13 Years Ago Today, Ahsoka Proved She Was A Better Jedi Than Anakin – When She Left the Order

It’s hard for modern viewers to understand, but the introduction of Ahsoka Tano initially made Star Wars: The Clone Wars seriously controversial. First reactions to Ahsoka were mixed, only changing as audiences bought into her character arc. More importantly, though, nobody was quite sure how Anakin Skywalker’s Padawan fitted into the overarching story of the Skywalker saga; she clearly wasn’t still around by the time of Revenge of the Sith, so what happened to her? Many speculated her prequel trilogy absence meant she was doomed to die in the Clone Wars.

The truth was revealed 13 years ago today, in The Clone Wars Season 5 episode “The Wrong Jedi” (which also served as the series finale on Cartoon Network). Far from dying, Ahsoka left the Jedi Order after become disillusioned by the Council. The Jedi Council had wrongly allowed her to be blamed for a terrorist attack on Coruscant’s Jedi Temple, and she couldn’t believe they lacked the wisdom and compassion to believe she’d do this. Ahsoka walked away from the Jedi, her departure creating yet another reason Anakin himself lost trust in the Council.

Ahsoka Proved She Was So Much Greater Than Anakin

Yoda initially gave Anakin a Padawan to teach him the hardest lesson of all; the need to let go of those he feared to lose. The aged and wise Jedi Grandmaster sensed that Anakin still struggled with attachment, and perhaps even disagreed with his being knighted in a hurry during the early days of the Clone Wars; so he gave Anakin a student that he may learn a lesson for himself. The core problem, though, was that Yoda failed to understand just how deep a problem Anakin’s attachments were.

The problem for Anakin was that he was essentially caught between two different attachments: his self-absorbed love of Padmé and his attachment to the Jedi Order itself. Ahsoka came to a point where she, too, lost confidence in the Jedi – but she chose to act in accordance with her own moral code regardless. Ironically, in doing so she proved herself a much better Jedi than Anakin, in that she was unwilling to compromise her sense of right and wrong out of attachment. Kristin Baver explores the point in her (canon) biography, Skywalkers: A Family At War:

“Ahsoka accomplished something Anakin Skywalker was too afraid to do himself. Like her, Anakin had also lost faith in the Jedi. He had spurned their strict code and violated their protocols again and again in the name of justice and desire. But he was not strong enough to take a stand and walk away. The Jedi Order had been his life. The Jedi had freed him from slavery and offered him a home. Despite all the reasons he had to follow Ahsoka, abandoning the Jedi felt like a terrible mistake. He owed them too much.

In the end, Yoda had succeeded in teaching the value of letting go of all one feared to lose. Only it was Ahsoka who had mastered the lesson, leaping into the unknown, while Anakin was left with familiar feelings of abandonment.”

Anakin Was Destroyed By His Attachments, But Ahsoka Was Not

This is the striking thing about Ahsoka; her master was defined, and ultimately destroyed by, his attachments, but she was not. Anakin’s selfish attachments essentially meant he wanted to have his cake and eat it, to enjoy two competing and contradictory attachments that were not designed to go together. He was acting in violation of the Jedi Code, and yet he wanted to remain a Jedi; he was living a lie before the Jedi Council, but he wanted to continue in that lie rather than resolve this horrible tension.

It was never going to work. It wouldn’t have worked even if Anakin somehow avoided falling to the dark side, because that more pleasant timeline would have seen Padmé give birth to two Force-sensitive twins, and the truth would have eventually come out. Other Jedi had turned a blind eye; we now know that Obi-Wan Kenobi was secretly aware of Anakin and Padmé‘s relationship, but chose to ignore it, a hint of his own issues with attachment. But they wouldn’t be able to continue doing so after the birth of the twins.

Instead, though, the tension between Anakin’s competing attachment built to a climax and broke him. Ahsoka, for her part, avoided that fate. She refused to compromise her morals, walking away from the Jedi despite her own attachments, and in so doing proved the student was greater than the master. She did what Anakin could not, what Anakin never could, and let go. And though she ceased to be part of the Jedi community, she never truly stopped being a Jedi, because she’d just proved herself true to the code.

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