Every author plays a role in their story like God.

“I created this world to feel some control, destroy it if I want…”

At this moment, Twenty One Pilots fans the world over eagerly await frantically search for breadcrumbs left by band creator, Tyler Joseph, to unlock the final chapter in the years’ long story of the world of Trench.

Clancy, the band’s seventh studio album, recently dropped, weighing in at 13 songs and as many music videos—minus one. The record’s lore-heavy finale track, “Paladin Strait,” was promised an eventual pairing with a big-budget, in-world film counterpart in “early June.” 

When Friday, June 14th came and went—the last possible June date that could be considered “early”—fans questioned everything, and theories started flying. (“What if Tyler really meant ‘early “next” June’?”)

By Monday, one theory was taking root, gaining traction, and growing from the ground up: that the video had indeed already been posted at the beginning of the month, and that it was up to the fanbase to band together, make a plan, fan out for clues, and bring back any pieces to solve the final hiding place of the album’s protagonist, Clancy, by discovering the “Paladin Strait” music video chronicling his fate.

If it needed stating before now, hopefully you’ve gathered: Twenty One Pilots is infamously cryptic and their Clique is rabidly legendarily investigative. 

Twenty One Pilots is infamously cryptic and their Clique is rabidly legendarily investigative. 

If the band’s followers are that way, you can’t blame them. Tyler has deliberately left clues in everything from misspelled tweets to obscure video time stamps. Anything the band posts (or doesn’t post) will be endlessly scrutinized—and history has shown for good reason. 

Ironically, because of the multi-layered environment he’s created for his fictional world to live in, the real Tyler has virtually sacrificed the ability to be taken at face value. It’s hard to imagine him sharing anything that could be read in any other way than as a clue veiled in doublespeak. Anything he says “must” have a deeper meaning. 

And maybe, now, it all does have to.

Maybe, when you’ve architected such a deeply intentional world as Trench, inviting your fanbase to symbolically populate its wild, green hills as the narrative’s hopeful rebel inhabitants, you trade the voice of an artist for the voice of a creator. 

An artist can discuss their craft with fans; a creator can’t speak with members of their story as equals. 

I Want To Know You

Why are some authors drawn to write themselves into their own stories? I don’t mean that they’ve just “put a lot of themselves” into their work, or that they can merely see traits of theirs in the characters of their making. 

It seems there’s something in a certain kind of author that makes them unable to resist their own worlds. Some writers can’t (or won’t) tell the story unless they will live in it, binding themselves to the narrative in the form of a character within their own creation. 

Maybe the lines between fiction and reality sometimes get (pardon the word)—blurry. 

Tyler created the lore and the history and the world of Trench. Tyler as Clancy is also the story’s hero. Additionally, he’s the nemesis of his own world as Blurryface. Whatever is right with / wrong with / or even simply part of the lush hillsides of Trench, the oppressive city of Dema, and the overall saga of Clancy has its origin in the real-life person, Tyler Joseph. 

To a fanbase spiritually identifying as the torch-wielding banditos of Trench, Tyler the person can no longer communicate with tweets and updates like other figures in our real world do. 

In a poetic turn, if Tyler has a message he needs to be received at face value, he’d now have to deliver it to us through the character Clancy. The only way we can hear him speaking immanently as one of us—without the distant separation of his “Creatorhood”—is when he addresses us through the beaten-down, pain-soaked, travel-weary protagonist of his own story. 

Maybe for some authors, this is the only way they know to share their hearts. Maybe for some stories, the only way its characters can know their Creator’s heart is if He Himself steps in. 

Maybe for some audiences, the only way to know that they are as fully and vulnerably and sacrificially loved as the characters in the story are, is if the One telling the story writes Himself into the story to die.

Maybe for some stories, the only way its characters can know their Creator’s heart is if He Himself steps in. 

Clancy might not die at the end of this ordeal. I find that highly unlikely. Those familiar with the personal faith that has, over the years, colored with various shades the lyrics and themes of Twenty One Pilots, know that there’s another story that The Creator couldn’t keep Himself out of… 

…one with a world whose Creator chose to make it His home, and its inhabitants His friends…

I think Tyler knows from personal experience something of the Creator Who had to die inside His creation to let a world know His love.