Amanoa, born in 4070 BBY, was a Human female hailing from the planet of Onderon. As the daughter of a distinguished nobleman, Amanoa reaped the benefits of the Onderonian upper class, eventually marrying into the royal family of the planet as the wife of King Ommin. They had a daughter named Galia, and they resided together in the royal palace situated within Onderon's capital city, Iziz. During Amanoa's time as queen, Onderon experienced significant shifts in its galactic standing within the galaxy. She and her husband fell under the influence of the spectral presence of the deceased Dark Lord Freedon Nadd, eventually becoming his Sith apprentice near the end of her life. As both she and Ommin delved further into the dark side of the Force, they evolved into masters of Sith sorcery, employing their dark arts to maintain control over the Onderonian people in accordance with a four-century-long tradition. When Ommin's health deteriorated, Amanoa assumed complete leadership of Onderon, enforcing her rule through the power of the dark side of the Force.
Amanoa's dedication to Freedon Nadd's spirit put her at odds with the Beast Riders, Onderon's wilderness inhabitants who had been exiled and refused to bow to the oppression of the Sith. Ignoring Nadd's advice, Amanoa initiated a lengthy war against the Beast Riders, ultimately seeking assistance from the Jedi Order to find a peaceful resolution. However, her plea for help exposed her secret activities under Nadd's guidance. She was defeated by Jedi Master Arca Jeth and his apprentices, and met her demise when they purged the Dark Lord's influence from Iziz. Following her husband's death in battle against the same Jedi two years later, the former queen of Onderon was entombed with him and their Sith Master in a burial temple located on Onderon's jungle moon, Dxun.
Born in 4070 BBY, Amanoa was an Onderonian woman, the daughter of a rich nobleman. When Ommin's father passed into the Force, Ommin rightfully ascended to the throne as king of Onderon and ruler of Iziz. The new King then married Lady Amanoa, making her his queen, and together they had a daughter named Galia. As a direct descendant of Freedon Nadd, King Ommin followed in his ancestors' footsteps, dominating the people of Onderon with the power of the dark side.
Ommin and his forebears kept their dark secrets hidden, so for many years, Amanoa remained unaware of her husband's allegiance to the Sith. But then, Ommin suddenly lost interest in everyday activities, as his training under Nadd's ghost progressed significantly. Eventually, Amanoa discovered the connection between her husband and the Sith. The queen tried to dissuade Ommin from the dark teachings, but her efforts were in vain, for Nadd's blood flowed through Ommin's veins. Unable to help her husband, Amanoa's frustration turned into anger and outright hatred for the king. It was at that moment that King Ommin decided his wife was ready to embrace the ways of the Sith and the teachings of darkness. Slowly, the queen succumbed to the dark side. Once Amanoa passed the point of no return, she opened herself to the dark power. King Ommin and the spirit of Freedon Nadd taught Amanoa the ways of the Force and the techniques of the Sith, and together, the king and queen became formidable Sith sorcerers.
The love between Ommin and Amanoa diminished during their pursuit of Sith knowledge. Mistrust, loathing, and pure hatred replaced the love they once shared. Unbeknownst to them, Freedon Nadd was manipulating them both. The long-dead Dark Lord's ultimate goal was to resurrect himself physically. By instructing his descendants well, Nadd hoped to find a powerful candidate to study Sith alchemy and create a body to house his spirit. To ensure that either Ommin or Amanoa would be powerful enough, Nadd manipulated them into competing with one another.
Soon after, Ommin lost control of his own body—the price he paid for the power of the dark side. The king's personal doctors constructed a durasteel exoskeleton to support his body. As Ommin withdrew from public life to further his study of the dark ways, Queen Amanoa assumed the daily duties as the ruler of Onderon.
In addition to ruling Iziz, Amanoa sought to expand the Onderonian Sith cult. Throughout Onderon's history, only the royal family had been permitted to practice the Sith ways. King Ommin had taken Minister of State Novar as an apprentice two years prior, and had taught his initiate well. Amanoa continued Novar's training and gave him King Adas's Sith holocron, which she had discovered less than a decade earlier, after she had learned all of its secrets. Amanoa commanded Novar to expand their Sith cult, instructing him to teach the new recruits the basic principles and philosophies of the dark side. Those who proved worthy of advancement would then receive further training from the holocron.
At the same time, Nadd realized that the couple had failed him: Ommin himself would never be strong enough to fulfill Nadd's dream, while Amanoa would not further her study once her husband failed to compete with her anymore. Indeed, Queen Amanoa spent all her time focusing on the administration of Onderon, abandoning her dark side studies, and handing the running of her cult over to Novar.
Amanoa learned from Nadd's example that one would be relatively powerless after death, so she sought to expand the influence of Iziz to the rest of Onderon, concerned with temporal power while she still lived. The conflict between the rulers of Iziz and the Beast Lords of the wild had never ended. This long struggle, known as the Beast Wars, intensified during the iron-fisted rule of Queen Amanoa. One day during a Sith ritual, the spirit of her mentor Freedon Nadd foretold her demise: if Amanoa allowed the war to fully erupt, she would be destroyed. In a desperate measure of survival, Queen Amanoa called upon the help of the Jedi to settle the three-centuries-old conflict once and for all.
Amanoa never knew that Nadd's prophecy was not a Force vision, but merely a deception of the Dark Lord. Freedon Nadd hoped to con Amanoa back into studying the Sith ways instead of ruling Iziz, but the queen completely misunderstood him.
Upon receiving the news that the experienced Jedi Master Arca Jeth had been assigned as the Jedi watchman of Onderon, Amanoa did her best to conceal the presence of the dark side on the planet. However, just before the Jedi entered her palace, Queen Amanoa used the dark side to execute a prisoner named Olis. She had mixed feelings when the arriving Jedi turned out to be the apprentices of Arca instead of the Master himself. It would be much easier to hide the dark side from those young Jedi, but the youths might not be experienced enough to settle the conflict, which threatened her survival (according to Nadd's prophecy).
During the negotiation, the Beast Riders breached the heavy defenses of Iziz and stormed the citadel. Convinced that such a breach could only succeed with the help of traitors, Amanoa requested the Jedi's help in defending Iziz. During the battle in the citadel, Beast Warrior commandos slipped past the Jedi and kidnapped Princess Galia. Queen Amanoa attempted to call upon the dark side, but was not fast enough to prevent the retreat of the commandos—therefore, Amanoa demanded that the Jedi rescue the princess.
The next reports Amanoa received were of massing Beast armies and the unification between her daughter and the Beast Lord Oron Kira. As the young couple and the Jedi returned to negotiate peace with Amanoa, the enraged queen called upon the dark side and the teachings of Nadd to crush her enemies. The citadel was surrounded by physical darkness, instilling fear in those present. Hearing that the negotiations had failed, Oron's father Modon launched an attack on Iziz, known as the Battle of Onderon. In the confusion of the citadel, Cay Qel-Droma came face-to-face with Amanoa and ordered that the queen cease using her dark power. However, Cay's sword-hand was shot by Amanoa's guardsman, and the young Jedi eventually lost his left arm completely. Outside, as the battle raged against the very wall of the citadel, Amanoa retreated to the mausoleum of Freedon Nadd in order to deploy her ultimate weapon. Knowing that Iziz's military strength would not decide the outcome of the battle, Amanoa called upon the dark side against the Beast warriors in the name of Ommin and Nadd. For the first time in her life, Amanoa gave herself completely to the dark side. Achieving an effect similar to that of battle meditation, Amanoa's dark power sapped the will of the Beast armies. The attack of the Beast Lords began to lose momentum; the war beasts no longer listened to their riders, and the soldiers became sick and confused. It appeared that Queen Amanoa had successfully turned the tide of the battle.
However, victory was not destined for Amanoa. Jedi Master Arca Jeth arrived at that key moment and, sensing the dark energies being used against the Beast Riders, applied his own Jedi battle meditation to turn the tide once more—after more than three centuries of conflict, the Beast Wars were finally over.
Reunited after the battle, Master Arca led his apprentices and Princess Galia to the deepest sub-levels of the palace: the tomb of Freedon Nadd. As Galia rushed to her mother, Freedon Nadd withdrew his dark power and support from Amanoa as he sensed the approaching light of Arca Jeth. Without the support of Nadd's power, Queen Amanoa of Onderon died in the arms of her daughter.
After her death, Amanoa's husband Ommin ordered his subordinates to launch a series of attacks throughout Iziz. Sensing the presence of the dark side haunting the planet, Master Arca determined to move the sarcophagi of Amanoa and Freedon Nadd to the moon Dxun. An armored dark side warrior named Warb Null led a task force to ambush the Jedi at the spaceport with a groundborer, and the Naddists successfully brought the sarcophagi to Ommin's stronghold.
After the Jedi settled the Naddist revolt, Amanoa's sarcophagus, together with Nadd's, was moved to Dxun and interred in a protected tomb. Despite frequent intruders who sought Nadd's legacy, Amanoa rested in her sarcophagus peacefully and was never disturbed again.
Before she embraced the dark side, Amanoa was naive, taking a long time to discover—and accept—her husband's dark alliance with Nadd. This refusal to see things as they were then drove the queen to attempt to end Ommin's studies, a futile effort. Her awakening came when she realized that the king could not be redeemed, and Amanoa gave in to depression, fear, and anger: her transformation into a minion of the dark side had already begun.
As she and Ommin trained under the specter of Freedon Nadd, Amanoa possessed a spirit of competition. Her loathing and distrust of her husband drove the queen to develop her abilities to incredible heights, if only to best him. When King Ommin became ill and removed himself from public life, Amanoa's studies began to stagnate as she became content to simply rule Iziz with an iron fist.
One of the most constant motivations in Amanoa's life was love. Love for her husband drove the queen to support him in his dark apprenticeship. However, ultimately the dark side saw to it that their love could only serve its purposes and not theirs, as it drove them apart, fostering fear and hatred between them. Love for her daughter Galia caused the queen to request the Jedi's support in her rescue. In the end, Amanoa died in the arms of Galia, having embraced the dark side and the Sith teachings because of her belief that it was the only way for her to protect her daughter and assure the power their family enjoyed.
The character of Amanoa first appeared in the sub-series Ulic Qel-Droma and the Beast Wars of Onderon, Part 1 of the comic series Tales of the Jedi. Writer Tom Veitch created her for this sub-series, and he used her dark side legacy in the second sub-series The Freedon Nadd Uprising, which Veitch also wrote. Although Amanoa is stated to be 70 years old during Tales of the Jedi 1, which would place her birth date at 4070 BBY, the article Straight from the Horse's Mouth in Star Wars Insider 26 asserts that Amanoa was born in 4068 BBY. As Straight from the Horse's Mouth contradicts a number of other established dates, for the purpose of this article the original comic is treated as correct.
There has been some confusion about whether or not Amanoa is a proclaimed user of the Force technique battle meditation. According to the comic sub-series Ulic Qel-Droma and the Beast Wars of Onderon, Amanoa does not use battle meditation. However, according to the Tales of the Jedi audio book, Amanoa uses a series of Force abilities which are very similar to battle meditation; though, in this point in the audio book, it is only ever established that Arca Jeth is a user of this Force technique.