Lit What was so artistically done?

Exactly.

And really, Star Wars has enough dramatic confrontations between Big Good and Big Bad as it is. Never meeting his enemies and dying as a result of being out-gambitted like that was fitting for Thrawn, the tactician and mastermind.

 

I can't speak for anyone who complained about that appearance, because I haven't read it, but a confrontation does not mean there has to be a physical encounter. I would prefer if Thrawn allowed himself a dignified arrest.

 

Thrawn is all about the bigger picture, most of his success is because for a long time he's looking at a bigger picture and a longer term plan than anyone else (except possibly Sidious before he died) and everyone else is reacting to him. His ever being captured or killed in person would probably feel like a failure in principle - he's the mastermind, the tactician and the planner, he shouldn't be getting into a position where he CAN be captured, even if that does mean the odd strategic withdrawal when facing defeat.

His death was entirely because he overestimated his own skills AND underestimated the Skywalker/Solo family. The master planner was completely blindsided - that was artistic.

 

This thread is Peak Lit.

 

Well, I would argue that all galaxy threatening villains have a "bigger picture" that they're focusing on. Heck Palps wanted to become the physical embodiment of the Dark Side and he still had a confrontation with Luke. There is something dramatically satisfying in having your heroes confront the villains and argue out their points of view. His getting captured or killed on person would be exactly the type of failure that a villain needs for a satisfying win, because as you say there is nothing else that would truly defeat him on principle instead of just physically.The way it was done was almost incidental to the actions of the heroes themselves and that just didn't feel satisfying to me. Plus his capture would have allowed his future use, so that's always a plus for me.

 

To be fair what I meant by 'bigger picture' was that Thrawn had a plan for the entire campaign and restarting the Empire - for the most part everyone else was just reacting to his moves instead of dictating when and where the fights took place. Even when he lost individual battles the whole campaign was of his choosing. For him to be caught would necessitate someone out-thinking him on a level very few were shown as capable of - they'd have to predict his tactics, defeat them and in such a way he couldn't get away. Every time he DID lose, he escaped long before he was in danger of capture. For the 'main' heroes to have ever got into a position to be able to catch Thrawn he would have had to have made some serious errors.

I would disagree as to it being incidental to the heroes though - if Leia wasn't the daughter of Vader it would not have happened the way it did - ONLY she could have convinced the Noghri to turn on Thrawn, and she had to work hard at it.

 

Yeah, I think people are over-thinking this, his campaign is what was so artistically done.

 

Maybe in his last moments he was reflecting back on his youth and the paintings the so-called "admissions office" deemed not worthy of the Chiss Art School.

 

I feel vindicated.

His smile was a WISTFUL SMILE

 

This has aged like the finest wine. I just had to log in and bump it, with how Rebels turned out, and now with the airing of Ahsoka.

 

Imagine this, in his finale Moment Thrawn recognised the dagger that killed him... and understood it was not because of the Noghri, or Rukh, or the Rebels/NR... but a barely noticeable little design hidden on Rukh's dagger... a Sith symbol, and Thrawn suddendly knew, the rumors about the undead Emperor reborn are true. Despite machinating somehow through intermediaries that Thrawn was useful, he ended his rise to prepare his own... and in that would thwart the Rebels that celebrate victory over Thrawn, who died smiling, knowing their coming doom unable to tell.

 

Makes sense. I believe the Dark Empire Sourcebook claimed that Palpatine still had Noghri agents loyal to him during his rebirth period.

 

I think Thrawn broke the fourth wall and aknowledged how the artist (author) had written himself into a corner by making his villian (Thrawn) too strong and all knowing, so he was forced to have Thrawn grab the idiot ball with completly failing to recognize that Leia and Chewie were on Honogr, to find out about the Noghri´s slavish worship of Vader (and the wider implications of that) and his family, how using fear to control his opponents fails in its goals (something Thrawn actually aknowledges in book 1 but then unlearns in the second), or simply that have your personal be a bodyguard be a person you are consistently lying to is a really, really bad idea that already cost Palpatine his life(also why do you even need a personal bodyguard when you spend most of your time in the safety of your command ship?).
I think the Grand Admiral realized in that final moment of his that the story/art necessitates the bad guy to fail in the end and with him being the bad guy his end having now come. IU logic and character progression had been ignored for the sake of art to make the story work.

Though TBF already so much of TTT relies on happenstance.
Book 1 the good guys only win because the mole miners happened to be Lando´s.
Book 2 the good guys only don`t loose completly because Luke randomly leads them onto the flagship of the Katana Fleet (yes I know the force told him but lets be honest that is basically cheating) and before that chosing to blindly trust Mara, a woman who hasn`t even hid her hatred of Luke from him, over a Jedi Master from the old Order.
Book 3 is then the culmination of that, with things like Luuke Skywalker or the more or less random discovery of the delta source...

I think in his final moment Thrawn realized he was a fictional character and now had to die for the sake of art due to circumstance and happenstance...

 

Could always just ask Zahn himself, right? Isn't he on Facebook or Twitter?

 

Quite prescient for a post from 2014

He also in that final moment foresaw the eventual end of the EU and birth of the nu-canon, and realized if he went out with an epic final line he would become a legend amongst Legends, thus ensuring it would only be a matter of time before he would be reborn.

 

The thread should have closed after this

 

That's a good one. One of a bunch of early fan narratives that didn't quite stand the test of time.

But, sidv88 actually touches on a question in his original post that I've thought about on and off over the years - and I'm sure the EU-immersed folks here have talked about this in depth and long since come to a consensus: what role did the reborn Emperor actually play in Thrawn's demise? We all know what happened in TTT - Leia reveals Vader's deception to the Noghri, which leads pretty directly to Rukh assassinating Thrawn at the height of the Battle of Bilbringi. But the Dark Empire Sourcebook seems to add the hidden hand of Palpatine to those events:

"Still, no contender could ever be allowed to become too powerful. It was no accident when Thrawn fell. Palpatine never knew if Thrawn guessed that he was being used to divert attention from his own return."​

Was it ever revealed exactly how Palpatine was involved in the chain of events leading to Thrawn's death? If not, did fan debate ever settle on a theory? The thing that makes the most sense to me is that Rukh was secretly working for Palpatine - the DE Sourcebook also tells us that "he [Palpatine] still had his Hands and his Noghri" - but I'm not sure if the text of The Last Command supports that (I seem to recall Rukh saying something about avenging the Noghri after killing Thrawn, a comment that doesn't make much sense if Rukh is operating under Palpatine's orders).

 

Palpatine, IMO, used the Force to ensure that Thrawn wouldn't focus any attention on the Noghri home planet.

 

There's room for a bit of both - he was Palpatine's agent among the Noghri, there to kill Thrawn if Thrawn became overambitious - and he became angry when he found out from the other Noghri that Palpatine and Vader and Thrawn had all conned the Noghri into believing they were fixing Clone Wars damage when they were really "fixing" (very slowly) damage done by the Empire's own bioengineered plant.

 

I would much prefer it if palpatines power level of "most powerful evil space wizard and expert politician " not creep into "demi God of planning"

 

I feel like the main character should have some direct part of Thrawns defeat. As it stands things are set up, they take out the clones and his pet Jedi. Yet none of this affected Thrawn. The heroes aren't even there when he dies. Only one has a partial role in Thrawns death, rukh made his own decision, Leia is his ideological basis for his actions but he takes the decision fully himself.

So the heroes play no real part in the death of Thrawn, just Zahns OCs.

As to what was artistically done? Maybe his own life, or betrayal.

 

I think the ambiguity of the statement is part of what makes it such a great line. Would it stick in our heads so that we're still discussing it thirty years later if it were a matter-of-fact, straightforward line? The beauty of it is that we can never be truly sure what Thrawn was reflecting on when he said it. Was he ruefully lamenting the failure of his perfectly-planned campaign? Was he appreciating the narrative beauty of his unanticipated undoing by his own bodyguard, the skillfulness of his betrayal? You can apply the words to so many things, and like Rashomon, I don't think there's a single indisputable thing the audience can point to to establish the "truth" of what Thrawn is referencing. And it's that enigmatic nature, the fact that his final words pose us one last puzzle, that makes them so engaging.

On the main character thing, I think the story works better the way it is. Thrawn is set up as a tactical genius, and he winds up in battle against Ackbar with a chance to lose -- yet what ultimately undoes him is his hubris, the flaw that's been highlighted the whole series. Thrawn is overconfident in his genius, and he's undone by his arrogance in keeping a bodyguard who is enslaved by deceit, by yet another of Thrawn's oh-so-clever ploys, instead of one who is simply loyal. It is Thrawn's own apparatus of schemes that kills him when the truth is revealed by Leia's daring gambit. That's far more striking, far more dramatically satisfying, than any confrontation. Again, it's part of what makes Thrawn so iconic a character -- he remains a genius, but a genius who beats himself through hubris. If Han comes up with some scheme to defeat Thrawn in battle, it's just not the same. If Thrawn gets beat because Luke and Mara board his Star Destroyer, that's generic. That can happen to anybody. That's the thing about Thrawn: as compelling a character as he is, he's an impersonal villain. He doesn't have a personal connection to any of the main characters except somewhat to Mara, so it wouldn't really mean anything for them to face him. What's important about Thrawn is his threat to the New Republic, not his personal connection to the heroes, unlike Darth Vader or Emperor Palpatine, who wanted to corrupt Luke. So Thrawn is defeated impersonally, but by Leia's hand, while Zahn conjures another villain, Car'das, who can provide a more meaningful personal confrontation with the heroes, and occupies them in storming Thrawn's secret base of power and confronting Car'das. It all works out.

 

C'baoth, not Car'das. Car'das is the protagonist of Outbound Flight and the guy Karrde gets info from in Vision of the Future - the heroes of Yavin never come into conflict with him.

 

I am entitled to one brain-fart typo per post-10:00 PM post.

 

All has proceeded as this post from 2014 has foreseen.