Your Top 20 Favorite "Thrawn" Book Characters: No. 15, Nightswan
O.K., let's get this countdown going again
I asked for your favorite Thrawn novel characters and you voted. The list so far:
Species: Human
Abilities: Smugling, morality
Job: Insurgency leader
Canon appearances: Thrawn
Legends appearances: none
The bio: Nevil Cygni (hilarious Star Wars name), aka Nightswan, is a smuggler who uses a variety of means to fund small–r rebellion. Sort of a proto-Luthen Rael, Cygni has one foot in the world of the Coruscant elite, while still trawling the Outer Rim for valuables and supplies. A series of cat-and-mouse encounters with Thrawn leads to a fateful meeting in Batonn sector, where Nightswan and his insurgency make their last stand.
From the books:
Thrawn shook his head. “No. At the moment the turmoil is unorganized. Nightswan is not a shadowy mirror image of the Emperor, guiding a growing army of disaffection. But I likewise have no doubt that Nightswan has had a hand in some of the incidents. In many of those, I suspect, he achieved his intended goal.”
Why he’s a favorite: Nightswan is the is the primary antagonist of Thrawn, Timothy Zahn’s first—and possibly best—entry into the new Star Wars canon. Since the titular protagonist of Thrawn is a tool of a fascistic war machine, Nightswan has to be the unlikely moral center of the book. Thief-with-a-heart-of-gold is a seminal character trope in the galaxy far, far away. Cygni’s belief in rebellion, however, comes off as a little more considered than Han Solo’s. Nightswan provides a philosophical foil, poking holes in Thrawn’s ends-justify-the-means logic. The climax of the book, in which the two characters unsuccessfully pitch each other on joining forces, makes both more likable for the reader (albeit one of them doomed).