#grysk

[knightofthenewrepublic]

[mayhaps-a-blog]

Also I am more and more enamored of a plot where it's all a trick. That's not Thrawn, Elspeth has been deceived, it's a trap and she walked right into it.

Like - it would be the perfect set up for a Grysk reveal. Thrawn isn't Force Sensitive. You know who are, kind of? The Agbui. And Elspeth's inner voice is probably screaming for a savior of her pretty perfect Empire, with Thrawn (possibly her favorite, being an alien and she being at least part Dathomirian and him also just being the best obviously to anyone not a human supremacist) at its head and her at his right hand (she gets to be pretty much in charge, he just does all the military stuff she doesn't want to handle anyway).

All it would take is a touch, and the right words to awaken a dream. Elspeth would do the rest herself, tricking herself into believing what she so desperately wants to believe. Skoll's an easy sell, he just wants power, and he brings Hati and Marrock with him. Between the four of them...

It would work so well. Heck, replace the Grysk with the Rakata and it works, they certainly have a history of whispering across the galaxy. Wind them up and watch them go, and may the galaxy forgive you.

[valkorianknight12]

Dayum Thrawn

[infinitepunches]

so is it the yuuzhan vong galaxy you think??

Who wiped out the Witch Kingdom of the Dathomiri? It's not easy to take on an army of Force users.

Why is Thrawn so anxious to "escape this galaxy"? Thrawn doesn't scare easy.

It's either the Vong or the Grysk.

[gratuacuun14]

YOU SEE THIS MAN?!?!?

This wonderful, cultured, courteous man?

The one and only Grand Admiral Thrawn.

Well, if they make him evil in Ahsoka, I will probably have a screaming fit and then break the TV. Seriously. He can be an antagonist, I don't care about that, but we saw in his new trilogies and even some Legends material that Thrawn actually has a softer side. And it's pretty prominent.

Who else thinks that they'll focus on the Grysk War instead?

Also, we NEED live-action Ar'alani.

I have spoken

[short-wooloo]

I really hate that the fucking human pet guy keeps popping up on SW tumblr

and he has some of the most irritating takes too

like how the Galaxy joining together to fight the sith in ROS shows that centralized government is unnecessary

never mind how the fleet from all over the galaxy was gathered and lead to exegol by Lando, aka was organized by a central leadership and didn't just show up on their own

And never mind how the first order rapidly conquered the galaxy precisely because they wiped out the central government, and in the absence of said central government many worlds adopted "look out for themselves" stances, which only further guaranteed the first order's successful conquest as those worlds had little chance of resisting alone

and that's just one thing, centralized government is needed in SW at the very least for dealing with common threats

threats such as...

What if the first order regroups and keeps fighting?

What if the mandalorians start conquering again?

What if we get another separatist type situation where a bunch of mega corps make a sham government that says its about democracy and self determination but really is just a corporate-military dictatorship?

What if Kanjiclub, the Guavian Death Gang, or other crime factions want to rank up from criminal organizations to actual territorial powers?

in a similar vein, what if the Hutts decide now's the time to make a comeback?

speaking of the hutts, If there’s no centralized government how do you effectively combat slavery? How do you keep slavery illegal?

What if one of the highly aggressive alien species from legends like the Ssi-ruu, the Yeventha, or the Yuuzhan-Vong get brought into canon?

what if the Chiss decide to give galactic conquest a try?

what if the Chiss start conquering worlds to harvest resources to fuel there wars against the Grysk, Vagaari, or other unknown regions powers?

what if the Yinchorri (big aggressive mind-trick immune turtles) start attacking like in legends?

which btw, was only stopped by a collective effort organized by Chancellor Valorum

Or what if stronger planets start bullying/conquering weaker planets, thus encouraging planets to create tangled webs of alliances between each other, and that in turn creates a WWI-type powder keg where a minor dispute between two planets drags their varying networks of allies into a galactic scale war?

Central government would be good for preventing that

it would also be good for enforcing a ban on superweapons and preventing the spread of that technology

very important in the post-ROS galaxy, as planet killers can now be mounted on smaller ships and mass-produced

(Not mine) The villains' plot in *The Phantom Menace* is only possible because Palpatine *takes the central government out of the picture*

and the backstory of SW is the centralized government has worked for several thousand years

so why does a few decades of it being deliberately sabotaged discount the entire concept?

Because they don't like the concept that's why

They are so obviously libertarian

I mean, their whole thesis comes down to "centralized government is unnecessary because if the collective people need some service or task done then people will just do it"

Textbook libertarian crap, the stuff that gets a town taken over by bears

And all the above is just the more dramatic exciting stuff

A central government is essential for mundane things like maintaining a universal galactic currency

Trade agreements

Consistent tax rates

saftey ratings being the same across the galaxy

Maintaining travel and communication infrastructure (eg hyperspace routes, however comms work)

exchange rates for more archaic currencies

[stuckinanotherfandomohno]

My absolutely ludicrous and improbable Ahsoka theory to keep Thrawn in character with my interpretation of him in the ascendancy novels goes as follows:

Thrawn and Ezra end up wherever (not important)

They are found by Captain Pellaeon, causing Pellaeon to suggest his return in Mando S3

Thrawn takes up his position as Heir to the Empire as Palpatine had to hand it off to someone vaguely competent

Ezra is being held in the brig or another secure location

Thrawn maintains the appearance of being a Grand Admiral of the Empire but actually reckons that it's going to fall to the New Republic so tries to covertly end up back in the Ascendancy, taking Ezra with him

Hijinks ensue

Ultimately, at the end of the Ascendancy trilogy, Thrawn's goal (vaguely) is to gain allies to help the ascendancy eliminate the Grysk threat. Could he have gone on a tangent and decided building up the Empire for power would be better for him? Sure.

But let me hope

[mandojediblogger]

Timothy Zahn wrote this in Thrawn: Alliances.

"Grysks are a species living somewhere in the Unknown Regions. Creatures half of myth, whom few have ever seen. It is said that they are nomads, with no fixed home, traveling in spacecraft so numerous they blot out the stars. They are said to be terrifying warriors, overwhelming their opponents by sheer numbers and ferocity."

―Thrawn, to Darth Vader

Do you remember Hera’s narration of the Rebels Season 4 trailer?

“It was a simple story, about a boy who was lost, and a girl who was broken. They fought alongside a survivor, a war veteran, and a fallen knight. I led them into battle against an evil so terrible, it tried to black out the stars. We fought for each other. We fought for those who could not. But we never imagined it would end like this.”

~Hera Syndulla

There’s that “blot out the stars” phrase again. Why is that significant? She was referring to the Empire, but what if the evil lurking in the Unknown Regions is an even greater threat?

I predict that in the Ahsoka series, she and Sabine Wren will discover that Thrawn and Ezra have disappeared into the Unknown Regions.

What if they encounter the Grysks there?

From wookieepedia:

The Grysks would enslave the minds and souls of beings, having twisted their desires, fears, memories, and hopes to their will, to be their "clients.” These new "clients" were then willing to fight and die for their new masters. Because of this, the Chiss ozyly-esehembo named Vah'nya believed it only took three Grysks to rule a nation and only one hundred to rule a world.

What if the Grysks have control over Thrawn’s brilliant mind and Ezra’s Force abilities? 😱 Maybe that will be what Ahsoka and Sabine will have to save them from.

Bring on the drama. 🍿

What do you think?

[ladyknight33]

Chapters: 8/? Fandom: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Thrawn Series - Timothy Zahn (2017), Star Wars: Thrawn Ascendancy Trilogy - Timothy Zahn, Star Wars: Rebels Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Thrawn | Mitth'raw'nuruodo/Eli Vanto, Thrawn | Mitth'raw'nuruodo & Eli Vanto, Ezra Bridger & Thrawn | Mitth'raw'nuruodo Characters: Thrawn | Mitth'raw'nuruodo, Ezra Bridger, Eli Vanto, Brierly Ronan, Ar'alani (Star Wars), Ba'kif (Star Wars), Thurfian | Mitth'urf'ianico, Thalias | Mitth'ali'astov Additional Tags: Imprisonment, Wrongful Imprisonment, Sky-walkers, Ezra Bridger and Thrawn | Mitth'raw'nuruodo's Space Adventures, Chiss Ascendancy (Star Wars), Non-Linear Narrative, Friendship, Developing Relationship, Developing Friendships, Friends to Enemies, Emotional Manipulation, Jedi Training (Star Wars), Made up Jedi Traditions and Training Series: Part 2 of Beyond a Galaxy Far Far Away Summary:

Thurfian sends bounty hunters to find and capture the stranded Grand Admiral Thrawn, ending with Thrawn imprisoned in carbonite stasis. It falls to the strange trio of humans in the Chiss Ascendancy to combat Ascendancy Laws and Chiss Traditions, if they hope to survive the inter-Family conflict.

[metataxy]

Sith Ezra and Thrawn in Wildspace, #2

Summary: What if Thrawn encouraged Ezra to cultivate the darker elements of his gift after they were stranded in wild space?

Following the first drabble, Thrawn explains to Sabine and Ahsoka everything that happened after the end of Rebels S4. 

----------------------------------------------------------

The Chiss had recovered Ezra and Thrawn amid a fight for their very survival.

The scattered sentient peoples of Wild Space had banded together to fight against the Grysk, but were failing miserably.  With each defeat, their enemy grew stronger, enslaving the conquered Chiss and their allies and turning them to fight against their own people.  

The best tools the Allies had against the Grysk came from intelligence Thrawn himself had delivered over the years on the methods of the Inquisitorius and other Jedi hunters.  Ysalamiri, sluggish, small reptiles from the planet Mykyr, could produce a small Force-nullifying field.  The Chiss’ small colony had been distributed in breeding pairs to senior command officers, to ward off any telepathic surveillance of their tactics, and ensure their autonomy remained uncompromised.  

Still better and still rarer than Ysalamiri were the other resources Thrawn had delivered them over the years, the sentient resources.  Thrawn could not and would not save every Force Sensitive he encountered from the Empire.  Some he could not save without compromising his position, others he judged unwilling to leave the fight in the Republic.  But Skywalkers were precious in Wild Space, and Thrawn found the Emperor’s slaughter wasteful.

So he sent them to the Chiss.  Jedi Shadows who would have been his assassins.  The unregistered children of the Jedi that would otherwise been sent to their deaths at Vader’s hand.  Sith Acolytes of the fallen Darth Tyrannus, who feared Vader’s reprisal for their support of their rival, or who chafed under Palpatine’s restrictions.  He gathered them and sent them all.  When they found their way into Wild Space, they stumbled across the Sensitives there already, the Exploracorps missions that had lost themselves there in the Purges, Fallen Jedi, the smaller Sith Lords with their coteries.  

There were no rivalries in Wild Space.  They were all refugees here.  Some joined the Chiss at the start.  Others struck out on their own.  But when the Grysk began harvesting them, with the intent to dominate them to navigate their ships, and steal their children for their own, the Force Sensitives of Wild Space joined the Allies and fought back, which was how they made the crucial discovery of the war.  

A sufficiently powerful empath could displace a Grysk queen and take her forces for their own.  

There weren’t many empaths though, and still less willing to destroy the free will of another, even when, as in the case of the Grysk, it seemed only justice.  The Jedi shrinked back from such an action, and while the Sith were willing, few had the empathic ability to counter the stronger queens.

By this point, Thrawn and Ezra had been stranded together with the remaining crew of the Chimaera for three years.  Whatever the admiral might have felt about Ezra’s destruction of his ship and the subsequent loss of life, the man had never been known to waste resources.  Their communication tech had been largely damaged when they’d crashed, their medical supplies were limited, and many of the survivors were wounded.  Their crashsite teemed with hostile wildlife.  Their survival depended on Ezra Bridger’s cooperation, and Thrawn took every effort to coax it from him, appealing as much to his need for companionship as his guilt at the loss of life.

And Thrawn?

Exiled again from the Syndicate, from culture and society, he had been bored, and the best outlet for his idleness had been the conflicted young Jedi who’d done it to him.  As Ezra became more at ease among the Imperials, Thrawn focused on cultivating him.  Martial arts, first, because the boy would be comforted by the familiarity of the routines.  Wilderness survival, a necessity, and a skillset he would not have learnt in the city streets.  Their simple proximity forced them to speak and brought them into conflict.  This also was an opportunity.  Their arguments became debates, the debates became discussions. Thrawn began to teach him history, rhetoric, politics, and the boy quietly began to read the limited files available on the ship’s databanks to confirm Thrawn’s lessons.

When the Grysk answered the distress call then, Ezra had been prepared.

Despite Thrawn’s warnings, he’d tried to treat with the Grysk, that first time.  It didn’t work, of course, and after the first of their crew was cut down, Ezra overwhelmed the lesser Queen of that vessel.  They’d taken the ship.  He’d tried to give the Grysk back their individuality, but when another Queen emerged among them, and they’d attempted to mutiny, he was forced again to assert his dominance.  Then, they found the Chiss survivors, and the small coterie of Force-Sensitives among them, and all of them—Sith and Jedi—recognized Ezra as what they’d been waiting for.

They’d taken him for training.  For weeks, Thrawn only saw him in passing, in the canteen, slumped over his rations; in the showers, bruises and burns raked up and down his sides.  And each time, the gold slowly creeping further into the blue of his eyes.  The Jedi of Wild Space, renegades and survivors all, were indifferent; some said bitterly that this would be better, easier for him, than otherwise.  And around the time the yellow had entirely replaced the blue in his iris, they pronounced him ready.

The Force Users, and Ezra most of all, destroyed the Grysk.  Ship by ship, they turned their own tactics and people against them.  Each successful attack brought another unexpected challenge: the liberation of captive Force-Sensitives.

Liberation from the Grysk Collective was never simple.

The Force Users, unlike the slaves, retained a measure of their free will, but their minds became more entangled with the Collective.  They became used to using the minds of nearby slaves and drones the way a central computer used external memory.  Even if the captive Force Users were willing to disengage from the Collective—and not all were—they had to undergo intensive mental and physical therapy with the Jedi Healers to relearn how to process their world within the single mind that belonged to them.  Even more difficult was relearning respect for the boundaries of nearby minds.

Almost invariably, they couldn’t release those who had been raised from infancy to adulthood as Grysk.  Those, they stranded together with their captors on the Grysk homeworld.  Captives who’d been imprisoned for less than a few years, or those who’d been taken as adults, were simpler.  

The children were difficult, in more ways than one.

There had been infants born to non-Grysk over the years, many with a Grysk parent.  The Jedi had balked at forcefully separating the children from their parents, while the Chiss had determined that the release of any number of half-Grysk into the galaxy ran the risk of future conflict.  Ezra considered both arguments and quietly made his own evaluations.  Many of the children did stay with their parents, but by that point, Ezra knew a handful of Force Users, mostly Sith, living in isolated locations who could be bullied into accepting a crècheling.  He took the most likely candidates for rehabilitation and matched them to Masters based on their psychic strengths.  

And while the Jedi would have been horrified at the prospect of raising children who’d already shown a capacity for dominating the will of others to the Sith, it had <i>worked</i>.  No Sith, least of all the curmudgeonly types living as hermits, would accept unsolicited psychic overtures from an apprentice, and all of them were wary of the Grysk.  The younglings had all received thorough lessons in respecting people’s privacy and autonomy.  Any that had shown signs otherwise would be killed in adolescence, either by their own Masters or Ezra himself.

Then, there were other children who had spent their formative years among the Grysk, but who’d spent those years fighting for their freedom.  They couldn’t help but internalize some of the Grysk’s practices but had enough individuality and moral sense to struggle with them.  Haster had been one of these.  She had been taken at the age of eight, along with her ExploraCorps mother and younger sister.  She’d been thirteen when Ezra had found her, already developing into an Underqueen, and entirely despised the Grysk.  She’d asked him for help.

He’d stranded her alone in a wasteland with a month’s worth of supplies near at hand, told her to meditate, and took her as his apprentice when she’d survived.

She’d understood.  Earlier, Ezra’s compassion had gotten civilians killed, when children incapable of functioning with only their own mind reached out in a panic and destroyed the will of any other nearby organisms with a functioning brain.

The early months of their apprenticeship hadn’t been no more easy.  Living with the Grysk queens had been a constant struggle for dominance, over her own mind and theirs.  Ezra was <i>the</i> Grysk Queen.  While he usually respected the privacy of her mind, he always anticipated when she was about to have an accident and invade the mind of someone else.  And in those cases, she’d always resisted, reflexively, when he gently and firmly blocked her attempts.  

It had become easier, in the past year.  Someday, he promised her, when all the accidents had stopped for awhile, he’d teach her how to do it the right way, gently, so that it didn’t harm the other person.  

Haster wondered how he’d retained that ability.  She wondered if, by the end of this war, if he would retain anything of who he’d been.

After all, there was an inherent risk to Force Users becoming entangled with the Grysk Collective.  And as the Grysk Queen, connected to thousands on thousands of the enemy, Ezra Bridger ran the greatest risk of them all.

[nebulousmistress]

Chapter 4: New Orders

Admiral Helmi Stiles has fallen. Completely. The Hive has him and it will never let go. He doesn’t even want it to, not anymore. Never again.

The Grysk are beginning to integrate knowledge and vocabulary of the First Order into the Hive. They’re beginning to understand now, just enough to know their own next step.

Definitely still hard into Spooky Season with this one. Turning the Spooky off come next story is going to be... difficult :3

[mayhaps-a-blog]

Next chapter of post-Rebels Thrawn is up! A little later this week, it's been busy, but hopefully things will even out soon :)

Summary:

There is progress! And a battle. At the last, a secret is revealed.

[infinitepunches]

your theory is making more sense every episode

I assume this is about Ahsoka and how I said a couple years ago that the Star Wars shows should culminate with the New Republic and Imperial Remnant being forced to work together to fight an extragalactic threat like the Grysk or the Yuuzhan Vong.

When Filoni said Thrawn was going to be the main villain of the movie, I thought there was no chance. But the introduction of a new galaxy, and the New Republic senate refusing to lend aid to Hera, it seems like a possibility.

That theory was mostly me hoping that Thrawn wouldn't be a straight up villain after reading the Ascendancy Trilogy.

[klazje]

ascendency era political intrigue show. you agree.

[leahikol]

I just wanted to see Anakin mispronouncing Thrawn's name and Vader in a Tie Defender. 😩😭