>>115331075>>115330940EU Thrawn sucked. The original Thrawn Trilogy - Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, and His Last Command - were fantastic fucking books, the best stories in the entire expanded universe, infinitely superior to the "actual" sequel movies we got, and definitely better, bigger, grander, and more spectacular than the new Thrawn novels. But Thrawn the character fucking sucked.
He was a 1-dimensional villain whose asspull bat-shark-repellent-logic Moriarty "characterization" was invariably a cheap copout to move the plot along by reading ahead in the script. His "muh art deduction" was cheating bullshit, and his toady Pellaeon was an even less-developed buffoon than the Grand Admiral himself. They were nothing more than suitably mean and artificially threatening bad guys to give the actual main characters of the series - the OT heroes and Mara Jade - an obstacle to overcome in a sufficiently satisfying resolution. (see pic related)
The new Thrawn novels are not, strictly speaking, as good as the original novels. But they are better written. The scale and scope of them is not as galaxy-spanningly wide or as history-definingly epic as the originals, but what they do better than anything else is make villainous characters actual CHARACTERS. Thrawn himself is a fully-realized genius with an interesting backstory and motivations at that, Pellaeon's archetype is split into 3 different personalities - Eli Vanto, Thrawn's protege; extant character Colonel Wulff Yularen, director of the ISB (and whom Pellaeon came to resemble even though he never looked like that originaly); and Commodore Karyn Faro, Thrawn's second-in-command of the ISD Chimera - as well as backstories for Governor Pryce, Krennic's cronies, Anakin's transformation into Vader, and the Chiss ascendancy itself. All of these are given the respect they deserve in a skilled literary talent that Timothy Zahn has worked for 40 years to perfect.
