Building a lightsaber is a Jedi right of passage, with each apprentice traveling to the planet Ilum to meditate and find their Kyber crystal before the process can even begin. (Whether the Jedi chooses the crystal or the crystal chooses the Jedi is a matter of debate.) Given the very personal relationship between the Jedi and their lightsaber’s crystal, not to mention the difficulty of fighting with two sabers instead of one, very few Jedi have ever built themselves a second saber unless their original had been lost or destroyed.
Ahsoka Tano is one of those few, building herself a second lightsaber and adopting a dual-wielding combat style in the middle of the Clone Wars, before she’d even finished her Jedi training. Here’s how—and why—Ahsoka came to be a duel-wielding practitioner of the Jar’Kai style of fighting.
What is Jar’Kai?
Jar’Kai is a specialist combat technique used by numerous Force traditions across the spectrum of light, dark, and gray. Referring to the number of blades in use, rather than the number of individual lightsabers, the Jar’Kai tradition includes fighters who use a single, dual-bladed lightsaber like Darth Maul; multi-armed species or cyborgs able to wield as many as four blades at once (i.e., General Grievous); and combatants like Ahsoka who hold a standard lightsaber in their dominant hand and a shorter, shoto lightsaber in their off-hand. Though it’s considered a difficult skill to learn and very few Force-users adopt it as their primary combat style, most Jedi have at least a little proficiency in it, as picking up the blade of a downed comrade and using it in addition to their own for the rest of the battle appears to be a fairly common tactic.
Why does Ahsoka have two lightsabers?
Ahsoka was always particularly skilled with a lightsaber, specializing in the Form V combat techniques and becoming a master of the Shien form with a secondary focus on the Djem So form, designed for melee combat. Considered one of the most difficult single blade forms to master, the natural next step for a gifted student like Ahsoka, now highly skilled in both subforms of the technique, was to build herself a second lightsaber and move into learning the Jar’Kai style of combat as it would allow her to implement Shien and Djem So simultaneously.
Though not shown on screen, Ahsoka made her second trip to Ilum and built her second lightsaber midway through the Clone Wars, between the events of the “Sphere of Influence” and “Heroes on Both Sides” episodes. Despite her skill with a single blade, the transition into Jar’Kai was not an easy one, and Ahsoka struggled significantly with incorporating a second blade and implementing both halves of Form V simultaneously. It wasn’t until Yoda, as shown in the Star Wars Forces of Destiny episode “Teach You, I Will,” stepped in to train her personally that Ahsoka was able to master Jar’Kai as well, making her one of the deadliest Jedi combatants of her time.
Both of Ahsoka’s original sabers were green, and she’s since wielded two further sets of blades, first blue and then white. After the bombing of the Jedi Temple on Coruscant, and being falsely accused of perpetrating it by the Jedi Council, Ahsoka decided to leave the Jedi Order, turning her original green blades over to the Jedi Council before taking off on her own. The blue pair were given to her by Anakin, after she chose to join forces with Bo Katan during the Siege of Mandalore. Rather than being a wholly new pair of weapons, however, the blue-bladed lightsabers were actually her original green sabers returned—with some modifications courtesy of her former master so that the color of the blades would match his own.
Ahsoka only held the blue blades for a short time; she had to abandon them after Order 66 was executed in order to convince the newly minted Empire that she had died along with the other Jedi—leaving them with the wreckage of her ship at the crash site. It wasn’t until after she defeated an Inquisitor at Raada that Ahsoka built herself replacements, using the white crystals from her defeated enemy’s blades to make the twin white-bladed lightsabers she’s still wielding in Ahsoka.
(featured image: Disney+)
