#the grysk are lame and will not be the inciting factor uniting imperial remnant and new republic forces

[tarisilmarwen]

I don’t know....

“They are a terrible enemy, Eli,” Vah’nya said. “Your Empire—your former Empire—forces its will on its slaves through soldiers and weapons and warships. But the Grysks…three can command a nation. A hundred can rule an entire world. Billions of beings, their hearts and souls broken, ready to fight and die at the order of a handful of aliens. No resistance, no revolt, no dissent, no hope.”

That seems powerful (and scary) to me — I always saw this as potentially implying the Grysk leadership to be Force sensitives, literally taking the will of their soldiers. Giving us the same ‘Force-less’ Vong as soldiers, but with a purpose (for now).

So here's the main thrust of my issue with the Grysk:

They are talked up an awful lot more than they actually follow up.

Characters are always telling us about how much of a threat the Grysk are, about things they can supposedly do, but it never actually really gets demonstrated within the text.

That quote from Vah'nya, about the Grysks' supposed fearsome mind control abilities? Yeah, they don't actually have any, they farm that task out to their telepathic client species the Agbui, who have to physically touch another being in order to read them, which means they can't break or turn a person unless they physically capture them. I've already talked about how tedious that would make any kind of concerted galactic conquest.

What the Grysk do far more often than have their lackeys mindwash prisoners (from what I can gather in the new Thrawn books at least) is actually sow political dissent, manipulate a few key government players, blackmail a culture by threatening what's important to them, and basically do a lot of internal sabotage before they even begin to test warships against any new military force. Only one actual Grysk commander ever gets into a real space battle in the course of six new Thrawn books and predictably since he's up against Thrawn he gets outmaneuvered soundly.

A lot of the Grysks' client species also seem to have been convinced and bribed rather than conquered and brainwashed/mind-controlled. So while Vah'nya's speech is certainly frightening-sounding, it's not backed up by anything the Grysk actually do.

And Vah'nya's not the only character to do this, either, Thrawn tends to talk up the Grysk A LOT when he's trying to convince someone that they're a threat to take seriously. He tells Vader the Grysk are said to have "spacecraft so numerous they blot out the stars" and claims that they're "terrifying warriors, overwhelming their opponents by sheer numbers and ferocity" mostly to convince Vader to help him go rescue the Chiss skywalkers and, you know, not go tattle on him to Palpatine about his maybe conflicting loyalties.

But the Grysk have failed to demonstrate that they employ a tactic of "overwhelming through numbers and ferocity" and if they did have a giant fleet as big as Thrawn claims... where the hell is it? Why haven't the Grysk used it at all?

The claim that they are some kind of overpowering attacking mind-controlling force simply has no actual teeth in the narrative. Zahn has not convinced me they are anything more than a local threat to the Chiss, certainly nothing capable of conquering a territory as large as the GFFA.

Now you compare them to the Yuuzhan Vong, who not only had the numbers and warrior training and ferocity and fanaticism and effective brainwashing and bizarre unknown organic technology and whose first official act against the galaxy was to pull a freaking moon out of orbit and crash it into a planet and the Grysk just seem like such a poor man's Walmart bargain bin cheap replacement.

They're not enough of a threat to the New Republic to justify any kind of alliance with either the Chiss Ascendancy in general or Thrawn in particular, I'm sorry, I will die on this hill.