Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/09/06/grand-admiral-thrawn-focus-of.html
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YES! YES! TAKE MY MONEY! ER - my eyeballs!
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Looks like they are going to try and make him all Eeeevyllll, which I’m not on board with.
Thrawn should not be evil at all, that’s not what he was about.
Clone Wars and Rebels are much more about clouding the good/evil thing in Star Wars.
Thrawn is just very Empire.
Why do you think he is evil? I mean he isn’t a good guy, but his motivations seem to be to crush opponents tactically and with strategy - which IIRC was the original characters MO.
I think the story telling in Rebels is much better than the Clone Wars, so far. Not so say they didn’t have some good Clone War stories, but over all.
I explicitly don’t think he’s evil. That’s my problem with the clip. It looks like they are characterizing him as the kind of hand-wringing Mr. Burns creep you can find anywhere rather than the considerate, fair minded, but completely driven person he was.
I’d also like to see Gillead Palleon show up as a nice guy working for the Empire.
I’m just weird like that.
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Absolutely agree. Rebels is far grittier and was really the Star Wars story I’ve been waiting for. It is far more interesting to see this part of the post OE-Trilogy Star Wars universe develop than any of the others have been.
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Well let’s see. I know they using old references like him analyzing the art and culture of the enemy. It is hard to get how the character will play out, especially one that is more complicated, from a short trailer.
Wait… how is Thrawn not evil in the novels? It’s been a long time, but Thrawn is explicitly driven to join the racial purging and continuous war of the Empire with no real regrets about it - he’s just a good (as in well made) evil character and not a caricature.
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Game Of Thrawn’s.
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He only joined the Empire after he’d been exiled from the Chiss Empire and for the sole purpose of protecting his own people from the Yusang Vong (at the time referred to as “Outsiders”).
Sheev convinced him in Outbound Flight as to the dangers coming from outside the known galaxy and Thrawn had first hand experience with them.
Sheev did what he did for personal power, immortality, etc. Thrawn took the most apparent route to securing the future of his own people. That meant working with the Emperor.
If you look up the death tally from the Yusang Vong invasion it’s in the trillions.
When the Thrawn trilogy was written, there was no Yuuzhan Vong invasion being discussed. Yes, that was ultimately retconned into his backstory, but in the initial novels, he just thinks that the Empire is a better choice to rule the galaxy than the New Republic is.
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In the HoT trilogy he explicitly is dealing with a threat from outside known space. Much of the description of these threats match the eventual description for the YV. The fact that they were not named or fully fleshed out yet isn’t really the important factor here; the important factor is that Thrawn is established as an absolute pragmatist in the defense of his own people. The same books take multiple opportunities to show Thrawn as ruthless (executes an officer for deflecting blame from himself) and fair (promotes another officer for creative thinking, unusual in the post Clone War Empire, where the doctrine was to remove individuality).
This whole thing is expanded on in Outbound Flight (a prequel) where Thrawn again behaves both honorably and while efficient he is not cruel. His repeatedly stated objectives are the protection of Chiss space via the Chiss Expeditionary Force and he begins by trying to use persuasion on the Jedi led colonizing effort. Even when contacted by Palpatine (under the guise of Sidious) and encouraged to kill the colonists (or allow them to be killed by the ambush he’d just defeated in moments) Thrawn just tries to get them to go elsewhere. In that book C’baoth (not sure if spelled right, but I’m guess you know who I’m talking about) is really the villain.
Thrawn isn’t evil because his priorities are not evil. His priorities are generally noble and his nature isn’t even aggressive he does actually try peace, or at least deception or coercion before violence.
The problem is that for whatever reason he’s also an absolutist when it comes to the #1 thing he values (the Chiss) and he’s super competent at military matters so he applies himself in the area where he can exert the most influence in securing his objective.
I understand that there is a notion of “passive evil” of the evil of complicity and I agree with that. It’s easy for me to do so because I’m not really in jeopardy of losing that which I hold most dear if I don’t violate my own core beliefs. I also know that if you had a knife to my daughter’s throat I’d pretty much do anything you wanted. To Thrawn that is what the threat of the Outsiders was.
You should read Larry Niven’s book Protector. It’s about a hyper intelligent and incredibly powerful race that has an overwhelming compulsion. When you’re a competent genius with the ability to do pretty much anything your choices narrow down to nothing.
I love this show and the Guardians of the Galaxy animated show as well.
Now if only I could find some footie pj’s my size and watch these on the floor of my living room eating cereal from the box.
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Rebels and to some extent Clone Wars are really about these two opposing views of governance for the universe. Disorderly equality enforced by odd occultists, or very orderly government of, for and by the government. Both have good and bad points.
I’ve read both the Hand of Thrawn duology and Outbound Flight, and I can see where you’re coming from, but neither of those were things when the core character (the one we see in the original Thrawn Trilogy) was conceived.
The thing that disturbs me most about Thrawn is his treatment of the Noghri. These are people whose homeworld has been chemically destroyed, and he basically enslaves them to his will. Yes, they agree to serve him willingly as recompense for the cleaning up the contamination, but in order to prolong that servitude, he proceeds to go about that cleanup at a rate a tiny fraction of what it could be (even if he devoted zero additional resources to the effort and simply reprogrammed the droids to work faster and told the Noghri that the khomm grass was the cause of the issue so that they could uproot it themselves).
I understand loyalty to the ideals of the Empire, and to the preservation of his race, but, in my opinion, if the means are evil, the effort is evil, even if the ends are worthy. And so, by using the enslavement of the Noghri towards his own ends of asserting the Empire’s supremacy over the Rebellion/New Republic, he’s doing evil, even if he’s right (and he might have been, given the Vong invasion) that the Empire being in charge was the better option.
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