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Anyway if the cinematic framing drawing a direct parallel between Lyn saving Barriss here and Barriss saving the enby Jedi from Lyn sixteen years earlier wasn't enough, and the fact that Barriss was visibly still moving after Lyn picked her up wasn't enough, and the fact that the scene would have no point if Lyn wasn't rewarded for her change of heart about Barriss wasn't enough, and the fact that Barriss was stabbed off-center (a narratively survivable wound) and there's a tent full of medical supplies RIGHT OUTSIDE wasn't enough—

It's just. Our last shot of Barriss here is a direct visual parallel to the last shot of Ahsoka in Twilight of the Apprentice—the episode where Ahsoka faced her darksider nemesis in an encounter that seemed sure to end in her death but that she survived against all odds, which probably takes place months at most after The Way Out does—with Barriss's shot light where Ahsoka's is dark and Barriss being carried out of the cave while Ahsoka is walking in, both having a symbolic rebirth after defeating the narrative they were seemingly doomed by?

If you're still at all worried that this was meant to be a death scene, I don't know what else to tell you.

Hey so are we going to talk about this or—

#you ever narrative foil with a girl so hard you might as well be making out with tongue #star wars #tales of the empire #barriss offee #ahsoka tano #barrissoka #tote spoilers #tales of the empire spoilers

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lmao The Way Out and The Lost Commanders have the same episode writer. fucking phenomenal

Remember how in the second episode of Rebels S2, Ahsoka leaves the Ghost crew after sending them to recruit Rex because she needs to get some questions about Vader answered?

Yeah, I think now we know exactly who she went to.

#tales of the empire spoilers #tote spoilers

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I can't believe the real milf was Jedi Master Barriss Offee all along.

I have three modes when it comes to Tales of the Empire, one is being pretentious about Barriss, the second is being anxious about Barriss, and the third is being like "damn Fourth Sister is kind of a milf tho"

#tales of the empire spoilers #tote spoilers

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Remember how in the second episode of Rebels S2, Ahsoka leaves the Ghost crew after sending them to recruit Rex because she needs to get some questions about Vader answered?

Yeah, I think now we know exactly who she went to.

#ahsoka tano #barriss offee #barrissoka #star wars #star wars rebels #tales of the empire #tales of the empire spoilers #tote spoilers

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Hey so are we going to talk about this or—

#star wars #tales of the empire #barriss offee #ahsoka tano #barrissoka #tote spoilers #tales of the empire spoilers #undescribed

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i wonder if barriss ever found out what they did to her mom

#tales of the empire spoilers #tote spoilers

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Tales of the Empire spoilers:

That was beyond my wildest dreams. That was beautiful. That was something I could never have imagined we would get like this ever in my life. That has so much room for so much story all around it. That was. That.

We just watched Jedi Master Barriss Offee have the most peak Jedi moment since Return of the fucking Jedi.

And the way that. The way that. I was sitting there thinking yes, this is a death I can accept for her, this is the most Jedi thing ever and it's a distant epilogue and—and then they made it obvious that Lyn saves Barriss's life because the radical compassion and forgiveness that Barriss showed her fucking broke her.

Eleven years. Eleven years we waited. And we won.

#barriss offee #tales of the empire #tales of the empire spoilers #tote spoilers #watch it. WATCH IT. it's. I can't even articulate I've been rendered speechless

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I am seeing some indication that TotE is up in japan already so I am abandoning the social medias for the day see you on the other side

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the implication of everything I've seen is that we're about to win beyond our wildest dreams tbh

REVIEW EMBARGO'S BEEN LIFTED I'M REMAINING STRONG AND ONLY PEEKING A LITTLE

#doing SO normal this morning how are you

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REVIEW EMBARGO'S BEEN LIFTED I'M REMAINING STRONG AND ONLY PEEKING A LITTLE

#tales of the empire #barriss offee #the thrust of everything I've seen is ''she's not going to die and she's not depicted as A Villain at any point'' #''she really really really does not want to be in a show called tales of the empire''

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I have three modes when it comes to Tales of the Empire, one is being pretentious about Barriss, the second is being anxious about Barriss, and the third is being like "damn Fourth Sister is kind of a milf tho"

#star wars #tales of the empire #barriss offee #fourth sister

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Thinking about the star war home of the most beat-you-over-the-head color/lighting symbolism in fiction and about how the Inquisitor trainee uniform they have Barriss in looks dark grey/black in most of the shots thanks to Fortress Inquisitorius's eerie green lighting/the harsh red lighting in the training ring, but when under neutral lighting you can see it's actually in shades of blue.

And I just gotta say that is some PEAK "you're not evil the way they're trying to force you to be/convince you you are" star war visual symbolism bullshit right there.

And while I'm at it—

Even post-initiation when she's in full Inquisitor gear and kneeling to Vader, looking hopeless and empty inside, framed in shadow—

The light from outside is shining directly down on her. It still reaches her, even now.

#barriss offee #star wars #tales of the empire #this isn't who she is and she's going to know that by the end #because WHAT is the star war for if not for getting really really pretentious about lighting symbolism

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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.

#barriss offee #grand inquisitor #inquisitorius #tales of the empire #tote #star wars #they're gonna make her use the dark side and they're gonna make her do some stuff it'll be hard for her to live with #and she might give up hope for a minute #but I believe in her #she's gonna make it #the only way out is through

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THE CLONE WARS BRAIN INVADERS

#I see we are all feeling extremely normal about this scene rn #In Which The Girls Discuss The Existential Dread Of The Narrative Bearing Down On Them (Over A Midnight Snack) #rewatched brain invaders the other day and oh yeah this bit is already hitting even harder #(gosh they are just so INCREDIBLY fond of each other though)

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Okay, two weeks to go, putting my cards on the table: there is no way in hell that Barriss is going to be an Inquisitor. That's not what this is. Everyone’s taking for granted that because the trailer sets up her training as an Inquisitor that means that we’re seeing a corruption arc for her, but just. Look at her. There is not a single frame of this trailer where she is not visibly looking for the exit. There is not a single frame of this trailer where she isn’t either visibly masking what she’s feeling or just looking determined to survive. This isn’t a start of darkness; it’s Ahsoka getting hunted for sport in Padawan Lost.

We aren’t doing the “we’re setting Barriss up as an Inquisitor so we can give her a redemption arc later” scenario. This is the redemption arc, this is her facing an in-universe attempt to force her into the fanon Inquisitor!Barriss mold that she doesn’t fit into at all, and she’s going to prove it and she’s going to outsmart all of these actual fallen Jedi she’s surrounded by who are trying to make her be like them. When Order 66 happened, Barriss was sitting defenseless in a cell and was offered a series of choices that weren’t real choices. But she knows that, she is not buying into it, and that offers her one, incredibly dangerous route to freedom: convincing them to trust her enough to send her into the field with a lightsaber.

It’s going to be rough, it’s going to be an incredibly dangerous, difficult path for her to navigate—they will make her do some messed up stuff to prove herself and for a moment it might look like she's given into despair—but she’s going to come out the other end of this miniseries having rejected both the Empire and the dark side. Not only as a Jedi in every way that matters but also as someone who is equipped with knowledge of how the Inquisitorius operates, which she can use to save as many people as she can from them—because she knows what happens when they take you alive.

And she's going to do it all onscreen in a story that is about her, she is the main protagonist here, and that is frankly something that was beyond my wildest dreams.

This isn’t wishful thinking on my part, this isn’t me trying to do a preemptive rewrite—this is me looking at what’s onscreen in this trailer, at what they’re telling us, at what they’re not telling us, and seeing the story laid out in front of us.

The only way out is through.

#star wars #barriss offee #tales of the empire #I can break down citations but if I did this post would be a mile long and take me all week so tldr just pay attention to her in the traile #and to the narrative framing around it #'divergent paths' wrt her and morgan in the official series description. etc. #so like. it feels unreal but after 11 years this is how we win #because if they were gonna just lazily make her an inquisitor they would have put it in the background of something else years ago #instead of waiting for a chance to animate a whole story for and about her

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Morgan's half of Tales of the Empire:

Barriss's half of Tales of the Empire:

#in one corner we have women's wrongs in the other corner we have a sad wet kitten #star wars #tales of the empire #morgan elsbeth #barriss offee

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This is the first use of my art degree