Musings On Thrawn

Musings On Thrawn

Let me begin this by stating up front; Thrawn is a villain. A brilliant, fascinating, charismatic villain, but a villain nonetheless. He is Holmes and Rommel and Moriarty all rolled into one. (Please don’t hate me for this.)

And I’ve tried to keep that front of mind as I have been writing this massive Alexsandr Kallus fic, Especially now that I am into the cat and mouse section where Kallus is spying for the rebels as Fulcrum, but having to interact with Thrawn on an almost daily basis. 

To prepare to write this I reread all the Thrawn books. I even read the first Heir to Empire, and if people thought Thrawn was vile in Rebels he was far worse in that Legends novel. I’ve also been rewatching a number of Rebel’s episodes.

In the books Tim tries very hard not to have Thrawn be as loathsome as Tarkin or Vader and succeeds, but it’s still important to remember he is not a good, kind man. Yes, he tries to limit civilian casualties… when possible, but he won’t let the death of innocents stand in the way of a victory. In the end it’s always about the cold equation.

In the Ascendency novels he makes it clear to Admiral Ba’kif that he would have destroyed the planet Sunrise and all of its inhabitants in order to destroy the Grysk threat to the Chiss. And he would have leveled Capital City if Ezra had not capitulated.

He also uses and discards his own troops in the service of tactics and strategy. In Treason he cold bloodily sends a number of Tie pilots to their deaths to verify his theory about the alien’s battle tactics. War for Thrawn is like a giant game of tactica or chess.

I do love the fact that Thrawn was the perfect Chiss to send into Lesser Space to serve in the Empire. While Thrawn, unlike many of his fellow Chiss, is able and willing to work with aliens he comes from a culture that is every bit as bigoted as the high human cult in the Empire. Which is another reason he can so easily slide into serving Palpatine.

Basically, he seems to be a man who has great difficulty forming personal relationships. (To be fair Tim has no choice, but to write books that focus on battles and strategy and political skullduggery and not much on the inner lives of the characters, and it certainly provides fanfic authors a rich playing field. Actually that is one of my complaints about the books. Nobody seems to have any personal attachments. Eli blithely waltzes off to the Ascendancy without a thought for his parents, but I digress). 

So, to lay our Blue Meanie on the coach for a moment….

All of his relationships take the form of mentor to mentee whether it’s with Thrass or Ar'alani or Samakro or Che’ri or Faro or Eli. And his emotional reactions to Thrass’ death, or sending away Eli seem very muted. The books do give us a potential reason for this reticence – the loss of the sister. The fear that he would be hurt again makes him avoid deep relationships and leaves him isolated. 

At his core, I think Thrawn is a man of the mind and not the heart. I think he fears strong emotion, passion because it might cloud his judgement, and open him up to pain again. 

All of which combines to make him a tragic figure. Which really is the best kind of villain. The ones who had the possibility to be heroes, but are brought low by their own fatal flaw.