Chapter Text
It’s hard to know where to start, so let’s do the beginning. First there was a Star Wars show, and it was going to do a lot of worldbuilding, and follow new characters across the span of the Clone Wars; it was a part of the Star Wars prequel era which we had not seen, cut from the films for the most part so as to streamline the story of Anakin’s rise and fall. This wasn’t going to be a part of that story, just an expansion, a look at the wider universe of Star Wars which George Lucas himself would be involved in. Then he looked at it again, and Lucas decided no: as he found when he chose to make the prequels, Anakin had more story to tell—and who better to tell it with than the character of a young girl? Someone new who could grow up alongside Anakin, inviting us into his story from a different angle. So he talked to his protégé Dave Filoni, reconceived Filoni’s existing character concept for her, and the rest is history, spanning a movie release in Star Wars: The Clone Wars, a show of the same name, and another show set chronologically afterwards called Star Wars: Rebels.
The story itself goes like this: a boy, barely a young man, is a general in a massive war; a young girl, just a few years of difference between them, is sent to be taught by him, fight the same battles, and share the joys and pains such an extreme life can provide them. A boy whose one constant joy since childhood is to fly, and a girl who flies into his life, who will end up living it more freely than he was ever able to manage. Anakin didn’t ask for an apprentice, and her teasing catches him further off-guard, but their first experience on the battlefield shows him a kindred spirit in Ahsoka. She brings a wall crashing around him, but leaves him perfectly intact. She’s wild, impulsive, just as he knows himself to be, and as well-meaning and courageous. “You would never have made it as Obi-Wan’s padawan, but you just might make it as mine.” Those words start the relationship, and map out what is to come.
For the rest of their story, they are in parallel arcs, mirroring each other. Ahsoka worries about losing him, protects him when he’s fallen, has to learn a lesson about letting go of her personal feelings when he’s injured enough to become helpless; she understands that letting go of her need to take action actually helped her look out for his interests better than if she’d hovered over him. Anakin, in the grip of his tragedy, is faced with this lesson but never truly learns it: time and again, he is presented with the option of accepting there is nothing he can do for her, and refuse it. They engage in banter and play, as the war drags on the galaxy and on their minds, their hearts. There are little hints at how they spend their time offscreen, with Ahsoka showing Anakin’s aptitude for mechanics halfway through the third season. They are both given a shot at romance with a Senator, and again, Ahsoka is willing to accept the possibility of losing it to someone else, while Anakin is too afraid to allow it. Through it all, they’re at each other’s side, with humor paired with caring looks and touches, Ahsoka ready to protect and watch over him and he ready to do the same for her. From her standing over his unconscious body, ready to fight anything that approaches, to her carrying him out of his ship; from trading information to a pirate in exchange for her life to literally infusing her with the essence of a god to bring her back to life. From his support and encouragement when she makes mistakes in battle, to her hand on his shoulder when he’s having nightmares, from his faith in her goodness when every institution they worked to serve turns its back on her to her recognition of his own even when he has turned his back on it. He gives her weapons, then half his army; she gives him understanding, the gift of being seen, the way he saw her when he first accepted her as his padawan. She saw him as a hero, a Jedi, and a man; Anakin led two lives, one as a general for the Republic with Obi-Wan, and a secret one as a husband with Padmé—he let Ahsoka into both from the start. Without ever explicitly being told about their marriage, she knew, and they knew it, and still she remained a trusted friend to Anakin and Padmé both; the duality of his identity that presaged his future transformation.
Transformation, a recurring thing in this saga. As Anakin was a beloved father lost, then an evil lord, before becoming a beloved father regained; so Ahsoka was a new look at the universe of the prequel era, then a new look at Anakin, and finally a character who embodied the theme of hope in the darkness just as much as Anakin and Luke did, as The Clone Wars found its shape around her and their relationship. The movie that starts it all, and the first two and a half seasons which immediately follow it, is a set of stories purposefully aired out of chronological order. Though it had already been decided to foreground the Anakin and Ahsoka relationship, when Lucas had them take the episodes she was introduced in and turn them into a movie to be aired in theaters before the premiere of the show on television, the early show harkened back to when its purpose was to give little peeks here and there at how people were doing in different parts of the galaxy, with little to no serialization apart from recurring characters and the presence of the main ones, with Anakin, Ahsoka, Obi-Wan, and Padmé in various combinations or solo, and the Sith Lord Dooku having his own apprentice in Asajj Ventress, in opposition to Anakin and Ahsoka.
Halfway through season three, this would change. First, Dooku betrays his apprentice, attempts to have her killed at the behest of his own master Darth Sidious. She is left to attempt revenge, and then wander alone to find a new place for herself in the stars. Then Anakin, lured in along with Ahsoka and Obi-Wan by a distress call, falls into a world out of time inhabited only by three divine beings, shape-changing avatars of the Force: the light in The Daughter, the dark in the Son, and the Father to balance them. Their story plays out in a familiar way, foreshadowing what is to happen with Anakin. The light falls with the Daughter’s death, then the dark with the Son, as the self-sacrifice of the Father leads to a restoration of balance, if a bittersweet one. As with Anakin himself, however, the light was never truly eradicated with the grief and horror of the Daughter’s death. For the struggle in the world of Mortis involves the kidnapping, corruption, and death of Ahsoka at the hands of the Son, and for the first and only time until Luke, Anakin is able to stop death from taking a loved one, by turning to the light side of the Force in him. He is able to resurrect her with the Daughter’s fading light. Over her body, he decides that “there’s always hope,” and there is. She lives.
From then onwards, the show arranged itself into chronological order. There would still be peeks all over the galaxy, at recurring and minor characters; these were paired with a sense of progression, as Ahsoka got to show off the results of her training both alone and within their partnership. We see them as a team, whether together or apart, happy or sad. When Obi-Wan betrays Anakin’s trust with a calculated plan during the war, Ahsoka is there to support and take care of him; when Ahsoka’s own close friend betrays her trust in a more thorough manner, by going to the dark side over disillusionment with the Jedi, Anakin does everything he can to keep Ahsoka safe, though both incidents leave their marks on the characters and foreshadow Anakin’s own betrayal of everyone dear to him when he gives in to his own disillusionment to become a Sith Lord. Ahsoka’s experiences that pain and loss of trust herself, but true to her story’s mirroring of Anakin’s, expresses it in a different way. She realizes that the Jedi Order cannot be an institution she belongs in, and so she leaves it behind, along with all the dreams her identity was based on, all the people she knew and loved. She knows, though there is much for her to work through yet, that she can’t cling to the past if she wants to move forward. She lets it go.
Ahsoka leaves, and Anakin falls. All things turn dark. Ahsoka’s book, named after her and authored by E.K. Johntson, explores the goings on of her mind at this early time. They are lost—Anakin leaving his past behind with everything he’s lost, surviving as Vader, while Ahsoka wanders the galaxy, unable to help anyone as she struggles to survive, thinking of herself as the ordinary refugee Ashla—and Ahsoka finds herself sooner, in the purpose of serving others. Her grief eats at her, but she is not subsumed into a life as narrow and empty as that which Anakin now leads, though they share an element of isolation. She loses touch with the people she loves, in the life she has to lead. But there she is still, after, fighting for the Rebellion, becoming one of its early leaders as the Fulcrum, the spymaster organizing its intelligence network.
What becomes of them next happens in a show set about a decade and a half in the future. Star Wars: Rebels, takes place few years before the events that set Luke Skywalker on his journey, following a cell of the growing Rebellion through adventures which will bring Ahsoka and Anakin-as-Vader together after their long separation. They find each other again, the erstwhile Jedi. They are both thrown off-course in the midst of their respective missions, each feeling the shock of the other being alive and her bearing the weight of his fate: Vader, meant to destroy a Rebel fleet, chooses to spare the ship carrying her in favor of taking them alive, and only later, with Palpatine’s guidance, does he find a practical reason for it in the possibility of her knowing more Jedi survivors; Ahsoka, as one of the only people who can fight him, reaches out through the Force to determine the identity of this Sith Lord, and what she senses, during the moment of their mutual recognition, causes her to pass out from the horror of it. Ahsoka struggles. She doesn’t speak about it. She’s haunted by visions of what happened, the survivor’s guilt she’s held inside her rearing up with intensity.
Vader prods at that guilt and denial when they meet in person. She walks in, with the kind of snark we haven’t seen from her in a good long time, and at first he turns off his lightsaber to talk. She tries to reach him, to find some sign to confirm what she dreads. He encourages her to be angry, to take vengeance for Anakin rather than see him inside Vader. He notes how not like a Jedi that would be, drawing out her struggle to live by the values of a way of life she once left behind along with him, and pushes her to reject it altogether. They fight. They are equals. He knocks her out, but doesn’t follow up for the kill, though it wouldn’t take him long to do it before continuing his mission. She makes a comeback, driving him to the floor and slicing up his mask.
Ahsoka recovers first. Vader is on his knees before her. He calls out. She looks at him, finally sees him again, after all these years, and she understands. She doesn’t know a thing about the details of his fall to the dark side, of what happened to his body when he embraced his choice, and she doesn’t need to—all she knows is that he is here, and she is here with him, and in promising not to leave again she extends her compassion, shows him her love for who he is. For that moment, as they say each others’ names, they both recognize the other and in that, they recognize themselves.
She sees behind the mask, and he sees her with his true eyes. She is calm, steady in her passion, the clarity of her resolve. He is in turmoil, what we can see of his face changing, before he settles into rage. He is too subsumed in his despair, sees no possibility of a future in which he could move forward in the light. She has rejected the darkness already, a Jedi in all but name. She has angered him, calling to him out of a past he has ruthlessly surpressed and to a self he considers to have been weak. So he gives in to his passion, his coping method of choice, and goes to murder her instead. If he ever truly had a plan for what to do with her, a reason to face her that had nothing to do with his feelings about their relationship, he does not even pretend it matters now; they fight more earnestly than ever, as Ahsoka does what she must do in facing him despite the pain of it, protecting the only two Jedi she knows are alive that they may escape while she traps herself with Vader. The Sith temple they struggle in explodes around them. The next thing we see, Vader is limping, not a note of triumph as he staggers out of the ruins; this is followed by the sight of a lone bird, and a silhouette we can just recognize as Ahsoka in a doorway standing amongst the ruins.
Vader may have just tried to kill her, but that is not where it ends. Once, in a timeless world, Anakin saved Ahsoka’s life, because he had hope, and it infused her with the divine essence of light. Now, in a World Between Worlds where all time can be accessed, that light manifests itself. A bird, one of the forms The Daughter had taken. It won’t let Vader override his own deeds through murder, anymore than Vader can override the whole of who he was by throwing himself into darkness. There’s always hope. Once more, Ahsoka lives. Once more, she lets Anakin go. She loves him, but she cannot be responsible for him, and he has rejected her help. It’s up to him. She must move forward. She is stranded in the ruins of the Sith temple, but she has reached a new level of understanding. Ahsoka has been fighting for more than half her life; now she accepts, as she has done before, that she must learn to see herself and her purpose anew.
Ahsoka lives. We see her next a year after the battle of Endor, when Vader has, in his choice to die, finally accepted his whole self as Anakin. They have both accepted their darkness and moved beyond it now. A whole world of knowledge gained is in her face, as she stands all in white, wearing a wanderer’s cloak and staff, before a ship she’s flown onto the planet. She’s about to set off on another stop in her long journey, and there’s more life for her to live yet. The last of the Jedi as they were, the only one remaining who grew up in the institution of an Order. Obi-Wan’s padawan didn’t make it, but Anakin’s did, and she has a whole galaxy open to her. She made the choices he couldn’t, and what was good about both of them, the courage, the love and care they felt so fiercely in the service of others, lives in her.
There is no information about what happened in that Sith temple, or during the year between Anakin’s death and our last sighting of Ahsoka, beyond the suggestiveness of Ahsoka having changed visually indicating a whole journey. The possibility remains that they meet again, that one of the first things he does after dying is to appear to her in his new ghostly form, and that this is the way she learns of what happened to him. They could get this chance at reconciliation, to see again who they have become, with all the weight of their pasts and the beauty that has come from their journeys towards acceptance. May they have this next moment of mutual recognition, of seeing each other and seeing themselves.
That is all for the future. Star Wars is an ongoing canon, even if this story is, at least for now, ended. It’s a story of characters entwined, not only in their shared love, but in how they parallel each other, showing each other who they are; where Anakin stumbles and falls, Ahsoka is his bright mirror, matching his every transformation with one of her own, stumbling but finding her way, carrying all the hope and potential of what he could have been, and fulfilling it with a life far beyond what either of them imagined when they were young.