I have so many thought about Hondo Ohnaka.
And the way I often see fandom portray him - hilarious inept friend.
And the way he portrays himself - best friend of a certain Jedi master who is always willing to help, for a price.
And the heinous acts he is able to get away with because of this Jack Sparrow like representation.
When we see him in Rebels, it is a glowing representation of him as a scoundrel.
He loves the Jedi
He and Ezra are adorable together
He misses his Jedi best friend.
When we meet him in The Clone Wars, he’s hilarious, mostly harmless, and pretty helpful
Captures Dooku, Anakin, and Obi-wan with the goal to ransom them back to the Republic. Yay, the good guys!
Takes weapons to Onderon. Yay! Overthrow the separatist oppressors
Tries to steal kyber crystals from younglings - that’s not great, but no one got hurt and he definitely thought they could just get more. No harm, no foul?
Attempts to sell a teenage girl…. *insert record scratch here*
Everyone, and I mean everyone, loves to gloss over that last part. Fans, the entirety of the rest of canon, hell even the end of that arc, love to gloss over the fact that THAT MAN TRIED TO SELL AHSOKA.
Not ransom her back to the Republic, not sell her to the separatists.
No, he captured a teenage girl and was going to sell her to someone who specifically wanted to buy a female Jedi.
He told us this!
The truth is, I have my sights set on more nefarious criminals than I, a businessman who will pay handsomely for a Jedi.
A female Jedi at that.
This is the last arc of The Clone Wars he is in.
Later, in this exact episode, he tells us he killed an entire circus troupe because he didn’t like their act!
I would hate to be forced to cut off their heads like I did to your last act.
You remember those guys.
You are a brave man to come before me again.
Where is my Jedi?
I would hate for her to miss the show
which I'm hoping will be better than last time.
We learn so much about Hondo in this episode and it all seems to be telling us the same thing - don’t forget this guy is a bad guy. Like a very bad guy.
He seems to like Anakin and Obi-wan, so they don’t get the worst of him.
Ahsoka does not have that luxury. He is going to sell her to the highest bidder. The type of scum to say they don’t just want to say they own a Jedi, they want to own a female Jedi. We all saw the Zyggeria arc. We all know what he is talking about.
And what is worse is Obi-wan doesn’t even think anything like this is a possibility! Because he and Hondo are friends or something.
Obi-wan: We shall deal with Hondo on Florrum.
Youngling: Will Ahsoka be all right?
Obi-wan: Hondo would be even more of a fool than I think he is to hurt her.
Guess what General - HE IS GOING TO SELL HER!
And he would have continued to try if Grievous hadn’t shown up to ruin his plans.
He did not see the light and change from his murdering of circus troupe and selling sentient beings ways, a bigger bad showed up and he allied himself with the person he just tried to sell because she is a Jedi and still believed his life was worth saving.
And yet this saving his own skin behavior seems to have completely wiped the stain of tried to sell a whole person off of him. Because it’s adorable how he immediately cared for Katooni and that is all people seem to remember from that arc.
No, it isn’t adorable. At all. If Katooni had been a few years older he would have looked at her and seen profits too.
If Ahsoka hadn’t been so concussed from Grievous throwing her around, she would have mentioned the whole trying to sell her thing to someone.
And that would have been the end of the Obi-wan and Hondo friendship, because of, you know, the horrible behavior.
Anyways, TLDR - Never forget that everyone’s favorite pirate with a heart of gold Hondo Ohnaka tried to sell Ahsoka and was only thwarted because Grievous came to attack him instead.
I would have loved to see Ezra tell Ahsoka about his new bestie Hondo. Kanan is over there with his hand over his face thinking ‘I don’t know how to convince him this guy shouldn’t be trusted’ and suddenly Ahsoka solves the problem for him like ‘oh I know Hondo, yeah, he tried to sell me when I was 16 because it would be *airquotes* profitable’.
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