By Chris Seekell
Star Wars: The Clone Wars is back for a final, seventh season, and for the first time since it was cancelled 7 years ago, we are getting new stories with beloved former Jedi knight Ahsoka Tano.
In the first new episode, “Gone With A Trace”, Ahsoka meets a new character, pilot and mechanic Trace Martez, as she struggles alone to survive in the Underworld of Coruscant.
What’s interesting about this character, is that it has been confirmed by series supervising director Dave Filoni, that Trace and her sister Rafa were originally a male character named Nyx Okami, who was a potential love interest for Ahsoka. With the episodes being rewritten for the Disney+ release, the gender of his character was changed to female and his role was also split into two, Trace and Rafa.
This then brings up an interesting question, will Trace or Rafa be written exactly like Nyx, with a romantic tie to Ahsoka? Or will the potential relationship be written out along with his character?
So far LGBTQ+ characters in Star Wars have been relegated to publishing or minor roles in films. We saw our first kiss between two women on screen in The Rise of Skywalker, and while it was confirmed by creatives that Lando Calrissian is pansexual, there is no depiction of this aspect of his character.
If the romantic tension is still in the story, with perhaps Ahsoka and Trace being more than just friends, what will this mean for the Star Wars Universe?
A lead character like Ahsoka Tano, arguably the heart and soul of the Clone Wars series, being depicted as a pansexual character with love interests of multiple genders in Star Wars, would be a massive win for LGBTQ+ representation. She was depicted as having romantic tension with the male Lux Bonterri in earlier seasons of the show, and now may be being shown to have similar tension or even more with one of these new female characters.
This might all be speculation, but representation like this in Star Wars is certainly long overdo. It will be very interesting to see how the relationships between these characters unfold in coming weeks.
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