Thrawn's character is a perfect example of how expansive the Star Wars universe can be. He was created by author Timothy Zahn as part of the Legends stories (essentially Star Wars stories not counting the feature films that occurred prior to Disney purchasing the franchise), and thus isn't mentioned in any of the feature films. Yet he now plays an important role in the greater Star Wars canon as Disney has included him in their series. I've never read any of the Legends stories, so for me he was first introduced in Rebels. He is one of the main antagonist facing against the rebel group, which includes Ahsoka Tano, Padawan Ezra Bridger, and Jedi Kanan. From a timeline perspective, the Rebels stories fit in after the prequels and before A New Hope, as the Empire has gained power over the Republic. Thrawn is portrayed as a brilliant officer in the Empire's military. The last time we saw Thrawn on screen, he was on a ship with Ezra that was launched into hyperspace with an unknown destination. Fast forward through episodes IV-VI, where the Mandalorian show picks up after the events on Endor. As Ahsoka's character is introduced to film for the first time, she reveals her objective is to find Thrawn. Presumably this is to also find Ezra, and likely this storyline will continue in Ahsoka's featured show.
When I started reading Star Wars books, I was afraid this would happen. I was afraid I would get confused with unknown characters and unknown planets, etc. Thus far this has not been too big of an issue. Since Light of the Jedi took place 200 years prior to the Clone Wars, those characters and places were new and so my confusion existed a bit in that book, but to a minor degree. This changed with Ascendancy - Chaos Rising. The book takes place beyond the Star Wars galaxy, in a location called the Chaos. The main characters and locations are unfamiliar, and thus a lot of time was spent in this book building the environment, and the plot suffers because of this. Specifically, the race of the main characters, including Thrawn, are called the Chiss. As an example of the confusion, Thrawn's actual name is Mitth'raw'nuruodo, born as Kivu'raw'nuru and has the core name Vurawn. Many of the characters have similar confusing names, which makes keeping characters straight difficult at times. As another example, the Chiss use navigators called sky-walkers, who use a version of the Force called third sight to help navigate hyperspace, but they have nothing to do with Luke Skywalker. The author has memory chapters in between regular chapters where he highlights events in the past. These also become confusing because it is somewhat difficult to figure out where in the timeline the memories take place. Some of them seem quite old, whereas others seem to take place near the events of the book. To make a long story short, by about page 200 I was getting used to the nomenclature, but by this point in the book the fine details of the story were a bit fuzzy. After reading a couple of reviews on the book, I think my fuzziness is OK. Getting caught up in the details isn't important. The plot was very thin, and I doubt the details carry over to the next books. This book was all about setting up the Chiss world and culture, which once I got used to the nomenclature I think I grasped the ideas.
The Chiss have a unique culture that revolves around nine families and their political power. They have a military, but generally their military stance is to stick to themselves and not get involved in the affairs of the rest of the Chaos. Thrawn was adopted into one of the nine powerful families. He has a brilliant military mind, highlighted by his interest in other culture's arts and society. He uses information from their paintings and artifacts to gain knowledge on their mindset, and thus their military strategy. Despite his military brilliance, he lacks any kind of political knowledge, which is essential in the Chiss culture. Most likely, this will be his demise on this planet. In this book there were grumblings of taking Thrawn down due his military aggressiveness which often times were at odds with Chiss ideals, but nothing happened. During these discussions, the story was often told through the lens of characters other than Thrawn, which was a bit odd since he was the main character.
Overall I thought this book was OK, but it was the worse one I've read thus far. The plot was nearly non-existent. The majority of the book was spent building the Chiss and Chaos worlds, which I suppose was necessary since they are new environments to the Star Wars universe. I'm hoping that Zahn takes what he's built in book one and expands upon it in books 2 and 3 to develop an interesting story around a potentially interesting character who now has a much expanded role in the Star Wars canon.
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