PT Club Jocasta: You'd be wise to read DARTH PLAGUEIS with us

Has everyone begun reading the novel;?

 

Yes, it's fair game!

I'm reading it too, but having a lot of fun with the comments as I go through the chapters.

 

Yay! So happy I have the book for this season of the PT book club lol. I love Darth Plagueis; Luceno did such an amazing job with the book and all the characters. Especially all of the background we get with Plagueis & Sheev. It made me like Palpatine even more and how he develops throughout the films and all his machinations, plotting and scheming all the more, and enhanced my enjoyment of TPM because of the set up we get for the events in it here. And of course I loved getting more Darth Maul too.

I should reread it so its fresh in my mind & I can discuss it with more in-depth comments other than, "Hey guys I love this book too!" but I'm swamped with papers at the moment.

Luckily I did bookmark a ton of passages that I liked or was fascinated by as I read so I at least have those to jog my memory & contribute.

Happy reading to those who haven't finished (or started reading ) yet!

 

I like how this novel reveals that, after Plagueis' death, the Emperor referred to him as "the Wise" as a form of mockery. That seems like something he would do.

 

That is certainly more intimidating than how I've initially imagined him.

 

What did people think about

Spoiler

What did people think about Plagueis surviving up to TPM?

In spoiler tags because I have no idea where everyone else is at in the story.


My thoughts

Spoiler

Didn't really care for that but it was interesting.
When did everyone else think that Plagueis was killed? I would have said 10 years earlier. Just in time to possibly create Anakin

 

It was widely assumed to be well before the book claimed/revealed, from the reference to the ''legend'', suggesting it was pretty old. But turned out to be Palpatine's idea of a joke.

As to Tenebrous, whilst that image DOES look pretty impressive, I don't actually recall him wearing the whole 'evil rebreather' outfit as a matter of course so wouldn't necessarily look like that very often.

 

OMG, that's a Bith?

I'm having a hard time with Tenebrous now and am glad he didn't make it past the first chapter.

 

Yeah, Palpy is certainly a case of an unreliable narrator.

 

A friend of mine nearly ruined him for me by saying, "Hey, you think his theme would have been a Wagnerian version of the Cantina Theme?"

 

Tenebrous in his 'civilian' identity was a famous ship designer so probably didn't go around Sith-ing it up in public. On the other hand, Muuns seem to favour robes and dark colours anyway and seem to be widely seen as, um, bar-stewards by people with less money (which is to say, practically everyone) so Plagueis probably didn't need to do much more than remember which name he was answering to at that moment.

It's actually quite interesting that ''Hego Demask'' and ''Darth Plagueis'' are basically both doing the exact same thing (i.e. creating a plutarchy) but where Damask gets to do it pretty openly and with all sorts of secret handshakes and cult gatherings and so on, Plagueis is basically running things in the background. I actually view Damask as the more villainous of the two identities in that it's all about the money whereas Plagueis does at least have a moral code and a principle he's fighting for (albeit an evil one.)

 

Brilliant!
This is now my headcanon: Tenebrous making some ship holo designs, Tony Stark style, speakers-droid blasting some operas.

An interesting take on it. I do agree that Damask would be "more evil" since he is already purely driven by his self-interest, manipulation of others and the need to be in control. There are those kind of people in RL too. And in such cases, corruption of the Dark Side cannot be blamed for the "evil", desire for manipulation and control is heinous on its own. So I guess the Plagueis persona is actually helping the nefarious Damask achieve his sinister goals.

 

A few thoughts.

I like the name, Tenebrous.

LOL Awesome!

This is a thought after reading about how alien characters tend not to be front and center besides like Legacy, which I guess it true. Anyway, do any other Sith Master and Apprentice that are both aliens at the same time besides Plagueis and Tenebrous? They always seem to be a human and another human or maybe an alien. Like Bane and Zannah, Zannah and Cognus, Plagueis and Sidious, Sidious and Maul, etc.

 

I love how this book helps elucidate a lot of the stuff in the prequels-Luceno knows the prequel era pretty well and prequel fans would certainly appreciate it.

 

It does actually help with a lot of some of the more egregious parts of the PT's overarching plot. When it becomes clear just how long before the actual prequels Palpatine has been planning his scheme (and Plagueis even earlier than that) it feels much less like Palpatine pulling lucky breaks out of his backside and more like him reaping the seeds he has sown long beforehand. The clone army, Dooku's fall, the political machinations that lead to a legally-appointed dictatorship, the war breaking out when it did - these weren't fortunate coincidences, these were all put in place long ago.

 

Just wanted to say I'm very excited about this. As you can tell by my name, Darth Plagueis is my favorite book. And I only just read it for the first time back in March of this year. I then reread it almost immediately afterwards.

I've just started it for my 3rd time in order to participate in this thread with a fresher perspective. I have so much to talk about. Almost every paragraph is worthy of days of digesting and pondering.



*by read I mean audiobook.

 

Luceno has indeed shown a fair amount of Prequel appreciation over time. I really enjoyed how well he combined elements of both trilogies in Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader.

There's something to it. However it seems that Plagueis actually broke the streak of non-human Bane-descendant Sith. Tenebrous was a Bith and his master a Twi'lek. Darth Gean was also a Twi'lek. But yeah, this alien diversity wasn't introduced before Luceno did it in Darth Plagueis.

 

I'm almost halfway through and LOVE IT. I don't know why I waited so long to read this one, but I'm glad I am now. Everyone in this thread has had a lot of intriguing talking points and I can see why. This book is full of interesting info.

My thoughts exactly! When I was reminded what they look like, I laughed. As was mentioned by some of you above, they just don't look menacing to me at all.

 

On the other hand, a wrinkly old dude with yellow eyes doesn't sound like it should be all that scary, yet Palpatine is in some ways even scarier than Vader the seven foot tall cyborg warrior or the horn headed tattooed assassin Maul. And even if not, sometimes not looking scary can be as advantageous as scaring the beejebers out of all and sundry, and Tenebrous spent his ''civilian'' life as a ship designer - he wants to look relatively unassuming. Plagueis is fortunate in that ''tall, intimidating jerks who wear a lot of black'' is just as accurate for normal Muuns as it is for a Sith Lord.

 

I haven't read this book in a long time, but it makes me glad that Luceneo is writing The Rogue One book