Complaint first, thrawn suffers from the same problem as Sherlock homes in that their genius is a contrivance of the author. I.e. they know perfect things because they’re written to.
Other than that the books are well written & paced. Amongst the best Star Wars books there are.
They could have taken them and turned them into episode 7-9. Even had an explanation for Palpi in there.
These are the sequels in my mind regardless of what Disney says. They will probably be pulled from further for future TV and film. Thrawn is arguably the second most interesting antagonist after Vader.
And they completely missed the mark in Ashoka.
Ahsoka is the Jedi. Ashoka is the Maurya emperor who became a Buddhist.
Thrawn is one of the few fiction villains who is also written as an effective leader. It makes him scarier.
And his ending is perfect.
Even though most of his troops are very loyal, his downfall comes from one of the many people he abused during his rise to power.
That he is a very different threat than Vader and the Emperor helps preserve the accomplishments of the heroes in the movies. He doesn’t feel like he is undoing events and resetting the setting back to a status quo. Thrawn is a character that exists in the natural evolution of the setting.
I really love how his plans come from being in the underdog position. The first book especially is him making a clever play for resources while having almost none of his own.
Plus, he has the scariest, most genius trait a Star Wars military leader can have:
A vague understanding of physics.
He was UNSTOPPABLE.
Everyone is gushing over Thrawn, and I agree, but I want to give some attention to how Luke, Han, and Leia all acted and talked like they did in the movies.
The books captured Luke’s optimistic and patient attitude, Han being clever yet rash and coating it all in a veneer of half baked one liners, and Leia seeing right through Han’s BS and in being very practical.
Being very early EU material, the books have such a different tone than works made after the universe was fleshed out. The Jedi order was treated as something so long gone that even records of it were hard to come by, the clone wars were vague and the implications about them set a very different picture than what was later established, and even the sith as a coherent order weren’t thought of yet- instead there were Jedi and fallen Jedi.
The feel of the books rode such a perfect line, being easy to follow but compelling.
It set a high bar for everything that followed.
It was a great trilogy. Some of my favourite SW books
The original Thrawn trilogy is good, but I personally prefer the reboot trilogy by Zahn. That’s the character that we saw in Rebels, although he has a lot more depth in the books. His motivations for rising through the ranks of the Empire are not what you would expect them to be.
The second new trilogy goes into Thrawn’s youth and culture, and while I still enjoyed those three books as well, I think you basically have to love Thrawn’s character to get through them.
After a long drought of anything Star Wars, this was very welcome and it turns out it was a great story as well.
I also remember the Dark Horse adaptation being really good as well.
I’m in the process of reading it now. Just finished the 1st book, Heir to the Empire yesterday. So far I’m really enjoying the series. The audiobook is wonderfully done.
One might even say it was…
so artistically done.
(This is a reference for later)
