YMMV / Dark Disciple

• Broken Base:
  • The Ventress/Vos romance, besides those that shipped the two with others, Ventress with Obi-wan and Vos with Khaleen (his Legends love interest), some just found that the romance dragged on the story.
  • Killing off Ventress was very divisive, with many feeling that her death was cheap and that she should have lived due to being a more prominent and popular character than Vos, while others felt that her embracing the light in death properly ended her story arc. Evidently, George Lucas and Dave Filoni couldn't agree either; Filoni wanted another Ventress/Ahsoka team-up, but Lucas was never swayed by his proposals, and Filoni thought about having Ventress appear in Star Wars Resistance, having been mysteriously revived at some point and now in old age, though her death was changed to being Not Quite Dead by the time she appeared in Star Wars: The Bad Batch.
  • The previous two points could be summed up in those who liked the storyline and those who would have preferred Ventress' and Quinlan' personal arcs to have followed the comics.
• Continuity Lock-Out: Dark Disciple relies on the events that occurred in The Clone Wars in order for the readers to understand the general events of the novel.
• I Knew It!: Ventress' death; most fans had long since guessed that, since she was the only major character on the Separatist side not in some way present in Revenge of the Sith, she wasn't going to live through this book.
• Moral Event Horizon: Dooku's committed plenty of atrocities throughout the Clone Wars, but the massacre of the Mahran race just for being Republic citizens may as well be one of the most abhorrent things he's explicitly done in the Canon. It's even considered as such in-universe, as this act is what prompts the Jedi Council to finally consider assassinating him (something that Jedi are traditionally against).
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Many, many Star Wars: Republic fans wouldn’t view this as canon if you paid them. This is due to how the book radically alters the characters and storylines surrounding Quinlan, Ventress, and their particularly popular Legends Story Arcs.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Aayla Secura, who used to be Quinlan Vos' Padawan, and even claimed that he had been like a father to her, is completely absent from the novel, and isn't even mentioned. This is probably in part the result of Golden's research extending only as far as watching The Clone Wars, where Aayla doesn't give the name of the master she's talking about, and their relation was only confirmed in the episode guide for "Jedi Crash".
  • Similarly, when the Council contemplates executing Vos without fair trial, they bring up Barriss Offee's treason as an example of them having grown too placate. The fact that during the same unfortunate affair, they readily sent Ahsoka without fair trial to the hands of the Republic Military Tribunal and very nearly to her death in an eerily similar manner to the one proposed, isn't brought up at all.
  • In a piece of concept art depicting characters from both the two arcs upon which Dark Disciple is based and the Darth Maul: Son of Dathomir arc, Quinlan Vos is shown wielding a crimson blade in a lightsaber duel with Maul. While it might have cluttered the more focused storyline of the book (except as something alluded to in passing), adapting that concept art scenario into animation could have been a good opportunity to have a spinoff episode focused on, e.g., Quinlan Vos being sent on a mission against Maul by Dooku during his time as his apprentice "Admiral Enigma" (likely after the eponymous "Dark Disciple" episode with Ventress leaving Vos to his fate on Serenno as Dooku's new apprentice at the end of the first arc, but before the "Saving Vos, Part I" episode that begins the second Dark Disciple arc in which he is rescued from Separatist captivity by Ventress and the Jedi, since those respective arcs aired in separate seasons). However, there is no further evidence that any such plans for a Maul-Vos storyline crossover progressed beyond the initial concept art.