Warlord Zsinj

But maybe we need a specific face for that council. Most of them were unnamed—we have Brendol Hux, the father of Armitage Hux and the eventual architect of the First Order Stormtroopers, and we have Captain Gilad Pellaeon, who’s likely going to be saved for Thrawn business given his expansive EU history with the Grand Admiral. But what if we turned to the Expanded Universe to give one other major faction on the council a face: the Warlords, the collective of former Imperial officers and Moffs that ruled their own splintered factions of loyalists vying for their own fiefdoms?

And what if we turned to what is, frankly, the current canon’s favorite EU novel to give them that face: Warlord Zsinj?

Introduced in The Courtship of Princess Leia, Zsinj was a former Admiral in the Imperial Navy who, in the wake of Palpatine’s death and the Empire’s fragmentation, built himself a massive base of power to rival both the nascent New Republic and the Imperial remnant. A shadowy threat throughout the first few X-Wing novels in the wake of Ysanne Isard’s downfall (keep that name in mind), Zsinj was also a personal foil to Han Solo in the EU, narrowly escaping defeat at Han’s hands multiple times until… well long story in Courtship made short, Han won the planet Dathomir in a gambling match, a world over which Zsinj had established a secret base. Han took Zsinj down in the ensuing battle over Dathomir, leading to his Empire falling apart.

Given Dathomir’s vital importance to current canon, making a play for EU nods by throwing in Zsinj as the major Warlord on Gideon’s Shadow Council could make for a very fun villain—especially giving Din the Han stand-in role.