And this is worse than the Duology, which has everyone in the galaxy shit their pants based on the rumour that Thrawn the Magnificent Who Can DO NO WRONG has returned from the dead? Fuck, even the goddamn IMPERIALS were acting like little fanboys. "Yay! Thrawn's back! I saw him die but whatev. Now we can go kick some arse, because before now we were dumbshits who couldn't fight worth a damn."
Maybe so, but I thought in
Spectre of the Past(my memory is kind of hazy, it was a while ago that I read it) Pellaeon(who HAD watched Thrawn die) didn't believe that he was back, and I remember Leia(I think) saying that when Thrawn had mounted his last campaign "He had a quarter of the former Empire's resources. Now he back, but he has almost nothing."
C'Baoth wasn't bad, and I liked how Zahn added two adversaries like he did. Of course this was a stage where Thrawn-wanking hadn't been established to rediculous extremes. And the point about the guard was ultimately a point about Thrawn's overconfidence. He had a tendency in the novels to make leaps in logic and assumptions on people's motives; why must he be 100% correct ALL the time? Can't he make a mistake? An error in judgement? You know, like assuming those hitherto loyal and fanatical supercommandos wouldn't turn on him when they learned the truth about what he did to their homeworld?
I suppose, but it seems like the last thing Thrawn would do. This is a commander who went to the trouble of searching out and finding Ysalamiri to protect himself from C'Baoth erratically force-choking him, and who use planet's histories(The leaps in logic you mentioned) to mount tailored assaults on worlds. Neglecting to know the history of his elite bodyguards seems like a MAJOR oversight on his part.
Thrawn isn't a bloody genius you know.
AHA, AHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHA!
I actually DO think he's a genius. He may have made many leaps in logic, and used them to create strange tactics and strategies, BUT he managed to use them successfully to severely weaken the New Republic(not to mention the fact that as Curtis Saxton mentions on his site, Thrawn was almost denied shipbuilding areas, and had to spend a lot of time trying to find adequate resources). If a more conventional Admiral, say Pellaeon, had tried something like this, it would have royally blown back in his face.[/i]