Lovable droid sidekicks are a crucial component of any Star Wars spinoff. In Star Wars: Rebels and Ahsoka that role goes to Chopper, an orange astromech droid who hangs out with rebel heroes Hera Syndulla and Kanan Jarrus. His most famous trait is that he loves to kill.
The Star Wars wiki diplomatically describes Chopper as “cantankerous” and “argumentative,” but there are a ton of examples of him being violent and erratic throughout Rebels, shoving stormtroopers out of airlocks and callously injuring his own allies. His estimated kill count is about 50,000, leading to a running joke that he’s a war criminal.
Unsurprisingly, fans are thrilled to see this behavior continue in the live-action Ahsoka show.
One key scene in the Ahsoka premiere involves Hera and Chopper chasing an enemy ship. Chopper (whose dialogue is a lot more intelligible than R2-D2’s) yells at Hera to “shoot it down,” but she explains that she can’t do that because the debris would fall onto a city full of civilians. “Is that bad?” asks Chopper.
“He’s just as genocidal and manic as he was in Rebels,” says one viral TikTok praising the scene. “Chopper still has no empathy for innocent civilian lives.”
If you’re familiar with Star Wars droid lore, you can easily infer why Chopper is the way he is. Droids develop glitches and personality traits when they avoid memory wipes for extended periods of time. That’s why R2-D2 is so independent, and why Rogue One‘s K-2SO is radically different from Imperial KX droids.
Fighting through the Clone Wars and the Rebellion, Chopper’s entire life revolves around war. He’s also old as hell, by droid standards.
Astromechs are designed to help with navigation and piloting, and to perform mechanical repair duties around a ship. They’re not battle droids. But after decades of combat and zero memory wipes, Chopper has developed an incredibly cavalier attitude to death and violence. Rebels and Ahsoka both play this for laughs, but you could certainly make the argument that Chopper’s entire personality was shaped by robot PTSD.
