On one side, there’s the Jedi.
On the other side, there’s the Sith.
And in the middle, there’s Ahsoka Tano, one of the most complex characters in Star
Wars.
And if you want to know more about Anakin Skywalker’s old padawan, then here’s the
untold truth of Ahsoka Tano.
When you get right down to it, the job of a Jedi Knight is essentially half wandering
samurai-peacekeeper and half teacher.
The basic idea is that after being certified by the intergalactic school board that is
the Jedi Council, each Jedi Master takes on an apprentice of their own, passing down their
knowledge and experience to the next generation.
Ideally, this is done after the apprentice, called a "padawan," gets a basic education
in the Force as a child, but there's, of course, the odd exception.
Either way, once the apprentice becomes a full-fledged knight, they take on their own
apprentice, and the cycle continues down through the ages.
We know all this because we see it happening in the prequel trilogy, in which Obi-Wan Kenobi
goes from being an apprentice to Qui-Gon Jinn to a master in his own right who demands the
opportunity to train Anakin Skywalker.
The thing is, we also see Anakin himself graduate from padawan to knight in the prequel trilogy.
So, if Anakin didn't go straight from being Obi-Wan's student to becoming Darth Vader,
did he have an apprentice of his own?
It turns out he did, and she's one of the most interesting characters in Star Wars history.
In 2008, Star Wars: The Clone Wars was released in theaters as a lead-in to a television series
of the same name on Cartoon Network.
Set between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, the film followed Obi-Wan Kenobi
and Anakin Skywalker as they attempted to rescue Jabba the Hutt's son, Rotta, during
the eponymous conflict.
When they got that assignment, Obi-Wan and Anakin, along with the audience, were introduced
to Ahsoka Tano, who'd been assigned as Anakin's brand new padawan.
"Sir, I thought you said you'd never have a padawan."
"There's been a mix-up, the youngling isn't with me."
Originally, however, the concept of The Clone Wars was very different, and so was Ahsoka.
When the show was first in development, in fact, she wasn't even "Ahsoka" at all.
The earliest concept from Dave Filoni — a veteran animator who would go on to be the
supervising director, executive producer, and a writer on the series — was built on
a very different idea.
The focus was on a ragtag crew working on the fringes of the galaxy, dealing with the
sketchier side of the Star Wars universe, far away from where Obi-Wan and Anakin were
fighting alongside the clone troopers.
The Jedi would've been represented, though, in the form of a master named Sendak and his
young apprentice, Ashla.
Both Filoni and George Lucas wanted to have a prominent female Jedi in order to appeal
to the girls in the audience, so when the series was retooled to be built around Obi-Wan
and Anakin's time in the war, Ashla stuck around.
Just like in Filoni's original pitch, she was the viewpoint character who, like the
audience, was thrown into this legendary era when the galaxy was barreling toward tragedy.
The only difference was that unlike Ashla herself, the audience already knew how Anakin's
story would end, giving the Clone Wars series — and Ashla herself — a suspenseful tension
that it would've otherwise lacked.
Star Wars has never really been subtle about character names.
"Vader," for example, literally means "father" in Dutch, and even if you can get past George
Lucas naming his chosen one character "Luke S.," there's the fact that "Luke" is probably
related to the Latin word for light.
"Ashla" is at least a little different.
In George Lucas' original notes for The Star Wars, it was the proper name for the light
side of the Force, and if you were the kind of fan who obsesses over the most minor details,
you might've seen it elsewhere, too.
While it's not spoken in the film, it's the canonical name of one of Yoda's "youngling"
students briefly seen in Attack of the Clones, who just happens to be a young Togruta who
bears a suspicious resemblance to Anakin's future padawan.
It's possible that they were meant to be the same character, but in 2008, Leland Chee,
the guy officially in charge of maintaining continuity for the saga, mentioned that they
couldn't be the same because their ages didn't match up.
In addition to the tweaks to her name, Ahsoka's development also involved some pretty heavy
visual designs.
One of her earliest designs included high-heeled boots and a pleated skirt that was somewhere
between ballerina and cheerleader — not exactly a bad look, but maybe not what you
want for the first female Jedi to ever have a main character role in a Star Wars movie.
In what might be the least surprising development in the history of the franchise, her redesign
was heavily influenced by samurai and other bits of Japanese culture.
According to Filoni, the outfit she wears in The Clone Wars was inspired by San, the
wolf-riding heroine of Hayao Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke.
There's another specific influence, too.
Unlike most of the other Jedi, Ahsoka holds her lightsaber in the "reverse grip," with
the blade pointed down.
It's a cool look that sets her apart from Anakin and Obi-Wan, and it was lifted from
the blind swordsman Zatoichi, from the long-running series of films.
In the opening scenes of The Clone Wars, Ahsoka Tano arrives on the planet Christophsis, announcing
herself as Anakin's new apprentice on orders from Yoda.
This comes as news to Anakin, who definitely doesn't want to take on a padawan of his own,
and he initially tries to pawn her off on Obi-Wan.
To make matters worse, there's initially a lot of friction between the two characters.
Ahsoka is impatient, headstrong, occasionally overconfident, and quick with a snarky retort,
which quickly earns her the nickname "Snips" from Anakin.
In other words, she's a lot like Anakin himself, who now begins to understand how annoying
that is.
"Master, if you've taught me one thing, it's that nothing is easy when you're around."
And as the story of Clone Wars goes on, it becomes clear that that's the point, both
for the audience and for the characters.
Yoda, who was always pretty reluctant to let Anakin join up with the Jedi from the beginning,
was clearly hoping that being put in the role of a mentor would help to temper Anakin's
own reckless, hotheaded impulses.
Sadly, as you might already know, that didn't really work out.
The relationship between the two characters, however, develops into one of the most compelling
teacher-student dynamics that the entire Star Wars saga has ever seen.
By the end of the first act of the Clone Wars movie, Anakin has recognized a lot of himself
in Ahsoka, and he clearly wants to give her the kind of training that he wishes he would've
gotten from the more traditional, restrictive Obi-Wan.
The only problem was that we already knew that Anakin's own training would turn out
to be a failure, making it a pretty safe bet that Ahsoka's would as well.
The question was what form that failure would take.
We knew from the start of things that for all of its fun, pulpy adventure, Ahsoka's
story was never going to have a happy ending.
Before she'd shown up on the screen, we'd seen Anakin personally slaughtering children
with his lightsaber as part of his fall from grace.
The Clone Wars — ostensibly a show directed at children — forced its audience to ask
whether we would see Anakin turn on Ahsoka and provide a permanent reason why she wasn't
hanging around with the Rebellion in the original trilogy.
The worst part?
Ahsoka finding herself on the wrong end of Darth Vader's lightsaber seemed like it might
be the best-case scenario.
The other most likely alternative was that she would follow him in his fall, giving in
to her own reckless, hot-tempered nature.
After all, now that we knew Anakin had an apprentice, it wasn't out of the question
that we'd find out Vader had one, too.
Fortunately for Ahsoka, neither of those fates were hers.
The way for Ahsoka to get around the fact that there weren't a whole lot of Jedi hanging
around after the purge in Revenge of the Sith, without being killed by her former mentor,
was actually pretty simple.
If Order 66 was targeting the Jedi, then all she had to do was just not be a Jedi anymore.
The downside was that while it ultimately saved her life, her parting with the Jedi
order wasn't exactly her idea.
Instead, it came as part of an elaborate plot to discredit both Ahsoka and the Jedi Order
itself that played out in the fifth season of The Clone Wars animated series.
After the hangar at the Jedi Temple is bombed, Ahsoka is framed for the murder of the bomber,
and then she's further framed for being the mastermind behind it all.
Even worse, part of the plot involves breaking her out of prison, killing a whole lot of
clone troopers with her lightsaber in the process, and framing her for all that as well.
In the end, it turns out that it actually was a Jedi who bombed the temple and committed
the murders — it just wasn't Ahsoka.
It was Barriss Offee, a longtime member of the Jedi Order who specialized in healing
and who'd lost her faith in the Order's commitment to peace when they effectively became a military
force during the Clone Wars.
The reveal is a shock to the other Jedi, not only because Offee was thought of as a dependable,
well-liked Jedi, but because Ahsoka considered her a close friend.
She'd even turned to her for help when she was trying to clear her name.
Despite the fact that she's able to clear her name, Ahsoka is left with some pretty
hard feelings for the rest of the Order.
Not only had she been put on trial for a crime she didn't commit, but the Jedi had sent both
Anakin Skywalker and Plo Koon, the Jedi who first mentored her as a child, to apprehend
her.
At this point, Ahsoka is left feeling personally betrayed by those who were closest to her,
who seemed awfully quick to believe she was capable of horrible crimes.
As a result, Ahsoka leaves the Jedi Order after her trial, and while it's under bitter
circumstances, it's also what saves her life.
Since she isn't fighting alongside the clone soldiers when Order 66 comes down, she isn't
a victim of the initial purge that kills off most of the Jedi.
Instead, she escapes, living in hiding under the name "Ashla" in the first years of the
Empire.
Eventually, though, Ahsoka realizes that staying out of the conflict is only helping the Empire
remain in power, and she joins up with the fledgling rebel movement started by Bail Organa
and adopts the codename "Fulcrum."
It's during this time that she winds up discovering that Darth Vader isn't Anakin's murderer but
Anakin himself, who's still holding a grudge against Ahsoka for abandoning his friendship
when she left the Order.
When they finally fight, it seems like Vader is going to strike her down just as he had
the others, but Ahsoka does something pretty unexpected.
She gets pulled through a portal into a "World Between Worlds" and emerges two years later
after traveling through time.
You know.
Star Wars stuff.
"Does this always happen to you?"
“Everywhere I go."
In the binary world of light and dark that is the Star Wars saga, Ahsoka is fairly unique
in that she's a powerful Force user who's neither Jedi nor Sith.
That was reflected visually as her character evolved over the years, too.
Rather than sticking with the traditional lightsaber colors — red for the bad guys
and pretty much every other color for the heroes — the blades of Ahsoka's sabers are
white.
The in-canon reason for this is that after losing the sabers she used as a Jedi when
she left the Order, Ahsoka made new ones using crystals that she'd taken from the red lightsabers
of a Sith inquisitor.
Originally, the crystals were used in a traditionally evil-colored red saber, but Ahsoka was able
to purify them, removing the taint of the Dark Side and creating the distinctive white
blades that she used in her battles against the Sith.
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