Controversies surrounding Star Wars: The Acolyte seem to pop up daily. Well, “controversies” may be the wrong word. There are people who are angry about every little thing the show dares to do, and thus we all have to fight about it on social media for an entire day—rinse and repeat.
These so-called “controversies” stem from things that are not even part of the show, that are from years ago, and things that “fans” are just mad about because when isn’t a certain part of the Star Wars fandom mad about something? With The Acolyte, it has been non-stop to the point where we’re all just fighting every single day about things.
So let’s talk about all of these issues and why none of them are actually real reasons to be mad at the show.
Charlie Barnett misspoke in an interview
One of the first bits of nonsense with this show was people yelling online because Charlie Barnett (who plays Yorde) meant to say Luke Skywalker but said Anakin by mistake—an honest mistake, but instead, these “fans”—who were already looking for any reason to hate the show because it dared to feature characters other than white men—acted like we saw Barnett murder someone right in front of us. He made a mistake and said Anakin blew up the Death Star.
Oh no how DARE HE. People in this world are dying, but yes, this is the worst thing a person can do. There are MULTIPLE TikTok videos floating around, all blaming Barnett for not knowing, and even insinuating he needed to go to Star Wars training to learn things. No, he doesn’t. He’s an actor hired to do an acting job, and he’s doing just that. Star Wars icon Harrison Ford often made fun of this franchise, so where was the outrage there?
Amandla Stenberg said something to Trevor Noah in 2018
The Hate U Give is a movie about a young Black girl who watches her childhood friend getting killed by the police. Stenberg played a character named Starr, and she had to find where she could use her voice to fight back against police brutality. So during the promotion for that movie, Stenberg said white people “crying was actually the goal.”
You know these “fans” took that to mean that they were talking about The Acolyte without doing any kind of research into what was going on. Don’t worry, though. Stenberg posted a video mocking those “fans” who used the 2018 interview to somehow fuel Star Wars discourse.
Saying that the Jedi aren’t great, which … they aren’t!
A big “complaint” has been that the series paints the Jedi as the bad guys. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the Jedi aren’t great. The series isn’t calling them villains, but it is pointing out the folly of the Jedi and their lack of understanding of how the rest of the galaxy works.
Review bombing is so ridiculous
Trolls love to review-bomb something and then claim it is not a “review bomb,” just an attempt to show the world what “fans” think. They get their little cronies to do it all together, and the rest of us (with lives) can’t be bothered to deal with them (or their bots). This time around, they also review bombed a movie called Acolytes from 2008 that had nothing to do with this.
This Jedi Master Ki-Adi-Mundi nonsense
So, Jedi Master Ki-Adi-Mundi was in The Acolyte, and now World War III has erupted. Mundi, who first appeared in The Phantom Menace, used to kind of have a birthday. First from a CD-ROM that even Star Wars creator George Lucas didn’t see as canon, and then from a playing card that was also deemed non-canon. So we didn’t actually know his birthday in the canon sense anyway, but that’s not stopping the haters.
The confirmation that he was alive at the time of The Acolyte gave us some new information, so Wookieepedia updated their site. It has unleashed hell on earth. Even a writer from The Acolyte has explained how it makes sense, but the anti-Acolyte faction is SCREAMING instead of hearing any kind of reason.
Now they found some random supposed Disney employee
The latest incident is a video of Michael Giordano, reportedly a vice president of business affairs at Disney, who was talking about the company’s hiring practices. “Nobody else is going to tell you this, but they’re not considering any white males for the job,” said Giordano, “there’s no way we’re hiring a white male.” That’s hilarious given the casting of Galactus, Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm in Fantastic Four!
Even weirder since Dean-Charles Chapman is in the very same Star Wars show they’re all complaining about. But while looking into it, I saw Giordano listed nowhere in connection to Disney. I searched databases, I went onto wiki pages, and tried to search everywhere for more information, but the only things I could find were this video and those sources, so take that with the biggest grain of salt imaginable.
I’m sure we’ll have more “controversies” to add to the list soon!
