Welcome to the Pit

—

Tim: Yeah, he looks completely different. I mean, his eyes literally grew, I swear.

Kon: It is physically impossible for that to happen. Your eyes remain the same size from birth to death.

Tim: Oh.

Kon: Maybe it’s the wrong person you saw? Or someone’s impersonating him?

Tim: …you’re right. Thanks, Kon.

—

(On an outer space mission)

Timkon: *having to hold onto each other or they would get torn apart with the pressure of the spacecraft*

Kon: We’re like otters.

Tim: Uh huh. And what led you to this conclusion?

Kon: Well, they go to sleep holding hands to not drift apart!

Tim:

Tim: I think this is more life and death, Kon.

Kon: Still.

—

Cassie: I can barely see.

Bart: It’s literally pitch black right now.

Tim: Just try to navigate by following voices, alright?

Kon: The body actually gives off light, so try focus real hard.

Cassie: Rightttt, let me just get my night vision goggles.

Kon: I’m being serious!

—

Bart: *Makes a horrific sneezing sound*

Tim: Who died?

Bart: Ugh, it’s like I sneezed and took a breath at the same time.

Kon: Scientifically, that’s not possible.

Honestly, we don't speak about Kon enough.

Like, he was literally a product.

Like, a marketed actual product mascot. He is the original mascot horror story—! The horror of corporate stage capitalism, the abuse of child stars, & the way in which he encapsulates the hollowness of billionaires: how the wealthy will do things for their own benefit, no thought to the consequences.

I want him to send cash to Lena Luthor every month and she tries to send it back but it always ends up back in her accounts.

I want him to use his prison calls to call Kon but never gets answered.

I want all his wealth to be split 70/30 between Lena and Kon respectively if he passes.

I want him to still be a supervillain and deeply unsympathetic to others but still tries and look out for his kids. Maybe out of seeing them as an extension of his ego, maybe out of misguided love.

He is defeated by Eve, who found a way to document all his shady bullshit despite understanding perfectly well what kind of danger she is in. He is defeated by Lois, who already knows Luthor is up to no good but spends the whole movie finding proof of it so she can publish it.

Because usually when you have your villain, usually the civilians working for them are gonna be largely faceless or cowed. And then when the hero crashes the scene, only the armed goons are taken out while said civilians flee to remove any questions.

In here though, you can tell they all enjoy working for Luthor. The technicians in his hq have fun plugging in directions to Ultraman. And those in the base camp wear tropical shirts while listening to music and playing games on their downtime. Nobody is working with rigid confirmity nor are there moral reservations (the only objection shown was when his obsession almost got them killed).

So when Mr. Terrific arrived on the scene, it is actually fitting that he wiped out the workers alongside the armed goons.

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're owen lars. the woman you call mom had another child once. it doesn't make her love you less, but she talks about him in a way that makes it clear that she loved him, too. he's off to be a jedi now and she's very proud.

you're owen lars. your mother's been kidnapped and you have to assume the worst. a man and a woman step into your home and the man announces himself to be that kid who went off to become a jedi. he knows you less than you know him and before anything else can happen, he takes off to bring back his mother, a feat you think is impossible.

you're owen lars. anakin skywalker brings your mom's corpse to your doorstep. her funeral is interrupted by a message of utmost galactic importance.

you're owen lars. your brother is dead. you never saw him again after that first time. there is another jedi on your doorstep, with a baby in his arm and you know what it means and you can't bring yourself to face him as he hands your nephew off to your wife.

you're owen lars. obi-wan ben kenobi is a pain in the ass. he was more your brother's brother than you ever were and he doesn't understand your particular kind of grief, is drowning in his own. you don't even know the full story and kenobi will never tell you all of it. but you have a child to care for so you tell him off and get back to work.

you're owen lars. you didn't know your brother, but you know your nephew and your nephew wants out of this place as soon as possible. you know he won't be safe out there but in the end you're helpless to stop him. and you know the stories, you remember the one time you met him, the days your mother died. and you do this for her and you do this for your father and you do this for your brother and you do this for your nephew.

I love TimKon same as everyone else but sometimes I just want to read a Kon fic where Kon is actually the main character and he interacts with other people.

I want more family fics but so many of them are just a timkon fics in disguise (in which I mean that timkon takes center stage and the family part is barely there) :(

And I don’t want to exclude timkon out of the tags because I do love the ship and it’s good in family fics (and it takes away SO many fics if I do) but I’m really tired of being baited by a family fic only for it all to be thrown to the side in favor of timkon plot