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inquisitor-apologist · 2 months

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hi I would personally LOVE to read thousands of essays on your thoughts about the inquisitors, so if you feel comfy posting them just know they will be received with gratitude :)

Alright, I’ve got a 4-hour car ride, so nothing but time.

The first thing that I’d say is absolutely essential to my understanding of/obsession with the Inquisitorius is that they’re expendable. Both in-text and out-of-text, they’re disposable and that is absolutely essential to their whole existence.

On the Doylist level, the Rebels team created them/reincorporated them to canon to be the replaceable early series antagonists. They're there to build the characters up to face the real threats of Maul’s temptation to the dark and Thrawn’s existential threat to the Rebel cause. The rest of the Star Wars media that shows them only reinforces this.

In Kenobi, they're there in the background, to set up Reva (who is, in the show, functionally not an Inquisitor) and Vader, in J:FO they're scary bad guys meant to be defeated and killed for Cal's growth (though, notably, J:FO is one of the only pieces of Inquisitor media that views them as victims worthy of empathy), and, while I haven't read (all of) the Vader comics, they're in the Vader comics, not in their own stories.

On the Watsonian level, they’re a sort of… buffer between the true power of the Sith and the public. They’re the one attacking the regular Force-sensitives and taking babies (someone much more qualified than me could probably talk a LOT about the very interesting ways the Jedi, Empire, and Inquisition (like, come on) parallel and draw from Judaism and historical antisemitism) and they’re the ones the Rebellion direct their anger about the Jedi Purge at. It’s easy for the two masterminds and main perpetrators to hide behind the atrocities of a dozen faceless subordinates.

This is really clearly shown in Kenobi, where the Inquisitors are dismissed as “Jedi who turned to the dark side. Now, they hunt their own kind”. They’re not seen as victims who’ve been forced into self-destructive monsters, but as the perpetrators of their own genocide, personas that they readily claim. I mean, Reva is literally a survivor of the Temple Massacre who was turned into one of the Inquisitors that Obi-Wan dismisses as traitors. They’re very convenient, effective, scapegoats.

That’s honestly a very underrated part of Palpatine’s genius; one of his most important traits is his ability to manipulate the media. By creating the Inquisitors and delegating most of the work of completing the Purge to them, he distances both himself and Vader from any public outcry against the actions of the Inquisitorius (and, to some extent, their own actions), allowing Vader to be seen as a more legitimate military officer and extension of the Emperor’s will, which is itself legitimized by that distance.

The lines between the Emperor, Vader, and the Inquisitors are also very important. There's a very clear distinction between the Sith and the Inquisitors in of autonomy, which is the second thing that defines my view of the Inquisitors. The Inquisitors are largely pawns for Palpatine’s ends, manipulated and indoctrinated kids, and as such there’s kind of a spectrum of the Empire’s Force-sensitive hierarchy between Sidious, Vader, and the Inquisitors.

Sidious is the first extreme, where he chose everything; he Fell on purpose, became a Sith on purpose, consolidated power and killed the Jedi on purpose, became Emperor on purpose. And then there’s Vader, who very much chose to Fall, kill the Jedi, and become a Sith, but he was manipulated and pushed to it by Sidious. He chose, but Sidious kind of underlies all those choices, driving him to them. Lastly, the Inquisitors chose nothing; they were hunted and persecuted by Vader and the Sith, then tortured and indoctrinated to serve Sidious, brainwashed into continuing to serve. It’s really a gradient of autonomy, if you think about it; Sidious is the only Dark Sider afforded full choice, both by the narrative and in-universe.

The Inquisitors are, fundamentally, kids ripped from their family and people, tortured and indoctrinated into self-loathing and anger. They don’t get names; they’re told they were born wrong and tortured until they believe it, then pressed into service, because, while they might have been born wrong, they were also born useful.

This is why I kind of hate the idea of Inquisitors who choose to join, and one of the reasons I’m not particularly inclined to read the new Inquisitor book (also it apparently implies that the tortured inquisitors were actually just. Force-brainwashed??). One of the most interesting and most fundamental things about them is that they are victims of horrific genocide coerced into becoming their own oppressors. If you take that away, you make them so much less interesting—they turn into stock evil traitors.

The protagonist of the new Inquisitor book is, from what I’ve gathered, a jerk who was already half-fallen in the Clone Wars and who seized the chance to gain more power with the Empire. That’s just diet Vader, and I, personally, have seen too much of both real Vader and diet vaders, so I’m not interested.

So, uh, @stellanslashgeode, you asked me for my thoughts on Iskat Akaris, here they are. Sorry it’s probably not what you wanted.

So, like, there’s my opinion on the fandom-and-canon obsession with Inquisitors who chose the Empire. We literally haven’t seen pretty much anything about how the normal inquisitors join, can we focus on the actually interesting stuff? The Inquisitors' lack of autonomy, their lack of choice, is a huge part of what fascinates me so much about them, because it's very unique. Let's not take that away.

Another piece of why I think the Inquisitors are so interesting is how their abuse at the hands of the Empire shapes them, though this part has more speculation than the stuff above due to lack of clear information.

In canon, we know that inquisitors go through fucking hellish initiation criteria (“Isolation! Torture! Mutilation!”), stuff that absolutely breaks them until they no longer believe that the Empire can be stopped at all (“You can’t stop the Empire!” “She said something about becoming an Inquisitor… like it’s inevitable”). We also know that, however it happens, it's very fast and effective. The Vader Comics are set just months after Order 66, and there's already at least ten fully initiated Inquisitors.

Unfortunately, we never directly see the exact initiation protocols the Inquisitors are subject to, but we do get quick glimpses, like in the flashbacks from J:FO, and with Reva in Kenobi. Right now, I want to look at what those flashbacks from J:FO, together with the dialogue above, tells us about what exactly happens to Inquisitors.

In the flashback, we see Trilla, strapped to the torture chair that Cere's in later in the flashback, being subjected to Star Wars' favorite kind of torture, weird electricity chairs. I'm going to call them shockseats, just to distinguish them from real-life electric chairs. We transition from the torture to some time later, when Second Sister has been fully turned, wearing the Inquisitor uniform and everything.

That, annoyingly enough, is all we get to work with. It's basically the "Being tortured makes you evil" trope, but Ninth Sister's dialogue gives it some nuance. She says "Isolation! Torture! Mutilation!", and, well, we just saw the torture part, and I'm guessing the mutilation is the whole thing in the comics where Vader teaches the Inquisitors by cutting their limbs off, so that leaves isolation, which I think is probably a very significant part of the process.

Based on the vault vision and the Fortress Inquisitorius section in J:FO, most of the Fortress's prison has a kind-of panopticon feel, with see-through energy shields, guards everywhere, and several prisoners in one cell, so I'm guessing there are probably some deeper isolation cells. The isolation is probably where most of the indoctrination happens, because we never hear anyone saying anything during the torture scenes.

This is mostly headcanon from the scraps we get, but I'd say initiation probably goes something like this: 1. a survivor is captured 2. They're taken to Nur, and tortured on the way there (per Rebels) 3 The timeline here is annoyingly unclear but I think the ‘isolation’/indoctrination comes before the rest? 4. They're tortured in an attempt to get them to turn to the Dark Side 5. They're somehow fully initiated into the Inquisitorius with their full title and uniform 6. They're trained ('mutilation') 7. They're a full Inquisitor

obv I have headcanons (ie a full-on not-really canon-compliant system that I think works better than the disjointed 'being tortured makes you evil' bits we have now, but I'm trying to stay as canon-compliant here as possible) but I think this is about what we get in canon, and it’s kind of necessary to have a vague idea about what probably happens in order to understand them, and dang is this very important to basically their entire self-concepts.

In Kenobi, Third Sister is hated by all the others, probably for not going through what they did. We see throughout the show that she’s just as good, or better, than most of them, but because she wasn’t tortured (or, at least, not to the same extent), the rest despise her. She does the exact same things we've consistently seen all the other Inquisitor's do, but she's punished and derided for it. In J:FO, Second Sister goes out and threatens civilians in order to draw Cal out, and everyone’s fine with it, but when Reva does it, everyone hates her.

There’s no rational reason; she does exactly what they do , what she’s been taught to do, but she’s treated differently. The only reason for this, in-universe, is that she’s the only Inquisitor we know of that wasn’t brought in for being a Jedi—she explicitly hides that she was one. The rest of the Inquisitors clearly do hate each other, but it’s on a different level with her, because they do not see her as one of them. She wasn’t a Jedi, and thus she didn’t go through the same things they did. There seems to be a sort-of trauma-induced bond between the other Inquisitors. They hate each other, but they all see each other as Inquisitors, largely the same as them. They don’t share that with Reva because whatever happened to them didn’t happen to her, to the same extent.

Connecting to my earlier point about Inquisitors who chose to join, I think that that's WAY more interesting than a bunch of jerk coworkers who just decided to be evil.

These people were family in the Jedi, and then their whole family died as they watched and heard and felt it in their brains, and they were chased and hunted and tortured until they broke and brought back together, warped and different and told to call each other siblings—and at this point, aren’t they? They were raised together in the bowels of Nur, subjected to the same horror and misery; they’ve been through everything together, in the worst way possible, constantly competing and fighting and killing for anything they can get. Who else could understand them in any meaningful way?

I'm getting off-topic, but the physical abuse and torture of the Inquisitors seems fundamental to their identity, even if we don't know exactly what it entailed.

So, with the isolation and indoctrination, I think it's fair to say that there's probably quite a lot of mental abuse there. The Dark Side, in itself, is pretty horrible mental health-wise (the Jedi actively use cognitive behavioral therapy just to prevent the possibility of the Dark) and being literally tortured and forced into it must be like. so much worse. Plus, isolation has been shown to be really fucking awful for your brain and the Inquisitor’s utter hopelessness (they literally do not believe that the Empire can be stopped and are really angry at anyone who tries) kind of seems like the whole being unable to believe that things can be better and getting angry at people who try to help part of depression?

Basically I don’t really know enough about mental health to say definitively, but I’m guessing a core part of Inquisitor Initiation is like. Insane mental abuse to get them to crack.

This last bit is less supported, and I know even less about it, so I’m going to keep this real brief, but I think there’s a possibility of some sexual abuse as well? This is a pretty big thing in fanon with the Grand Inquisitor, and then there’s all the creepy pervy stuff with Seventh Sister that she did not learn from the Jedi, but that’s as much as I’ll say for that because I know nothing about this kind of thing.

So, those are really the three things that define the Inquisitors to me: their expendability, lack of autonomy, and how their abuse defines them. I could write more on this, but this post took a fucking month already, so I’ll stick to those points.

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