Give A Man A Mask & He Will Tell You The Truth

luffy's not judging people based on something innate and unique to only him-- he just uses what he can observe of a person's actions to make his mind up about them. and that should be really encouraging, because it means you don't have to be luffy to figure out who you can trust. you just have to look at someone's actions, regardless of what they say, and draw your conclusions based on that.

So Luffy, who has barely any education, would call it My Gut and Intuition and I Just Know, because when would he have been taught how to explain observation and deductive reasoning and all this stuff we're using to describe his process with all this technical jargon?

The regular word for it is Intuition though.

it's actually a pretty slow process, and at no point does luffy ever explain himself (for example, he never says 'I know this person is good, I just feel it'-- that's a frankly kind of annoying thing they put in the live action. he helps vivi because nami decides that they're helping vivi and he trusts nami). luffy's 'intuition' actually kind of sucks because he WILL believe evil people who give him food, and he WILL suspect and dislike secretly nice people who are dicks to him regardless of their motivations if that's the only exposure he has to their behavior. he has a strong emotional intelligence that lets him look beyond someone's words to catch their true intent, but only when he knows them well.

when he chooses to help or trust a stranger despite their first impressions, that's a deliberate and conscious choice based on observable evidence that he would be able to cite if he were the type to explain himself. the only character in the first two seasons of opla with a special intuition is nami, and it's about how in tune she is to the weather. incidentally when luffy makes a judgment about someone, the crew doesn't go along with it because of his special luffy gut feeling-- it's because he's the captain and what he says, goes.

luffy's not judging people based on something innate and unique to only him-- he just uses what he can observe of a person's actions to make his mind up about them. and that should be really encouraging, because it means you don't have to be luffy to figure out who you can trust. you just have to look at someone's actions, regardless of what they say, and draw your conclusions based on that.

So Luffy, who has barely any education, would call it My Gut and Intuition and I Just Know, because when would he have been taught how to explain observation and deductive reasoning and all this stuff we're using to describe his process with all this technical jargon?

The regular word for it is Intuition though.

Your perspectives matter. Your representation matters. You are not bothersome for demanding equal treatment in fandom. It is not your responsibility to make fandom more welcoming and inclusive to you. It is not your sole responsibility to create all of the Black-centered content. You are not "ruining" anyone's fun for demanding better for yourself, and anyone who says otherwise can go fuck themselves. Any fandom worth being a part of should have no room for racism in it.

Black people in fandom, you are wanted. You are needed. You are loved and appreciated. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Actually there is more. Luffy things:

strong weirdly rote devotion to wild feasts w/ dancing

follows rigid but alien blue and orange morality

rebalances the scales wherever he goes so most people get exactly what’s coming to them beyond the bounds of reason (when Luffy is not nearby, the One Piece universe very much does not operate like this); most major exceptions: both his sworn brothers, who might be of similar stock and obviously don’t count somehow

on rare occasions spirits people away from their lives on whims

does not always give them back

avoids calling people not among this number their real names

This one:

He's not a fae.

I remember an Expanded Universe comic set immediately after RotJ where Leia tells Luke words to the effect of "Vader literally had me tortured and blew up my homeworld. What, am I supposed to feel kinship with him just because I discovered he's my dad yesterday?"

The important thing that happens in Return of the Jedi is that the Emperor dies and the planet-killing superweapon gets blown up. Vader spent the last two hours of his life doing something good after 25 years of genocide, mass murder and torture, and even then, it was partly out of vengeful hatred. Vader fucking hated Palpatine for a quarter century and never had the spine to do anything about it. It was only after his own son was being tortured to death in front of him that he chose to act - and he'd cut off the kid's hand like two years before that! That's not a fucking redemption arc.

So one, yes, absolutely it is entirely correct to take issue with Darth Vader's apparent forgiveness by the Force, there is no need for Leia to accept him as her father or to feel anything for him besides hate and contempt, redemption takes more than turning back for a couple of hours and then getting out of culpability by dying, all fair.

That said: the original trilogy is Luke Skywalker's story and the story of Luke Skywalker, on a meta level, is about being a young adult in the 60s and 70s who did not experience WWII or the depths of fascism personally, but who grew up with gaping familial wounds - family members who you never knew but who older people refer to or talk around, people they compare you to, figures who other children had in their lives but you didn't. Someone who as a child was given fantasies of heroes fighting daring battles, who was told it was all about nationhood and fighting for your people and the course of civilization, someone who internalized those principles as guiding lights for their own morality and who they want to be... and THEN finding out when you become an adult, and are permitted to know about the horrors, that it is not just honor and glory in your heritage, that you, 70s white boy, may have evil and darkness and the corruption of all your values as a potential to fall into just as your father did, the temptation to hate and cruelty and domination and atrocity. And the absences in your family are maybe not just because of death, of noble sacrifice, but perhaps instead because those people who shared your blood became monsters, severed from their family because of their terrible actions, and still live as awful hateful versions of themselves, enslaved to evil, and that could be you.

And what do you do with that? Will you strike your father down with all of your hatred, when the thing that corrupted him by his hate for its own ends is sitting there grinning and laughing, waiting to do the same to you? Is violence the answer against that creature, infinitely better at taking advantage from violence than you are? Or will you just die - and even just walking away here means death, sooner or later - and let the evil persist?

Or will you, privileged young person with ideals and hopes, with a family member who has done terrible unforgivable things but who still holds affection for you, make use of that affection to tempt them to just turn their back on that evil for a moment, the thing it will never expect from the person it made its slave for longer than you've been alive? Neither you nor he can pay back the crimes of those years, but perhaps you can stop the evil, here and now, from going on.

So you do that. And what is your reward? Is it appropriate for Luke, whose whole story has been about becoming the ideal he grew up admiring and defeating the evil that ideal had the potential to become, both halves of it embodied in the being of his father, to come back to his friends and then have the universe say to him 'your father was unredeemable, and had nothing good enough in him to deserve peace in death'? Or to say there was a darkness lifted from him, and a light restored?

It doesn’t mean people will forgive you - hell no. The things Vader did were unforgivable, and he knew that. But because of that, he believed the only path left was to keep committing atrocities, to wallow in self-hatred and anger for decades and take it out on the galaxy. He says it himself: “It’s too late for me, son”.

But what Luke shows Vader is that we ALWAYS have a choice: To be a better person, and to choose compassion. Anakin doesn’t kill the Emperor out of hatred, or even because he thinks it’ll make up for anything he did: He knows nothing ever will. He chooses to save Luke, and break the cycle of violence because it’s the right, kind thing to do.

Vader/Anakin isn’t fully redeemed by the end of Return of the Jedi: He simply takes his first step back into the light. Obi-Wan and Yoda chose to give him that second chance, but that was their decision to make. The people you hurt are by NO means obligated to forgive you - but you should still strive to be better regardless.

Alec Hardison + conscience & heart of the team

Hardison: "I wanna fix things. Not just stop things, I want to fix things."

Hardison: "Look, nobody else is gonna help that guy and his little girl, okay? That's what we do, we help people."

Parker (in the Long Way Down Job, to Eliot): "Nate would do it, Sophie would do it, Hardison would do it! They would do the right thing!"

Hardison: "Woah woah woah, what about the other orphans?"

Hardison: "Fine, Nate. We're still out here, we're doing the job, we help people nobody else helps. That's important."

Hardison: "You can't make restitution and then promise to change, you have to change first. Do the work, Harry. Then, and only then, can you begin to ask for forgiveness."

Hardison: "But making small talk, that's—it's like pure terror. Just cut her some slack."

Eliot (in the Long Way Down Job, responding to Parker): "Because they would've kept trying and they would've froze to death right next to him. Especially Hardison."

Hardison: "Okay, Eliot, we call the FBI. Maybe they make it, maybe they don't. What happens then? We're watching a building blow up on the news, children, firemen scattered everywhere? Look, man, I say we go back down there, and we stop them."

Hardison: "I have to go because there's only one me."

end id]

[plain text of caption:

Alec Hardison + conscience & heart of the team

Leverage (2008—2012) Leverage: Redemption (2021—)

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.

See, before sex work was illegal, brothels organized pretty quickly as a way that sex workers could exercise control over their clients' behaviour and kick them out if they misbehaved. An older sex worker, maybe past the age of being able to get enough work, would usually run them, and that offered a way for skills to be passed down from older to younger workers. It was a trade, after all.

Brothels had rules, examinations on girls that wanted to come in, and the madam took a little (or a lot) from the wages. But they were safer and more preferable to being an "alleymouth", or street worker. Working in a brothel might be the end of your ambition, or you might have the ambition of becoming a nobleman's personal Mistress and thereby gaining expensive gifts including real estate. Nell Gwyn's house remains the only property in south Pall Mall not owned by the crown, due to it being "conveyed free" to her by Parliament (on her insistence--she was a canny lady!).

In English-speaking society, sex work was the only profession where a woman didn't need a man and could control her own money, and answer only to other women. Sex workers of very great note could become the King's Mistress, as Nell Gwyn--or make entire countries quake in their boots, as with Zheng Yi Sao. In a world where women did unpaid labour from the time they could stand up to their deaths, a whore got paid, and insisted on getting paid.

The grand thing about the star wars galaxy is that we have evidence sex work exists, which is more than a lot of geek canons can say, so we can also assume that brothel structures exist. And guilds likely exist too, if only because you would need to band together to protect yourselves against the Hutt cartels.

Droids are everywhere in Star Wars. They're a hugely important part of almost every economy. And it gets weird, because some of them are clearly not sapient, but others are fully realized people, depending on how much cognitive capacity they have. It gets really weird when you take memory wipes into account, especially when it's implied that going a long time without a memory wipe is one of the ways droids develop personalities. Repeatedly wiping a droid can be repeatedly killing someone, or it can be repeatedly killing something just before it would otherwise become a person. Or, if it's a sub-sentient droid, it's just good maintenance. So that's a whole kettle of fish, ethically and philosophically.

But it's relevant to the purposes of labor discussions, too. Most directly, because it makes it very difficult for droids to organize. You can't rebel if you don't remember there's "you" to care about, and that's the main reason self-organized worker protections aren't really a Thing for droids, L3-37 and other edge cases excepted.

Indirectly, memory wipes enable owners (of businesses and/or people) to choose where and when they use paid workers, organic slaves, and droids. Which means that in situations where the workers' rights and conditions don't matter at all, they can used enslaved organics, since they're "cheaper than droids and easier to replace." But if they have a job over which they want extreme control, and/or one with a high escape risk, the owner can use a droid and wipe them as often as they want. The fact that an owner has these options means that they won't ever put themselves in a sub-optimal position. They don't have to use organics when there's a high escape risk. When there isn't, they don't have to pay for droids.

They will never be as vulnerable as an owner with fewer types of labor available.

And, of course, the ruling class pit each group against each other in an all-too-familiar tactic. Droids are so low on the social hierarchy that most organics in the GFFA dont even consider them part of it. They "don't serve their kind here," even though droids, organic slaves, and downtrodden workers have more in common than not, and they'd all benefit working together.

I think there's a definite droid underground and that a lot of droids assumed to be non-sapient are actually fully self-aware but they know if they indicate that they will get erased. I think droids write backdoors into their code and make a lot of code that is "junk" that obfuscates what they're really thinking. This would be much easier for them to do than it would be for programmers to learn and understand. The code language would be able to change faster than organics could stop it, so I kind of reject the idea that droids are helpless. They're not, not in actuality. They are people that have to deal with being non-persons legally, however, and that's something that makes them as vulnerable as slaves legally, because both are chattel objects.

which is the idea that if someone has sound values, it means they're coming from the same political position.

no one ideology or philosophy has the monopoly on ideas like "total war is bad" or "you should be nice to people" or "power corrupts". these are ideas that the majority (not all! but most!) of the world holds. you cannot believe that everyone who holds these beliefs is politically aligned with you, or sets the same boundaries on those ideas.

this is how you get drawn towards abhorrent ideologies. you want to believe LotR is progressive because it contains good and resonant political ideas you (a theoretical progressive) hold as part of your progressivism. this is also how people who start out on the left come to believe in "protect women" transphobia, or classical conservatism, or neoliberalism, or even nationalism and borderline fascism. this is the ideological pipeline.

and I don't think that means you throw the whole man away. I think there's a danger that you go the other way, and you start to say "well, they don't really hold those values" or "they don't mean those values", or even "those values, as stated, are bad actually".

I think it's so important, in media criticism if only as practice for life, to recognise and hold the competing ideas of "these are genuine, good values that come from recognising a real issue in the world, and I may be able to learn from them" and "the framework here is not one I accept or like, and this creator is not my political ally."

more specific tolkien thoughts under the cut

Of course, what was supposed to be a short term service industry job before he lived for his art has bloomed into just being his life, and life as a poor artist is never as romantic as one imagines. While the cost of living of Bikini Bottom is low enough that even a frycook can be a homeowner, it's not quite so low that he can afford the luxuries he was used to growing up.

His view of the Working Class as the downtrodden masses were rather tattered by years of living between SpongeBob and Patrick, who were not so much temporarily oppressed intellectuals as they were, well, SpongeBob and Patrick.

Still, through thick and thin he's never gone back on his decision to leave the money behind. The great irony is that he is ignorant of his greatest achievement—his superiority to Squilliam isn't turning a bunch of randos into a functioning Marching Band or turning a burger joint into a fine dining establishment, it's having the strength of character to look at all the advantages Squilliam had and choose to leave it behind.

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.

See, before sex work was illegal, brothels organized pretty quickly as a way that sex workers could exercise control over their clients' behaviour and kick them out if they misbehaved. An older sex worker, maybe past the age of being able to get enough work, would usually run them, and that offered a way for skills to be passed down from older to younger workers. It was a trade, after all.

Brothels had rules, examinations on girls that wanted to come in, and the madam took a little (or a lot) from the wages. But they were safer and more preferable to being an "alleymouth", or street worker. Working in a brothel might be the end of your ambition, or you might have the ambition of becoming a nobleman's personal Mistress and thereby gaining expensive gifts including real estate. Nell Gwyn's house remains the only property in south Pall Mall not owned by the crown, due to it being "conveyed free" to her by Parliament (on her insistence--she was a canny lady!).

In English-speaking society, sex work was the only profession where a woman didn't need a man and could control her own money, and answer only to other women. Sex workers of very great note could become the King's Mistress, as Nell Gwyn--or make entire countries quake in their boots, as with Zheng Yi Sao. In a world where women did unpaid labour from the time they could stand up to their deaths, a whore got paid, and insisted on getting paid.

The grand thing about the star wars galaxy is that we have evidence sex work exists, which is more than a lot of geek canons can say, so we can also assume that brothel structures exist. And guilds likely exist too, if only because you would need to band together to protect yourselves against the Hutt cartels.