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Religious women disappearing after explosions new favorite character trope

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Been pondering about Tasi, Yord’s Padawan, since she hasn’t been accompanying her master on many of his missions a la Barriss, but good thing she really hasn’t lol

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The official audio description for ToTE notes that Barriss has yellow skin, I knew I wasn’t living in a parallel dimension

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Thinking about how Barriss reaches out for Ahsoka's hand, willing to die but leaves her fate to Ahsoka, craving Ahsoka's comfort and compassion, and not knowing a way out.

Then Barriss reaches out for Lyn's hand, willing to die but leaves her fate to Lyn, giving all of her comfort and compassion, and knowing a way out.

Unending compassion.

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I'm so gagged when people say they wish antagonists stayed evil when referring to Barriss but the other half of ToTE is about Morgan Elsbeth like idk what to say 😭

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Meredith Salenger rooting for this is so real

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Barriss ToTE thoughts

What’s there is good, I feel like the shorts format may have hindered Barriss as a character a bit, but ultimately I thought it was okay.

There are interesting ideas and prompts for Barriss, but I feel like what makes Barriss a compelling character is her complex thought process when she’s faced with adversity. The shorts do their best to convey Barriss’ feelings and I think they were shown pretty decently, but I feel like it could have been presented in a way that was more complex and rewarding in a format that just showed more. I don’t blame people if they think her development feels rushed, but as someone whose been reading analysis posts on Barriss for a decade, I bought it.

Overall though, I’m grateful with the trajectory they chose for Barriss. After a decade, what’s given is truly better than Barriss dying by Vader/Ahsoka or just nothing. The implication that Barriss reconciled with Ahsoka was very pleasing and I hope we see how that went down, maybe in a book where we can directly know what the characters feel more intimately.

also Barriss canon trans ally sjbfjajdhkqfbwj

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I’m getting the vibe that ToTE is utilizing Vader for marketing (Since Barriss isn’t a popular character, fair enough) but I’m fully expecting him to be in one scene and have one line that goes, “okay kiddos, go hunt Jedi” and that’ll be it for him, and I’m gonna cackle if that’s really true because gLUP SHITTO RIIISE

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The cruel beauty of Barriss' Inquisitor outfit mirroring her prison outfit. Doomed to be a prisoner no matter what she does.

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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.

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Having Vader kill Barriss would be so “And then it was all a dream” like what was the point, making Vader look cool for 5 seconds, hello?

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Inquisitor: Rise of the Red Blade notes that Fourth Sister looked like she was always thinking about something else and didn’t seem interested in interacting with the other inquisitors. I’d be living if, in hindsight, she was dissociating thinking about how Barriss absconded under her watch.

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Whats shocked me the most is that Mirialans don't naturally have cunty nails and Barriss found nail polish somewhere on Coruscant

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free my girl she did the same things as the celebrated male protagonists but the fandom has labeled her irredeemable

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The only rational Marrok speculation

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Rise of the Red Blade describes the Seventh Sister as having green skin and I swear I'm living on another dimension cause every mirialan that I know for sure has yellow skin is being said otherwise

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In A Jedi's Duty, Barriss has trouble meditating since the war started. It's interesting then that after committing the most messiest betrayal-then-redirect plan, she chooses to try meditating again.

I used to think that there was lazy writing in the sabotage arc but with new context, viewing Barriss' actions as purposeful can be more interesting. She herself would clock this plan as delaying the inevitable with how many holes she left (not killing Ventress, not letting the clones see her disguised). So it's intriguing to view these faults as self-sabotage whether it be done subconsciously or not.

So in this moment when she's alone in her room, it's fun to think if she's actually meditating, or just waiting for something to happen. Because she knows anyone as determined as her couldn't have not been able to find the burning trail she left behind.