The reaction I always get, from people who don't support the pairing, is either "Why?" or "But Locke belongs with Celes," with varying degrees of hostility or bafflement. Of course, I also get "Huh, I never thought of that, I guess it works," or "I'm open to any pairing as long as it's well-written," or "Finally! I'm not the only one!" but if that's the reaction you had, you probably went for the galleries or the fanfic first.

This site originated as a listing or fanclub - fanlistings hadn't really caught on at the time I made it, or I might have thought of it that way. And when people filled in the support form, what they usually said was "At the beginning of the game, I thought Locke and Terra would be together."

At the beginning of the game, Locke immediately begins associating Terra with Rachel, just as he'll later do when he meets Celes - not that we know at the time why he freaks out at the mention of amnesia, or even, exactly, what he means when he says Celes reminds him of someone. He promises to protect Terra, just as he'll later do for Celes. He doesn't get nearly as upset when Terra calls him a thief as he does when anyone else does the same. When Edgar inadvertently hurts Terra's feelings, Locke smooths things over and cheers her up. And when they split up at the Returner hideout, well: "Terra... wait for me... and don't let a certain lecherous young king, who shall remain nameless, near you!"

You see how some of us could start getting ideas?

After that, of course, Celes enters the picture. I can't speak for anyone else, but I can't deny that Locke and Celes are set up to be a couple; but it's the outline for a pairing, with enormous gaps I just can't seem to leap, and don't want to. I don't want to turn this essay into "here is a piece of 'canon evidence' for the Locke/Celes pairing, now watch me debunk it," either, but I will say that most of those scenes used as evidence involve Locke saving Celes's life - as if he's supposed to drop her off a cliff in the ending! He protects Setzer and Terra, too, at different points in the game - it's just something he does, and (in my view) shouldn't be taken as evidence for or against his desire to sleep with that person. The very first time I played the game, I immediately got attached to the idea of a Locke/Terra pairing - not because of the rescues and the vow to protect, or not just because of those, but because of his concern for her and especially because of the way he behaved in the Returner headquarters. As I kept playing, I kept expecting that there'd be some acknowledgment of the love triangle, some moment between Locke and Terra, and I kept being disappointed when none materialized. I was dissatisfied with the ending, unconvinced by the Locke/Celes scenes, frustrated that the very pronounced Locke/Terra subtext at the beginning was just dropped later on.

That's what fanfic's for, though. I don't understand the fans who insist we must never write anything that doesn't match canon. I try to hew as closely to it as I can, or at least, as closely as I can to my somewhat eccentric reading of canon, but insisting that only certain pairings should ever be written? That's crazy talk. Yes, the game does seem to indicate there's mutual attraction and interest between Locke and Celes, but unless you've got a really special copy of the game, we don't ever see her in a wedding gown.

Maybe you think that five minutes after the credits roll, Locke asks Celes to marry him. I may think that five minutes after the credits roll, he walks up to Terra and says "I don't think I've ever seen your hair down before. Looks good on you." And someone else might think that Edgar will then walk up to him and say "I'm sick of living a lie!" and Locke will fall into his arms. None of us are wrong, because you know what? Canon's done. Canon ends without any weddings, any on-screen kisses, any conclusively-settled pairings. And even if it had married everyone off at the end, I still maintain that fiddling with that is what fanfic's for. Just because canon says A and B are in love at this point doesn't mean they'd still be in love at this other point. They could be, but you can't just take it for granted. And if canon strongly hints L and C might have feelings for each other but neither one has openly said so to the other, well.... from there, you could go in all kinds of directions, especially since canon may have tried to forget L acted like he had feelings for T, but it never turned around and said, no, his feelings were purely platonic, either. You know, hypothetically, not thinking of any game in particular that I've been replaying for over a decade...

I meant to use this to try to explain some of the things I liked about the pairing, not to defend the practice of writing off-canon pairings. But it's hard to explain to someone else what you like about a pairing, because so much of it comes down to personal quirks, the way that individual interpreted the two characters, even the mood you were in when you were playing or the first fanfic you read when you went looking.

I see Locke as an easy-going guy with a sense of humor, when he's not angsting over Rachel; I tend to think that until magic came back, he was trying to move past her a bit, hence the interest in Terra and Celes; and that when he got access to magic, his hope of reviving Rachel came back with a vengeance. I see Terra as having a capacity for a snarky sense of humor (her comment about Sabin as a stray bodybuilder) that meshes well with Locke. I don't hold her confusion and her concern with love against her, though I know some do. Love - familial love, love for friends, romantic love, lost love - is the major theme of the game. It's also a motivating factor for many of her friends in joining the Returners - especially Locke, the only one who tells her much about his reasons for opposing the Empire. She's disoriented, swept along by events, and she doesn't understand the bonds that hold people together; she doesn't have a home or any form of stability until the World of Ruin. No wonder she wants to know more about love - it's an attempt to make sense of human behavior in general. And I don't think it's at all a stretch that she could get attached to her friends - one in particular - but not be fully aware of her feelings, or able to identify them.

And, well, "wait for me." I see something at the beginning that I want to see given a chance to grow; I could either get sappy and purple-prosed about it, or I could just put up some screenshots and point vehemently at them while saying "See? SEE?" but either way, it wouldn't convince you if you don't agree with me, and it'd probably make you embarrassed to be on my side if you did agree. I like what I see between them. I like it better than any other pairing in the game, certainly better than any pairings that'd put either Locke or Terra with someone else.

That's me, though. Everyone interprets the game a bit differently when they play, especially a game like this with a relatively open-ended story and characterization; where some of the later games give you the characters' internal monologues, launch you into plot scenes whenever you enter a town and sometimes in the middle of dungeons, and give optional characters backstory and subplots, FF6's script is fairly minimalist. The characters are vividly sketched, but they're sketched; what you like about the game is as much about the gaps you fill in as about the parts that are already there, and that's true of, say, the Daryl flashbacks, just as much as it's true of any meddling we choose to do with the characters' love lives.