Star Wars: The Acolyte official trailer

[Tyndmyr]

Don't know how you qualify "best" here, but i wouldn't call Ahsoka the best outcome.

Well, she didn't die, so...

[LibraryOgre]

You know the Jedi Council ****ed up when the best at raising children among them became Darth Vader. I mean, yeah, his name is "Lord Daddy", but, seriously, y'all got out-parented by the Sith.

Don't know how you qualify "best" here, but i wouldn't call Ahsoka the best outcome.

Best is relative, and the Jedi set the bar very, very low.

[Peelee]

Well, she didn't die, so...

So Ahsoka, Cal Kestis, Kanan Jarrus, Kenobi, and Yoda. Plus whoever else eventually gets added to the list.

Again, what makes her the best?

Ignoring, of course, the whole "the other Jedi were all killed by Palpatine after Vader betrayed the Jedi and swore fealty to Palps" thing, which kind of undercuts the idea that Anakin's training was responsible for her survival.

Best is relative, and the Jedi set the bar very, very low.

How so?

[Infernally Clay]

Don't know how you qualify "best" here, but i wouldn't call Ahsoka the best outcome.

By what metric, exactly? She survived the war, she was vital to the Rebellion defeating the Empire, she defeated many Inquisitors and kept even more of her fellow survivors of Order 66 out of their clutches, she fought Vader and was able to get through to him even if only partially (she broke one side of his mask, Obi-Wan broke the other, symbolism yo!), she was active even after the fall of the Empire and fought to stop its revival...

It's no exaggeration to say Ahsoka is the most prolific survivor of the Clone Wars, thanks in no small part to Filoni making her a major player at every opportunity, so who among her fellow survivors turned out better than she did?

[Tyndmyr]

Again, what makes her the best?

As far as I can tell, largely this is a result of being Filoni's favorite.

I don't actually like her character or her show. Inserting OC special snowflakes is going to kind of muddle the message though, and if you're going for Anakin would have made a terrible teacher/dad, then...yeah, she does make that somewhat less clear.

[Infernally Clay]

I will point out that Anakin's training is in fact the reason Ahsoka survived Order 66. Tales of the Jedi is pretty explicit that Anakin's pathological need to ensure Ahsoka survived the war caused him to train her in very unorthodox ways, including having her fend off multiple clone troopers at once. This turned out to be pretty vital to her survival when those same clone troopers surrounded her, because she knew what to do to survive.

Of course if it hadn't been for Anakin's training I don't think Ahsoka would have been able to fight, and defeat, Maul either so there is strong evidence suggesting that Anakin was simply a much better teacher than the other Jedi. Which is understandable given that, moreso than the other Jedi, Anakin was a warrior and the war was where he thrived. According to Rebels, he basically published the equivalent of multiple theses on adapting traditional Jedi fighting styles to large scale combat scenarios and of course he was the bes pilot the Republic had.

For all intents and purposes Ahsoka learned from the best Jedi the Order had and he taught her exactly what she needed to learn to survive the war. The only thing he didn't get to teach her, while he was alive at any rate, was what to do after she survived.

[warty goblin]

Yeah, Anakin is a great teacher and mentor, ignoring the giant pile of kids he chops up whenever he's feeling stressed. Personally, when evaluating teachers, I find the number of elementary schools they've massacred ranks a bit higher than whether or not their favorite survives Dictator Daddy's kill order, but maybe that's just me.

[Peelee]

As far as I can tell, largely this is a result of being Filoni's favorite.

Imean, the only reason she's still alive is because Filoni invented a DEM for her with the World Between Worlds. Twice now, at least.

Yeah, Anakin is a great teacher and mentor, ignoring the giant pile of kids he chops up whenever he's feeling stressed.

And men and women too!

[Infernally Clay]

Yeah, Anakin is a great teacher and mentor, ignoring the giant pile of kids he chops up whenever he's feeling stressed. Personally, when evaluating teachers, I find the number of elementary schools they've massacred ranks a bit higher than whether or not their favorite survives Dictator Daddy's kill order, but maybe that's just me.

Anakin is a complicated character, that’s kinda the point. He did terrible things but he also did great things too. He is at times an anti-hero and at others a villain. Before he became Vader Anakin was the hero of the war. He saved billions if not trillions of lives, led the Republic to countless victories and pretty much single-handedly ended the war when he killed Dooku. Then when he became Vader he directly or indirectly destroyed billions if not trillions of lives, led the Empire to countless victories and pretty much single-handedly wiped out the Jedi by hunting and killing any survivors of Order 66.

It’s hard to reconcile these two versions of him, for sure, but that’s also kinda the point. It wasn’t until after he died that Anakin was able to accept both halves of himself, as evidenced by the fact he is both Anakin and Vader when he appears to Ahsoka in the World Between Worlds.

[gbaji]

They didn’t integrate him, that’s the problem. Making Anakin a padawan out the gate was a huge mistake because it meant he didn’t spend years in a classroom with other students like himself, as a youngling should, which would have made him feel like he belonged somewhere. Anakin never felt like he belonged in the Jedi Order because the Jedi Order intentionally excluded him. There’s even a comic book where other padawans gang up and try to bully Anakin because they feel like he got special treatment. Obviously it doesn’t end well for them because Anakin is vastly more powerful than them even when they’re twice his age, but it emphasises that the Jedi Order did not treat Anakin like any other Jedi. They kinda didn’t want anything to do with him and he knew it. Imagine being raised as a slave, then being sent to train as a Jedi by an Order that doesn’t want you around.

I feel like this is an unfair and impossible standard though. The reality is that there was no possible way to train Anakin as a Jedi while "including him" in the same experience that all the other Jedi had. He was 9 when they started his training (probably closer to 10 by the time things started formally). They did not have access to a convenient time machine to go back to when he was a toddler and start his training. They had to start him, at the age he was. Which meant the only thing it can mean: Special one on one training.

You present the negatives "They didn't integrate him" and "intentionally excluded him", but present no (positive) alternatives. I asked what they should have done differnetly, and instead you respond with "not this!". That's great. No one is arguing that his training wasn't ideal. But what was the alternative? Are you seriousliy suggesting they should have "integrated him" by putting him in a claasroom with 3-4 year old younglings so he could get the same social experience? He's too old for that. Instruction is not just about current skill/knowledge level, but also age/maturity level.

The cold hard reality is that Anakin was too untrained for his age to ever properly integrate in a classroom setting with other Jedi. If he was put in with students at the same level of training, he would be too old for them (and it would be incredibly disruptive and problematic for all of them). If he's put in with students his own age, they have already learned and mastered the things he's still working on. Again. He's not going to fit in. Heck. Just sharing the title of "padawan" got him bullied by other Jedi students, right? Do you think that would have been any different in a classroom setting?

I also think you are misrepreseting his training a bit. While Kenobi took him as his padawan, Anakin presumably also recieved instruction from other Jedi, based on each ones specialties (I'm positive I remember such things being mentioned in TCW). He certainly had opportunties to meet and interact with other students, but again, all of those interactions are going to be as the stranger showing up from outside. All of the other Jedi started as young children, and trained at more or less the same pace, thorugh the same set of instructors, always right alongside their peers. There is simply no way to replicate that socialization process for Anakin.

If you think there was, then post that. Don't just post what they should not have done, but tell us what they should have and then tell us why you think that would have worked. Your entire post was listing off things they shouldn't have done, and all the negatives that occurred as a result. How about trying to tell us what they should have done, and what positives that would have created? And in your answer remember that he's already too old to be considered a "youngling" (and yes, I'm aware that they use those terms inconsistently, so take it to mean "actual young child").

Look at Ahsoka, for example. She’s only actually about five years younger than Anakin and she actually joined the Jedi Order around the same time as him (she was 3 years old, he was 8). She didn’t become a padawan until she was 14 and that was considered a young age to become a padawan given that a lot of younglings were being fast tracked to padawan status because of the war. So even though Anakin and Ahsoka joined the Order around the same time, Ahsoka spent the next eleven years building that sense of community and belonging whereas Anakin spent almost no time at all with other Jedi besides Obi-Wan because they were always being sent on missions.

Yeah. Because she started at age 3, and learned right alongside other children her age and level. Barring de-aging Anakin 6+ years to make him fit in, there is no way to replicate that experience for him.

I also doubt very much that Anakin was off on missions with Obi-wan right out of the gate. Occasionally, maybe. My assumption is that they spent a heck of a lot of time at the Jedi temple training. The difference is that it was individual training rather than in a classroom. But again, who was he supposed to be socializing with and how/when should it have been happening?

BTW, we see the same issue with child prodigies and geniuses as well. They have a very hard time fitting into any sort of standard socialized classroom structure. And, while they generally do not go as far as turning to the darkside and whatnot, they do tend to have a very hard time integrating even much later in life. Now, take a genius level kid, but one who for some reason recieved zero educational instruction until nearly 10 years of age. And change the education from "learning math and science and art" to "learning how to use magical powers and wield a highly lethal weapon in combat situations". Now we start to see the massive problems that lay before Anakin.

I place far less weight on "they didn't instruct him properly, or help him learn to be a good Jedi" and more on "their initial assessment that he was too old to begin the training was spot on, and they should have stuck with it". I mean, where our education analogy breaks down here is that Anakin without Jedi training is still a fully capable person relative to the world around them. He's just not trained in how to use the force (which, in hindsight, might have been a good thing). IMO, the Jedi Order, having made the decision to train Anakin (which, again, was unquestionably the wrong one), did the best job they could possibly have done with him. it was just a nearly impossible task in the first place.


Oh. Since a couple people have mentioned Anakin's actions and fall. I actually felt like The Clone Wars did a really good job at filling in the gaps in this. In the RotS, there's this really jarring move from "Upset and betrayed by the council, so when Windu puts him in an impossible choice, he chooses to save Palpatine, resulting in Windu's death", to "hacking younglings to bits in the Jedi temple". I think that one of the key aspects of TCW, which has been touched on a few times in this thread, is that over this time period it can be argued that the Jedi were now effectively training and deploying child soldiers for the war. This is actually where Anakin's lack of similar training really showed itself. He saw the toll this took on the young Jedi, and he saw them as indoctinated into a course of action that ultimately lead to their deaths while empowering others (the Republic, the Senate, the Council).

I could see how someone who was already alienated from the "normal training process" might see those who went through it as flawed or doomed to repeat the same mistakes (cause they were indoctinated to do so). And yeah, in a horribly dark side rage warped viewpoint, that killing them was necessary to end this process. Ugly? Yes. But when you watch TCW and all of the horrible things that happen along the way, you can absolutely see how he could have gotten there (and yeah, the whole "give in to the dark side" thing gives a strong nudge as well). Ironically, we could also see his "special training" of Ahsoka as an early manifestation of that. He did a lot to make her not think and act like the rest of the Jedi, at the time possibly just thinking of it in terms of maximizing her survival odds, but her out of the box way of doing things (and willingness to bail on the Jedi as an instittution) was ulitimately what saved her. And she also arguably became a better "light side" force user as a result.

[Darth Credence]

I'm sorry, but no, Anakin is not a complicated character. Anakin fell to the dark side before he even became a Jedi Knight. He was a straight-up bad guy. That he was a "hero" in a war organized by the Sith does not change that. The only time in the series he could be considered anything other than a villain is Episode I. A case could be made that he was merely a creep before Tatooine in Episode II, but it's all villain after that. You don't stop being a villain after you massacre a village just because you're on a particular side in a war. He certainly never did anything to atone for the massacre, which would be a bare minimum to be considered a hero of any sort.
His victories in the Clone War were irrelevant - the war was a sham, so victories in the war did not save anyone. Killing Dooku didn't save anyone by ending the war (and the war didn't end then, anyway). He saved no one after Tatooine because at that point, he became a part of a war that only existed to kill as many Jedi as they could.

[Peelee]

I'm sorry, but no, Anakin is not a complicated character.

Agreed. Anakin is pretty simplistic - "other people should do what i think is right, and if they don't, i can make them". He directly said that in AOTC. He's s good example of continuing the cycle of abuse, the former slave becomes the slaver, if you want to go that route. But complicated, he is not.

[Mordar]

I will point out that Anakin's training is in fact the reason Ahsoka survived Order 66. Tales of the Jedi is pretty explicit that Anakin's pathological need to ensure Ahsoka survived the war caused him to train her in very unorthodox ways, including having her fend off multiple clone troopers at once. This turned out to be pretty vital to her survival when those same clone troopers surrounded her, because she knew what to do to survive.

For all intents and purposes Ahsoka learned from the best Jedi the Order had and he taught her exactly what she needed to learn to survive the war. The only thing he didn't get to teach her, while he was alive at any rate, was what to do after she survived.

Yeah, Anakin is a great teacher and mentor, ignoring the giant pile of kids he chops up whenever he's feeling stressed. Personally, when evaluating teachers, I find the number of elementary schools they've massacred ranks a bit higher than whether or not their favorite survives Dictator Daddy's kill order, but maybe that's just me.

I think I'd like a little more specificity. Teacher here is overly broad. One might be good at teaching a sport but be a poor teacher elsewhere, or one might be excellent at teaching undergraduate students but useless at teaching middle-schoolers. I think Anakin was a very good combat instructor. He was obviously also a pretty good combatant. Just needed some work on impulse control, it seems.

Agreed. Anakin is pretty simplistic - "other people should do what i think is right, and if they don't, i can make them". He directly said that in AOTC. He's s good example of continuing the cycle of abuse, the former slave becomes the slaver, if you want to go that route. But complicated, he is not.

I think he is deeper than "bad guy in black" and the perpetuation of abuse. I like the preying on his desire to protect angle, coupled with a high drive to learn/excel. Feels a little like a VIKI, Tony Stark and maybe some Nickolas Angel mushed together. And then, you know, full bore slaughter evil. But with spirit!

- M

[Infernally Clay]

I'm sorry, but no, Anakin is not a complicated character. Anakin fell to the dark side before he even became a Jedi Knight. He was a straight-up bad guy. That he was a "hero" in a war organized by the Sith does not change that. The only time in the series he could be considered anything other than a villain is Episode I. A case could be made that he was merely a creep before Tatooine in Episode II, but it's all villain after that. You don't stop being a villain after you massacre a village just because you're on a particular side in a war. He certainly never did anything to atone for the massacre, which would be a bare minimum to be considered a hero of any sort.
His victories in the Clone War were irrelevant - the war was a sham, so victories in the war did not save anyone. Killing Dooku didn't save anyone by ending the war (and the war didn't end then, anyway). He saved no one after Tatooine because at that point, he became a part of a war that only existed to kill as many Jedi as they could.

Sympathetic villains exist and they often veer out of and into anti-hero territory. Anakin is no different. In fact he’s the archetypal version of such a character and, yes, that means he’s complex. Anakin didn’t fall to the dark side until the events of Revenge of the Sith, when he chose Palpatine over Windu. This is simply fact. He struggled with his negative emotions for many years, yes, but that’s not the same thing. You can’t just write people off because they stumble, even if in stumbling they kill all the men, women and children in the camp where his mother was tortured and murdered by a nomadic gang of bandits who apparently go around kidnapping and murdering people all the time.

If you want to discount every single good act Anakin ever did because he acted out of anger and pain and sought revenge for his mother’s murder when he was still just a kid, you have pretty harsh standards by which someone may be redeemed or attempt to redeem themselves. Did he go too far? Of course he did, but he was in such terrible pain they could feel it half a galaxy away. Can you imagine the kind of emotion he was outputting at that moment for them to feel it even on Coruscant? That was no ordinary pain. Those bandits tortured and killed his mother and entry #1 of “ways to avoid meltdowns from walking nuclear bombs” is “don’t kill their parents”. Anakin wasn’t thinking straight and he was horrified by his own actions when he realised what he had done.

Interestingly enough the first episode of the Castlevania cartoon touches on a similar subject when Dracula’s wife is murdered by a superstitious mob. He argued that none of the people present at the time were innocent because any one of them could have said no, that they won’t be animals and stand aside as an innocent woman is slowly burned to death. Nobody spoke up for Shmi either. Nobody said “hey maybe we shouldn’t beat this woman to death”.

I don’t agree with what Anakin did but I can sympathise with his state of mind when he did it and the fact that he would spend the next five years saving countless lives, to me, is itself a form of atonement. The war may have been a sham but the people caught in the middle of it were very real and those are the people Anakin saved. Heck I don’t even agree with the assertion that Anakin saved nobody by killing Dooku. At the absolute bare minimum he saved Obi-Wan (who 100% would have died) and Dooku’s death forced the Separatist troops to surrender or retreat from Coruscant too.

[Errorname]

There is also Kanan Jarrus and Cal Kestis.

True, I was tunnel-visioning in on Clone Wars, but you're right, and they both exhibit the same behaviour. Yeah, this is definitely a trend.

Both were deeply traumatised by the war and it affected them severely even as adults. It makes sense too. The Jedi are emotionally detached by design and they see little wrong with sending children into warzones or giving them command over hundreds of clone troopers.

A more sympathetic reading is that wartime pressure and the need to mobilize as many Jedi as possible led to lower teaching standards and students who weren't given the guidance necessary to be able to function as Jedi, but still not great.

Don't know how you qualify "best" here, but i wouldn't call Ahsoka the best outcome.

She's still alive, which counts for a lot.

I feel like this is an unfair and impossible standard though. The reality is that there was no possible way to train Anakin as a Jedi while "including him" in the same experience that all the other Jedi had. He was 9 when they started his training (probably closer to 10 by the time things started formally). They did not have access to a convenient time machine to go back to when he was a toddler and start his training. They had to start him, at the age he was. Which meant the only thing it can mean: Special one on one training.

Yeah, Anakin couldn't have the same training as the rest of the Jedi. Now, I think there is some very good criticism we could make of an order which is only capable of instilling it's beliefs into people if it abducts and indoctrinates them at a very young age. That the Jedi get completely short circuited trying to guide someone through such unusual questions as "Homesick" and "Horny" do not speak well to them as an institution.

His victories in the Clone War were irrelevant - the war was a sham, so victories in the war did not save anyone.

He objectively does save the lives of people who would have otherwise died.

I think I'd like a little more specificity. Teacher here is overly broad. One might be good at teaching a sport but be a poor teacher elsewhere, or one might be excellent at teaching undergraduate students but useless at teaching middle-schoolers. I think Anakin was a very good combat instructor. He was obviously also a pretty good combatant. Just needed some work on impulse control, it seems.

Ahsoka also spent a lot of time with Obi-Wan and Plo Koon, who are also positive influences and probably more to credit for any understanding she has of the philosophy side.

[Peelee]

She's still alive, which counts for a lot.

Not really. Again, a concerted, systemic effort to wipe out the Jedi isn't going to leave the "best" Jedi alive. It's largely going to get down to luck. Kenobi, for example, was lucky that his clones fired a single shot and never bothered to confirm, unlike others who had blaster fire poured into their corpse like it was going out of style. Ahsoka was lucky in that she was excommunicated from the Jedi (another reason she can't be the best - she wasn't one after that anyway, a card she herself played on multiple times occasions) and wasn't in the same position as, say, Ayla Secura.

Hell, she survived a direct confrontation with Vader. Not because she was good but because Filoni can't kill his characters and came up with one of the worst mechanics where space and time can just open up for her to save her when nothing else can.

She's not the best Jedi. She just has the strongest plot armor.

[Keltest]

Not really. Again, a concerted, systemic effort to wipe out the Jedi isn't going to leave the "best" Jedi alive. It's largely going to get down to luck. Kenobi, for example, was lucky that his clones fired a single shot and never bothered to confirm, unlike others who had blaster fire poured into their corpse like it was going out of style. Ahsoka was lucky in that she was excommunicated from the Jedi (another reason she can't be the best - she wasn't one after that anyway, a card she herself played on multiple times occasions) and wasn't in the same position as, say, Ayla Secura.

Hell, she survived a direct confrontation with Vader. Not because she was good but because Filoni can't kill his characters and came up with one of the worst mechanics where space and time can just open up for her to save her when nothing else can.

She's not the best Jedi. She just has the strongest plot armor.

I would argue that the point that Kenobi makes, where behaving like a Jedi gets you killed in the purges, is actually a very valid point. The best Jedi are altruists, among other things. But that behavior is not conducive to living in the shadows and hiding from the Empire. To survive, you have to be a bad Jedi.

[Infernally Clay]

Not really. Again, a concerted, systemic effort to wipe out the Jedi isn't going to leave the "best" Jedi alive. It's largely going to get down to luck. Kenobi, for example, was lucky that his clones fired a single shot and never bothered to confirm, unlike others who had blaster fire poured into their corpse like it was going out of style. Ahsoka was lucky in that she was excommunicated from the Jedi (another reason she can't be the best - she wasn't one after that anyway, a card she herself played on multiple times occasions) and wasn't in the same position as, say, Ayla Secura.

Hell, she survived a direct confrontation with Vader. Not because she was good but because Filoni can't kill his characters and came up with one of the worst mechanics where space and time can just open up for her to save her when nothing else can.

She's not the best Jedi. She just has the strongest plot armor.

For a guy that says he's the biggest Star Wars fan ever it's a little odd you get what Ahsoka went through with Order 66 so wrong.

Ahsoka was on a Republic vessel headed to Coruscant from Mandalore with Maul in custody when Order 66 was issued and the clones turned on her immediately. Interestingly enough they also tried to kill Maul, so Order 66 likely does not distinguish between Force sensitive individuals whether they've been excommunicated from the Jedi Order or not. She broke Maul out because it turns out he was right all along and while she tried to get off the ship he crashed it into the nearest planet.

In fact Ahsoka was in a much worse position than Ayla Secura (who was surrounded by maybe a dozen clones at most on a densely tropical planet) because, again, she was onboard a Republic vessel with hundreds of clone troopers all trying to kill her. Worse yet they were her clones, the very people she fought alongside during the war countless times. Their helmets bore her sigil. She couldn't bring herself to kill them and was so deeply affected by what happened she personally buried each and every one of the clones.

Vader himself came across the burial site, which means a lot because it tells us one of the very first things Anakin did after Revenge of the Sith was try to find Ahsoka. He knew she survived. The Inquisitors believed she was dead and the only reason they'd think that is if Vader told them that himself.

So no it wasn't just luck or plot armour (plot armour isn't really a valid complaint anyway). She was just taught how to survive and if Ahsoka was ever good at anything it was surviving.

[Errorname]

Not really. Again, a concerted, systemic effort to wipe out the Jedi isn't going to leave the "best" Jedi alive. It's largely going to get down to luck.

There's luck to everything, but we can't just write everything off as luck. Ahsoka gets put into a lot of situations that would have killed a less capable Jedi.

She's not the best Jedi. She just has the strongest plot armor.

She's not necessarily the best Jedi, but of the younger cohort that came up during the Clone Wars? What's her competition? Guy who ran into a fight with Grievous and died, guy who ran into a fight with Maul's brother and died, girl who blew up the Jedi temple? Pretty comfortable saying she's the best of the crop.

In fact Ahsoka was in a much worse position than Ayla Secura (who was surrounded by maybe a dozen clones at most on a densely tropical planet) because, again, she was onboard a Republic vessel with hundreds of clone troopers all trying to kill her. Worse yet they were her clones, the very people she fought alongside during the war countless times. Their helmets bore her sigil. She couldn't bring herself to kill them and was so deeply affected by what happened she personally buried each and every one of the clones.

Her situation is worse for escaping than Secura, maybe, but Rex hesistated and Bly did not. Without that, Ahsoka dies, so it's fair to say that she was lucky that her would be executioner had the strength of mind to not immediately ice her.

[Mechalich]

Yeah, Anakin couldn't have the same training as the rest of the Jedi. Now, I think there is some very good criticism we could make of an order which is only capable of instilling it's beliefs into people if it abducts and indoctrinates them at a very young age. That the Jedi get completely short circuited trying to guide someone through such unusual questions as "Homesick" and "Horny" do not speak well to them as an institution.

'Abducts' is inaccurate and pejorative. Children who become Jedi Initiates are not illegally taken from their parents by force. They are willingly volunteered by their parents to join the Order. Yes, this is a violation of Western 21st century social mores, in which sending children to join a monastic institution is considered broadly unacceptable, but it is perfectly within the grounds of acceptability within the social mores of other human cultures. Parents sending their kids off to become monks may seem weird to us and is admittedly an odd fit for the social systems we see in most of Star Wars, but it is a long-standing practice that is not inherently problematic.

That said, the Jedi Order's inability to properly accommodate members who are not funneled through an extremely narrow recruitment pipeline is a major institutional problem. It makes the Order extremely inflexible. Also, insofar as there are not sufficient numbers of Jedi to meet the needs of their institutional responsibilities - which it very much appears is the case during the PT Era - the limited recruitment mechanism may be highly responsible for this issue.

The war may have been a sham but the people caught in the middle of it were very real and those are the people Anakin saved. Heck I don’t even agree with the assertion that Anakin saved nobody by killing Dooku. At the absolute bare minimum he saved Obi-Wan (who 100% would have died) and Dooku’s death forced the Separatist troops to surrender or retreat from Coruscant too.

I'd go further and say that people need to stop saying the Clone Wars was a sham. It wasn't a fraud of hoax, the conflict was very real, armies fought, people died, and planets were ravaged. The war was rigged such that Palpatine would win regardless of which side triumphed, but that was not widely known. 99.9999% of the people on the Separatist side were trying to win the war for their cause (admittedly, because they were a dubious conglomerate, causes and definitions of victory differed). Separatist victory was always highly unlikely, because the Republic possessed huge strategic advantages and because Palpatine was manipulating the conflict to arrange a Republic triumph, and the Separatists knew this which is why they devoted so much effort to high-risk superweapon schemes, however they had a chance of success. A low chance, IMO I'd give them 5-10%, but still a chance.

It's also worth noting that Anakin, personally, lowered overall Separatist chances of success by a huge amount because he was involved in stopping so many of their superweapon schemes.

Not really. Again, a concerted, systemic effort to wipe out the Jedi isn't going to leave the "best" Jedi alive. It's largely going to get down to luck. Kenobi, for example, was lucky that his clones fired a single shot and never bothered to confirm, unlike others who had blaster fire poured into their corpse like it was going out of style. Ahsoka was lucky in that she was excommunicated from the Jedi (another reason she can't be the best - she wasn't one after that anyway, a card she herself played on multiple times occasions) and wasn't in the same position as, say, Ayla Secura.

While luck played a role, it was more a matter of circumstance. The overwhelming majority of Jedi who survived Order 66 were simply those not surrounded by Clones at the time. The largest group was those who were sitting in the Jedi Temple - which may well have been several hundred Jedi and thousands of Initiates - who were killed a few hours later during Operation: Knightfall. Most of those who survived the first few days of the purge were simply those not either commanding clones and not in a location the clones could easily reach. Ahsoka is anomalous in that she fought her way out.

[Peelee]

There's luck to everything, but we can't just write everything off as luck. Ahsoka gets put into a lot of situations that would have killed a less capable Jedi.

What, like fighting Maul? I'll agree that bad writing and blatant authorial favoritism lets her get away with an awful lot, sure.

Ahsoka is anomalous in that she fought her way out.

As did Cal, if I remember Fallen Order correctly. And Yoda. And regardless, again, it's less convincing when Filoni can just have the WBW yank her out to save her.

I really hate WBW. It's easily the worst thing ever introduced to Star Wars, beyond even anything Abrams brought to the table. It pretty much ruins Ahsoka entirely for me.

[Infernally Clay]

Her situation is worse for escaping than Secura, maybe, but Rex hesistated and Bly did not. Without that, Ahsoka dies, so it's fair to say that she was lucky that her would be executioner had the strength of mind to not immediately ice her.

I’m not even sure how much of that counts as luck, given it was the payoff to a multi-season arc about the control chips in clone troopers and how one of Rex’s closest friends told him about them. Rex knew what was happening and he was trying his damnedest to resist it. He was even able to tell Ahsoka how to deal with it by telling her to find Fives. It’s possible that if the other clones knew they too would have tried to do the same. The clones aren’t bad people, after all. They just didn’t know.

[Keltest]

What, like fighting Maul? I'll agree that bad writing and blatant authorial favoritism lets her get away with an awful lot, sure.

You say that like Maul wasnt already bisected by a padawan learner once in his prime.

[Errorname]

As did Cal, if I remember Fallen Order correctly. And Yoda

If [most experienced, very powerful and allegedly wisest jedi] and [video game protagonist] managed to do something, than obviously that's an easy feat that's completely unimpressive.

There are thousands of Jedi. Most of them do not survive if put into the sort of survival situations Ahsoka was.

I’m not even sure how much of that counts as luck, given it was the payoff to a multi-season arc about the control chips in clone troopers and how one of Rex’s closest friends told him about them.

It is luck in that if it had been literally anyone else, like if Rex wasn't assigned to the 332nd or if he simply hadn't been in the room and it had fallen to Jesse or Vaughn, she would be dead.

This sort of thing is true of literally every character in any fiction with life or death stakes ever though, circumstances outside their control or ability to predict allowing them to escape a potential death is very common.

[Infernally Clay]

You say that like Maul wasnt already bisected by a padawan learner once in his prime.

In Maul’s defence he’s actually quite powerful but he wasn’t trying to kill Ahsoka. He knew what Palpatine was about to do and he was desperate to stop him, but he knew he couldn’t do it alone. He needed help to take Palpatine out before it was too late and Ahsoka was really his only option.

The sad thing is Ahsoka was totally on board until Maul told her that Anakin had been groomed for years to become Palpatine’s newest apprentice and that he was the key to everything. Ahsoka refused to believe Anakin would ever fall to the dark side and it wouldn’t be for another eighteen or nineteen years until she realised Maul was right all along.

If [most experienced, very powerful and allegedly wisest jedi] and [video game protagonist] managed to do something, than obviously that's an easy feat that's completely unimpressive.

There are thousands of Jedi. Most of them do not survive if put into the sort of survival situations Ahsoka was.

The fact that, out of roughly ten thousand Jedi, maybe fifty survived Order 66 is itself a testament to how impressive it was to survive it at all. Ahsoka was unique insofar as she survived by fighting her way out but, to be fair, the circumstances were similarly unique. She was on a ship with a former Sith Lord who was more than happy to provide a suitable distraction by murdering his way to the engine room and crashing the ship and Rex both knew about the inhibitor chips and how to remove them so Ahsoka had a way to get some much needed help.

Of course Anakin’s unorthodox teaching methods prepared Ahsoka for situations like this and, as I have said several times already, Ahsoka is a survivor. She has survived far worse situations than most Jedi would ever find themselves in - being hunted by Trandoshans, getting trapped in the middle of a zombie outbreak, being on the run in Coruscant - so her chances were always better than most anyway.

It is luck in that if it had been literally anyone else, like if Rex wasn't assigned to the 332nd or if he simply hadn't been in the room and it had fallen to Jesse or Vaughn, she would be dead.

This sort of thing is true of literally every character in any fiction with life or death stakes ever though, circumstances outside their control or ability to predict allowing them to escape a potential death is very common.

That is a reasonable enough assertion. Lots of things could have gone even slightly differently and changed the outcome considerably. It wasn’t all luck, but the show needed a believable way for Ahsoka to escape Order 66 and events played out in such a way that she would do so.

[Mechalich]

If [most experienced, very powerful and allegedly wisest jedi] and [video game protagonist] managed to do something, than obviously that's an easy feat that's completely unimpressive.

This sort of thing is true of literally every character in any fiction with life or death stakes ever though, circumstances outside their control or ability to predict allowing them to escape a potential death is very common.

Exactly, fictional narratives are biased towards statistical outliers, whether those are events, characters, or really any other element. A really obvious example is the case of disaster fiction, since disasters are inherently outlier events.

It is important, when discussing a fictional setting to recognize that the narratives presented in that setting will be describing outliers and to work backward to reassemble what the typical, average, or median case might be. This is challenging, especially in a setting like Star Wars, which, due to its galactic scale, deals with lots of very large numbers that human minds are bad at handling intuitively.

[LibraryOgre]

"In my experience, there's no such thing as luck."

Ahsoka was one of the most highly skilled of her generation to survive the war. Some of this is the Will of the Forciloni, some of this I attribute to how Anakin trained her, and how he encouraged her to think of the clones around her as people, and her ability to bond with them; those bonds saved her life. We don't have the focus on others that we do on her... they weren't the stars of a series about their padawan years. But we know that she, like others of her age, were thrown into war as children, and only a few came out the other side.

How many would have come out without Order 66? That's a good question. I don't doubt that one of the results of Order 66 was a significant amount of trauma for those Padawans who did survive. We know how badly it wounded Caleb/Kaanan. But we also know of those who were emotionally injured by the war, before Order 66... Barris was mentioned above.

And Ahsoka, for whatever reason, survived the war and almost immediately joined the Alliance to Restore the Republic.

[Peelee]

You say that like Maul wasnt already bisected by a padawan learner once in his prime.

Do you want me to gripe about everything I dislike in Star Wars, or do you want my post to have an endpoint somewhere?

If [most experienced, very powerful and allegedly wisest jedi] and [video game protagonist] managed to do something, than obviously that's an easy feat that's completely unimpressive.

So if better Jedi and worse Jedi managed to do something, then Ahsoka must be the best for doing that thing?

"In my experience, there's no such thing as luck."

Spoiler

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I love Kenobi, but he was making a point there that Luke's deflections weren't luck. Kenobi certainly experienced luck.

[Errorname]

So if better Jedi and worse Jedi managed to do something, then Ahsoka must be the best for doing that thing?

Do you think when I said "video game protagonist" I was trying to say that Cal Kestis should be understood as a bad Jedi? Because he obviously shouldn't, he's got a lot of impressive feats to his belt. I am not judging Ahsoka against other main character Jedi, I am judging her against the average members of the Order.

[Peelee]

Do you think when I said "video game protagonist" I was trying to say that Cal Kestis should be understood as a bad Jedi? Because he obviously shouldn't, he's got a lot of impressive feats to his belt. I am not judging Ahsoka against other main character Jedi, I am judging her against the average members of the Order.

I didn't call him a bad Jedi. I called him a worse Jedi [than Ahsoka] which I assumed is explicit in the claim that Ahsoka is the best one. Cal sure seems to be an average member of the Order, just one who happened to be involved in a video game. Kanan also seemed pretty average, and is not a video game character, if that makes things better.