Absolutely NOBODY is allowed to call me an Angel (trigger word) except for that One Little Girl who I helped teach to read who had untreated ADHD and I let her talk and I listened to all her stories because noone else would.
on this, the 11th birthday of fall out boy's esteemed fifth studio album save rock and roll, i just want to remind everyone of the one thing that never fails to Get Me about it.
there was a lot of scorn and derision about the title when it first got promoted, and fob was well aware this would happen. critics and caustic news outlets collectively scoffed about it, save rock and roll. like this four-piece from chicago, this dorky pop band, is gonna save rock and roll?
of course they missed the point, which is in the very god damn title. it's not a declarative statement. it's not a pronouncement of how we, fall out boy, saved rock and roll. it is a call to action. it is an earnest request for you, the listener, to participate in this act alongside them. it is an expression of desire to inspire creation in turn.
that's the ethos they've carried at the forefront of every creative endeavor they've undertaken since returning from hiatus. certainly that element was present before then, but save rock and roll marked the moment where they very deliberately centered that squarely in their narrative.
because fall out boy doesn't just want to save rock and roll. they want you to save rock and roll with them.
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.
unicorn but it's a goat or a sheep. it's a nonhorse. it's an artiodactyl of some kind. any of them. unicorn but cow. moose. will anyone draw this so i can look at it