Star Wars fans are about to get the answer to what now qualifies as an ancient mystery: How does Ahsoka Tano survive the extermination of the Jedi?

The question has grown in importance along with the character herself—a short alien girl with blue and white “head-tails” who has become a towering figure in Star Wars mythology. Not only was she a central character in The Clone Wars and Rebels animated shows, but she is the star of her own Y.A. novel, as well as one of the ethereal voices who guided Rey from the beyond in finale of The Rise of Skywalker.

Ahsoka was the first lead female Jedi, although there is still debate about whether that term should apply to her. Before Rey in The Force Awakens—before Rogue One’s Jyn Erso, The Last Jedi’s Rose Tico, or The Mandalorian’s Cara Dune—there was Ahsoka Tano holding open the blast-door for a new generation of girls and women. Those viewers had Princess Leia and Padmé Amidala, but wanted more.

Ahsoka Tano brought it.

When viewers first met the young Force-wielder in the first episode of The Clone Wars in 2008, it wasn’t clear that she had much future. She was a Jedi in training, a padawan, learning from Anakin Skywalker, who would go on to become Darth Vader. Her chances of survival were grim at best. Even her creators—George Lucas and Dave Filoni—weren’t sure where she was headed.

Then The Clone Wars halted production following Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm in 2012, and it seemed as if the question might never be answered at all. When season five ended in 2013, Ahsoka was last seen walking away from the Jedi order. She didn’t turn up at all in season six, an abbreviated run of episodes that were too far along in production to scrap. A few years later, fans saw her reappear as an older figure in Rebels, uniting the Rebellion and facing down her old mentor, by then known as Darth Vader.

It took until now, six years later, to find out how she survived the purge that ended the other Jedi in Revenge of the Sith. The resurrected season seven of the The Clone Wars is finally telling that tale with its final episodes on Disney+, starting tonight with a showdown between Ahsoka and another looming Star Wars figure, the demonic dark-sider known as Maul.

Ahsoka’s journey is likely to continue soon, if rumors are to be believed. The character will reportedly turn up in the next season of The Mandalorian, which is set after the fall of Vader and the Emperor in Return of the Jedi. (Rosario Dawson has strongly implyied she’ll be playing the character in live-action.)

As this chapter of her story concludes, Vanity Fair spoke with some of Ahsoka’s creators and admirers about where she came from, where she’s going, and how she changed everything.

A Long Time Ago…

After finishing the prequel films, George Lucas wanted to make an animated series to tell the in-between story of “the Clone Wars,” which were first alluded to in 1977’s original Star Wars. The lead characters of the show would be Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker, but also a youngling—never seen before.

Dave Filoni, supervising director of The Clone Wars and Rebels: Ahsoka was one of the first characters that I ever drew when I was working here at Lucasfilm. I have a little sketch of her, and she’s come so far.

Ashley Eckstein, voice actor for Ahsoka: When I first began playing Ahsoka, what a lot of people don’t realize is we recorded the entire first season before The Clone Wars animated movie even premiered [in 2008]. So we’d been working on the show for almost two years before anyone ever met Ahsoka.

Some things evolved and changed about her during that time. Other things were already locked.

Eckstein: She was always an alien. Ahsoka being a Togruta, Ahsoka having orange skin, Ahsoka having the blue and white head tails. She has always been an alien, at least from when I was cast and entered the scene.

Filoni: George is the one that came up with the name Ahsoka.

Eckstein: I do know that at one point they were considering the name Ashla, which is just weird since my name was Ashley.

Filoni: We called her Ashla in the beginning. That was 2005, and that worked on several levels for me. I think it was the name given to one of the [young Jedis Yoda was training] in Attack of the Clones. There was a little Togruta girl. We kicked around the idea that maybe that was Ahsoka but then we thought the age didn’t really work out for it to be the same character. She was too young in the film.

Eckstein: I had so many conversations with Dave. I’ve had a couple of conversations even with George Lucas when I got to meet him for the first time, and we talked about our hopes and dreams for the character of Ahsoka and her journey and even the series as a whole.

Filoni: Way back in the beginning, Ahsoka was more involved in the black-market world and working with a Jedi in a way that was not really involved in the day-to-day big battles of the war. She was involved in the intrigue and the plots of where we ended up [in season seven], which is that she’s trying to help prevent these criminals from taking advantage of this situation of wartime.

E.K. Johnston, author of the 2016 Y.A. novel Ahsoka: When I think about Ahsoka and The Clone Wars, it is this really deep and thoughtful show, but it's so highly accessible. And Ahsoka really makes it something that kids can watch for fun and then be like, Wait…is war-profiteering tearing the world apart?

As development continued, Lucas and Filoni decided to center the show more directly within the world of the Jedi.

Filoni: We thought having a padawan was important. And having a young girl. I felt like I’d seen Luke and then I’d seen Anakin, and we wanted to do something different and give a different point of view on it.

Eckstein: It was the first time on a regular basis that a lightsaber was put in a girl’s hand and it was a big deal.

Amy Richau, the journalist behind 365StarWars.com, which chronicles female creators and characters from the galaxy: I think it was incredibly bold of Lucasfilm to give Anakin a padawan—to add such a major character into the mix between two prequel films. Her relationship with Anakin made him an even more interesting character and made his fall even more heartbreaking. But Ahsoka is such a great character she didn’t need Anakin by her side to carry episodes of The Clone Wars.

Eckstein: I didn’t realize how important of a character she was, how big of a character she was. I mean, it was groundbreaking to have Ahsoka Tano. It’s so easy to forget, because now we live in a time where we have Rey. The lead of the last three Star Wars films in the Skywalker saga, was a girl. We’ve had Rose Tico and Jyn Erso and Hera Syndulla and Sabine Wren. We’ve got all of these lead female characters and female-driven movies. But at the time, that was not the case.

Filoni: [George] said, “This is going to be Anakin Skywalker’s padawan because I want him to have a padawan. People don’t expect that and it will add a way to give him somebody to teach, and it creates a great dynamic between him and Obi-Wan and her.” And at first it seems like, well that’s a far-out idea. Growing up, I never thought Anakin had a padawan. That’s why George is George. He just perceives things and trusts his instincts and goes for it and ends up creating a character that now is beloved.

Richau: Watching her accomplishments and her failures, Ahsoka’s an incredibly easy character to latch onto as a viewer. There was also the excitement, the dread of what would happen to her since she didn’t seem to be a part of Anakin’s life in Revenge of the Sith.

The Looming Threat

Viewers of The Clone Wars already knew the Jedi were headed toward a bad end. Many guessed it was inevitable that Ahsoka would have one too.

Eckstein: I always asked Dave the same question, and he has told me several different things for Ahsoka over the years. It definitely changed over time.

Filoni: The tension was good and we liked it. Many people would say, Well, we know what happens to Anakin and Obi-Wan. We could say, Yeah, but you don’t know what happens to Ahsoka.

Johnston: It was terrifying. Yeah, you don’t want to fall in love [with her]…. Ahsoka keeps running off into danger. There’s one episode pretty early on where Ahsoka has to face General Grievous by herself. You’re just like, No! Please someone, protect this child! And of course she can take care of herself, and she gets better and better at it as the series progresses. But, it’s definitely that level of, Please don’t hurt me!

Eckstein: That movie threat has been with me from the beginning, because fans would say, Okay, well, she’s not in Episode II, and she’s not in Episode III, so therefore she must die. I remember at convention after convention, fans would say, Ahsoka is going to die. It wasn’t even a question. I always said, How do you know she has to die? What if something else happens?

Filoni: I thought that there was a possibility that the character died before the end of The Clone Wars, but I didn’t really want the character to exist just to become another thing that pushed Anakin [to the dark side.] If that was an important element of his story, it would have been in the movies.

Eckstein: Over time, those statements went away. Then, everyone started asking, Well, can she survive? Is there any way she can survive Order 66?

Richau: With so much of Filoni’s work, fans—and me—expect everyone to die but then they don’t! I mostly remember Filoni teasing about Ahsoka’s future—something he is still doing.

Survivor Type

One reason Ahsoka has continued to turn up is because she came to mean so much to the viewers.

Eckstein: It’s so funny. I think there are very few characters that every single person can see themselves in. Part of that is because she’s just an alien with orange skin, with head tails. We can all be Ahsoka. We can put aside our race and gender and we can all be Ahsoka. And I think it is so powerful.

Filoni: That’s the thing I like most. That idea that it’s been earned.

Johnston: In terms of girls specifically, The Clone Wars gave a whole generation of fans their Rey moment a lot earlier. The movie purists, if you will, didn’t really get that moment until Rey called the lightsaber to her hand in The Force Awakens. But, if you were a Clone Wars fan, you already knew that she could do that.

Richau: It’s a cliché to say that Star Wars is all about hope, but it’s hard to think of a character that personifies hope more than Ahsoka. Her character is introduced during the Clone Wars right when everything is falling apart for Anakin, Padmé, Kenobi, and the Jedi. Even in the darkest days of the Empire. [In the Rebels series] she’s there as [secret agent] Fulcrum, doing everything she can, risking it all to defeat the Imperials, never giving up.

Johnston: I think my favorite part to write of her was something that Dave brought up really early: Ahsoka is funny. She’s often the one with the zippy one-liner because she’s a 14- to 16-year-old sass-master in the TV show. She’s always bringing everybody down a peg.

Richau: One of the highlights of Star Wars Celebration in Chicago [a year ago] was attending the Ahsoka Lives photo event. There were plenty of men there, but it was mostly a sea of women—women cosplaying as Ahsoka, which is no easy feat! Women wearing Ahsoka T-shirts, and women who just wanted to share their love for the character with fellow fans.

Eckstein: It’s such a beautiful thing that so many people have been so inspired by this character and care so much about this fictional animated character. People are literally—like, grown men, grown women, and children—openly weeping and sobbing over about what happens to this character. It’s really a beautiful thing. And trust me, the tears are going to continue to come in the season finale showing now.

The Dark Side

Some blowback did follow Ahsoka, as with every effort to broaden a fandom by including girls and women. Some male viewers actually did want her gone.

Eckstein: You know what, yeah, there was definitely resistance to Ahsoka. She had her haters in the beginning. People that thought that she was too bratty. I even got a lot of hate in the beginning because I was most known for my work on the Disney Channel. I was an actress on That’s So Raven, and I got a lot of hate that this Disney Channel actress is going to come ruin Star Wars. I definitely read several of those headlines, and I was really, really down. I took a day to just kind of wallow in the negativity and be sad for a second. But then after that day I said, No, this character is still important.

Filoni: We knew that going in, because she starts out so young-seeming. If you go back and look at [the early episodes], she feels very young and very naive and I think that’s for multiple reasons. Part of it is the way we wrote it, part of it is our own naiveness, our lack of experience as a team producing it. It’s a very real one-to-one growth and you can almost say that as the character grew up, so did everybody working on the show. That lent a dimension of reality to her that would’ve been absent otherwise.

Eckstein: I just started asking fans to trust me. I said, look, Ahsoka is about to go on an amazing journey and you’re going to like the direction she’s going in. No character is going to be perfect in the beginning. And if they were, that wouldn’t be very exciting. So I told them, She’s going in the direction you want her to go.

Filoni: She’s earned her place, and it wasn’t automatic. She had to prove herself along the way from this kind of snippy young character who always had an answer for everyone to everything.

Richau: I know when Ahsoka debuted there was a lot of grumbling in the fan base about her character in general, but by the time I met her she was incredibly beloved by fans—who were understandably sad The Clone Wars never got a proper ending.

The Shutdown

After Disney purchased Lucasfilm and began retooling its pipeline to create new movies and TV shows, major projects that had been in the works were halted. Only now is is the finale of The Clone Wars being told.

Eckstein: There was a lot of sadness. I mean, I’m not going to lie, I watched the season five finale [in 2013] and I just cried my eyes out. Part of it was because I knew that it was all ending. I was devastated. I chose to work toward the light and be hopeful that I would get to voice Ahsoka again and continue to get to do Star Wars. That’s the way I choose to look at it. And, I mean, boy, I’m looking back of everything that’s happened since 2012, and it’s been incredible.

Filoni tried to give Ahsoka closure by bringing her into season two of Rebels, proving that she survived the purge—but without revealing how.

Filoni: If you look at the growth of the character and how different she is in Rebels than she is in Clone Wars…It’s kind of funny to go back now and do these new episodes, because we had to build a bridge between the younger girl and the kind of wandering Samurai that you begin to get in Rebels.

Johnston also helped fill in the blanks with her 2016 novel, which follows an 18-year-old Ahsoka in the period after the slaying of the Jedi under the Emperor’s Order 66.

Johnston: The way I got to write her was a little bit more, I guess, sad—because of what’s happened with Order 66. But she never gives in to despair, she never gives in to that sadness. No matter what happens, she’s always, always going to look on the bright side. She’s always going to find something worth salvaging from every situation, and that is a great kind of character to write because you know they’re going to find the best in everyone every time.

Filoni: One of the reasons there was the Ahsoka novel was that I wanted to test the waters: Does this character work outside of the medium of animation? When I talked to the publishing division at Lucasfilm about the potential of it, I said, We should explore it because it will help show people that maybe aren’t as aware of Clone Wars or Rebels that this character has a bigger fan base.

Johnston: It’s a Y.A. book, so I wanted to keep her on the young side, and—especially because so many Clone Wars fans are kids—I wanted the book to be accessible to people who have seen it, even if they’re not confident readers themselves yet. She was 18, which really puts me as close to Order 66 as possible. So, the book ended up being a bit more about healing and less about adventure than I think everybody’s intentions were originally. But that worked out really well because there haven’t been a lot of Star Wars books that deal with the fallout of stuff.

The Present

Ahsoka Lives! Although she broke ground as the “first lead female Jedi,” she endures today in part because she chose to no longer be one.

Richau: She’s not a Jedi. Not because she couldn’t be, but because she chose a different path. Ahsoka choosing to leave the Jedi Order was one of the most powerful moments of The Clone Wars series and I think is one of the most important stories in all of Star Wars. She left the Order, but she didn’t stop helping people. She went her own way and helped take down the Empire. So I wouldn’t call her a Jedi or a padawan. She’s a hero.

Filoni: What’s important about her character is that she can make a different choice. When we wrote the story about her walking away from the Order, it was about her being pulled in one direction, and then the other, and becoming frustrated. We were trying to look at young people and say, There are [predetermined] ways that you can go, but you can also take all this information and make a choice for yourself.

That’s why one of her major final showdowns in the final episodes of The Clone Wars is with Maul—a former Sith apprentice, also now an outsider.

Filoni: I just think of it as Maul has fallen out of the Sith way of doing things, and she has fallen out of the Jedi way of doing things. There’s a parallel there.

The Future

Will Ahsoka turn up in season two of The Mandalorian, which Filoni is executive producing with creator Jon Favreau? No one is saying. But it’s a safe bet to expect more Ahsoka to be interwoven with whatever the future holds for Star Wars.

Filoni: It’s exciting that people have been asking me for years, What about a live-action Ahsoka?

Richau: I’d love to see Ahsoka in The Mandalorian. I hope it’s not a cameo but she’s there for a multi-episode arc. Ashley is rightfully very connected with fans’ minds when they think of Ahsoka. I’m open to another actress tackling the role for live action. Nothing will take away from what Ashley has brought to the character.

Johnston: Obviously in my heart I want to see her pick up baby Yoda because I want to see everybody pick up baby Yoda. I love the surprise of Star Wars so much that I honestly try not to think about it.

Eckstein: I’ve always known that Ahsoka is bigger than just me. I think my hope for anyone that joins Team Tano moving forward is that they realize how much Ahsoka means to people and that she’s more than just a character. She’s more than just a role. She’s more than just another story. Ahsoka is changing lives. I hope that whoever joins the team recognizes that and continues to breathe life into her in a way that carries on her legacy.

Filoni: I’ve done way more Ahsoka stories than I ever thought I would. It seems to be an unstoppable force at this point. I think we just have to be careful and make sure the bar is high and always tell good stories and ones that are adding to the character’s depth and dimension. We’ll see. But it’s potential. Potential energy is always very exciting.