Ransolm Casterfo is the New Republic senator for Riosa and a leading light of the Centrist bloc, created by Claudia Gray for Bloodline (Del Rey, 2016). He is introduced as everything Leia Organa despises — a young, glossy authoritarian who keeps Imperial artefacts in his apartments — and the novel then spends three hundred pages dismantling that reading.
The collection is the tell. Casterfo's homeworld was stripped by the Empire and his parents were killed by it; he keeps the memorabilia the way one keeps evidence. His Centrism is a sincere argument about a weak Republic's inability to protect small worlds, not a nostalgia for the boot.
The partnership he forms with Leia across the aisle is the best thing in the book, and it is destroyed by his own faction. Lady Carise Sindian manoeuvres him into exposing Leia's parentage in open session, then frames him for terrorism and murder when he will not fall into line. He ends the novel imprisoned, his reputation gone, having done nothing worse than trust a colleague.
Bloodline is set six years before The Force Awakens, and Casterfo is the clearest illustration of why the Republic does not survive it: the chamber destroys its own best member for the sake of a factional advantage that lasts about a week.
