⋆°.☾⋆.ೃ࿔*:⋆

Rapid fire touching on things that other people than me have touched on before and better:

THIS MAN IS TEN DISASTERS IN A TRENCHCOAT. Seriously, I've seen a meme going around here labeled "This is my Terzo - he has every disease" and gods, the accuracy. Cardi may be a mental illness icon to me for his clear neurodivergence and dissociation, but he's not in new territory - Terzo is a Byronic Hero level tortured soul with a major in self loathing and a minor in suicidal ideation. He cops to being old (whilst still clearly dyeing his hair about it), he's got vision and hearing and coordination problems and ran around with sunglasses and a knee brace to protect his delicate constitution, fainting from exhaustion at least once on stage. Terzo is also That Guy in the most infuriating way - if you went to college and knew a philosophy major who was way into the absolute wrong kind of politics and then later got aggressively into the right kind of politics, you've met Terzo. Terzo is also impossible to discuss as a character without bringing up the Forgotten Ghost Lore Character, Bishop Necropolitus - who is clearly so, so gay for and estranged from his old friend Terzo it's beautiful and pathetic - but he also makes Terzo to be the only Papa so far with a canon friend. Fucking crazy, huh? Also this man is simultaneously either the most or least romantic Papa, being the most charming motherfucker to ever step onto a stage and also being a massive recluse who brings an entire airport's worth of baggage to any relationship. Terzo the socialist, Terzo the iconoclast, Terzo the Hot Mess, Terzo the Bisexual Fanfiction Romantic Ideal - folks who read this kind of yapping from other people as well as me know this guy by now.

Okay. I don't know if I will have a single original thought in my head but I at least got the unoriginal ones out of the way.

Terzo burst onto the scene as something new and fresh, despite his face makeup not being fully baked to doneness yet. As a point of comparison, when Secondo introduced himself, it was hypnotic and gentle, authoritative and calm - and then he swept us all out to sea in a Secular Haze. When Terzo introduced himself, with was with a rasp in his voice and an extra spicy trill in his pronunciation of 'Terzo', and he immediately launched us From the Pinnacle to the Pit. Terzo was a shock to the system. He elevated the text from Satanic musing to challenging thoughts. He wore pants, we could see his bifurcated legs for fuck's sake. The scandal - unmatched until his second successor had fully functioning lips.

Tobias clearly had a Vision with Meliora and the Terzo era - one I can't perfectly follow if I'm being frank, but he had one. The art deco design elements, the utopian intellectual bent - and to be honest the fate of this vision sort of matches the fate of Terzo as a character as well. His character arc is from an aggressive, idealistic, nearly Randian Cardinal (according to the Bishop's testimony) to a jaded, exhausted socialist who is struck down by the very power he served. Meanwhile Tobias Forge had this huge artistic Vision, rode the high all the way to a Grammy and the highest level of achievement the band had seen yet, at the cost of his physical health (the eye infection, passing out, knee brace etc that are canon for Terzo because he wore them weren't props, Tobibi was going through it) and his relationship with his band members at the time leading into the Lawsuit. Life imitated art like a BITCH in the form of Papa Emeritus III, recursively so, to the point that you can tell TF's extra spicy killing off of the first three Papas came from a personal desperation to start fresh.

Terzo is shaped like a Shakespearean tragedy. He begins with everything. He has a strong if rocky relationship with his predecessor and closest brother (see this post for him mentioning Secondo on stage - the Little Brother Energy is off the charts). He has everything going for him at first: Secondo's advice, a huge fashion glow up, his background as an intellectual and hard working Cardinal with grand dreams and aspirations fueling the creative side, charisma for days. And yet by the end, he is a corpse in a coffin, dragged off stage and disposed of brutally, his bloody head (whether in effigy or actually removed I have seen arguments about whether the metal hammer cover counts as canon, I like it to personally just because of the extra spicy angst about it but my word doesn't make it canon) a wretched prop for the next man's ascension. In between, he is lonely.

The only Papa with a canon friend (Bishop Necropolitus) is estranged from that friend - the Bishop thinks of Terzo as the man he used to be, with values that are foreign to the man now. His relationship with Secondo is clearly close and also clearly fraught - pointy and jagged like many sibling relationships are. He is close enough to the ghouls to rib them personally on stage, but Special Ghoul has said in an interview how isolated he is, by choice as well as by default, how despite being nicer than his predecessors he remains as remote as a star.

Terzo's most profound connection with anybody is one that is by its very nature transient, impermanent, and non-intimate. That is to say, the strongest personal relationship in the man's entire life by the end is the two hour bond he forges with an audience on stage. While Secondo was the showman who delighted in his connection with the people, Terzo's naturally skilled at that craft but it isn't his joy - however, it's a deep and true connection, even if fleeting, and Terzo is on a search for realness and meaning and he finds it in these little windows, taking the time to talk to the audience about what's on his mind, to teach them while he charms them. Then every night he walks off stage, that bubble bursts, and he is alone again.

The shape of this arc, working himself to exhaustion with a magnificent artistic and spiritual vision in his head he is desperate to build even if he has to drag the Ministry that way by his nails, his profound loneliness and the Ministry rejecting his vision and casting his labors as indulgence and his aspirations as heresy, is fascinating to me, and I would have loved to see him in a world where he got to heal and live out his life - but this arc ends with a splat at the bottom. As the lyrics in Pinnacle said, it is a long way down.

Terzo is more than his tragedy though. Like Secondo, he is a fountain of whimsy. He is a mischievous little shit - the way he teases his ghouls, talks about his brother, makes honking noises to imply what Not to Do to the Sisters of Sin, got a whole children's choir to sing about coming for Lucifer's son. He played the Kazoo of Destiny with the utmost earnestness. He joked self deprecatingly about himself as well. It may have been gallows humor, but Terzo was determined to find joy where he could. Love, as well -

His genuine care shines through in the only place his thwarted ambitions are allowed to show it by the end - that connection with the audience. It may be largely performative, but the love he has for us from on stage is still real. Terzo's jadedness with humanity comes from not cynicism, but burned out optimism - he knows the human race can do better and he is so, so disappointed in us and himself. However, when he looks out in the crowd and sees people coming together as one, he glimpses pieces of what gave him that optimism in the first place. We gave him our adoration, yes, but we also gave him the occasional reminder that there's bits of this wretched human race worth the effort.

Also man, laid out like this, the Widows make so much sense - give a man a mountain of emotional pain and loneliness and this much rizz? No wonder people are desperate to imagine Themselves, or Omega, Or Necropolitus as the One Person to be a balm to that sadness. TF has done so much of his biggest non-music artistic achievements by accident, and he tripped and fell into making The Archetypical Crush Object. I understand and agree with the sheer rage and frustration that so many people feel about Tobias's seeming desire to bury this era - but I also, as implied above in my 'heck art imitating life' bit, totally empathize with and understand why he's doing that. (STILL, GIVE US A PLUSHIE COWARD).