Author Topic: Chiss History and Culture  (Read 4204 times)

Offline Phatty

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Chiss History and Culture
« on: November 26, 2009, 09:36:40 PM »
The Chiss were a tall, blue-skinned Near-Human civilization from the Unknown Regions, best known as the people to which Grand Admiral Thrawn belonged. Due to the remote position of their home territory in the Chiss Ascendancy they remained largely an enigma to the rest of the galaxy, and contact with outsiders was limited even in the days of the Galactic Alliance.

The Chiss were a tall humanoid species, marked out from the majority of mainstream Galactic civilization by their pure blue skin, gleaming black hair, and glowing red eyes. Physically striking and instantly recognizable, and armed with a typically cool and disciplined manner, the mystique of the Chiss was further increased by the remote location of their territory in the Unknown Regions beyond the Outer Rim. But this remoteness also meant that they were largely disconnected from the galaxyspanning nexus of hyperspace travel and subspace communications that bound together the Old Republic, Empire and New Republic in turn, and thus detached from the associated pan-Galactic networks of economic, cultural and political contacts.

There is, in fact, evidence that intermittent, clandestine and low-level encounters between the Chiss and groups within the Old Republic had been ongoing for perhaps four millennia prior to the era of the Galactic Civil War; but these encounters left no visible, lasting impression on the galaxy as a whole, and the isolation of the Chiss can be gauged by the fact that they remained largely unaware of standard languages such as Huttese and Basic, with communications with outsiders being conducted instead through local trade-languages such as Minnisiat.

The pace of contact began to accelerate shortly before the Clone Wars, but it was only after the Battle of Endor that the Chiss became visible for the first time on the wider Galactic stage—largely due to the rise to prominence of the exiled warrior named Thrawn, a military genius who became the only non-Human Grand Admiral in the Imperial Starfleet. Thrawn's distinctive character has undoubtedly influenced subsequent popular perceptions of the Chiss as cool, enigmatic warriors, but he was a highly controversial figure among his own people, and two points must be borne in mind when considering the pattern of this and subsequent contacts. Firstly, interaction between outsiders and the Chiss remained largely restricted to encounters with military personnel, and the primarily martial nature of these encounters may not have reflected Chiss society as a whole. Moreover, it must also be appreciated that contact was made at this time with two distinct and entirely independent Chiss military forces, apparently reflecting two sharply diverging trends in Chiss opinion.

The first of these was Thrawn's own Household Phalanx, personally loyal to him and his ideals, and allied with the Imperial forces that he brought to the Unknown Regions—the faction that came to be known as the Empire of the Hand. The other group was the Chiss Expansionary Defense Fleet, which served the Chiss Ascendancy, the government which exiled Thrawn in around 20 BBY for breaking its strict codes of military conduct, and which apparently commanded the loyalty, or at least the acceptance, of the vast bulk of the Chiss population.

The frequent confusion between the CEDF and the House Phalanx was just one indicator of how little the wider galaxy knew or understood about the Chiss. Although Thrawn's fame ensured that they rapidly became one of the most iconic and instantly recognizable of all non-Human peoples, much about them remained mysterious to Galactic civilization at large, even as the Unknown Regions began to be opened up in the age of the Galactic Alliance. Moreover, what was known about them was often hard to fully understand, and sometimes seemed paradoxical—and that may well have been exactly how they wanted the rest of the galaxy to think of them.

The Chiss are believed to have been established on Csilla for some time: records made available in the last years of the New Republic suggested that they had been there since before the beginning of the millennia-long ice-age in which the planet was then locked fast, and possibly since before the foundation of the Old Republic. By the time contact was made with modern Galactic civilization (which was right before the eruption of the Clone Wars), they had extended their frontier across a volume of space in the Unknown Regions, perhaps encompassing as many as several hundred thousand star systems, and they claimed to have been a major interstellar power in this area for at least ten centuries; but while Chiss space had been mapped by astrogation missions over the centuries, it was by no means fully explored, still less intensively colonized.