When you were creating her, were you going through that process, trying to really create her as an individual but balance her against the character?
Timothy Zahn: You’re right. It was set up to be slightly Luke’s Han, as it were. The way Han and Leia do it; it would be Luke and Mara with the flip side. Luke is the upstanding farmboy type, Mara is the one with the shady past. She started out as a connection between the rescue of Han in Return of the Jedi and the main Rebellion storyline, which is the main part of the three movies. I wanted somebody to link those together. It seemed logical that Palpatine might not like Vader offering to overthrow him with Luke, so he would send somebody to kill Luke. So that was her origin. Then she developed out of that. I want readers to identify and to connect with her, and you can’t connect with a totally amoral person. At least most readers can’t, and we don’t want to. So she’s got the shady past, but she has an ethical core. (x)
