Lit C'baoth Theory (Prepare for clone madness!)

Because the ROTJ Emperor is a menacing schemer and clearly insanely powerful, the Dark Empire Palpatine is feeble, unstable and more just simple insane then insanely powerful. Though I always figured it was actually on purpose to show how much his Death broke his mind, which also seems to be the idea Mara went with.

 

Technically Mara (presumably acting as Zahn's mouthpiece here) says she doesn't really think it was Palpatine at all, just a clone of him. My interpretation (and yours, apparently) is that it was him, he just didn't come all the way back, which is kind of different.

 

I seem to recall that Corran also had his doubts about the Emperor Reborn in "I, Jedi".

 

Yeah, well Stackpole and Zahn were friends, and had a similar outlook on what Star Wars should be. The Prequels overwrote a lot of their work though.

 

Ah they both wrote short stories to fix most of it, though yep Valin Horn's age is pretty unfix-able.

 

Yea the timing of the Clone Wars messed up quite a bit.

 

Nothing messed up Stackpole as much as Jedi Trial. Of course, that messed up a lot of things.

 

As far as the famous "Guardian of Mount Tantiss" is concerned, I'm afraid it's a false debate. The sources that stated Joruus C'baoth was the sole guardian are actually older and in minority. Additionally, none of these sources gave an entirely objective affirmation or denial: they just said that "all evidence indicated" that he was the sole guardian. The Complete Encyclopedia, however, does confirm that the Guardian and C'baoth were two separate entities. In the 20th anniversary edition of the Thrawn Trilogy, Zahn made a commentary about that, stating he wondered why some people even felt the need to doubt there was indeed a Guardian killed by C'baoth.