Ahsoka Tano Is a Star Wars Hero for a Generation of Dissenters

Earlier this summer, the buzz for the upcoming show Ahsoka was palpable at the Star Wars Convention in Anaheim. Due to be released in 2023, the show has been teased as a critical piece that will lay the groundwork for a major crossover event among the Star Wars shows that Disney+ currently streams. The excitement for the show marks a radical new chapter for the titular character, Ahsoka Tano. Now more than ever, Ahsoka’s journey — and the evolution of the public’s perception of her — offers a blueprint for young women who seek to do good and be honest in their resistance and activism amid increasingly chaotic, violent, and corrupt times.

Audiences first met Ahsoka Tano in the widely panned 2008 movie The Clone Wars. Critics blasted it for its lackluster animation rendering, poor dialogue, and tedious plot. Critics and fans alike, however, focused their backlash on the character of Ahsoka herself, calling her annoying and criticizing her very existence as a result of building corporate pressure to have a marketable young female Jedi character. Her character was a child, but this did little to protect her from criticism.

One critic wrote about his desire to see a depiction of Ahsoka being graphically killed in a “protracted” way. Another called her a “whiny, vacuous little twit who … would fit right in as a character on Hannah Montana.” When Clone Wars premiered as a TV show a few months after the movie’s release, Ahsoka’s inclusion continued to provoke contempt. Ahsoka shared key traits with young male characters in the Star Wars universe: She was portrayed as reckless, daring, and, yes, even a bit whiny — as Luke was in A New Hope and Anakin “It’s Not Fair!” Skywalker was in, well, most of the prequel trilogy. But while male characters seem to have permission to be carefree and childlike in their first chapters, female characters are targeted for being “out of place” for having the same interests and attitudes.

This reaction is hardly an anomaly in a fandom that has been hostile and unforgiving to women and minority characters, the actors that play them, and the fans that dare to like them. Disney has preemptively warned actors about the toxicity they’ll face and issued statements to fans saying, “there are more than 20 million sentient species in the Star Wars galaxy, don’t choose to be a racist.” Ashley Eckstein, Ahsoka’s voice actress for Clone Wars and Rebels, noted that Ahsoka “threw gender stereotypes out the window.” Eckstein did lots of work to cultivate and encourage the female fandom despite the cyberbullying that both she and female fans experienced. In an interview, she drew a clear line between Ahsoka’s gender and toxic fandom behavior. “A lot of people did not like Ahsoka. They thought she was snippy, bratty, annoying, and also they just didn’t expect Anakin Skywalker’s Padawan to be a 14-year-old girl.”

Ahsoka’s alienation for the crime of growing up as a girl makes it easy for young women to cultivate a sense of camaraderie with her off the bat. While some viewers — usually men — were dreaming of a violent death scene for Ahsoka, some women recount very different experiences. “I was immediately drawn to Ahsoka … she was a new female character, so that drew me in, but, in addition to that, she had some sass.”

Despite the initial outrage, many originally skeptical parts of the fandom began to fall in love with Ahsoka as her storyline solidified and matured. She grew into a curious, perceptive, empathetic adolescent Jedi and faced moral dilemmas and coming-of-age questions that Star Wars characters hadn’t yet explored. This uniqueness affirmed her as a “role model.” In 2010, at a time when many teens and young adults in America were questioning imperialist foreign policy and skeptical of reductive arguments about “democracy promotion,” Ahsoka’s character in Clone Wars explored how the war she was fighting in as a Jedi was not as morally simplistic as she’d been told. She also continuously became more mindful of political apathy and corruption, and her frustration with the institutional failings of the Republic at the height of its military-industrial era resonated with its audience. These thought-provoking storylines were key to why the fandom’s love for Ahsoka eventually led to her pivotal upcoming live-action show. By giving Ahsoka’s character a chance to shine with good writing and phenomenal voice acting by Ashley Eckstein, these messages got through.

Her dissonance was widely felt. Yes, Star Wars is a thinly veiled story about fascism. But it’s also a story about how to find a central identity of goodness that isn’t tied to the rise and fall of institutions. It spotlights the irreparable harm corrupt, divisive, and hypocritical powers that be can do. Ahsoka’s quest for betterment made her framing and betrayal at the hands of the Jedi Order that much more gutting for an audience that needed to see the truth: that an institution they loved and that had heralded itself as the “good guys” had become morally bankrupt and rotted from the inside out. Even when her innocence is proven, Ahsoka walks away from the Order, refusing to lay down her own sense of justice, swallow her own feelings, and pretend that everything is OK.

These are radical acts for any young woman. Ahsoka’s presence in Star Wars has been a coming-of-age story for the young women who are told to simply “vote harder” and derided as “divisive” when they show outrage and disappointment after abortion rights fall anyway, who are painted as troublesome for merely asking for transparency and morality from their surroundings, and who are betrayed by the very institutions they’ve devoted their lives to advancing — their colleges, their industries, their fandoms. What does it mean when you grow up in such dizzying times? How can you stay true to yourself? In tackling these questions, Ahsoka’s story speaks to a generation of young women who have fought their way into exclusionary spaces and found themselves wondering what to possibly do next.

Even as her political and spiritual allegiances undergo relatively seismic changes and her identity faces reckonings over the decades of canon leading up to Ahsoka, her charm, empathy, and inquisitiveness have stayed the same. She leaves the Jedi Order but does not leave the Force. She rejects the duality taught by her own mentor and his eventual son, which is that using the Force outside of its dominating institutions is a path to chaos or an active danger. She refuses to strip her power and gifts simply because she doesn’t use them the way the Jedi Order claims is “right.”

Ahsoka’s resonance with fans is a rare and welcome anomaly. Angry, bigoted fanboys were never going to like Ahsoka (and their desires should not be catered to), but her ability to shake off a botched introduction is extraordinary. When her live-action show premieres next year, audiences everywhere will come to understand that defying the expectations, dichotomies, and desires of oppressive systems is a key part of Ahsoka’s broader identity and appeal. In both her in-universe story arc and her character’s journey through public perception, Ahsoka has refused to be defined by the men around her — not the toxic fan base, not the misogynistic critics, not the Jedi Order, and not even when she faces down Darth Vader. After she vows to avenge his destruction of Anakin’s spirit, he taunts her by noting that revenge isn’t the Jedi way. However, this isn’t a problem for her because Ahsoka reminds him of the truth everyone has tried to suppress, and forces of apathy and evil have come to fear her for: “I am no Jedi.”