Characters Path of Dark Persuasion-The New Palpatine Characterization Thread: New Challenge is up!

So, here's a question that I was thinking of the other day. Usually for Halloween, I write some kind of horror story. What do you think Palpatine might have as haunting spirits? How would he react to them? Not necessarily spirits that would make him feel uncharacteristic remorse, but spirits who thought they needed to exact justice from the man who believes in justice the least.

 

I can see them being people from his childhood... parents, maybe. I can see him as having a lot of caregiver issues.

 

Depends on where and when in his life you're talkin'. If it's late in his life, say, after he counted on figuring out how to stay alive forever but hasn't, I would think that he'd be surrounded by earlier Sith masters who mock and deride him. And, perhaps, terrible forerunners of what he imagines death to be like.

palpatine is evil at its worst. there are no good characteristics about him at all. lucas says he is pure evil.

Everyone's entitled to their own opinion. But I submit that Lucas and even Ian don't really understand the character at all. In interviews published around the time ROTS was released, Ian, who formerly just went on and on about how thoroughly evil Palpatine was, is now saying he's human even though he's doing all this stuff, and he can't really explain it. After many years of the old broken record, "Palpatine is meant to represent Satan, the ultimate evil, etc. etc. etc.," GL goes and writes in this extremely compassionate scene with Anakin on the banks of Lava River. If he's evil, pure evil, and nothing but evil, why did Lucas do that?

I don't think he knows.

The fact is, Palpatine is only there to make the story go. You couldn't have a hotshot smuggler, a whiny kid, a couple of funny robots, and a wisecracking princess go through amazing adventures if there wasn't some person there to cause problems for them in the first place, and that's all Lucas needed Palpatine to do. He really didn't care about the character at all. At first even his name was nothing but "Cause The ..."

So of course these people lack understanding. They don't really care.

My opinion.

 

I agree with you that neither Ian nor Lucas really has a good grasp of the character. If we think of Palpatine as pure evil, I think that makes him too one-sided a character. His sociopathy has to be a study in manipulative contrasts.

 

People are evil for reasons. Nobody gets up one morning and says, "I think I'm going to become a total ******* just for the heck of it."

Whatever they are doing, it makes sense to them. And there's a whole lot of ways it could make sense to them, depending on who they are and their background.

 

Sorry, it's been a crazy few months and I don't even know where my co-host is. If there are any new Palpatine fics that I have not yet put in the index, please let me know.

What does everyone think of as the sort of jumping-off point for Palpatine's evil career?

In other news, best wishes go to LLL, former grand poobah of this genre, who is going to greener literary pastures.