Ryoma Terasaka

Terasaka sports short, spiky brown hair bleached blond along the sides and pale eyes, colored light green in the anime. His heavyset, muscular frame is the tool he most often uses to loom over and intimidate other people.

Terasaka starts the series as a crude, lazy bully who leaned on his size and volume to force smarter students into doing his work, a shortcut that collapsed at a school built entirely around grades. Dumped into Class 3-E, he embraced its dead-end gloom because it let him coast without effort, and he wanted Korosensei dead mostly so the class would sink back into the sluggish place where his idleness thrived. As his classmates grew more capable and left him behind, his frustration curdled into resentment, making him easy prey when Shiro manipulated him into sabotage. Realizing he had endangered everyone, he was struck by genuine guilt, and that reckoning became the turning point that reshaped him into a steadier, more considerate person, though a hot temper stayed with him to the end. Often mocked as dim, he in fact shows sound instincts and outside-the-box thinking whenever he bothers to apply them.

Before Class 3-E, Terasaka got by on brute force and a loud mouth, strong-arming classmates into handling his schoolwork, which is likely how he reached Kunugigaoka at all. Placed alongside the future Big Five member Natsuhiko Koyama, he tried the same intimidation only to find that a school obsessed with grades made his tactics worthless, and his poor marks landed him at the bottom. He was content there since it demanded nothing of him, until Korosensei arrived and swept the class up in the thrill of assassination, a change he resisted hard.

Early on he and his companions Takuya Muramatsu and Taisei Yoshida pushed Nagisa Shiota into a reckless bombing attempt, strapping a grenade of anti-sensei pellets to him and setting it off by remote; Korosensei emerged unharmed and, furious, taught the class the weight of such acts by collecting their family nameplates. During the summer his isolation boiled over and he let Shiro and Itona use him, contaminating the class pool and nearly drowning his classmates before he grasped the manipulation and turned to Karma Akabane to help undo it. That betrayal became the guilt that steeled his resolve: on the island mission he hid the same food poisoning that felled the rest of the class for hours, powering through on sheer will while wielding stun guns to clear a path.

His strengths run to raw power and stamina, an ability to follow a plan to the letter, and a working grasp of explosives, seen when he converted a toy grenade into a live one. He builds a real friendship with Itona Horibe, taking the newcomer under his wing much as he wished someone had done for him, and his rocky start with Karma eventually settles into mutual respect once he leans on Karma's cunning to fix his mistakes.