Ahsoka Tano is a Togruta female from Shili, introduced in the animated film Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) and voiced by Ashley Eckstein. She is Anakin Skywalker's padawan, and she is entirely a creation of the post-prequel era — she appears in none of the six live-action Skywalker-saga films.
The walkout
The central event of her story is the fifth-season arc in which she is framed for a bombing, expelled from the Order, tried by the Republic, exonerated, invited back — and declines. It is the sharpest thing the Clone Wars fiction ever did, because it makes the Order's failure specific rather than atmospheric. She leaves before Order 66, which is why she survives it.
In the books
E. K. Johnston's Ahsoka (Disney–Lucasfilm Press, 2016) covers the year after the purge, early in the Imperial era: a former Jedi hiding on an agricultural moon, refusing to be one thing or the other, slowly building the identity that Star Wars Rebels would later call Fulcrum. It is a quiet novel and a good one.
Canon only
Ahsoka does not exist in Star Wars Legends. She was created in 2008, after most of the Legends timeline was already written, and the older Expanded Universe simply proceeds as if Anakin never had a padawan. Readers moving between shelves should expect her to vanish entirely on the Legends side.
Why she matters
Because she is the franchise's proof that you can be devoted to the Force and correct to distrust the Jedi Order. Nearly every interesting Force-user written since 2008 is standing in the space she opened.
