Dobedobedo

Even in Hot Fuzz when the majority of the cast is male you fucking remember realistically happily slutty Doris who has a harem of men at her beck and call. She could have been a male fantasy but she’s so aggressively in charge of her own sexuality you never hear male viewers sexualize her. It’s magical.

I didn’t even realize that Shaun of The Dead set the tone for me until I watched the movie again a few nights ago.

At 1:27 there’s a random scene where the only people helping Shaun are the female characters. They don’t make any real point of it but we get it. Liz and Dianne know Shaun is slightly stronger than them so they hand him the “spear” but they act as a team. Extra material on the DVD even revealed that Shaun, Liz and Dianne were the only characters who survived to the end (Dianne got away and hid in a tree apparently).

Women are in general far more capable and helpful in the movie and Shaun himself is the most “feminine coded” of the male characters. You’ll never see a male protagonist more honest about his emotions and more willing to be visibly vulnerable than Shaun I can tell you that much.

And in The World’s End we have Sam who has her own agency and doesn’t exist to be a price to be won by the main character Gary at the end of the movie, try as he might. She will help and save him and let him help and save her, yes, but the movie makes it very clear that doesn’t mean he has any right to her. She wants Steven and there’s nothing Gary can do about that.

The movies aren’t feminist masterpieces but together Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg writes some amazing female characters.

Side note; men also act a certain way around women in these movies that I can’t quite put my finger on. They don’t treat women as brilliant goddess or anything and can be downright inappropriate but there’s also a certain respect that feels unusual in movies? When Liz grabs Ed in Shaun of The Dead he doesn’t push her away or grab her back. He just sorta shakes her off without touching her in a “fuck off but I have zero interest in hurting you” way. I really don’t know how to explain it. There’s an understanding that “yes we are stronger than women so we can hurt them unintentionally but we know they’re our equals in both good and bad so there’s no reason to take advantage of that and women have had to learn to get the upper hand in other ways so strength doesn’t mean an automatic win anyway”. Just the way Shaun and Ed approach the girl in the garden before they know she’s a zombie. They’re afraid of her but not really and yet a little scared anyway. It’s…different.

Red / Green, 2026. Watercolour & ink on 100% cotton cold pressed watercolour paper.

Recently I drew and painted this all in one evening/night, for a pop up art exhibition, in the middle of a heatwave, on a work night, at a larger format than I'm used to, the night before the exhibition set up. All things considered, I think it turned out pretty well! Who said doing things last minute is a bad idea? (me. all the time.)

This is a watercolour painting, with the theme RED/GREEN, for the exhibition of the same name which was held at the end of June in STPLN in Malmö, Sweden.

I decided on doing a peaceful, summery painting, featuring a somewhat Edwardian naturalist inspired character. She's sitting in a green scene, drawing little tomte nissar with red hats, which seem to be inhabiting the tree she's under. There's several little details hidden around the scene, mainly the tree, to pore over and delight in finding. I think there are 13 tomte nissar, total.

"Such matters don't concern me. I am a postman."

"I mean, what's in your trousers?"

We're getting there little by little, sure. But it's a road.

It’s the final few days of the Bluminarmour Project! After some issues with Kickstarter let’s see how far we can get!

If you want to see fantasy tropes, historical movement and silly tricks tested in authentic full plate armour, please consider chucking a few quid over (or like and share this post):

Kickstarter removed my highest funding tier so I lost £11k of funding since earlier today.

BUT

One of the quiet background realities of the Star Wars galaxy is that it is spectacularly bad at labor. Not just “late-stage capitalism” bad, but structurally, culturally, and institutionally allergic to the idea that workers should have enforceable protections. You’ve got child soldiers, child labor, debt slavery, corporate fiefdoms, and a Republic that can field a galaxy-spanning bureaucracy but somehow never gets around to standardizing “maybe don’t enslave people.” The Empire of course doesn’t fix this; it industrializes it.

So in that environment, formal labor law is either nonexistent, unenforced, or actively hostile. Which means if you’re operating in a sector where the state either can’t or won’t protect you, you get a classic historical pattern: workers build their own rules.

Enter the gray economies.

Groups like the Smugglers' Alliance (Legends) and the Bounty Hunters' Guild (new canon) look, at first glance, like professional associations for criminals. But if you squint at them through a labor history lens, they start to look a lot like early, proto-union structures — especially the kinds you see in maritime or extralegal industries on Earth.

Think pirate codes (yes actual ones, Pirates of the Caribbean didn't make that up). Think matelotage agreements. Think dockworker brotherhoods that predate formal unions.

Because what do these groups actually do?

They:

set norms for compensation and contracts

regulate competition to prevent destructive undercutting

provide a framework for dispute resolution

establish reputational systems (“you don’t honor contracts, you don’t get work”)

That’s industry self-governance in the absence of law.

Take bounty hunting. Without something like the Bounty Hunters' Guild, the field collapses into chaos: clients don’t pay; hunters underbid each other into oblivion; jobs get duplicated, interfered with, or sabotaged. And nobody trusts anybody!

The Guild steps in and says: here are the rules of engagement. Here’s how claims work. Here’s how you get paid. Here’s what happens if you break contract.

That’s basically a union crossed with a licensing board and a regulatory agency, just without any moral pretense.

Same with the Smugglers' Alliance. Smuggling is inherently risky, decentralized, and dependent on trust networks. If everyone is constantly betraying everyone else, the whole system stops functioning. So instead, you hash out agreed-upon routes and territories, informal protections against betrayal, mechanisms for information sharing, and consequences for breaking the code

Again: not altruism. Stability.

And the reason this emerges specifically in gray/illegal sectors is because they have to. The Core Worlds might pretend they have laws, but those laws don’t meaningfully protect the people actually doing dangerous, itinerant, high-risk work. So the margins of the galaxy — where enforcement is weakest and risk is highest — become the places where labor organization evolves first.

Which is very historically grounded.

On Earth, some of the earliest labor protections didn’t come from governments; they came from workers in dangerous, decentralized industries—sailors, pirates, miners—who literally wrote their own rules because no one else was going to save them.

Pirate codes, for example, often included:

compensation for injury

shared distribution of loot

limits on captain authority

Which is … shockingly progressive compared to a lot of contemporary working conditions (cough Amazon cough).

So in the galaxy far, far away, you end up with this ironic inversion:

The “legitimate” systems — Republic, Empire, megacorporations — are exploitative, inconsistent, or indifferent.

The “illegitimate” systems — smugglers, bounty hunters — are the ones building functional labor frameworks, because they need to survive.

And that feeds back into why the galaxy feels so unstable overall. There’s no universal baseline of rights. Everything is hyper-local, network-dependent, and contingent on whether you’re inside a system that has rules you can rely on.

If you’re a clone trooper? You are literally property.

If you’re a factory worker on a corporate world? Your protections are whatever your employer feels like offering.

But if you’re a smuggler or a bounty hunter?

You might actually have clearer expectations about your pay, your risks, and your recourse — because your “union” is the only thing standing between you and total chaos.

So yeah: the Smugglers’ Alliance and the Bounty Hunters’ Guild aren’t just flavor. They’re a glimpse of what labor organization looks like in a galaxy where the state has fundamentally failed to provide it.

You are posted out by the Hollywood sign tonight, sitting under the frame where the W used to be. It got burnt to a crisp during last week’s big superhero fight. A hero died right where you’re sitting. The whole area’s been closed down until Hero Force can coordinate a recovery effort. Usually it’d be done by now but no one’s willing to touch it until the ash has been completely blown away.

It’s a rule that the world must stand still when a hero dies.

“How much?”

The voice comes from behind you. The lights that illuminate the Hollywood sign are down to hide as much of the scorch marks as possible. You wouldn’t be able to see anything even if you did turn around, so you don’t.

You put some chapstick on, the glide of the balm against your wind chapped lips grounding.

“I said,” the Hero says, voice tightening, “How. Much.”

There’s the sound of gravel crunching now. They’re wearing heavy boots and the scent of fresh blood grows stronger the closer they get. Their breathing is smooth and even which means it’s not their blood.

You put the cap back on your chapstick and tuck it into your leather jacket’s inner pocket. “I don’t take money.”

“Then what do you take?” The Hero rounds the Y and comes into your line of sight. The dark hides most of their features, but you can make out a glittering gold mask and the dull shine of drying blood on their chest plate. Their breathing may be even, but their stance isn’t. They sway in place, back and forth, back and forth. Their arms wrap around their stomach. “I’ve got land. A house. You can have it.”