Ganner Rhysode is a human Jedi Knight introduced in Michael A. Stackpole's Dark Tide I: Onslaught (Del Rey, February 2000), and the subject of the single most quoted death scene in the Expanded Universe.
The vain one
For most of his run he is written as the Order's self-regarding hero — handsome, capable, conscious of the effect he has, and a little too pleased with the idea of himself as a Jedi. Other characters find him tiresome. The series lets that stand for a dozen books without much softening.
Traitor
Matthew Stover's Traitor (Del Rey, 2002) turns him into something else entirely. Held on the Yuuzhan Vong worldship with Jacen Solo and Vergere, Ganner is given the job of holding a single doorway so Jacen can escape — one man in a corridor against an army that keeps coming. He holds it until he is killed, and the Vong, who do not deify enemies, deify him anyway: he becomes a figure in their own religion, the Ganner, the one who guarded the passage.
Why it works
Because the vanity is the point. A character built on wanting to be a legend gets handed the exact circumstances required to become one, and discovers that the cost is everything. Stover writes the sequence as myth in the making, and it retroactively justifies a dozen books of a character nobody much liked.
