Asajj Ventress is a major villain in the Clone Wars era of Star Wars, but she had a much darker and less tidy ending in the Star Wars Legends continuity. Debuting in Dark Horse’s Jedi: Mace Windu comics and becoming even more popular thanks to 2003’s Star Wars: Clone Wars, Ventress never had a well-deserved conclusion to her story before she was rewritten in 2008’s Star Wars: The Clone Wars, a canon property that began before the Expanded Universe was removed from the new, Disney-sanctioned canon. While current continuity's version of Asajj Ventress has a satisfying ending to her story, her Legends counterpart’s status is left tantalizingly unknown.
In Legends, Asajj Ventress is a Rattataki, a near-human species from the brutal, war-torn, world of Rattatak. Recruited by Dooku, Ventress joins the CIS as a way to exact revenge against the Jedi (who she resents for seemingly abandoning her mentor) and a way to become a true Sith. Under Dooku’s tutelage, Ventress became a Sith in all but name, brutally killing the Republic’s heroic Clone Troopers and Jedi alike throughout the Clone Wars.
Asajj Ventress’ final appearance in the Legends timeline was in the five-issue Star Wars: Obsession miniseries by Haden Blackman and Brian Ching. Towards the end of the Battle of Boz Pity, Count Dooku unexpectedly betrays his Sith pupil, ordering a MagnaGuard to blast her so that he can escape the planet, seemingly killing the Rattataki warrior. However, Ventress enters a meditative healing state, thanks to her Sith training, and wakes up on a medical frigate, commandeering it so that she can flee to the far reaches of the galaxy and escape the Clone Wars.
The Legends version of Asajj Ventress fled towards the end of the Clone Wars, but the far reach of the Galactic Empire following the war’s conclusion would make it difficult for a powerful Force-user to keep a low profile. The fates of the medical ship’s crew and injured passengers, such as the prominent ARC Trooper, Alpha-17, also remain unknown, and there’s a grim possibility that Ventress killed him, seeing him as a threat.
In current canon, Ventress was rewritten in The Clone Wars to be of a new species, the Dathomirian, as well as a member of the Nightsisters, having been born on a reimagined version of the Legends-era Dathomir. Similar to her Legends counterpart, modern canon’s Ventress was betrayed by Count Dooku, only she remained in the war, first by rejoining her fellow Nightsisters and later becoming a bounty hunter following the Separatist Alliance’s massacre of her people. As shown in the canon novel Dark Disciple, Ventress rejected the dark side and sacrificed herself to save Quinlan Vos from Count Dooku, redeeming herself despite her past atrocities.
A fascinating character, Asajj Ventress gets a worthy conclusion in modern stories, but her now forever-unresolved Legends fate perhaps suits her dark path even better, leaving her adrift in a hostile galaxy and with significant blood on her hands. The Legends-era Asajj Ventress never redeemed herself like her canon counterpart, and her unknown fate makes her story’s conclusion much darker in the original Star Wars continuity.