Everything There Is To Know About Asajj Ventress, One of ‘Star Wars’ Most Complex Characters
Dave Filoni’s Star Wars: The Clone Wars was about the adventures of Anakin Skywalker and his apprentice, Ashoka Tano, as they and the rest of the Jedi Order battled against the droid armies of the Separatists, led by Count Dooku. Much like Anakin, Dooku had an apprentice of his own …
Who is Asajj Ventress?
Asajj is a Dathomirian Nightsister, though she has been a lot of things in the Star Wars galaxy. She was a former Jedi Padawan. She was an assassin for the Sith. She was a bounty hunter. Her legacy is about as complicated as her career. She was originally born into a clan of Force-sensitive witches on her home planet, Dathomir—yes, the Star Wars universe has witches (they were also recently featured in Ahsoka).
Ventress was stolen away from her clan at a young age by the space pirate Hal’Sted and was enslaved to him on the planet Rattatak. She was eventually freed from bondage after Hal’Sted was killed by a rival group of pirates and later became an apprentice to Jedi Knight Ky Narec after finding him stranded on the planet.
Narec raised Ventress to be a Jedi and taught the already adept child about the light side of the Force. She and Narec spent 10 years together, doing good deeds across Rattatak. However, the good times came to an end after Narec was murdered by space pirates. Consumed with grief over the loss of her Jedi dad, she fully embraced the dark side of the Force and ended up murdering pirates and warlords all across the planet. She was eventually captured during an assassination attempt on Osika Kirske, a volatile warlord, and he forced her to fight in gladiator pits. Her dark deliverance came when she was discovered by Count Dooku, who took the angry young warrior under his wing and groomed her into service for the Sith.
Now a full-fledged Bad Guy™, Ventress worked as a commander and assassin in Dooku’s Separatist army, often crossing sabers with Jedi like Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker. Kidnapping. Murder. Sabotage. Ventress could do it all. She was good at her job. Really good. So good, in fact, that the only person she ever had to compete with was General Grievous. And he had double the amount of arms that she did! If Ventress had two extra sets of hands, she could have easily defeated the Jedi.
Ventress was so overqualified for her job that eventually, her superiors started to mistrust her. Count Dooku’s master, Darth Sidious, began to fear Ventress’ strength, believing that she and Dooku would someday overpower and dispose of him, as is Sith tradition. As a test of his loyalty, Sidious ordered Count Dooku to kill his apprentice, and Dooku complied. The Count ordered Ventress’ own soldiers to attack her and then left her to die.
It didn’t go as planned.
After narrowly surviving an assassination attempt, a weakened Ventress returned to her homeworld to seek shelter with her former clan. The Nightsisters welcomed her back with open arms. Ventress and the girls came up with a plan to assassinate Dooku by sending a double agent his way: a Nightbrother named Savage Opress.
So, what’s a Nightbrother? The Nightbrothers are a group of Zabrak males who fled from their homeworld to escape prosecution for criminal activities (Darth Maul is also a Zabrak). They ended up making contact with the Nightsister witches, who offered them protection in exchange for subservience.
Under magically-induced orders from the Nightsisters, Savage Opress was to ingratiate himself into Dooku’s service and then assassinate the Count. Like everything else in poor Ventress’ life, this also didn’t go as planned. Opress ended up betraying both Ventress and Dooku, attempting to kill them both.
Her assassination plan having failed, Ventress fled back to her homeworld to hide out with the Nightsisters, but Dooku wasn’t just going to let her go. The Count ended up sicking his droid armies on the planet and killed almost all of the Dathomirian witches. Ventress and the clan’s matriarch, Mother Talzin, were two of the few surviving members.
All alone in the galaxy, Ventress turned to bounty hunting to make ends meet. Naturally, she was quite successful, once again overqualified for the job. Her bounty-hunting exploits eventually caused her to cross paths with Anakin and Obi-Wan once again, but this time as a tenuous ally. A frenemy, as it were.
And then she met the love of her life. A Jedi named Quinlan Vos.
Ventress’ story continues in Star Wars: Dark Disciple
At first, it was strictly business. Vos was attempting to assassinate Ventress’ old boss, Count Dooku, and the Nightsister jumped at the chance to merc the man who killed her clan. Neither Vos nor Ventress knew much about each other at first, as they were both simply posing as bounty hunters. However, after the pair fell in love, they revealed their respective Jedi and Nightsister identities. Ventress trained Vos in the use of magick, the Force power that Nightsisters use. Vos and Ventress launched an assassination attempt against Dooku, but it failed. While Ventress managed to escape, Vos was captured and imprisoned.
Ventress teamed up with Anakin and Obi-Wan in order to liberate Vos—the operation took months. During that time, Vos was tortured by Count Dooku in order to force the Jedi to give in to the dark side. While Ventress and the gang were eventually able to rescue her beloved, it was too late. Vos had fallen to the dark side. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the rest of the Jedi Council didn’t know that Vos’ mind had been poisoned by the dark side, so they sent him and Ventress after Count Dooku again.
After confronting Dooku, Vos attempted to fool The Count into believing that he was on the Separatist leader’s side. His reason? Vos thought that if he could convince Dooku that he had joined the dark side, Dooku would lead Vos and Ventress to his master, Sidious, and the pair could assassinate them both. Surprise, surprise … it didn’t work out. Dooku got wise to the plan and attempted to kill Vos with Force lightning. However, Ventress jumped in front of her lover and absorbed most of the blast. Finally enveloped in the light side of the Force, Ventress died in Vos’ arms. Her body was taken back to her home planet, and she was laid to rest.
Or was she … ?
Psyche! Somehow, Ventress was able to survive her injuries and live out her days during the Imperial Era—at the same time as a certain batch of clones were waging their own war against the Empire’s forces. I’m talking, of course, about the Bad Batch, baby! While we don’t know all the details, the new trailer for the upcoming third and final season of Star Wars: The Bad Batch shows that Ventress has been gloriously retconned back to life! We’ll just have to wait and see how that plays out.
(featured image: Disney+)
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