Master Ki-Adi-Mundi (R) stands around a conference table in 'The Acolyte'

You’d think that The Acolyte killed off a canon character the way people are acting. Instead … a birthday that wasn’t even canon to begin with got changed, and these dudebros will not let it go.

Ki-Adi-Mundi, who first appeared in Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace, used to have a birthday according to a CD-ROM from 1999 that even George Lucas contradicted, and then a playing card that was deemed non-canon. All this to say that he doesn’t really have a birthday in canon. So he could, very well, have been alive during The Acolyte—no reason not to have a simple cameo.

But of course, it didn’t stop there! People are mad because they claim his appearance contradicts canon, even going so far as to send death threats over a Wiki change. In The Phantom Menace, Mundi states that the Sith have been extinct for a millennium. Okay, but we don’t know that the Master in The Acolyte is actually a Sith, and we don’t know that Mundi ever meets them or that the Jedi talk about what has happened, even if they are. There are still episodes to go and yet everyone is up in arms about this. Also … Mundi was willfully ignoring information that contradicted that statement when he made it, so why wouldn’t he be doing the same thing in The Acolyte?

It got to the point where writer Claire “CK” Kiechel addressed the situation on X. Kiechel in multiple replies pointed out that Mundi might not know about the Sith. We don’t know that the Master is a Sith Lord. If anything, maybe Mundi being there proves that the Master really isn’t a Sith at all. The Master has a red lightsaber, but any dark side wielder may use a red saber, so that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.

Just another entry in the nonsense online

The anger over Mundi being in the show is truly off the rails. There is no reason to be this mad about it. Mundi was no one’s favorite character, and I would even go as far as to say that he was no one’s favorite Glup Shitto, either. But suddenly everyone is an expert on him? No, they’re doing it in bad faith, because The Acolyte is already under attack for politically conservative “reasons.”

Also Mundi being there and still not believing in the Sith does help to show how the Jedi could let the Sith return so it makes sense with the flow of this franchise! But these haters are too busy yelling about a non-canon birthday to actually use their brains.