what my rotting bones will sing

Thank you.

I have so many people to thank but I'm going to thank everyone in person. Or check out my instagram stories where we'll be doing a whole feature about everyone backstage and everything because I have some things to say.

Sometimes humanity needs a fantastical lens outside of ourselves to look at and explore questions about our own nature.

Vampires represent those who have shunned their own humanity in order to achieve a nonexistent sense of superiority.

The billionaires will never find happiness in their money. The colonizers will never find fulfillment from the land and lives they steal. The fascists will never find meaning from their conformity, not in this lifetime or eternity.

People like to say theatre is a form of escape, but I've found more than ever that in this season and time that theatre is one of the last places people will come to worship the power of true collective human presence. We take a moment to recondition our addiction to desensitization, we ask how we can see ourselves in a stranger's story, and then carry that sentiment out into the world that needs us to ask that more than ever.

This is dedicated to the beautiful tapestry of immigrant families who make this country really special: may you one day not have to audition for the empathy that should be freely given by this country that benefits from your beauty. For the queer and trans communities who have and always will exist no matter what people in power try to take away from them. For the people of Palestine who deserve to live a free life, a full life, without occupation. For Arab theatre-makers and artists, may we continue to tell our stories and show our faces so our humanity becomes undeniable and our families can no longer be written off as merely collateral damage. May they know the beauty of our kisses upon each cheek and the romance of a language rooted in passion, love, and life itself.

If there's one thing we can learn from vampires, it's that life is short, but that's its gift. Find beauty in the ephemeral and gratitude in what is not promised and always invest in the people that want to see you blossom into your truest self. And hold that space for them in return.

I dedicate this award to my late mentor, Ralph Petillo.

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.

I fucking love when people give in-universe reasons for omegaverse shenanigans being a relatively new phenomenon and not just a fact of life. And this is probably my favorite out of all of them. Insane choice, and I want to kiss the author sloppy style about it.

for @iceouthr, i podficced red string of fate by @xianvar (which is so funny to me. i didn't know who xia was then! now i'm like, ah yes xia of course! 😂 the difference a month voiceteam makes) for @allbloomgold777!

https://archiveofourown.org/works/79233116

Author's original summary:

Boss!