So last night I finished reading Rise of the Red Blade for TotE Vibes Research purposes and the two Inquisitor characters in it really illustrate exactly why I think Barriss is going to survive and escape them.

Because the thing is that there are two kinds of Inquisitors! The ones who volunteered, and the ones who...didn’t. Iskat (RotRB’s focus character) perfectly exemplifies the first type: she had some traumatizing experiences at a young age, fell through a number of institutional cracks in the Order, had a really terrible master (meet me in the pit, Sember Vey), everyone was too busy to give her the follow-up they would under normal circumstances, Palpatine had an agent actively gathering information about her and pushing her to become Worse—she was a pre-selected candidate who was offered the choice to come quietly when Order 66 hit, and she took it. By that point all of her issues and doubts had been exacerbated to the point where it wasn’t hard for her to make herself hate the Jedi, and then she rationalized her way through any indication that her freedom was a lie and doubled her way down right into hell.

By contrast: Tualon, Iskat’s crechemate situationship guy. He had some issues but was not someone on Palpatine’s radar; Iskat left him to die in Order 66 and he survived getting shot by darksiding out about her betrayal. Because of that he was taken alive and they did some shit to him. When Iskat runs into him at the Inquisitor HQ after he’s freshly-inducted he can barely remember why he hates her, or anything else from before he was taken. He woke up in the room where you fight Trilla and they fully shattered him and glued a semblance of a person back together out of the wreckage, just COMPLETELY Winter Soldiered the guy, and the only way he had to cope with it is to lean into a weird codependent situationship with Iskat.

And that distinction’s always been there with the Inquisitors; you have the true believers who ended up hating the Jedi or wanted to go on a power trip (or had the kind of revenge plan only a 12 year old could come up with and then stick to for a decade, in one case) and didn’t need any additional coercion to volunteer, and you have the ones that they broke. In the former group you’ve got the Grand Inquisitor, Reva/Third, Lyn/Fourth*, Fifth, and Iskat/Thirteenth. For the most part they’re certified freaks, but they came by it naturally. (Reva’s a different flavor.) In the latter, you’ve got Trilla/Second, Seventh, Masana/Ninth, Tualon, and probably most of the others. They all got disassembled and reassembled without much care given to the process and are all Coping with it badly in different ways, whether by deciding it’s Empowering, Actually (Trilla & Seventh) or by becoming completely jaded about everything (Masana & Tualon).

(*We obviously don’t know a lot about Fourth yet, but the fact that she shows up to recruit Barriss while rocking yellow dark side eyes before ROTS is even over tells me she’s definitely a volunteer.)

All this is to say: The Grand Inquisitor is making a colossal mistake with Barriss from the drop, and it’s why I think she’s going to win their battle of wits and escape. Because he is treating her like she is an Iskat and she could not be any farther from it.

He sends Lyn to get her to come quietly! They actively withhold information from her about what happened to the Jedi and what her expected role in it is! That’s not how they recruit the ones they think will be a problem; if that were the case she would have been stunned out of hand and woken up on a rack.

Instead, he’s giving her special attention,, he’s training her—he doesn’t think they need to break her. She’s just got a few...pesky hang-ups from her time as a Jedi that need ironing out**. He’s projecting on her; he doesn’t just want an empty shell holding a lightsaber—he wants Barriss Offee, loyally kneeling at his side, fully believing in their mission. She’s his favorite.

(**That “mercy only breeds defeat” line isn’t just a generic darksidism; I’m pretty sure he’s directly critiquing how Barriss got caught because she showed mercy to Asajj Ventress.)

And surely that's something he can turn her into, right? Because she hates the Jedi, right? She attacked them, she outsmarted them, obviously she’d be down for wanting to wipe them out! He was there when she confessed and, like pretty much everyone else in the room save for Ahsoka, he didn’t hear a single word that she said—just what he wanted her to be saying. He’s got a deeply incorrect idea of her, and that idea is “she’s just like me for real.”

And he’s wrong, because the Inquisitorius is everything she feared the Jedi Order was becoming—literally, an army fighting for the dark side—and the Empire is everything she knew the Republic was becoming. She might be prone to despairing, it might in some hypothetical be possible to get her into the same resigned despair trap as Anakin, but she would never actually want to serve the Empire, and they don't think they'll have to try hard to convince her to.

She loves the Jedi, she loved being a Jedi, she wanted to save them. She wants to be one again more than anything even though right now she thinks she doesn’t deserve it, thinks that she’s already too broken to reclaim what she was. But I think being surrounded by actual fallen Jedi and being told over and over again that she’s like them is, in the end, going to be what reminds her that she never stopped being a Jedi in the first place.

And as long as she can make sure her captors don't realize that's true until it's too late, she'll be home free.

I don't want to alarm anyone, but...this was only episode two 😮‍💨

We still have episode four...written by Danai 🫠

I would love to be the person who only ever says my dog is perfect and never have any complaints, but the truth is that is not me, not right now. I can't pretend to be positive all the time when my default demeanour at the moment is pessimist. I have to actively work every day to fight against it. I have to work hard to notice and treasure the good. It doesn't feel authentic to only mention what's going well. My dogs are beautiful and complex and interesting and triumphant all the time, but sometimes their behaviour is also difficult to work with and tiring to manage. I love living with dogs, but also living with dogs can be really hard sometimes.

The only inspirational quote that ever helped me, 2023

Neither the Unabomer, nor Derrick Jensen nor the unbelievably hot anarcha-primitivist women who made me swoon at 21 ever, ever held medieval peasant agriculture up as an ideal! They hated farmers and farming!

When the most beautiful deranged woman I’d ever seen showed up at the leftist commune wearing a raccoon tail attached to her deerskin miniskirt, she was part of a group off to squat in Ketchikan National Forest and live without the three great evils they were rejecting, or as she explained to us, “no pets, no alcohol, no farming.”

This was a terrible plan that was absolutely going to give them all mercury poisoning but I’m just pedantically demanding that people get all the details of this particular ideology right. Charlie Brown did not have hoes and the Unabomer did not like farmers.

I’m gonna feel like this again one day

Whatever it takes

So far so good today. The table is set, and the food is pretty much cooked. I gave myself permission to go out to lunch (I told my mom I was 'picking up my dry cleaning') and that was a nice break. Gotta go back now and actually get some of my job work done. Then just brace for everyone coming at 5pm.

One of the bright spots in our family dinners is that our family friend Larry brings the wine and he brings legitimately good wine and a lot of it and he is always nice to enjoy a glass with. I'll be looking forward to that.

And as always thank you all for your kind words. It helped a lot to get that off my chest and it was very validating to hear that this is indeed a lot. I will get through it.

Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not this week, this month, this season, or this year. Maybe not for a very long time. Maybe it's going to take a lot of work and effort on your part. But eventually, you will be okay.

things will get better for me even though right now it feels like the universe is against me things will get better for me even though right now it feels like the universe is against me things will get better for me even though right now it feels like the universe is against me things will get better for me even though right now it feels like the universe is against me things will get better for me even though right now it feels like the universe is against me things will get better for me even though right now it feels like the universe is against me

real facts so true

This too shall pass this too shall pass this too shall pass this too shall pass this too shall pass this too shall pass this too shall pass this too shall pass this too shall pass this too shall pass this too shall pass this too shall pass this too shall pass this too shall pass this too shall pass this too shall pass this too shall pass this too shall pass this too shall pass

BEING ALIVE IS SO SO TERRIFYING AND YET EVERY DAY WE DO IT ANYWAY