yes yes yes all of this!!!!

herasyndlla:

i love in trials of the darksaber that you can track kanan’s journey through him and his mask.

kanan starts off by not wearing his mask on when he talks to rau and asks about the darksaber. he doesn’t know exactly what this weapon means so he doesn’t have all his worries and anxieties surfacing so he doesn’t need his mask to hide under. he’s an open book at the beginning, ready to talk.

the next time we see him he has it on. when they’re having to group discussion about sabine taking this on and what it’ll mean, he’s closed himself off from her because he’s scared. he’s so scared but he doesn’t want to let that show so the mask is on. if he can hide that under his mask than maybe they can all get through this.

he has his mask on throughout first days of training and when sabine blows up. even when he’s talking to hera, the person who knows him completely and he can be open with. he’s shut himself out from this to try and protect sabine but also to protect himself. and the mask doesn’t work, it doesn’t keep him from lashing out at everyone, it doesn’t keep him from handling everything so poorly.

but then kanan takes his mask off. when after talking with hera and she points out, again, that how he’s dealing with this isn’t good for sabine and that sabine is the one that matters here, not his feelings, he accepts it all and accepts that he is making mistakes. and most importantly, he accepts that he is the one of is teaching sabine. he can’t push this onto ezra anymore and just come in to make corrections. he’s accepted that he has to commit to this just as much as sabine has to.

so kanan’s not wearing a mask when they apologize to each other. he’s not wearing a mask start actually train. he’s not wearing a mask when he pushes sabine to where she needs to go. he’s not wearing a mask when he comforts her and promises her that they’ll be there for her.

kanan wearing a mask in this episode is him putting his guard up and sabine can tell, so her guard goes up too. if kanan doesn’t want this and it’s committed, why should she be. this is one of the core problems and kanan had to accept it.

i think this is some of the strongest visual storytelling in rebels. because we do catch on that kanan is going about this wrong pretty quick once they start training but visually we see it immediately that kanan isn’t going to handle this well. i love the details of when they have kanan wearing his mask and when he’s not. it’s not always so intense like this (sometimes it’s just he’s around a lot of new people so he wears his mask or like, they’re on geonosis so like yeah, he’s wearing his mask). it’s a brilliant tool to show us where kanan is in a given situation.

(hey, thanks @zareleonis because your liveblogging sparked all these thoughts being sent to my best friend and then i thought that hey, i’ll share them here too)