random question but does the world of terras town have any sort of religion

swear i've been sitting on answering this one for literal months now i'm. so sorry! wanted to be in a more tt mood again before replying (i'm still not fully but nostalgia is hitting hard on this friday night. btw).

also yeah! so since tt exists as a refraction (and opposition) of the town right above it, its no surprise that its religion also has similar (and skewed) foundations. considering lev's hometown is largely christian (& catholic), aka structured around a man dying for them, surprise! tt's is all about a woman being killed by them. which actually fits into their general day to day beliefs and attitudes more than you'd think.

so, just as lev's world has Our Lord, tt has Our Lady. and god in their case came from the earths, her divine body both one with the sand and also somehow sleeping deep within it. and in popular mythos, this is how the people of terras also first came to be: chewing and tearing their way free from her flesh, and thus becoming imbued along the way with a small spark of her divinity (aka, their magic). but subsequently, for each new person 'born', god grew weaker, until eventually self preservation rose and she woke up, with the aim to swallow them all back down again and re-become whole. this is the point where the people of terras proceeded to band together and kill her to maintain their lives. bonding activities fr

anyway it's no real surprise that as a result religious virtue in tt is based less around humility and fearing your god, and more about personal pride and surpassing them. terran religion is meant to uplift the self, promote determination and senses of justice, and encourage unity in the face of greater evils, since they are literally all each other have in the middle of this cut off dreambubble wasteland. these beliefs also tie though as to why the council & upper classes in terras generally suppress or hand wave away most religious affairs - last thing they need here is the lower classes to start being like oh shit right, we are so powerful actually, we can take on those corrupt bastards in charge if we all stick together haha!!!. it's not like they'll discriminate or outright prohibit religious displays or holidays, since that tends to only breed fiercer devotion and encourage the unwanted behavior, but for each religious holiday, some other follow up festivity or something will be made to sort of remind people of their power in particular. yk. power that you can actually see and touch and fear. not the general sense of power that allowed us all to hypothetically kill a god once upon a time. so. it's also why they encourage the vitriol and suspicion people in the lower classes have for each other.

unfortunately these attempts have also sort of largely worked, since there is not a lot to be proud of when you're fighting from day to day to survive to the next - or a lot to trust when your neighbor seems keen to stab you in the back. religious people exist in terras, but they're not that frequent (esp amongst The Masses), and are also usually dismissed more as optimists.

anyway past this, there's also some other branches off this primary faith - main sub groups include people who maintain that the Lady willingly let herself be killed instead of being gloriously defeated, and that there is no honor to be found in that kind of victory and that terras town citizens should be repenting for the original sin (sounds more familiar right?) vs people who maintain that the Lady wasn't ever really killed, only pushed back into slumber, and that one day she'll rise again to swallow them all - and that the people of tt must be ready to band together when that happens and truly defeat her for good etc etc. most people in tt find the former group whiny, if not downright heretical if they too are religious (who are you to try and shame us for our proudest and core tenet?), and the second cringe as fuck, plus slightly hererical if we are being picky (the whole point is that she's fucking dead dude).

oh and also there's the breakers. right. forgot about them. they are not connected to religion so much as they are like... the science of terras town, but they're a cult so i guess they sort of count in this section too. basically their full title is the barrier breakers, they think terras and the upper world need to be unified in a great rapture, and that the first sign of this happening will be the two planes 'swapping blood.' & they are going to love lev ❤️