General Grievous (Canon)

“	Army or not, you must realize... you are doomed!	„
	~ Grievous to Obi-Wan Kenobi, also his last words before Obi-Wan shoots him to death.

General Grievous is a major antagonist in the Star Wars franchise. He is the villainous cyborg and General of the Droid Army, whom also acts as Count Dooku’s right hand man, as well as being Obi-Wan Kenobi’s arch nemesis throughout The Clone Wars era of the series.

He is voiced by Matthew Wood.

What Makes Him Pathetic?[]

It’s heavily implied (if one of his two backstories is actually real) that even after the Yam’ril had been dealt with, that Grievous needlessly went around killing random aliens just to prove his “dominance” for the sheer sake of it (even cutting a random alien’s head off just to put on a pathetic show).
Either way, after being approached by San Hill, Grievous willingly accepted cybernetic upgrades, purely for the sake of hoping to kill a Jedi at some point, rather than any genuine noble reason. Additionally, it’s heavily implied he did a lot of truly vile things while working for Hill (even if not given any emphasis on what he actually did or didn’t do).
During the Battle of Geonosis, while being hiding in the catacombs of the planet by Dooku (who wanted Grievous’ existence to be kept a secret for just a while longer), Grievous alongside some Geonosians encountered and were forced to slain a couple of random Jedi.
On Dooku’s orders, he had his Droid Army invade and terrorise innocent Republic planets fairly early into the Clone Wars, which resulted in many needless deaths and destruction, which was only one of many factors that needlessly dragged the war on for the next three years (all with sadistic relish as well).
Seeking to obtain an unidentified Jedi artefact on the Moon of Stagec, Grievous takes Senator Yarua and Padmé Amidala as hostages to try and find said Jedi artefact. However, when his forces discover Obi-Wan and Yaris’s young daughter; Viiveenn, Grievous threatens the Senator’s daughter into telling him where the artefact is or he’d spare her life (which he obviously wasn’t going to do regardless of the outcome). This results in Yarua sacrificing his life to save his daughter’s life, by pushing himself and Grievous into the vacuum of space, in an attempt to kill him, which as Yoda predicts, obviously failed and Yarua's sacrifice was essentially for nothing.
Tried to unnecessarily send a third of his current army on a suicide bombing/mission of a Republic base, mostly out of petty and hypocritical hatred for Battle Droids, rather than any tactical justification, as he knew that even a normal full on attack still would have guaranteed almost certain victory. Then when the Tactical Droid serving him, refused to give out the order for the suicide attack because of genuine care for its comrades, Grievous coldly tore it to pieces in a rage, for disobeying him. This whole thing is made even more pointless and time consuming by how the mission ended up being a complete failure because Grievous spent the whole time having a petty spat with a Tactical Droid.
After having destroyed a Lunar Bridge and capturing Obi-Wan and his Clone Squad, he tried to force him to illegally work (despite Obi-Wan pointing out its illegal to make a prisoner of war do manual labour), with Grievous’ immediate reaction being to punch him and threaten his Clone Squad, if he doesn’t start to comply immediately and start manual labour on the destroyed bridge, so Grievous can have weapons be smuggled across. He then made one of many attempts on Kenobi’s life, when he escaped Grievous’ custody, until he used The Force to crush him with an avalanche (which he obviously survives due to his armour).
After infiltrating the cruiser Stellar Rise with the help of four Magna Guards, Grievous needlessly and cruelly killed a random Clone named Checkbox, by literally slicing him in half. Afterwards, he had his Magna Guards take everyone hostage, while he took his time tormenting and intimidating the ship’s Captain Lozz Beraf and intimidating him both for his own sadistic amusement and to try and locate yet another Jedi artefact. Though he was luckily stopped in his tracks from causing further damage, by Jedi Knight Anap Ree-Di, who ejected him into the vacuum of space hoping to kill him (which obviously failed).
Used the Malevolence to try and destroy a Clone Medical centre with a population of 60,000 injured Clones and during the battle afterwards, took genuine pleasure in what he was doing and even sadistically laughed at one point, to further drive home his enjoyment he gets from his actions. It’s also confirmed that he saw to it a month beforehand, that he allowed the ship’s abilities to destroy three Republic bases, once again with sadistic glee at the impact of his and Dooku’s actions.
When two Droids warned Grievous that the engines on his ship had clearly been set to self destruct, he immediately pushed both of them out of the way, leaving them to die in the explosion almost immediately after, showing his utter lack of gratitude (especially given he wouldn’t have figured out his ship had been sabotaged if not for the both of them).
When fighting Obi-Wan on the Malevolence, he smashed a Droidika in half just for being unsuccessful in shooting Obi-Wan and cruelly knocked a random Droid off of the edge with his gun, just for complimenting Kenobi’s abilities.
After Gha Nachkt abducted and bought R2-D2 to Grievous and even dismantled it for him, Grievous coldly stabbed him with his Lightsaber when he demanded extra money for his already hefty salary he was being offered by Grievous, while mockingly saying “There’s your bonus” while laughing at him in his last moments of life. While Gha was being greedy and somewhat had it coming, it was still dishonourable and cruel on Grievous’ part.
Engaged in a duel with and attempted to murder the teenage Ahsoka Tano, even successfully knocking her out and preparing to kill the young girl, until a group of Clones arrived and Grievous slaughtered most of them, until Ahsoka rescued one of them and Grievous chased her into a dark storage unit of sorts, while taunting her the whole time. However, when she accidentally gave herself away by deactivating her Lightsaber, Grievous grabbed and began to strangle her, while stating her Lightsaber would make a nice addition to his collection (though she luckily escapes).
When engaging in a duel with Nadhar Vebb, when Grievous realised that young Jedi was putting up more of a fight than expected, he pulled a dirty and underhand trick, of pulling out his pistol and shooting him three times in the stomach and chest, while simply picking up his Lightsaber to add to his collection and taunting Kit Fisto about it (whom was watching the whole thing on a security camera).
Helped Dooku is his takeover Felucia, in an attempt to get their hands on the planets natural herbs, minerals and nysillium, with the battle being a success (albeit, only because the number of Droids Grievous was put in charge of was unusually far higher and more overwhelming than usual).
Abducted and tortured Jedi Master Eeth Koth, after having captured him in a dishonourable fight (Eeth successfully beat Grievous, but Grievous’ Magna Guards prevented Koth from doing further harm to their master, by electrocuting him to near exhaustion). Afterwards, wanting to sadistically gloat his undeserved victory, Grievous outright filmed and had a video sent to the Jedi Temple of him torturing and physically abusing the Jedi Master, horrifying everyone whom saw the video and Ahsoka having to comfort two Younglings immediately after whom were unfortunate enough to be in the room when the video was playing.
When having yet another rematch with Obi-Wan after this, Grievous casually admits that he has absolutely no care for Dooku’s politics and extremism, while all but straight up admitting that he uses the Clone Wars/his alliance with Dooku as an excuse to kill Jedi and engage in otherwise pointless atrocities because he genuinely enjoys it.
While on Saleucami, when a Droid asks Grievous if they can all rest because they are all running out of battery, Grievous coldly cuts the Droids head off for “annoying” him and threatening to do the same thing to any other Droid whom shall complain to him about anything. Then a short time later, he assaults (and possibly kills) another Battle Droid, simply for not knowing how to use a transmitter.
At the beginning of the Battle of Kamino, Grievous coldly orders all of his Droids to kill anyone in sight and to slain as many people with out a single ounce of mercy for their enemies, which lead to deaths of many Clones, including Commander Colt and the deformed Clone; 99.
Coldly “complimented” Ventress, after watching her stab and killing Commander Colt in cold blood, while also arrogantly calling himself better than her (despite his multiple failures in comparison to Ventress). Additionally, while he does ask if Ventress needs a “Droid escort”, not only did this have slightly weird undertones to it (judging by the tone of his voice and literally grabbing Ventress’ arm which was completely unnecessary) but it was equally also mocking her to try and further prove his superiority over her.
On Dooku’s orders, he sent six Infiltration Droids to destroy a power grid, leading to multiple deaths and the word blackout that Coruscant had experienced in a thousand years by that point.
After fatally stabbing Chief Tarpals, he cruelly asked him, “how does it feel to die” just to sadistically rub it in the dying Gungans face for the sake of it, which once again led to Grievous’ downfall as he ended up getting too caught up in his own cruelty that he Tarpals stabbed him and then he got ambushed by many other Gungans.
When he comes across a random pirate ship, he orders a Battle Droid to use it for target practice.
While searching for an ancient Jedi Temple, he needlessly kills a random Jedi Master and her young Padawan (even briefly toying with the Padawan before decapitating him).
He gleefully accepts Dooku’s orders to commit a massacre on the Nightsisters (partially out of spiteful hatred towards Ventress). Then after trying and failing miserably to kill Ventress in a fight (which he started solely for the sake of his own ego), he orders all of his Droids to kill her and then, when many Nightsisters suddenly charged at him (most of them unarmed) cruelly killed and mutilated all of them in sight (even breaking one’s arm before killing her for the sheer sake of it). He continued doing this multiple minutes (even intentionally taking his time just to make Dooku’s suffering more painful), until he eventually reached Old Daka and picked her and up and stabbed her to death in a particularly cruel manner. Additionally, his actions on this fateful night, would have an awful effect on a lot of the stories afterwards, as he killed Morgan Elsbeth’s mother right in front of her and cruelly taunted her about it as she ran for her life and it had a very bad impact on young Merrin who watched most of her people die because of Grievous, which allowed her and the remaining Nightsisters to be temporarily gaslighted by Taron Malicos because of this (at least until Cal Kestis came along and stopped Malicos in his tracks and also convinced Merrin to redeem herself).
Killed a random Clone by painfully crushing his throat and then snapping it with his cybernetic foot, just to spite Obi-Wan/his own sadistic amusement.
Tried to kill Ahsoka and the Younglings Petro, Ganodi, Katooni, Byph, Zatt and Gungi, just obtain their Lightsabers to add to his collection, while cruelly taunting them all about it. Though, luckily this obviously backfires when Ahsoka protects everyone and Hondo has a change of heart, using the Slave 1 to take everyone to safety.
Sadistically killed Mother Talzin right before Maul’s eyes, by brutally stabbing her through the chest with two Lightsabers, which alongside Obi-Wan cutting him in half and Sidious kill Savage right in front of him mere weeks before, would traumatise Maul for the rest of his life.
After having kidnapped Palpatine, he dangled Shakk Ti in an electrified rope above the ceiling, for the other Jedi to find. It’s also implied he killed Jedi Master Roronn Crobb, then collected his Lightsaber, while having his Magna Guards either kill or injure the other Jedi.
When he finally met Anakin face to face (after having his Droids capture him, Obi-Wan and Palpatine), he unnecessarily mocked him for thinking he expected him to look a lot older than he actually is and then hypocritically calls him “Jedi scum” when Anakin understandably insults him back, by stating he thought he’d be a bit taller.
After Obi-Wan and Anakin almost immediately get the upper hand on Grievous, he cowardly abandons The Invisible Hand, leaving his entire crew to die either from the crush or the two Jedi making their way through them.
Preparing for Obi-Wan’s arrival on Utapau, Grievous had his remaining Droid Army take over it’s capital city by taking most of its population as hostages and did to the same to the Pau’un leaders, with most of the reason he did this, also being out of racist hate for the Pau’un’s in general, taking immense sadistic satisfaction in turning their home into a miniature Droid factory.
When fighting Obi-Wan, he taunted him about how “doomed” he is either way, just to try and scare him. Then, halfway through their fight on the platform, he began to prioritise murdering him in painful ways rather than efficiently finishing him off (including electrocuting to death and trying to beat him to death), which leads to his well own well deserved death shortly after.
While he does have many comical moments throughout his screen time, such as his over the top sadism, his banter with Obi-Wan mid-fight with him, his cough, when the Infiltration Droids they might survive the suicide bombing before very quickly retracting his words to say they’re all going to die either way in an exaggerated voice, getting needlessly and avoidably taken hostage by Gungans and when Obi-Wan says his famous “So uncivilised” line to Grievous’ dead body after his death, none of this detracts from the cruelty and plain stupidity of most of his actions, which in comparison, are taken dead seriously by the narrative.

What Makes Him a Pinhead?[]

Ultimately, despite being the General of the literal biggest Droid Army in the Galaxy, Grievous does not treat them well at all to the point it’s fairly self destructive, as he destroys/kills many of them on a daily basis, which not only weakened the Separatists’ defences but helped lead to them losing many battles throughout the Clone Wars. Additionally, at one point he attempted to send one thousand Droids on a completely unnecessary suicide bombing mission (despite knowing that a normal approach to the Republic base would have still resulted in a huge victory for him and knowing that doing so would lead to a third of his current army being completely wiped out) which would have been of absolutely no benefit to him and when the Tactical Droid refused to do so because of genuine care for its comrades, Grievous coldly tore the Droid to pieces for rightly disobeying him. Not helping, is that in this instance, Grievous was partly doing this out of a hypocritical hatred for Droids rather than any tactical reason, making this even more ridiculous and tactically absurd on his part.
Despite going to Telemak, so he could create more Battle Droids for him and the Separatists, Grievous fairly foolishly refuses to continue on with his quest, once both Telemak said no (despite Grievous having more than enough power and resource means to force him to still make more Droids for him) and even after learning how powerful said Droids were (because Grievous didn’t realise how badly he underestimated them until too late), he made no actual effort to obtain them and stated that it would be fine to just wait until after the Clone Wars and that Dooku can just provide more Droids as usual because he sees them as expendable, showing that he needlessly chose weaker and far easily destroyed Droids, over the highly advanced and powerful ones that would have been of huge value to him.
Despite knowing how useful the Lunar Bridge would be for smuggling weapons across it, Grievous still made the foolish decision to destroy it, despite knowing its tactical value to him. While he does eventually realise the value it has, he didn’t attempt to actually repair the damage himself and instead made Obi-Wan do it, hoping that he would somehow fix it very quickly, so he can smuggle weapons across the bridge.
While fault is partially shared with Dooku, Grievous still didn’t have a lot of necessary protection around the Malevolence that could have prevented potential intruders onto the ship, which eventually led to the ship’s destruction and Grievous being humiliated in the process. Additionally, this is when he started to lose Dooku’s trust, as he also needlessly let both multiple prisoners and enemies escape during the battle because he held back on using the Mega-Ion canons to its capacity, which if he had, would have exterminated everyone. Additionally, during his fight with Obi-Wan on the Malevolence, he needlessly destroyed a Droidika for being unsuccessful in shooting Kenobi and killing a Droid for complimenting Obi-Wan’s abilities.
He underestimated Ahsoka’s abilities to an inexcusable degree, as instead of straight up killing her (which is what he was meant to do), he instead plays sadistic and time consuming “games” with her, by gloating how he was going to add her Lightsaber to his collection and being needlessly cruel in stating how he was going to find and kill Anakin (saying so just to spite her in her last moments), which just gave Ahsoka the time she needed to regain her strength, briefly wrestle against Grievous and make him cut one of his own hands off with her Lightsaber, which only caused more issues for Grievous down the line given that had he killed Ahsoka, he would have had a far better chance at getting to Anakin.
While he left the inside of his home guarded (at least before Dooku disabled them to test Grievous’ abilities), he still didn’t do a great job of ensuring that people couldn’t get into his home, given that Kit Fisto was able to gain entry pretty quickly by simply pressing a few pads on the wall to open the main door (granted that while Dooku leaked where Grievous’ home was, it was still reckless on Grievous’ part to have the entrance to his home unguarded/or made more difficult to gain access to for obvious reasons).
When on Saleucami and trying to find an escape pod with some remaining Battle Droids, he doesn’t consider how the Droids need their rest/power recharged for them to actually continue on and being genuinely confused/annoyed when one Droid (whom is implied to have tried talking about it to him multiple times but to no avail) states that all the Droids are running out of power and need to be charged, Grievous instead of doing the logically smart thing and letting them rest to salvage what little energy they have left, just kills the Droid who questioned him and makes the others continue on, despite more than knowing Obi-Wan is after him with many Clones to his disposal. This led to multiple of the Droids (including the one who best knew the directions of where to go) to shut down and just hold Grievous back even more than necessary had he tried to solve the problem.
After having actually overpowered Obi-Wan for once during the Battle of Kamino, instead of immediately finishing off the job and resuming his task of buying Ventress time to steal the Clone DNA, he decides to needlessly brag to Kenobi and mock him, which gave him just about enough time to use the Force on Grievous to push him away and escape from him, which with Obi-Wan’s survival, caused far more problems for him down the line, which obviously could have been avoided if he had put his cruelty aside and just finished his enemy off.
After “Boss Leonie” (secretly Jar Jar Binks in disguise) stated that he would not help Grievous in his planned takeover of Naboo, Grievous foolishly decided to raise the stakes by stating he still intends to use his Droid Army to takeover the planet either way, which only made further problems for himself because a peaceful species now knew that he wanted to invade their planet and would obviously oppose him. Additionally, while he did see through Jar Jar’s disguise, it’s only because Jar Jar is an idiot and made multiple comments that obviously weren’t “right” in Grievous’ eyes, so he’s not particularly smart for that either. He also, underestimated the Gungans in general to an inexcusable degree, as even after they proved themselves formidable against him with their technology, he still didn’t take them seriously until too late and even when he stabbed Tarpals, he let himself stay open to enemy attack by taunting him (which is ultimately what happens and he ends up being taken as a prisoner).
Despite his massacre of the Nightsisters towards the second half being motivated by having to save Dooku’s life (which even then, was for pragmatic reasons), Griveous intentionally took his time during the mass killing, which not only increased the risk of him failing his mission because Dooku would have died (which luckily for him he didn’t) but also lead to an unnecessary amount of Droids being damaged as well, once again showcasing Grievous’ self destructive sadism.
Despite never actually having the chance to bite him on the backside, Grievous still arrogantly underestimated Savage Oppress’ abilities, even after Dooku told him to treat him as such (especially as with pretty much most of the Nightsisters being dead no thanks to Grievous himself, Savage was completely untameable and growing even more powerful, which once again, Grievous arrogantly dismissed).
Despite Dooku have warned him earlier in the Clone Wars to never go toe to toe with Yoda himself under any circumstances, when he does eventually encounter Yoda (albeit by accident), he immediately mocks and underestimates him, solely for his physical size and underestimates him, which leads to Grievous very nearly sustaining brain damage, when Yoda jumped over and slashed him on the head with his Lightsaber (only being protected by his armour).
Despite having Obi-Wan right at his mercy and having his entire Droid Army pointing their blasters at him, Grievous made the foolish decision (which would cost him his life very shortly after) to tell his Army to back off so he can fight Obi-Wan himself, despite more than knowing that fighting him is just too risky (given that Grievous himself was basically the Separatists’ heartbeat by that point). This obviously led to Grievous losing miserably and eventually cause his death. Additionally, even on the platform, Grievous was fairy reckless, as towards the end of the fight, he began to prioritise killing Kenobi in some sort of painful way rather than in a genuinely effective manner, which led to Obi-Wan successfully opening up Grievous’ chest plate (exposing his heart in the process) and completely ignoring the gun Obi-Wan used the Force to get, resulting in Grievous’ death as he gets shot multiple times in his open heart.

Trivia[]

He, along with Admiral Kendall Ozzel and Ishin Il-Raz, are currently the three Star Wars villains to be Pathetic Pinheads.

External Links[]

General Grievous on the Pure Evil Wiki
General Grievous on the Villains Wiki
General Grievous on the Entertainingly Detestable Wiki
General Grievous on the Base Breaking Character Wiki