Ahsoka's New Lightsabers on 'Rebels' Are Stolen Sith Blades
When Ahsoka Tano — former Jedi Knight and apprentice to Anakin Skywalker — made her debut on Rebels, she was wielding shiny new white-bladed lightsabers, and now there’s a newly discovered canonical origin of those sabers: they originally belonged to one of Darth Vader’s Inquisitors.
A new Star Wars book published on October 11 simply titled Ahsoka chronicles what happened to Ahsoka in between the Jedi purge and her assuming a role as a Rebel informant. Though most of the action focuses mostly on events after Revenge of the Sith, there are a decent number of easter eggs for fans of The Clone Wars, and the classic Star Wars trilogy. An infant Princess Leia is briefly glimpsed hanging out with Bail Organa, R2-D2 pops up, and Ahsoka’s journey to becoming the agent code-named “Fulcrum” is established.
But the coolest detail is easily the origin of Ahsoka’s new lightsabers. For the majority of the Clone Wars, Ahsoka sported two sabers: one was “regular” length (green) and the other a shorter “shoto”-style weapon (yellow-green). When she loses these lightsabers, she is forced to get a new set of weapons.
In the events after the Clone Wars, Ahsoka is no longer “technically” a Jedi and kyber crystals are scarce, meaning obtaining a new lightsaber probably means you’d have to steal one. In this book, that is exactly what Ahsoka does.
It turns out these white ligthsabers were in originally red and wielded as a double-bladed saber by one of the evil Inquisitors: the Sixth Brother. Ahsoka defeats him by blowing up the hilt of his double-bladed saber. She then uses the crystals to build two new lightsabers, but here’s the rub: the red crystals turn to white when they pass to her. Ahsoka is such a good person that the Force turns the evil Sith crystals for her benefit.
What does this mean for the rest of Star Wars? Well, the color of the kyber crystals determines the color of the lightsaber, and up until now, we’ve never seen crystals change color. Historically, Sith crystals were red because they were supposedly manufactured artificially, but even that seems a little apocryphal. Kylo Ren’s lightsaber crackles the way that it does because it uses a broken crystal. Why was Luke’s second lightsaber green? Since 1999, fans theorized Luke must have used a green crystal at the heart of Qui-Gon’s old saber, presuming that Obi-Wan Kenobi kept it and stowed it in his hut on Tatooine.
Lightsaber colors have long connoted something about the character of the wielder: blue for traditional Jedi like Obi-Wan, green for maverick Jedi like Qui-Gon, and purple for badass mothers like Mace Windu. Because white is the absence of color, Ahsoka’s new sabers seem to reflect that she’s neither Jedi nor Sith. But if lightsaber colors can change based on the Force reacting to a person, then an interesting precedent could be set here. Or to put it another way: will Kylo Ren’s saber stay red? If Ahsoka’s saber started with a red blade that turned white, then all lightsaber color bets are off.
