Togrutas in Refridgerators
Spoilers for the relatively recent Star Wars: the Clone Wars finale.
Star Wars: The Clone Wars is not a very popular show in my quadrant of the Star Wars fandom, which is basically mid-30s male friends of mine; but tentative forays on the internet have generally established this opinion to be widely held. And I agree with many of the criticisms -- it is often hokey and atonal, the animation is thoroughly uncanny valley, the writing inconsistent.
But I give SW:tCW a pass for many reasons, and one of them is first among equals:
I love the character of Ahsoka Tano.
Ahsoka Tano, the female Jedi padawan who is complicated, nuanced. Who has tons of flaws, and tons of strengths. Who is a fully realized human being -- well, togruta -- not just an extension of the male characters around her. Who isn't defined by her love interest (and, indeed, doesn't get any for a long, long, long time, and once they happen, they in no way dominate her character arcs, or even have much of an arc themselves; sort of one-off things, then it's back to everyday Ahsoka, because every day for Ahsoka is being a fighter in a war with no clear-cut good guy, as she increasingly grows to discover).
Ahsoka Tano is a /strong female character/ in the best possible way: she is a strong character, who also happens to be female, rather than some sort of Saturday Morning Special about Girl Power. She is occasionally feminine. She is a bit sexualized in her season three-and-on design -- the boob window is not spectacularly classy -- but she's also got some guns on those arms, by god, as emphasized by leather straps. And she is never shamed for becoming sexier as she grows up, either, so that's something, too.
She is the /definitive/ lightsaber-wielding female protagonist of note in any televised iteration of Star Wars; Leia half-assing it in the books doesn't count, Mara Jade and Jaina were never onscreen, and Shaak Ti's five minutes of glory aren't really enough, on their own. They're great, but tokenism, and the same is true of Episode II-III Aayla Secura. (There are a few more examples of moderately developed female duelists in SW:tCW, which proves the point, really, about the show.) And Ahsoka is a /badass/. She joins Shaak Ti in the extremely elite ranks of having dueled Grevious defensively and survived, not once, but twice, starting at /age fourteen/. She pilots starships, commands clone troopers, and mostly idolizes her troubled master, Anakin Skywalker.
But her relationship with Anakin changes, just as she changes, from a bright-eyed, enthusiastic, overconfident fourteen-year-old into a somewhat more jaded and experienced but still passionately idealistic sixteen-year-old. She becomes, essentially, Anakin's moral center within the Jedi Order, prepared to call him on his bullshit. Not letting Ahsoka down becomes one of the main things keeping Anakin on the straight and narrow.
And so I suppose it is inevitable that the fandom has called hungrily for her death since she was first introduced -- and how many people called her ambiguous absence from Episode III, as finally explained, in the finale, by her departure from the Jedi Order that had betrayed her, 'writing cowardice'.
Because, I guess, the only value of Ahsoka Tano's character is to provide more emotional pathos for Anakin's arc towards the Dark Side.
Here's to Ahsoka Tano not being killed and put in a refridgerator, like so many of her peers in comics and movies. I'm disappointed that there isn't a Season Six, but at least the character survived to live another day in other media, perhaps.