The Star Wars franchise might also be known as the Skywalker Saga — and thus very, very focused on the eponymous family — but the Skywalkers aren’t actually the most visible characters in that galaxy far away. Sure, everybody knows Luke, Leia, Anakin, or Rey, but even if you combined their collective facetime in the franchise, it still wouldn’t match up to that of Ahsoka Tano. While a relatively newer character, created just before George Lucas stepped down as the shepherd of Lucasfilm, Ahsoka’s journey and impact has more than surpassed his original characters. She’s essentially a retcon forced to exist on the margins of the canon prequel films, but as Lucas and his protege, Dave Filoni, found more creative ways to fold her into the larger universe, the more instrumental a figure she became, even becoming part of the very fabric of the Force.
Ahsoka has cheated death more than any Star Wars character created before or since, and with her jump to live-action in Ahsoka, her story shows no signs of slowing down. Ahsoka’s second season is finally poised to continue her adventures, so there’s no better time to look back on Ahsoka’s journey from upstart Jedi Padawan to unstoppable force.
Ahsoka’s beginnings
We’ve seen nearly every era of Ahsoka’s life, even her infancy.
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Ahsoka was first introduced in 2008, with the then-derided spinoff film Star Wars: The Clone Wars — but more recent releases have worked to fill in the gaps of both her past and future. Tales of the Jedi gave us our earliest look at Ahsoka: born on the planet Shili, Ahsoka exhibited an early aptitude for the Force. When she was just three years old, she met the Jedi Plo Koon, who would whisk her off to the planet Coruscant and set her on the course to join the Jedi Order.
The canon novel Ahsoka offers more about the character’s early Jedi training. Like all trainees before her, Ahsoka eventually traveled to the ice planet of Ilum to retrieve a kyber crystal, the gem that powers all lightsabers. But her life would irrevocably change when she, somewhat inexplicably, became Anakin Skywalker’s Padawan.
Ahsoka’s introduction made zero sense at the time, but later became instrumental to Anakin’s story.
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Ahsoka’s appointment was unconventional, not to mention apocryphal. Her first adventure with Anakin took place just after Episode II – Attack of the Clones, shortly after Anakin was promoted from Padawan to Jedi Knight. Seeing as Anakin never, ever mentioned having a padawan in Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, Ahsoka’s very existence defied everything we understood about his life. Still, for Lucas, it made all the sense in the world… even if Anakin’s story was already pretty set in stone.
“I wanted to develop a character who would help Anakin settle down,” Lucas told Gizmodo in 2008. “He’s a wild child after [Attack of the Clones]… I wanted to force Anakin into that role of responsibility, into that juxtaposition.”
The Tragedy of Snips and Skyguy
Ahsoka was created to teach Anakin responsibility, but ended up doing so much more.
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As Ahsoka’s bond with Anakin deepened in the Clone Wars series, her role in this story — and Anakin’s fall to the Dark Side — came into clearer focus. The Chosen One spends most of his time struggling with emotional attachments and his distrust of the Jedi Order, and his attachment to Ahsoka only intensifies those foibles. The Clone Wars worked hard to justify Anakin’s worst flaws, and Ahsoka proved to be one of the most effective methods to do so… even if the series also (inadvertently?) turned Ahsoka into one of the most powerful and important figures in the Star Wars galaxy.
In Season 3’s iconic “Mortis Arc,” Anakin, Ahsoka, and Obi-Wan Kenobi found themselves in a realm teeming with Force energy. There, three god-like figures — the Father, the Daughter, and the Son — lived in near-constant conflict. The Gods of Mortis were about as close to a physical manifestation of the Force as the franchise ever got, and like the deities of any other mythology, they passed the time by toying with the unlucky mortals that crossed their path. While the Father recognized Anakin’s power to bring balance to the galaxy, the Daughter and Son had plans of their own.
Anakin transfers the spirit of the Daughter into Ahsoka in “Altar of Mortis.”
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Ahsoka and Obi-Wan became hostages twice over. The Son (the paradigm of the dark side) took a particular interest in Ahsoka, using her to get a rise out of Anakin. He poisoned her with the dark side and eventually drained her life force entirely. The Daughter later volunteered to save Ahsoka by transferring her soul into hers — which means that, when our heroes finally escaped Mortis, Ahsoka had essentially become the living embodiment of the light side of the Force.
The closer The Clone Wars got to the events of Revenge of the Sith, the more creative it had to get with Ahsoka’s future. In Season 5, it delivered a major blow to her relationship with the Jedi Order. The “Wrong Jedi” arc made Ahsoka the scapegoat for an attack on the Jedi Temple. Though the Council eventually realized she’d been framed by another disillusioned Padawan, the damage had been done. Ahsoka chose to leave the Jedi Order, much to Anakin’s dismay. She never completed her Jedi training, though she’d reunite with Anakin and her Clone allies at the end of The Clone Wars.
Ahsoka’s nine lives
Ahsoka in the Battle of Mandalore, one of the final skirmishes of the Clone Wars.
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Most assumed that killing Ahsoka off was the only way to reconcile her existence with canon, but Filoni found a way to have his cake and eat it, too. Ahsoka’s story continued in jumbled succession: after departing The Clone Wars in 2013, she’d appear in the second season of Star Wars: Rebels, which aired in 2015. As Rebels took place a decade after the fall of the Republic, her role in the series proved that she survived the Jedi Purge, but it wasn’t until The Clone Wars returned with its seventh and final season (in 2020!) that we saw exactly how. Confusing, right?
It’s here that Ahsoka’s place in the Star Wars saga gets overwhelming, scattershot, and more than a little indulgent on Filoni’s part. Ahsoka is a character who probably should have been written out somewhere during The Clone Wars — but she lived on through the events of Rebels and beyond, for better and worse. Her near-death experience on Mortis was the first of many: in Rebels’ Season 2 finale, she fought her old master, then known throughout the galaxy as Darth Vader, and nearly lost her life again in a blistering lightsaber battle.
Their confrontation in “Twilight of the Apprentice” was arguably Ahsoka’s finest hour, as it revealed that she never reclaimed her title as Jedi. She defied the Order to avenge what she called Anakin’s “death,” which is pretty far from everything she learned as a Padawan. Still, Ahsoka’s actions spoke louder than words. Though she claimed “I am no Jedi” in her big showdown with Vader, she’d prove to be the paragon of everything the Jedi should have been. Given how close this episode aired to The Last Jedi — which also pointed out the flaws in the Jedi Order and suggested a new way forward — Ahsoka essentially became the gold standard for a new school of Jedi.
The best of the Jedi
Ahsoka fights Vader in Rebels episode “Twilight of the Apprentice.”
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Again, Ahsoka probably should have died in her fight against Vader. “Twilight of the Apprentice” ended with the kind of cliffhanger that made most assume that she had — but thanks to some trippy time traveling in Rebels Season 4’s “A World Between Worlds,” Ahsoka lived to fight yet another day. By the end of Rebels, she’s one of the last characters standing. As the Rebellion agent “Fulcrum,” she was instrumental to the growth of the Rebel Alliance, but for reasons yet unknown, we’ve got no idea where she was when the Empire officially fell. It doesn’t seem like she had a lot to do after facing her old master.
Even with Ahsoka’s transition to live-action, the character has mostly been bopping around the galaxy on sidequests. Rosario Dawson took on the role in The Mandalorian, briefly serving as a mentor to Din Djarin’s Force-sensitive ward, Grogu. She even connected with Luke Skywalker in The Book of Boba Fett, but notably didn’t stick around to help him build his new Jedi academy. After five years of a somewhat aimless nomadic lifestyle, she resumed her mission to locate Ezra Bridger, who disappeared into a parallel galaxy after the Battle of Lothal in the final episode of Rebels.
Ahsoka recreates the final scene of Rebels.
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The first season of Ahsoka followed our favorite non-Jedi and the surviving crew of Rebels on their quest to rescue Ezra. While they did succeed on one front, Ahsoka and co. also accidentally provided a path for the evil Grand Admiral Thrawn to return to his native galaxy. One of the most formidable remnants of the Galactic Empire, Thrawn will be working hard to reestablish “order” in the galaxy in Ahsoka Season 2. That’s bad news for our heroine, who’s still stuck in the wrong galaxy, but Ahsoka teases more spiritual enlightenment, which will ideally bring her out of stagnation. The Gods of Mortis, as well as the ghost of Anakin Skywalker, will return in Season 2, setting Ahsoka up for an intriguing second (or maybe third?) act.
Ahsoka has come a long way from her dubious origins in The Clone Wars. Fans might have raged against her introduction back then, but Ahsoka has long proved she’s here to stay, impossible to destroy, and surprisingly instrumental to Star Wars history. We can’t wait to see what Ahsoka adds to her already robust resume, but it’s safe to assume that won’t be the end for this character, either.
