Quote Originally Posted by Sapphire Guard View Post
Spoiler: C'Baoth Thrawn Relations
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My reading of this book is that C'Baoth was thoroughly trounced. His ship was effectively disabled, every Jedi but Lorana was dead, and C'Baoth himself was heavily wounded. Thrawn didn't anticipate the Force choke, but that was immaterial really, the battle was lost and all it meant was instead of 'I push this button' , 'a man standing beside me pushes this button.' Not significant, especially in the face of 'I can use TF droids better than the TF, Interdictor fields better than the Vagaari, and anticipate the consequences of Force powers better than the Jedi. I knew nothing about any of these things two months ago'

Aside: One of my disappointments with TTT is that we never truly got a proper Thrawn/C'Baoth confrontation. They spent scene after scene building the tension, and then nothing happened. Might have been interesting to have Pellaeon take charge at Bilbringi (which would also show the trust and respect that was missing from their interactions) and take an ISD or two to lay siege to Mount Tantiss.

Spoiler: Outbound Flight and C'baoth
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Original-flavor C'baoth was beaten, yes, but Thrawn didn't anticipate him deciding to pull an Ahab and trying to take Thrawn down with him (as opposed to accepting defeat and not needing to go down at all). Or didn't anticipate that he would be able to do so effectively? One or the other. The button Doriana pushed was not supposed to be used on Outbound Flight, doing so ruined his plan to annihilate the Vagaari and resulted in a bunch of civilian casualties that Young Thrawn still cared enough to avoid.

I'm not trying to argue against his hypercompetence in general, but he did slip up here, and it cost him some.

Re the original trilogy: yeah, it's a bit odd that the struggle between clone-C'baoth and Thrawn never gets a chance to go off. Thrawn slips up again there, I believe, but it doesn't end up costing him because they both die anyway.