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Who is the greatest villian that the Star Wars EU has produced?

Thrawn. Calculating, ruthless and does not have to rely on superweapons.

EDIT: I also suspect this thread will turn into nothing but circlejerks shortly.

Thrawn.

Why? Well, unlike the others, he does not need *insert force power/new technology/huge amounts of resources here* - he relies on his intelligence.

Nom Anor is a close second, though. After all, to bring about the dissolution of the empire and manipulate it into civil war is no mean feat.

Thanas wrote:Nom Anor is a close second, though. After all, to bring about the dissolution of the empire and manipulate it into civil war is no mean feat.

Yeah, but didn't get twirl a moustache a few times?

I honestly prefer Thrawn because he was one of the Imperial Big Bads who wasn't evil just for the sake of being evil.

I voted 'other' meaning Aaron Allston's portrayal of the Warlord Zsinj and his second in command Melvar.

I'm honestly not sure there's much competition here; Thrawn has major advantages over most of the other villains in a variety of ways:

-Personal virtue: Sith lords and a lot of powerful Imperials tend to give in to vices or fail to display self control. Power corrupts. Thrawn isn't an ethical paragon by any stretch of the imagination, but you can respect him as a person rather than despising him for how vile he is.

-Competence: this one should be obvious.

-Effectiveness: Thrawn is portrayed as the kind of guy who'd be a significant threat without the plot on his side. As Thanas observes, he doesn't need the superweapon of the month to win battles, and he's actually got the talent to succeed even when his enemies aren't being idiots. Many authors fail to do this with their villains.

Can't we vote for that Traviss people hate so much?

Of this list it is clearly Thrawn, although he didn't quite deserve an additional duology of books after his death all about people still being irrationally scared shitless of him and disciples worshipping him.

Still, anytime that he is alive and "on camera" he is awesome, including his showdown with Jorus C'Baoth in Outbound Flight and his whipping the stormtrooper corps into shape in Tatooine Ghost.

I was a bit tempted to vote Cronal, but he's just too weird for me. He's a terrific villain for that particular story though, you just constantly want him to eat it, especially after his true nature is revealed. He also was brilliant tactically, tricking a New Republic battle group into flying headlong into their own mass murder. He may also be directly responsible for more deaths than anyone...other villains have ordered planetary destruction, but he Force-killed every single one of his own troops in an instant.

Other: Darth Maul.

Yeah yeah, I know that GL created him, but he didn't give us anything of substance other than cool look and cool lightsaber fight.
The EU 'produced' Darth Maul. Fleshed him out and made him interesting and more than just the one note henchman villain that GL gave us.

Thrawn's the easy first pick. No one's managed to top Zahn's creation, though Allston came close, in my opinion, with his take on Zsinj: he seemed to be a legitimate threat to the New Republic, without relying on the superpower of the week or some crackpot Force user to carry his weight, which is another of his unique characteristics that made him more three-dimensional.

Nom Anor's up there, as well. The way he played both sides of the war to survive and claw his way up the ladder was enjoyable to read.

I choose Onimi; the dude masterminded the most devastatin war in the galaxy's history, killed trillions for his own special reason's and expressed giddy joy in doing so. In short, a complete monster.

^That does not a good villain make, that is the senseless monster of the week.

Thrawn, however I would have preferred if he could have been portrayed how real military geniouses were thinking, by identifying and exploiting the rare and unseen opportunity, not with this pre-planning with nanosecond accurac stuff in cartoon villains. But all in all he was a credible character and way cooler than the PT villans also.

To be fair, the dude was batshit insane.

Where is Darth Revan on that list ?

bz249 wrote:Thrawn, however I would have preferred if he could have been portrayed how real military geniouses were thinking, by identifying and exploiting the rare and unseen opportunity, not with this pre-planning with nanosecond accurac stuff in cartoon villains. But all in all he was a credible character and way cooler than the PT villans also.

The problem with Thrawn is that only reason he seems like a genius is because everyone else is an idiot. His improvised tactics are more like cheat codes only he can use. Unlike a good commander he does not work with what exists. Instead the author of the book changes the rules of the star wars universe so that Thrawn can do the impossible. Take the Ysalmari for example. Thrawn needs to deal with hostile Jedi without killing them ? Forget about the problems of safely containing a Force user and creative ways to solve this problem. Lets just make a magic critter that neutralizes the Force. Voila ! Problem solved without wasting a braincell ! Thrawn is a genius who can pwn any Jedi !

Sarevok wrote:Where is Darth Revan on that list ?

Darth Revan doesn't really count as the villain of any piece, he's the main character. Unless he appears in comics set pre-KotOR1.

Sarevok wrote:

bz249 wrote:Thrawn, however I would have preferred if he could have been portrayed how real military geniouses were thinking, by identifying and exploiting the rare and unseen opportunity, not with this pre-planning with nanosecond accurac stuff in cartoon villains. But all in all he was a credible character and way cooler than the PT villans also.

The problem with Thrawn is that only reason he seems like a genius is because everyone else is an idiot. His improvised tactics are more like cheat codes only he can use. Unlike a good commander he does not work with what exists. Instead the author of the book changes the rules of the star wars universe so that Thrawn can do the impossible. Take the Ysalmari for example. Thrawn needs to deal with hostile Jedi without killing them ? Forget about the problems of safely containing a Force user and creative ways to solve this problem. Lets just make a magic critter that neutralizes the Force. Voila ! Problem solved without wasting a braincell ! Thrawn is a genius who can pwn any Jedi !

Did you never read the Thrawn trilogy? Or is there any other reason why you fail so spectacularly at what really happened?

Crazedwraith wrote:

Sarevok wrote:Where is Darth Revan on that list ?

Darth Revan doesn't really count as the villain of any piece, he's the main character. Unless he appears in comics set pre-KotOR1.

as far as know he barely appear in those and they're set before he fell anyway.

or in other words what we know about Darth Revan the sith lord that isn't second hand from unrelible sources?

speaking of the kotor comics, Haazen was a pretty good villian; he's like the protaginst, but the sheer evil and selfishness of his actions prevents the reader from sympathizing with him. And the scene where he revealed his plan and annihalated a bunch of jedi by hacking into a fleet was pure concentrated awesome. His breakdown was very well executed.

I hear the Thrawnwank is in full swing already. Since my distaste for Zahn's various idiosyncracies is well known, the others may not be surprised that I will not be joining. My choice is Emperor Palpatine, for the same reasons that Havok chose Maul. In tESB/RotJ he is fairly cool, in the prequel films an idiot, but the EU (select portions of it, at least) makes him a truly remarkable villain.

Serafina wrote:Thrawn.

Why? Well, unlike the others, he does not need *insert force power/new technology/huge amounts of resources here* - he relies on his intelligence.

No, he just needs magical foreknowledge of everyone else's intentions and plans provided by the unbeatable superpower that is author's fiat. Nevermind that Zahn's portrayal of military matters is bumbling and inept in general (as in, worse even than a lot of the rest of the EU), but his flagship character Thrawn works purely on Mary Sue. It amuses me no end that some people apparently think his Act-of-Plot "ZOMG-I-read-some-art-from-this-guy's-species-so-I'll-get-an-autowin-against-him-LOL!" ability to somehow be more realistic than the more overt magic displayed by C'baoth in the same series. It is frankly ridiculous when taken at face value.

Darth Hoth wrote:I hear the Thrawnwank is in full swing already. Since my distaste for Zahn's various idiosyncracies is well known, the others may not be surprised that I will not be joining. My choice is Emperor Palpatine, for the same reasons that Havok chose Maul. In tESB/RotJ he is fairly cool, in the prequel films an idiot, but the EU (select portions of it, at least) makes him a truly remarkable villain.

That makes sense. Wish I'd thought of that.
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Serafina wrote:Thrawn.
Why? Well, unlike the others, he does not need *insert force power/new technology/huge amounts of resources here* - he relies on his intelligence.

No, he just needs magical foreknowledge of everyone else's intentions and plans provided by the unbeatable superpower that is author's fiat. Nevermind that Zahn's portrayal of military matters is bumbling and inept in general (as in, worse even than a lot of the rest of the EU), but his flagship character Thrawn works purely on Mary Sue. It amuses me no end that some people apparently think his Act-of-Plot "ZOMG-I-read-some-art-from-this-guy's-species-so-I'll-get-an-autowin-against-him-LOL!" ability to somehow be more realistic than the more overt magic displayed by C'baoth in the same series. It is frankly ridiculous when taken at face value.

This is just a guess-interpretation:

I figure that Thrawn doesn't really work from the art; he just keeps his art collection around because he likes art, and occasionally uses it to illustrate a point. So when he says "Species X is terrified of the unknown, so if I pull something that looks impossible they'll panic and give me an opening to hammer them," it's not because he looked at a couple of statues; it's because he's been reviewing all kinds of stuff that's actually relevant during all those hours he spends contemplating shit.

But then Pellaeon or someone asks him "Admiral, what's the plan?" and he justifies it after the fact by pointing to the artwork. Most people with a decent level of intuition have had that experience of figuring something out, or at least feeling confident that it was true, before they could point to any one specific thing and say 'this is the proof'.
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And obviously that kind of intuition can be wrong, but it's there, and when it's well trained it can work quite well within its areas of competence. I think it's one of the big things that makes experienced people scarily effective. They look at the situation and they know roughly what to do before any normal person could even begin to size things up. But if you ask them why they're doing what they're doing, they may not be able to explain it unless they're also a good teacher along with being a good painter or troubleshooter or tactician. They may not even fully grasp it themselves, because if they had to think about what they were doing it wouldn't be as automatic and fast as it is.

So Thrawn, who is really good at predicting how an opponent will react to weird stimuli, doesn't necessarily understand how his own mind works well enough to deconstruct his own reasoning. Maybe he thinks he figures it out by decoding art because he likes art, so he seizes on the art as an explanation for his existing conclusions... conclusions that probably come from all the years he's spent studying whoever he's about to attack.

If you read Outbound Flight, his talent really is explained there. He does not look at art and then goes "ZOMG. I KNOW EVERYTHING" as Hoth so aptly strawmans. What he does is that he looks at information regarding a culture's patterns, their psyche etc and then combines it with his tactical knowledge. You can see it in outbound flight - he has fighters make an attack run, sees how the opponent reacts, then combines that information with other things (like formation, ship design etc) in order to get a grasp on the enemies thinking.

Then he tailors his strategies to those findings.

Except that is not how his "talent" is shown in the original trilogy. I did not read Outbound Flight, much like I have chosen to ignore most of what has come out of the EU since Bantam lost the license (I managed to slog through tNJO, and paid the price for that), so I cannot comment on that. In the trilogy, however, his abilities essentially amount to magical precognition and telempathy. Literally from the start to the end. In the very opening of Heir to the Empire he observes the formation of a fleet and immediately discerns (without any prior knowledge) that it is commanded by an Elomin, and then sets up a response with which that species is psychologically unable to cope. Then in The Last Command a major plot point is that he can second-guess the operational aims of the New Republic on the sole basis of knowing what pieces of art Ackbar and Bel Iblis favour (when the entire Imperial intelligence apparatus, with access to a galaxy's worth of the best analysts and computer assistance there is, fails spectacularly to do so, no less). His strategic/tactical "genius" is given no rational base - he simply "knows" things that no one else does (or, arguably, logically should, for that matter).

Now, Zahn might have gone back and corrected/moderated this at a later point, but the novels speak for themselves. Thrawn, just like Mara Jade, is a Gargantuan Mary Sue of Zahn's.