When Disney and Lucasfilm made the decision to officially break away from the old Expanded Universe and establish a new continuity for ‘Star Wars,’ a lot of fans were extremely disappointed and disheartened to lose a lot of memorable storylines, and more importantly, characters. Fortunately, the Lucasfilm group has been able to find ways to insert a lot of those fan favorite characters back into official continuity to some degree (with relative degrees of success), but there was one character that fans wanted to make sure was done right, and luckily for us all, it was a sentiment shared by the folks in charge of ‘Star Wars.’
Grand Admiral Thrawn was the villain that basically launched the expanded universe when Timothy Zahn wrote the Thrawn Trilogy back in the 90s and his inclusion in ‘Star Wars Rebels’ this year has been very well received, mainly because of the care taken to do the character justice, which Timothy Zahn recently spoke of during a panel at Seattle, Washington’s ‘Emerald City Comic Con’ while promoting his new book, ‘Thrawn.’ Apparently back in September of 2015, he was made aware of the plans for Thrawn when he was asked to sit in on a big meeting about ‘Star Wars’ and Dave Filoni was in attendance. It was then that they let Zahn knew that his beloved Grand Admiral would be the main villain for ‘Rebels’ Season 3. Zahn thought the decision was very smart, though he was curious about why he was there, and that was when they asked him to do a Thrawn novel for the new canon and to tie into the character’s appearance in ‘Rebels,’ a novel which is set to come out next month.
And for those fans who may think that Zahn is unhappy to see his original Thrawn work out of the main continuity, it seems he is pretty pleased with where the character is at right now. Even when a fan asked him his thoughts on Thrawn “losing” in ‘Rebels,’ Zahn pointed out that Thrawn was playing the long game all season, and technically as of the ‘Rebels’ Season 3 finale, Thrawn did win, as he routed Phoenix Squadron out of their hidden base, removed the spy in his midst, and destroyed most of the Phoenix Squadron Fleet, not to mentioned pre-empted their attack on Lothal, which all sounds like Thrawn came out on top to me. And Zahn clearly sees a lot of potential for the character in the new continuity, as he wants to do more writing with him.
Here’s an excerpt from ‘Far Far Awar Radio’s ‘ recap of a portion of the panel that dealt specifically with Zahn’s plans for future Thrawn novels:
“Right now, he is pitching Thrawn sequels to Del Rey… He semi-seriously says that he has to do four books with Thrawn, because they’ve already done a Thrawn Trilogy and a Thrawn Duology. One of the sequels he’s pitching involves Thrawn and Anakin Skywalker’s backstory, because someone asked ‘Well, wouldn’t Thrawn have met Darth Vader at some point?’… So that’s kind of the little tidbit he gave us… That is one of the ones he wants to write about.”
I know I would be very intrigued to see Thrawn and Vader team up, especially in novels written by Zahn, and with the new continuity, anything is possible. What are your thoughts about Thrawn in ‘Star Wars Rebels’ and in general nowadays? Are they really doing the character justice? Feel free to share your opinions in the comments below!
Source: Star Wars New Net