#like yep! soka has a bird god shes friends with! no biggie! definately not something we should have mentioned previously

[weirdo-from-bonesborough]

I hate that all of ahsoka’s relationships are seen as secondary to her relationship with anakin.

(oh my god i need to stop making ridiculously loooooong rants about a children's show from 2008. anyways spoilers below.)

Like, we know she has a relationship with Obi-Wan, but we never really see it expanded on. They’re in a lot of scenes together, but anakin’s always there and the focus is always on him. There aren’t really any one-on-one moments between just the two them.

During the Rako Hardeen arc, Ahsoka watches Obi-Wan die in her arms and all she has to say is that she’s worried about Anakin. We see Anakin be angry and try to kill “Hardeen” and Ahsoka’s right there with him with no elaboration into how she feels. And then Anakin calms down after he learns the truth and Ahsoka is just… also chill. If she was even told it was fake it happened off-screen, and on-screen she just all of a sudden stops being angry and sad and is just joking around with Padmé likes nothing’s wrong?

And Padmé. They hug and joke about Anakin and go off on missions with each other. Ahsoka confides in Padmé and goes to her apartment uninvited, and Padmé always seems genuinely happy to see Ahsoka, but I don’t remember ever actually seeing them meeting one another. And, while we do see Ahsoka mourning Padmé’s death, but we don’t ever get to see Padmé’s reaction to Ahsoka leaving. Padmé was just as much Ahsoka’s friend and mentor as Anakin, but while it’s implied that Anakin’s so aggressive and cold during season six is because he’s upset about Ahsoka, Padmé’s just… the same as she always is. She gets to be sad and angry about Anakin’s behavior, but her own relationship with Ahsoka is almost forgotten. And when Ahsoka comes back, Anakin gets to be ecstatic and happy over it, but then we don’t even know if Padmé was told her friend had returned.

It’s kinda like the show just assumes Ahsoka has a relationship with the people Anakin’s close to, but no one’s allowed to, like, outshine him.

Ahsoka spends the entire series with the 501st, but we never see her have any meaningful connections with them. She knows everyone’s name and she defends them in battle and she talks about how she trusts them, but she never interacts with anyone outside of combat. And they defend her too and follow her orders without question and paint they’re helmets in her honor (painting over one of obvious and most important identifying feature, meaning they are literally giving up their individuality to welcome back the girl they missed so much, but that's a whole other conversation), and most of the time we see them they are dying around her and she doesn’t even blink.

And Rex. Oh boy, Rex. Ahsoka spends her entire padawanhood at Rex’s side, and we’re never shown how it affects either of them. Rex is a battle-harden soldier forced to take orders from an inexperienced child. He lived with her and he fought with her and he watched her mature but there’s nothing to suggest he helped raised her. He’s not her master or her mentor or her brother or her father or her crèchemate or her CO, he’s just a guy who works for her. She calls him her friend and “Rex ol’ boy” and jokes with him and confides in him like they’re equals, but he only calls her “Commander” or “kid”. We get to watch Anakin warm up to her, but we don’t ever see Rex get used to her. He isn’t allowed to question her, he doesn’t react when she gets his brothers killed, but by the end he clearly respects her. He doesn’t mention her once when they aren’t in combat, but he’s happy to see her whenever they reunite.

Which, like. It makes sense. While most of the time we see Ahsoka is during missions and battles, she still was a Jedi and missed out on a lot of missions because she was back at the Temple doing her Padawan duties. If Ahsoka's primary social sphere is the Jedi, it'd make sense for her to only have a working relationship with the clones, but when never really get to see Ahsoka's relationship with the Jedi either.

She has these really meaningful moments that shape her identity with Sinube and Aayla and Luminara and Jocasta, and then barely interacts with them afterwards. We see how important Plo is to Ahsoka, and then she never mentions him or mourns him, and he we never see her feelings on her leaving.

We see Yoda genuinely shook and haunted and guilty and regretful about what happened to Ahsoka. We see her go to him for advice and spar with him and be taught by him and helping him with the younglings during the Gathering. We know they know each other, but we don't know why Yoda assigned her specifically to Anakin. We don't see either of their feelings about Ahsoka being a member of Yoda's lineage. We don't know her feelings about being in the same lineage as Qui-Gon or Dooku either.

We get to see Ahsoka and Barriss become friends on Geonosis, but we don't get to see that relationship develop until all of a sudden Barriss is framing Ahsoka for terrorism. Which is. Something that deserves elaborating I believe.

And we don't get to see Ahsoka be friends with any other Jedi her age. Anakin was the one who introduced Barriss and Ahsoka, and Kanan is younger than her and didn't seem to know her super well. We never see any of the people Ahsoka was raised with. The only person from her childhood she ever mentions is Plo. Like surely Ahsoka had friends growing up that she missed, other Padawans on the frontlines or at the Temple when she was being accused. And is Ahsoka *was* friendless growing up, that would likely have reflected in her personality?

And for the other friends Ahsoka makes in her range: she doesn't talk to Saw or Lux again after Onderon, we know next to nothing about her relationship with Bo-Katan, and when Ahsoka and Riyo were playing Nancy Drew it's just casually brought up that they've been besties the whole time?

(Trace and Rafa were done well though. They and Plo can remain unelaborated.)

And after tcw, this doesn't get any better! We don't know why she stayed in touch with Bo-Katan to the point that she knows what backwater planet Ahsoka was liberating.

And fucking Rebels,,, like we know she was a close friend and mentor to Ezra, but we don't see many meaningful moments between them, until all of a sudden Ahsoka is sacrificing herself and Ezra is crying on Kanan's shoulder like he did when his parents died. And then Ahsoka is ignoring the rest of the galaxy, just trying to find Ezra.

We don't see her relationship or feelings with Kanan, one of the only Temple-raised Jedi left. We don't see her relationship with Sabine, just that they're working together to find Ezra.

And Tales of the Jedi ALSO brought up more questions. Bail and Ahsoka are friends?? Ahsoka regularly lets the clones give her a concussion, to the point they can just be standing in a circle shooting at her in the middle of the hanger on the Star Destroyer and no one blinks??

And, well it's no longer canon, Ahsoka was designed wearing traditional Togruta clothes in the form of her sash and her akul-tooth headdress, which you can only get from killing an Akul single-handedly. This implies she has a relationship with her culture, and has performed Togruta rituals, likely on Shili. She calls the Togruta colonists on Kiros as "her people", implying she sees herself as one of the Togruta, in addition to being a Jedi. But does she know her parents? Does she have Togruta friends, whether on Shili or within the Jedi? Certainly you can identify with the culture you descended from without being close to your parents (2nd and 3rd gen immigrant identity crises rise up!), but we don't get to know her thoughts and relationship to her people. We don't know who took her back to Shili, who taught her about her people since her parents couldn't. I mean we know there are other Togruta Jedi, but I don't recall Ahsoka even interacting with Shaak Ti, a Togruta Jedi who was already in tcw.

I mean, we don't even see how her species makes her different from the humans around her. We don't see her fangs or her roar or her echo-location. They even gave her human eyes when originally they were gonna look like Shaak Ti's.

When Ahsoka leaves the Order, she stops wearing Togruta clothes. She doesn't go to Shili or Kiros, places where it can be assumed she has a relationship with someone, even if it's not her parents. She doesn't go see Padme or Riyo, both established to be close friends not in the Jedi.

We know she feels angry and upset with the Jedi and the Republic who betrayed and abandoned her, but we only see her goodbye to Anakin, not to Plo or Obi-Wan, who were on the council that dismissed her and would have complicated feelings in regards too. Not to Sinube or Jocasta or Aayla. Not to Padme. Not to Rex.

After Order 66, she mourns Anakin and Padme and Obi-Wan and the clones and... no one else. No mention of the Jedi she knew. She lived fourteen years without knowing Anakin, Obi-Wan, or Rex, but it's like she appeared out of the ether to join their group!

She went from ~Togruta girl brought to the Temple by Plo~ to ~Anakin's sassy badass Padawan~ with no in-between stage! Absolutely no mention of her life as an youngling and initiate!

And like, I know she was literally created to be Anakin's Padawan, and was never meant to be anything more then a device to aid his fall, but it shouldn't feel like that. Sure, she looks cool and she has character traits and she has other relationships, but it certainly feels like they needed Anakin to have a Padawan so they made "Anakin's PadawanTM" without thinking of her in any other way beyond that. And when she became a character who was bigger than just Anakin, they didn't bother fleshing her out as anything other than the vague idea she started as of "Jedi Togruta teenage girl Commander".