Birth by Sleep BBS Tried too Hard to Have a Happy Story

Terra is NOT a bad person: that's the main point of showing him fight against the darkness, and in many cases succeed. But he's also very conflicted and unsure of himself, thus susceptible to Xehanort's (and other's) influence. It's a struggle that he ultimately lost, but primarily because of Xehanort's planning, and less so because of his own shortcomings. The point of Birth by Sleep wasn't to make Terra look like a bad guy. Xehanort exploited a good person in a very vulnerable point of his life, having been passed over as a keyblade master.

Aqua briefly meets up with Terra in the Castle of Dreams where she feels reassured that he's okay, but later she meets Maleficent, who suggests that Terra told her, an outsider, all about the keyblade, and that he "hurt someone" with it (also a part of Xehanort's plan to make the three grow apart and doubt each other). I agree that it would have carried more weight if Aurora didn't get her heart back in the game, but it's still consistent with the plot. Maleficent didn't plunge the world into darkness until after BBS, when Ven and Aqua are no longer around to get her heart back.

So it's not out of nowhere that she confronts him. Eraqus told her to keep an eye on him because he was worried, and then Maleficent basically confirms (though somewhat deceptively, seeing as he was under her control, and Xehanort was the one who told Maleficent about the keyblade) that there was cause for concern.

Likewise, neither is Terra's fall. You're talking about the Disney worlds, but neglecting to mention all the times in between that Xehanort leads him astray. Gaining his trust and sympathy with the story about Vanitas, leading him to protect Ven at all costs, calling him "Master Terra" to reawaken his lust for power, turning him against his master, causing him to fall into extreme guilt, making him more susceptible to giving into anger at the final moments of his story. And there were those times that Hades and even Captain Hook managed to trick him, albeit briefly, to be on their side.

You're asking a little too much of the series. I hesitate to call it a "kid's game", but the franchise is at least supposed to be child-friendly. They can get away with the darker stuff because they have the cheesy kids stuff to point to. Call it Schizophrenic if you want, but it's in every Kingdom Hearts game. A lot of the Disney worlds serve as comic relief, and are inevitably going to be more light-hearted than the main story.

 

When did I ever say appealing to kids meant they can get away with bad writing? My point is that in the Kingdom Hearts universe, they aren't going to create a protagonist that goes around stealing hearts and using darkness at every opportunity. For what reason would we sympathize with someone like that? He associates himself with Maleficent, the Evil Queen, Hades, and Captain Hook, all before realizing they're evil. It's all fine and good to learn "not to be so gullible", but we haven't seen a single example of him putting it into practice. He nearly became a pawn of every single villain he encountered. So I don't know what more you wanted from his character to make his fall from grace more comprehensible.

People are allowed to be more than one thing. They're allowed to have conflicts. Showing another side of a character isn't a contradiction: it makes them believable. I'd define Terra's character in BBS as: a well-intentioned young-man who has trouble seeing the evil intentions that surround him. There aren't any points in the game that contradict that.

I'll concede that "I've been to the same worlds as you, and I've seen what you've done" is a very clunky and vague line, at least on its face value. I've come to interpret it as Aqua using that line to pry Terra and see how he reacts: seeing if he lets slip any other information, because she's very unsure of him. Aqua was by no means reassured about Terra after talking to Maleficent. Screaming "Stop lying!" hardly sounds convinced to me. You're taking everything very literally. Just because someone says something, doesn't mean they completely mean it, or even understand what it means. Aqua continually reassures herself that Terra is fine throughout the game, because she is not at all convinced that he IS fine: she just desperately wants to believe he is. Likewise, just because Terra says he learned something, doesn't mean he actually did. When the s*** hits the fan by the end, "playing by the rules" is a grey area (certainly more so than in a go-cart race). He isn't thinking about whether he's a "hero" or not: just that he wants to protect his friends. He's too lost to despair from learning he was being tricked all this time, from losing his master, from his friends being at risk, to think about what Xehanort wants out of it all.

So no, it's not sloppy writing. It's characters acting out of emotion, which is realistic. Oftentimes, I find Sora uninteresting because of how consistent he is. He's certainly had his moments of imperfection (Chain of Memories) and distress (KH1, DDD), but as a whole he's too sure of himself. That's why I welcome stories like BBS, Days, and even DDD, because they challenged the characters, and made them act human.