a child far away from other people, not allowing them regular interaction with other children, not letting them be with their mother, and most of all TEACHING THEM THEY ARE INTERNALLY EVIL is not good parenting my dudes.
It's not so much Terra chose to be evil, Raven chose to be good, as Raven has literally been brainwashed by a cult to believe if she is even a little bit selfish, if she expresses any negative emotion at all, then she's exactly like her father and evil. If you've ever read Bungo Stray Dogs, I compare Raven to Atsushi a lot.
Basically, in Bungo Stray Dogs Atsushi is an orphaned character who has the ability to turn into a Tiger. An ability that he cannot control, an ability that went out of control and murdered a man when he was young. His caretaker covers up for the murder, and tries to teach him to control that power but in the worst way possible. He isolates Atsushi, keeps him in a cage to punish him when he loses control, and he ends up teaching Atsushi if he doesn't use his power to protect others, then he's worthless.
It's not even that Atsushi wants to be a hero, it's that he has to be a hero otherwise he doesn't even deserve to live. Atsushi is incredibly dysfuctional because of this, he has black and white thinking that he applies to himself, he can't forgive hinmself, he has to be a completely selfless doormat because selfish people are EVIL! Atsushi has literally no identity outside of being superhero.
That's something a lot of people miss with Raven's character, she tries to fit in with literally having any kind of life outside of being a superhero and she always fails, because that is what Azarath taught her two "A person incapable of protecting others does not deserve to live" she doesn't deserve to be a normal person because she has to continually atone for being trigon's daughter. She's fundamentally born evil and must continue to work to prove she is not.
The real difference between Raven and Terra is that Raven represses herself to extreme extents to try to be a hero like the people around her to expect her to be, whereas Terra externalizes all of her trauma.
Terra LOATHES the expectation that she has to use her powers to help others, she thinks being a hero is STUPID AND DUMB. SHe chafes so much under a good girl image that she decides to embrace a villainous one instead, because that at least feels liberating to her.
If Terra were in Marvel instead of DC she would be working with Magneto and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Her powers have basically ruined her whole life and made her different from others, but it's also literally the only thing she has because everything else in her life is unstable, and by the time she gets with the titans she can't trust anyone. The royal family essentially tried the same brainwashing on Terra, because they only gave her her powers to be in service to them and make her a hero, and Terra said FUCK IT and decided to be NOT THAT. Raven formed her identity by repressing herself and trying to serve everyone's expectations, Terra's identity is expressed and she makes herself in defiance of what everyone expects her to be.
Now, now, now you say, well Raven still tried to be better than her father. However, this ignores once again that Raven's repression is not healthy, and just like Terra, she also turns evil fifteen squintillion times. Now this is where we get to the difference between text and subtext again. In the text Raven never chooses to turn evil, her father takes control of her body and makes her, or she gets possessed like when she ruined Kory and Dick's raven. Subtextually though, Raven is pulling a dark phoenix arc.
This is where we briefly touch upon something in another comic as an example DARK PHOENIX ARC, if you've read the X-Men comics is literally the most famous X-Men arc of all time.
The gist is that Jean Gray, a character who was until this point one of the most token good girl of good girl characters has an incredibly strong and hard to control power called the "Phoenix" that is repressed inside of her own head to try to keep under control. Jean Gray represses herself, limits her agency, and pushes her power away instead of trying to control it. However, the Hellfire Club ends up interfering with Jean and unelashing this suppressed power. THe power in its totality overwhelms Jean, and destroys her original identity and she renames herself "Dark Phoenix" and all of the powers she was repressing now come to the forefront, she becomes a force of destruction through the completely unrestrained use of her power.
Raven and Jean Gray share a lot in common, it's not particualrly subtle, however the point of the Dark Phoenix is that Jean Gray is that she could have learned to control her power and grown into her womanhood, and instead she never tried to work with her power sealed it to the back of her head, until she couldn't anymore. That's the thing about repression it's unheathly.
To give another example on why repression is BAD. Have you ever seen the movie Carrie? An incredibly similiar arc, a girl who was horribly abused not only by her religious mother, but also the people in the school around her suddenly develops a psychic power. In isolation, Carrie grows more and more unstable but is still trying to be a normal girl and get along with everyone. She eventually reaches her breaking point when the blood is dropped on her prom dress and from that point onward, Carrie completely snaps and decides to burn down the prom gym and rampage on the town.
All three of these characters are Carrie to a different extent, Raven wasn't taught to be herself just to suppress herself because she's evil deep down inside, Jean Gray was too afraid of her power so she sealed it away inside her own mind, Carrie was continually taught by her religious nut mother she was fundamentally evil and was not allowed to be a normal girl and was isolated in her highschool. They repress, they repress, they repress until they can't anymore and then they explode. Terra is just like, same superpowers, same isolation from other people, she just skips the repression phase and goes straight to the explosion. Though, you could argue that Terra continually living under the false identity as a hero IS her repression. Terra pretending to be a generic good girl hero not only makes it so the Teen Titans can't reach her in time, but living under a false identity for so long just makes her LOATHE the Teen Titans more.
Terra and Raven are the same person in that both their childhood / formative years, and their sense of self was destroyed by both the cicrumstances they were born under, and the powers they were born with, neither of these things they chose for themselves. They are both reacting to the abuse they suffered throughout their developmental years, Raven's coping mechanism is to be completely selfless, Terra doubles down on her selfishness. At the same time, this is horribly unhealthy for both of them, they both snap because neither of them know how to live as people in any healthy way. Terra's mystique, Raven is Carrie on Prom Night, neither of them are having a fun time.
The biggest thing they have in common though is they are both lonely little girls. I think something a lot of people don't understand about Raven's character because they're more familiar with the cartoon version than NTT is that Raven was not a team player. Raven, for the vast majority of the comic kept entirely to herself, showed up to say something ominious, teleported away. Raven is horribly isolated, doesn't really form emotional connections to people, and convinces herself that other people don't care about her.
You have one girl who only ever engages people through a fake persona, nobody on the team ever knows the real Terra, she sees every relationship as a transaction of a manipulation, when people try to show her concern or empathy she can't see that because she assumes they're looking down on her.
You have another girl who's teammates just don't get, and who basically interacts with all other humans as a space alien, because she was raised so far outside of society and she doesn't believe she deserves to have relationships with people in the first place. The second Terror of Trigon happens in the first place, because Raven has been getting more and more isolated and struggled with her father's powers and no one on the team notices because no one pays attention to Raven and when they try to she brushes them off.
You have two girls, one of them is always at the center of attention, the other one is always off in some dark corner and both of them are equally lonely and that's the greatest thing they have in common. I
If you're more curious on my take about the Terra and Raven foiling, I am writing a fanfic where Terra and Raven are the two main characters, here!
I honestly think its a crime no one ships Beast Boy and Terra and Raven- like there’s plenty of content for Beast Boy and Terra and Raven and Terra and Beast Boy and Raven but theres no content for all three of them. An absolute travesty i tell you-
