012 | Teresa of the Faint Smile 01

[priscilla]

Summary First Appearance: Teresa, Clare (child), Orsay This skill is all kinds of not in the Claymore handbook. Effortlessly, a woman with long, wavy hair carves through a yoma's body, and then steps on its head and drives the blade through its skull. Her power takes the townspeople surrounding her aback... and the fact that she shakes the blood from her blade onto the witnesses doesn't help. A man offers her thanks, nonetheless and approaches her with the Organization's fee, only to be told that she doesn't need it - instead, a stranger in black will come for it at a later date. The townsman asks what we've all probably wondered from time to time: what if they give it to the wrong person? The woman doesn't care. A case like that will simply be counted as non-payment, and then the next time a yoma appears - or even many yoma appear - the Organization will not answer their call for help. Smiling, she tells them to be careful - she's heard that if a village refuses to pay, yoma will appear a few days later and destroy it entirely. Shocked, the villager promises that they'll pay, which the woman tells him is the wise choice. Handlers: The creepiest visitors of all. Shortly thereafter, she passes the aforementioned stranger, Orsay, in black on the mountain roads. One might call him reminiscent of Rubel, in some way, and like Rubel to Clare, this man serves as the woman's "handler." He chastises her for scaring another village - she made it sound as though the Organization sends the yoma, themselves. The woman rather seems to think they do, but Orsay denies it. Instead, he directs her to Teo village, a two day walk to the west. That is her next job. She inquires about any additional details, but confirms that she doesn't really need them, when asked. Orsay instructs her to simply go and kill all of the yoma there. It's as simple as that. With a friendly salute, she heads off on her way. Left behind, Orsay contemplates her. She is Teresa of the Faint Smile, warrior number 182 of the 77th generation, capable of defeating any number of yoma without drawing on her yoki, or exhausting her power. Always, she fights with a faint smile on her lips, thus her nickname. She is considered the most powerful woman in the Claymore ranks. Or, should he say, the most powerful monster. We rejoin Teresa presumably two days later, when she arrives at the edge of a village. Cold-eyed and smiling, she bisects one man, drives her blade through the head of another, cuts the head off another, and cuts a fourth in half vertically. All the while, she counts them. Destiny! Too bad about the circumstances. At last, two villagers - yoma - draw on their yoma power and attack. Teresa notes that they ought to have done that as soon as she arrived... but also that it's pointless to fight her, even as she cuts a fifth in half and lops half the head off a sixth. Finally, the villagers present realize that all of the corpses scattered around are actually yoma. Teresa tells the village that they're fortunate - seven yoma had been living there, but instead of feeding where they lived, they took their victims in neighboring towns. One of those towns contacted the Organization. Still, she did say seven but only killed six. She counts them again, and idly muses on what to do if she can't find the final yoma... before locking gazes with a man currently hiding behind a young girl. Teresa slices the man in half, asking if he believed he could use the girl as a shield. The villagers scream as Teresa meets the eyes of the girl who will change her life for the first time. Notes and Comments Teresa knows her way around the evil implication. 01. Though it's easy to write off at the time, this is obviously the first clue that the Organization may be responsible for the existence of yoma to begin with... or may, at least, have some kind of arrangement with certain ones. It could also be seen as foreshadowing for arrangements such as the one they had with the six-armed male. How Teresa "found out" is another issue - it's probably just a case of her living long enough to have noticed certain patterns... but that does make one wonder why no one else seems to have put two and two together. Or perhaps they have. After all, we don't know how many groups the Organization sent to the Six-Armed Male, or for what most of the Pieta force had been targeted. 02. Teresa is described here as "warrior number 182 of the 77th generation," or "The 77th generation, warrior number 182." There are two primary ways to interpret these numbers: either she's the 182nd warrior period, and there have been 182 warriors over the course of 77 generations... or there are hundreds of warriors within the single generation to which Teresa belongs, and she is the 182nd of them. Either one seems strange, really, but of the two the latter is, in my opinion, more feasible. Because with 47 warriors each belonging to the male generation and Riful's all-female generation alone, and with the rate at which the organization loses soldiers (half dead in combat with Luciela during her awakening, for example, and during Clare's story we see the deaths dozens), it doesn't seem feasible for there to have been only 182 warriors in the entirety of the claymore project. Furthermore, that would mean a "generation" consists of less than three warriors on average. That look is totally the reason humans are afraid of claymores. That leaves us with the idea that there could be hundreds of warriors in any generation... but that seems excessive? One theory that might work, though, is that the number may include the trainees - the vast majority of which die during their certification trial, as seen in Clare's extra scene flashback. This way, a given generation can have 200 "warriors," but only 10-40ish actual certified soldiers. As for the oft-discussed question of what, exactly, constitutes a generation... the easiest answer is probably "the graduates of a given trainee class." 03. Teresa is also described as "the strongest woman among those called claymores. (Or) maybe not the strongest woman. Rather, the strongest creature." Much has been made of this phrase, which is often used to justify the claim that Teresa was the most powerful soldier of all time (which is to say, that Orsay was saying she was the strongest woman among all Claymores who ever lived, rather than simply among those who are active at the time of the story), or the claim that Teresa was stronger than any awakened being (the claim that Orsay's correction of himself from "woman" to "creature" was intended to indicate that he considered her the strongest being in existence). Get used to this. You see it a lot with Teresa. Without getting into that too deeply, let's just say that my understanding of his correction from "woman" to "creature" is a reference to the that Claymores are considered to be monsters, themselves, rather than humans. Additionally, particularly strong soldiers are often referred to as monsters by themselves and others (see Fit for Battle, where Clare refers to Irene as a monster, or Marked for Death, where Teresa refers to Priscilla as a potential monster. Or, for that matter, the Slashers where Miria refers to all soldiers of rank 5 or above as monsters, or the Teresa-based extra scene where she refers to herself as one, as well). As for the "strongest among Claymores" statement, I don't see any evidence that he intended to state that Teresa was the strongest soldier of all time, rather than that his intention was to say, in a more drawn out way, that she was the Number One ranked warrior at the time. To be clear, this is the first time we've been given an indication that there is a power difference between various Claymores, and there has, at this point, been absolutely no mention of rank. For him to simply say "The Number One ranked warrior" would be a little strange and potentially confusing - is she number one because of seniority? Power? Because she has some kind of leadership role? Introducing her as the most powerful soldier makes the ranking issue clear when it finally comes up explicitly in Marked for Death. So, in short, I will be proceeding with the assumption that the entire statement means simply that Teresa is the Number One ranked warrior, and that the Organization perceives their soldiers not as woman, but as monsters. This isn't to claim that Teresa necessarily was not the strongest soldier of all time (there's no way to know as of now), but only to say that Orsay wasn't making the claim at this time. 04. Is Teo the name of village where Clare had been kept by the yoma? Unclear. Teresa is sent to Teo, but Orsay is not specific about whether the assignment comes from Teo, or if Teo is the village where the yoma have taken up hiding. 05. Thinking about the size of the island/continent on which Claymore takes place... Clare is capable of walking through her Western region for 72 hours without stopping... and while it would be easy to suggest that perhaps she was not moving the same direction each time (e.g. perhaps she went a bit west for a job and then headed back east for another and then a bit north for a third, all without stopping to rest), here we're shown that Teresa's region contains villages at least 2 days walk apart from one another. 06. Teresa's personality is described, in the databooks, as obedient but with an "I'll bite your head off" attitude. That's pretty evident in this chapter, where she terrifies villagers, sprays blood on them, and pretends she might not be able to find the 7th yoma (and for those who doubt she was playing headgames with the crowd, let's remember that she's among the most renown yoki-sensors of all time). It's easy to see why Orsay was, ultimately, unsurprised at Teresa's rebellious attitude. Fact-Checking N/A ☩ ☩ ☩ Back