Kit Fisto is a Nautolan Jedi Master from Glee Anselm, introduced in Attack of the Clones (2002) and played by Zachariah Jensen and, in Revenge of the Sith, Ben Cooke. Nautolans are amphibious, which the fiction uses for exactly what you would expect: he is the Order's underwater specialist, and The Clone Wars puts him in the Mon Calamari campaign to prove it.
What made him popular is much simpler than that. In the Geonosis arena and again in the Council chamber, Fisto smiles. In a trilogy where the Jedi are written as institutionally grave, one character with visible good humour stands out enormously, and the merchandising followed.
His end is the most brutally efficient scene in Revenge of the Sith: he is one of the four Masters who go with Mace Windu to arrest Palpatine, and he is the third of them to die, in roughly two seconds, before the fight has properly begun. The sequence exists to establish that Palpatine is not bluffing, and Fisto pays for it.
He carries a modest publishing history — Clone Wars-era comics and the animated series — and no essential novel. Read him as a design that earned its promotion: a background alien from a crowd shot who ended up on the Jedi Council and in the last act of the trilogy.
