Talking to some friends the other day, and the topic of "worst Star Wars character" bubbled up, because the only thing people who like Star Wars love more than liking Star Wars is disliking Star Wars.
Dull and usual contenders bounced around, the usual suspects, but when it game to me, I looked inside my heart and knew the truth of it:
The only answer could be "Grand Admiral Thrawn."
Which is not to say Grand Admiral Thrawn is a bad character. Far be it, he earned his reputation as one of the great Star Wars baddies twice over, first in the EU and then again in the Disney era. He's a fantastic character top to bottom, a clever subversion of audience expectations and a legitimate threat whenever deployed.
It's just, he's in the wrong genre.
See, the problem of Thrawn, the sin of Thrawn, the bit of Thrawn that breaks Star Wars forever and hangs like an albatross about his neck forever is that Thrawn convinced a generation of fans that Star Wars is military sci-fi. That it can be understood and discussed as military sci-fi, that it can stand up to the rigor of that analytical mindset, that the universe needed facts and figures and troop deployments and logistics and--
and it loses sight of the heroic fantasy of it all. 1
Thrawn convinces you that Star Wars is something it is not, can never be, and grows the resentment in your heart when it never attempts it. I think more deliterious fandom can be traced to the precise militarism of Grand Admiral Thrawn than any other element in Star Wars.
Which is to say, the comments are open for this post...
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To wit, another person in this discussion said that Ahsoka was their pick for worst character, and mentioned the continuity issue her lack of action during the Original Trilogy introduces. For them, Ahsoka's absence in the historical record indicated a failure. But if Atalanta isn't on the Argo's manifest, you don't regard it as a historical fact, but simply imagine she leapt on at the last minute, and sailed with Jason all the way to Colchis. The untold story is as potent as the told one, when the universe is myth, not history.
