Books Thrawn: Treason by Timothy Zahn Summer 2019

"Evil" is quite a strong word that gets thrown around a little too easily for my taste.
(To be clear: Not being evil does not automatically make one good.)

To me, both canon and legends Thrawn starts off pragmatic and becoms increasingly ruthless in the pursuit of his goals.
He doesn't commit atrocities for the sake of it or exterminates people because they are not worth living. Neither does he seek personal glory.
He wants to safeguard the survival of his people and sacrifices more and more principles along the way.
(As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.)

That's why he is such a compelling villain for me. I get his motivations, why he chooses to join the Empire and (in legends) decides to take on the New Republic.
That doesn't make him a hero. At least not in the eyes of our Rebel/Republic protagonists.

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I want Thrawn to be on the side of Ezra in whatever they’re cooking up for the post ROTJ era.

For me the only real blight on Thrawn’s nu canon version was when he almost murdered that guy for not appreciating art in that one Rebels episode.

I don’t really remember him explicitly doing anything “evil” in Rebels or the new Zahn books. Make him Star Wars Vegeta!

 

Morad Sumar.

Also, the bombardment of Lothal.

 

Please don't forget that Rebels is a short-format comic show. Things are more simplistic because there wasn't enough time for nuance.

(One of my issues with using Thrawn as a villain there... Works better in books for me.)

Although the Morad Sumar scene fits quite well with the one from the legends trilogy where Thrawn has a hapless navy staffer executed for incompetence & refusing to own up to a mistake.


It's funny how we are supposed to find Thrawn despicable for blasting Lothal from space but the Rebels blowing up Imperial HQ with everyone in it - no matter their station or level of loyalty - is portrayed as a heroic act.

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Morad Sumar was a saboteur who caused the deaths of countless Imperial soldiers, he was by no means an innocent.

 

Actually, I thought that was a nice character beat. And I don't think it was really about appreciating art.

If you watch the episode again... this happens when he unmasks Hera Syndulla. If it had been up to the soldier in question, Hera's confused slave act would have worked. Thrawn not only catches her, but spends several minutes talking through the thought process of how he caught her. That was at least partly for the benefit of the soldier, so he would see how she slipped passed his blind spots, how he could have identified her, so that he wouldn't let that happen again. Only instead of taking notes, the soldier just spends all that time blustering pointlessly to cover up his embarrassment at having been played, and totally ignoring that Thrawn is trying to teach him something. Thrawn snaps at the end because he's tired of the idiot missing every point he's trying to make. And almost immediately recovers, and realizes there's no point in trying to wise him up. The subtext of "I'm sorry, I forget not everyone appreciates art like I do" is "I'm sorry, I forget some people are just too dumb to be educated."

Or at least that's how I took it.

 

Understated as it is, in the EU and new canon Thrawn does have quite the temper when he is rarely agitated.

 

I imagine if C'baoth was made canon, then canon Thrawn would be agitated more often.

 

C’baoth’s canon debut is long overdue.

 

This is a great analysis. If you notice in Zahn’s books, Thrawn is always trying to be a teacher. Even with someone like Anakin, who in any other situation would never be anyone’s Watson, Thrawn took on the teacher role. It’s how he relates to people. The Imperial officer wasn’t having any of this, probably because the Imperial military culture is that when your superior is explaining a mistake to you, it is always 100% a bad thing. He therefore took the whole conversation with Thrawn as a personal attack and responded to that by being defensive.


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Yeah, exactly. Thrawn cultivated Pellaeon and more briefly Jorj Car'das like this in the old EU, and Eli Vanto in the new one. He just... after five minutes, could tell that this wasn't going to be one of these guys.

It reminded me of a line from old canon: "Anyone can make an error. But the error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it." That guy was refusing to correct it, no matter how hard Thrawn was trying to help him do it.

That's a really good point about Imperial military culture. It hadn't occurred to me, but yeah, it's probably not all that guy's fault.

In old canon especially, but not just there, I always got the sense that the Empire cultivated this sort of arrogant blustering... dumbness in its officers. Palpatine doesn't, as a rule, want his servants to be smart and self-reflective. Sure, he recognizes that there are special and talented beings like Darth Vader or Thrawn who can be of use to him and he cultivates them in his own way - but that's not what he wants his baseline officer to be like. That probably applies to both the guy Thrawn lost his temper at, and 90% of the superiors that guy has had over the years. Which explains at least partly why he is the way he is, or at least why he never got better.