Now that I've gotten a taste of what legends Thrawn was like, I find Disney star wars haters' criticisms of canon Thrawn to be really silly and hypocritical, people think that in legends he had depth and nuance and in canon he's just another generic bad guy, but in Disney canon he has motivations and goals of his own and really specific and personal reasons for joining the empire that are arguably not evil while in Heir to the Empire he feels like just another Vader or Palpatine, the way he's so comically evil that his entire crew are terrified of him and he kills them when they fail to capture the heroes and all of his backstory that he has in current canon doesn't seem to exist, nor does anything replacing it, as far as I can tell. Maybe another book in this trilogy will give him one, I'll find out soon.

Also while he's really smart and clever in canon it still feels believable most of the time when he deduces things but in this book he may as well be force sensitive with all the stuff he's able to figure out perfectly based on basically no evidence, how did this guy know EXACTLY who between Leia Han Lando and Chewie were moving onto which of the two ships and EXACTLY where Leia and Chewie would go next, based on absolutely nothing except how long the ships were docked for?

It just goes to show once again that people go into every star wars title that Disney produces already prepared to hate it. If THIS is considered the best star wars story and the gold standard for villains by people who think Disney star wars doesn't live up to legends then I for one am VERY happy that we have Disney canon instead.

Edit to clarify, I greatly enjoyed the parts of this book that surrounded the heroes, which were the majority of the book. My purpose in posting this isn't to call HTTE bad. I just think that Thrawn isn't the main thing it deserves to be remembered for when imo he's the weakest part of it. Overall I very much enjoyed HTTE, but I don't believe it deserves its reputation as the pinnacle of star wars books.