T. K. Arispe

 More FFTA2 OC sketching! (I know, the proportions are kind of off. I draw these late at night when I'm winding down and I'm like "yeah this looks fine" and then in the morning I'm like "no no it's all wrong" but I don't feel like going to the bother of fixing it because it's just a sketch, and here I am overexplaining everything again when I should be eating breakfast.)

Anyway. This is Tara O'Donovan Squallhammer, the main character and first-person narrator of all the fics. She started off as an overstressed, exhausted college student from modern-day Earth, who was beginning to question what she was doing with her life when she found a Grimoire in a used bookstore and it transported her to Ivalice. At first, her adventures followed a path similar to Luso Clemens, with the Grimoire recording her escapades so it could return her home when its pages were filled.

However, as Tara grew accustomed to Ivalice, made friends for the first time in her life, and realized that her job as her clan's White Mage was way more fulfilling than being on the fast track to the rat race, she began to dread returning to Earth. Finally she made the decision to destroy her Grimoire, ensuring she could stay in Ivalice permanently (or so she thought, but that's a story for a later fic). 

Now Tara's living her best life doing clan work, enjoying her friends, and being the supportive wife of a fairly ridiculous pirate king. She met the seeq Viking Qrrog Squallhammer when Clan Excelsior was trying to apprehend his crew, and after working together to not get eaten by a sea serpent (which led to Qrrog joining the clan), the two struck up a fast friendship that developed into a romantic relationship. They're a cute couple. (As to how Qrrog became the Pirate King, I'll save that for when I put his sketch up here.)

Tara is shy and bookish, but cares deeply about others, and her compassion has turned enemies into friends many times during the clan's adventures. Alongside her White Mage skillset, she also studies Bishop skills and basically specializes in Holy magic, both defensive and offensive. (I know in the game, the Bishop job is exclusive to bangaa, but there's really no in-universe reason why jobs should be restricted to certain races.)

If you're wondering why her name is so similar to that of Terra from my Neopets fics, in the original version of the FFTA2 fics, this character's name was Terra as well. I started the first FFTA2 fic before I'd even conceived of my first Neopets fic that involved Terra*, but I got about three chapters in to the FFTA2 fic and then lost steam (and had no idea where I wanted the plot to go), so I dropped it for a long while. In the meantime, I started writing Neopets fics and established Neopets Terra as a fundamental part of my Neopets dramatis personae. 

So when I finally decided to finish that FFTA2 fic - and then started getting more ideas for further adventures with the cast and writing those stories - I had the dilemma of two main characters with the same name in two separate fanfic series for two separate franchises, which is pretty unoriginal and started getting on my nerves.

In all honesty, though, I'd gotten so used to calling the FFTA2 main character "Terra" that I decided not to completely change her name, but alter it to "Tara". (I also wanted to pay homage to Tara Strong, voice actress extraordinaire and voice of my spirit animal Twilight Sparkle from My Little Pony.)

The moral of this whole convoluted story is, I think it's best to not lose steam on a project and to see it through, because the more you let it sit, the more complications arise.

*I guess if you want to be really technical about it, a proto-Terra owner character for Blynn/Hyren/Pharazon did appear in a few stories I got into the Neopian Times in high school, so Worth Fighting For was not really Terra's first ever appearance. But that character was very different from Terra, with her defining character trait being a slushie addiction. My character development skills in high school were amazing.