palpatine strikes me as more a symbolic entity and (i hate the word but…) a plot device rather than an actual character. every other dark sider at least gets some sympathy and some form of tragic backstory, but palps is just there to… ruin everything? according to canon (or some material), was there ever a chance at redemption for him, or some… humanity there?

padawanlost:

Yes and no.
He is the embodiment of everything our heroes have to overcome in their environment
and their nature. And, no, there’s no chance of redemption for him. There can’t
be. He is the force that corrupts.

He has a black irredeemable heart. There’s nothing that can be said about him that’s good. When we
first saw Vader in the original trilogy we thought he was the heart of darkness,
and nobody could be darker. But now we understand what happened to him. And one
of the exciting things about seeing this movie is that you can follow Vader
through Anakin’s journey every step of the way even if you don’t agree with the
choices he’s making. In part his decisions stem from his traumatic childhood,
and his impatient lust for power. And it’s that which my character takes and
then uses again him. When you’re playing
a character of solid blackness, that in itself is very interesting, in the
sense that you have no other motivation
other than the accumulation of power. It’s not so much about not having a moral
center, it’s just that the only thing that mattered is increasing power.“
– Ian McDiarmid

Palpatine
is an amalgamation of the worst humanity has to offer, he’s been compared to
Stalin, Hitler and a bunch of corrupt politicians. In the end, the evil he
caused was so insidious there was no deed good enough for him to redeem himself
and, more importantly, a man that corrupt would not even want redemption. Giving
him a tragic backstory wouldn’t matter because we were never supposed to sympathize
with him. He is not the tragic character of the the story and he does not need
to be humanized.

In the EU,
he’s a rich kid form a powerful family. he’s miserable with them but nothing
happens to justify what he became. He was simply greedy, arrogant and entitled.
The closest SW got to humanizing him was in Star Wars Underworld (a live action
show that was never made) where we would learn that Palpatine became evil because
a heartless woman was mean to him