In Defense of Final Fantasy VI Calling Terra’s Mom ‘Madonna’
As it often happens, a throwaway sentence in a previous post grew to become a paragraph in the miscellaneous notes section, and before long that too grew to the point that it needed to become its own thing. This is one of those, and it concerns a strange choice made in the original English localization of Final Fantasy VI to make Terra’s mother share her name with a pop star.
Over the course of Final Fantasy VI’s first half, it’s revealed that Terra, the kinda-sorta protagonist of the game, is actually half-Esper and half-human. At one point, there’s a flashback explaining how this cross-species love match happened, and it involves Terra’s human mother somehow wandering into the Esper realm. What’s interesting about this scene is that the player actually controls Maduin, an horned but humanoid Esper, and the story is told through his point of view as he discovers this human woman and defends her against the prejudices of the other Espers. Eventually, Maduin takes the women to the gate back to the human world, but instead they conceive a baby together. Literally, the scene plays out like “Okay, human woman, I guess you could leave, but also have you ever done it with a magic monster?”
It’s actually kind of funny to think about this sequence today, because it’s very much Square using the limited graphical abilities of the Super NES to metaphorically show intercourse. I truly did not understand it this way when I first played this game, but all these years later it’s hard to see it any other way.
Anyway, the villains of the story eventually barge in and ransack Esperville. Recognized as a human who might possess Esper powers, baby Terra is taken, and it’s implied that both her parents are killed.
In every English version of the game following the original North American release, Terra’s mom is named Madeline, which should seem like a sensible enough rendering of her Japanese name, マドリーヌ or Madorīnu. The original translation by Ted Woolsey, however, names her Madonna — seemingly an editorial choice on his part, as the name Madonna is rendered in katakana as something マドンナ. It’s an entirely different name. Superficially, this might seem like a wild pick, because Final Fantasy VI came out in 1994, when the pop singer of the same name was still at the height of her powers and just about anyone except the most Catholic and the most art history-focused would have associated that mononym with her before the Virgin Mary. And obviously, later versions of the game undid this choice by calling the character Madeline, so it was not one of the Ted Woolseyism big swings that ended up becoming canon in the long run. But at the very least, I have a theory for why Woolsey might have made this choice and tossed in a name that might seem goofy.
The etymology of Madeline goes back to French and before that to the Greek Magdalene, literally meaning a woman from the city of Magdala (from the Aramaic מגדלא or Magdalā, “tower”), which once existed on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. It’s in ruins today, though the Israeli town Midgal includes the area where it once stood and also reflects the old city in its Hebrew name. Of course, there is one specific Magdalene woman who made this feminine name popular in the west, and that’s Mary Magdalene, famously one of the followers of Jesus Christ — by some accounts, his most dedicated follower, and by other accounts, possibly his lover as well.
In naming Terra’s mother Madonna, however, Woolsey linked the character to a different biblical figure: the Virgin Mary. In the same way as Mary Magdalene is sometimes just referred to as “the Madeline,” Mary, the mother of Jesus, is sometimes just referred to as “the Madonna,” madonna being the Italian equivalent of “my lady” and a term of respect essentially the same as English’s madam, which we get from French. And I think Woosley did this consciously because it makes more sense for Terra’s mom to be a Madonna figure than a Madeleine figure.
In Final Fantasy VI, Terra’s mom conceives a child that is… not half-divine, exactly, because as I tried to explain in this piece, the summoned beasts of Final Fantasy aren’t usually gods, but they nonetheless act like gods and are often named after gods pulled from real-life religions. By calling Terra’s mom Madonna, Woolsey is emphasizing the divine qualities of the Espers (Maduin in particular) and also fairly explicitly casting Terra as a sort of Christ figure in the game’s story. And that makes sense; Terra is the main character of the game’s first half, more or less, and her status as a fusion of human and Esper makes her a figurehead in the effort to topple the bad guys. She doesn’t die and resurrect, so she’s not fully a Christ figure, but having one divine parent actually puts both her (and Jesus) in league with a great many heroic demigod characters from classical mythology: Hercules, Achilles, Aeneas and Perseus, among many others.
If we want to read meaning into the names chosen for the original Japanese version — and surprise! I do! — then technically Terra’s mom being named Madeline would make Maduin the Christ figure. And I guess this also sort of works? It’s not certain that Maduin dies at the end of the flashback, but before that scene plays out, the party has already collected his Magicite, that being the form deceased Espers take in this game. So he sort of resurrects as a summonable entity, I guess, but that seems like a stretch. I think imagining Terra to be the Christ figure or at least the semi-divine hero actually makes more sense. So yeah, funny as it may sound to have a character in any 90s property named Madonna, that first English version of Final Fantasy VI was actually being slightly more accurate in its biblical allusions than the original Japanese script was. But like I already said, you just couldn’t speak that name in the 1990s without making people think of the pop singer instead of the Virgin Mary, and technical accuracy notwithstanding, this change did not make the cut for subsequent versions of the game.
But I think it’s worthwhile to consider this in light of another notable instance of Woolsey departing from the original Japanese in a way that did stick. In Japan, Terra’s name is Tina (ティナ). During the localization process, it was determined that the original name didn’t seem right for this haunted, mystically enabled character. There’s an interview with Woolsey archived at the Chrono Compendium that gets into this somewhat.
Sometimes it was legal issues or concerns — as in having characters with the same names as those in, let’s say, a well-known movie or something. Often it was because of comments from play testers. Before we released a product, dozens of people had played it. They were never hesitant to mention their likes and dislikes. They “hated” the name Tina, almost to a person!
You also have to remember that transliterated names have a variety of connotations and meanings in Japan, and sound quite different. […] Also, since a player in the U.S. might actually be named Tina (and in retrospect, Terra!), we tried to change the default characters so that there wouldn’t be disappointment or confusion. Imagine if we had had a sub-character named Scott, and the purchaser of the game had gone and named the hero of the game Scott. Two Scotts!
I know some people got furious that the names were changed, but to be honest, the games were meant for a broader audience than the one which buys and plays Japanese imports. In fact, I don't understand why someone who reads enough Japanese would buy the U.S. port! It’s like buying a translation of a novel when you can read the original.
Controversial though this might have been at the time with some Japanese purists, I think most Final Fantasy VI fans agree that it was the right choice. I don’t know exactly what kind of a character people might have expected to be named Tina, but it’s not a winsome green-haired magic girl haunted by her unknowable past.
What’s more, this particular name choice makes for some symbolic symmetry that’s missing from the Japanese version of the game. Like I said earlier, Terra is not actually the main character of this game. In the Dissidia series, she is the representative of Final Fantasy VI, and she basically is the main character of the first half, but in the second half it’s Celes, who in many ways is Terra’s equal and opposite both. (They’re both 18-year-olds who can use magic in a world that has essentially lost this art, but while Terra’s power comes from her half-Esper heritage, Celes got her powers as a result from scientific experimentation.) And just as the first half of the game opens focusing on Terra, the second opens with Celes. In fact, it’s entirely possible to beat the game without getting Terra to rejoin the party at all.
Of course, in Latin, Terra’s name just means “earth.” The etymology of Celes’ name is a little more mysterious. From a western standpoint, it might seem like a truncation of the name Celeste, which means “heavenly,” in which case it makes metaphorical sense that these two women representing the below and the above would split central protagonist duties between the game’s two halves. But that’s an association that just doesn’t exist in a version of the game where Terra is named Tina. I’m not sure if this earth/heaven symmetry was something that anyone was consciously processing back in the day, but regardless Terra’s name remained in all English-language versions of Final Fantasy VI. It just felt *right* even if the symbolism was only hitting on a subconscious level.
I hadn’t intended to get into the Terra/Celes stuff in this post. It was one of the articles I’d been meaning to write for a while, actually, but this Madeline/Madonna thing made for a natural segue into it. If you’re curious at all, I go into it in a little more depth — and with commentary about how Nobuo Uematsu’s music actually underscores this connection, if unintentionally — in an episode of my long forgotten VGM podcast, Singing Mountain, which I swear I will properly conclude one day.
Please do not hold me to this promise when I fail to properly conclude Singing Mountain.
Miscellaneous Notes
I think I can blame my AP English teacher for making me think having one divine parent was part of the hero’s journey template. As defined by Joseph Campbell in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, this story cycle has seventeen steps, but now that I actually look it up, none of them are “have a weird parent.” That said, two of them are “supernatural aid” and “meeting with the goddess” so I suppose more than a few heroes could interact with a superpowered parent in either of these steps. I guess it’s more that many classic heroes follow the hero’s journey template, and many of them have a parent who’s a god. (It’s usually Zeus, obvs.)
In case there’s any doubt about how thoroughly Madonna permeated pop culture back around the release of Final Fantasy VI, I’ll point out that in the preliminary stages of Sonic the Hedgehog, which was released in 1991, Sonic was meant to have a human girlfriend who was named Madonna. She’s obviously not the pop star of our world, but she’s also clearly meant to evoke her. I get into it in my Pauline post, but there was a trend of rockstar girlfriends in the late ’80s and early ’90s, especially ones in red dresses.
About a year ago, a reader of this site reached out to me, maybe on Bluesky, to tell me about some ideas they had about Celes. For the life of me, I can’t find where that conversation happened, so if you’re reading this now, mystery person, hit me up and let me know?