Lit Which of the movie Sith has the EU done the best at "expanding"?

Which of the Sith in the movies has the EU done the best at "expanding" and fleshing out, beyond what we already knew about them in the movies? (Though when it comes to Vader/Anakin, focus only on Vader, to be fair). Both Legends and NU.

This is NOT "favorite," it's a discussion on which character was most flesh-out beyond the movies.

Please explain your choice(s).

 

Any of them besides Dooku, who has been extremely poorly served in both the old and new continuities.

 

Sheev without a doubt thanks to the Plagueis novel.

 

Does Darth Plagueis count?

 

Palpatine without a doubt.

 

Eh. I'm not happy with my answer. I went with Maul, because on the one hand I'm glad he's getting attention and they've certainly done a lot with him, but.... ick. I'm not a fan of how emo he's become. He's like Kenny from South Park, but never dies. Every time he shows up you're waiting for the next awful boot in the rear he'll receive. You know he's going to do something horrible to someone and have something horrible happen in return to himself every single time he shows up.

And I absolutely agree with Vthuil -- Dooku has just been.... wasted. Sometimes there was a glimmer of something in the old EU. That comic where he almost got married, except like literally you could take him out of the comic and just have people talking about him and it wouldn't matter because he was stone-cold most of the time and the ending didn't amount to anything. Or the second Agent of the Empire... but still, not much on Dooku himself. Maybe the Jude Watson stories... but again, he didn't really do anything.

Maybe that book he tripped over the pet fox. Dark Rendezvous. That came closest to hitting the mark.

DP... yeah, Sheev was ok in that.

Anakin. *snort* TCW Anakin is awesome but he'll never explain why ROTS Anakin sucks so much. Nothing EU can explain why ROTS Anakin sucks so much.

 

I don't know just by volume how Vader doesn't dominate this.

Sheev has Darth Plageus.

Maul has ... four dedicated books (three?) and a comic.

Dooku has basically a few clone wars appearance.

Anakin? Jedi Quest, Episode 1 adventures Jedi Trial, Dark Lord, several vader mini-series in both old and new canon, Life of Darth Vader book, and appearances in almost everything in both old and new EU.

 

Dooku almost married? The heck?

 

The problem is that they've all had both good and terrible material. Vader has a lot of great, great material that served the character well, but he also has all that terrible post-ROTS emo-Vader crap that proliferated at the end. Some of the stuff done with Palpatine is just brilliant, but some of it is silly, most of it doesn't dig into him very deepy, and Darth Plagueis was the most concentrated look at the character and it . . . wasn't what he needed. Dooku has massive potential that a handful of works have brushed on, but mostly he's been horribly, horribly misused, easily the worst-served of the movie Sith. And Maul . . . the TPM-era Maul material is actually quite good in general. A lot of it is surface-level stuff but it uses the character well, and there are some bits that really did give him some character. None of it's really terrible. That all changed, however, when the ridiculous decision to resurrect him came around, because everything related to that is pretty much absurd garbage that has the side effect of making the apparent main narrative thrust of "the Clone Wars," as depicted by the new material, about how the Clone Wars . . . were also a time in which a resurrected Darth Maul created a completely random faction out of random criminal gangs and fought both sides in a random and wholly unrelated, but coincidentally-timed, conflict. (I can't wait until Rebels distracts itself into becoming a show about how the early Rebellion only won its first victory against the Empire when it stole the Death Star plans because beforehand it had to spend the Galactic Civil War keeping Zombie Count Dooku from taking over the galaxy with an army of Gungans.)

So, long story short, if you cut out his stupid resurrection, you could actually make a case for Maul as the Sith whose expansion was the most overall positive, but really, it's got to be Vader or Palpatine. I'm going to go Palpatine, because it's very rare that authors screw him up, rarer than with Vader, and there's been some incredibly brilliant dark twisted stuff with him. The Dark Empire Sourcebook is basically dedicated to making Palpatine awe-inspiringly evil. When Vader's done right, though, it's better than any other Sith's treatment, by far.

 

How exactly did Darth Plagueis fail Palpatine's character half the book was about him?

 

I believe it's Hero of the Confederacy that's being referred to - this was the person he was opening marriage negotiations with:

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Elodore_Vane

 

I chose Palpatine-- simply because I haven't read a lot of Maul's EU stuff (he's not exactly a character that interests me, and his expansion in TCW was just... sad. Maul did not strike me at all as the kind of dude who would hole up on some crappy backwater planet and go crazy. I would have believed it 100% had he actively sought revenge on Kenobi instead of doing that spider... whatever that was), I don't know much about Tyrannus in the EU, and pretty much any EU/NU book I've picked up (though few they are) that had anything about Anakin or Vader in it was ultimately disappointing. Darth Vader, to me, is a better movie character than he is a book character.

Darth Plagueis really takes the cake for me as far as EU material that expands one of the four listed above goes.

But I suppose if we were to rank it by who's had the most expansion rather than the most quality expansion, Vader comes first, followed by Maul, then Palpatine, with Dooku coming last.

 

Of course he does. His public persona was a banker, I believe.

 

Thanks Iron_lord. Never read that one

 

I'm not the biggest fan of the book's take on young Palpatine, and having Palpatine be the apprentice into TPM itself is just ridiculous.

 

10 years before TPM would have been fine.
To give wiggle-room for if Plagueis created Anakin or not.
But through TPM? No thanks.

 

Did you read the end of the book? By TPM he wasn't the learner any more, he had playing Plagueis as a fool for the past 15 years at least! De jure yes he was still the apprentice but he had mastered just about everything he needed by the end of TPM.

 

It was still a mistake.

 

This is an interesting discussion, before 2008ish I would have Dooku. During AotC he wasn't that interesting but the Clone Wars comics made him may fav Sith of the Era. He was very much 'the Emperor of the CIS'. I don't like him in the new stuff. But I still think the comics and books fleshed him out very well (RotS is a big art of this but not all)

On Palps as an apprentice. I used to agree with Havac. But upon re-reading, I now think that Plaps was just keeping his master around until he found a real apprentice. After the nuke goes off Plaguie is a recluse and Plaps is running the show. So it doesn't bother me too much.

 

Maul. Because in every other case, it's looking at different aspects of their character and their past, which is not to be dismissed casually - but in Maul's case, the EU is the only reason he HAS any character at all and isn't just the dude with the double-bladed lightsaber who died in Episode One.

 

...but he did.

They even named the episode "Revenge"!

 

Yeah but without spending years cooped up on whatever planet that was, first

 

I never understood the appeal of Darth Maul. He's the equivalent of the Nazi Mechanic and Giant Sherpa from the Indiana Jones movies; an Elite Mook who's there to give the main character(s) a hell of a fight, and then die. He's excellent at that, by the way - the battle in TPM is my absolute favorite lightsaber battle in all of the Star Wars films. And the Terminator-esque persona - a driven and determined tracker, a man of few words who could kill you with a flick of his wrist - is fine, and was the root of a few good books or comics. But I don't see the need to develop him beyond that - there was no need to bring him back from the dead, give him a brother, make him into a criminal mastermind instead of the blunt instrument he was, etc.

 

Darth Vader's finest moment in the old EU was Shadows of the Empire, for my money.

While the new universe still feels like New Coke to me, I'm glad that they've brought back that persona of Vader as an absolute badass.

 

Amusingly, he's the Prequels version of DARTH VADER. So, it would have been a good idea to have him survive and threaten everyone for the remaining two movies.