The XYZ Board

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.

"It's a long story."

someone once said that Irina might told young Ilya those words before and I could not help but make this little scene

The quote from 1x06 «The Cottage»

Yuna notices something is wrong because of course she does and together with David they herd Shane into some private empty side room hoping it will help him calm down. But it doesn't. He wont stop shaking and his breathing is too fast and he flinches at their voices even tho nobody is speaking loudly. Won't let Yuna come close to hug him or rub his arm.

Maybe Yuna is starting to panic a little herself, her heart aching as she watches Shane wrap his own arms around himself, hates that she cant do anything when her son is so clearly in distress, hates that she can't seem to think of anything that will work-

When suddenly the door bangs open and Ilya Fucking Rozanov??? strides into the room with quick steps, makes a beeline directly for her son, eyes locked on him like he doesnt even register her and David in the room as well and Yuna opens her mouth to cuss him out, tell him to fuck off and not bother Shane right now, she can feel her body moving already to stand in front of Shane protectively when David grabs her arm because-

Because Rozanov is pulling Shane into his arms, one hand on the back of Shane's neck, guiding his head to press into the crook of Rozanov's neck and Shane isn't fighting it, doesn't flinch from his touch. He goes where Rozanov arranges him and let's himself be held and rocked back and forth gently as Rozanov presses his mouth to Shane's ear and starts whispering something so quietly that Yuna can't really make out the words but what she can see is Shane's shaking subsiding, hands fisting tightly into Rozanov's shirt, his breathing going slowly back to normal because - oh. oh - her son is syncing his breaths with Rozanov who, Yuna realises, is taking very exaggerated deep slow breaths of his own so Shane can match them. And then Rozanov turns slightly while still rocking them both back and forth and Yuna sees Shane's face where it's smushed into Rozanov's neck. Sees the look there.

And that's how Yuna realises her son is in love and the man - his years-long rival - he loves must have left in the middle of his award-winning show to come here and pull her son out of a panic attack like there was no place he'd rather be than right here with Yuna's overwhelmed panicked boy in his arms, soothing him until Shane's body relaxes completely into that hold, mumbling that he's fine yet not pulling away and Rozanov makes no move to let go either.

The trade off of getting to play for the NHL is giving up their bodies, names, and likenesses. Their whole identities are used as a marketing tool and that’s part of their job. People are making a lot of money off of their rivalry. The NHL is getting more ticket and jersey sales from it. Fans are placing bets on their games. It really is that serious and people really are that invested.

That’s why the Irina Foundation plan is so smart. The rivalry is a narrative people are buying into, so Shane’s suggesting a new narrative. It gives the league a new marketing angle and it generates enough positive PR that people are kinda backed into a corner of letting the rivalry go. No one wants to be the guy saying a sports rivalry is more important than charity, kids, and mental health.

So no, Shane and Ilya are not stupid for feeling trapped by the stakes of this rivalry. They are trapped. They’re trapped in that tricky dissonance between the Hollander and Rozanov the media, league, and fans expect them to be and the Shane and Ilya they really are.

When Shane wakes Ilya up in the middle of the night with his plan, he’s saying: who we really are matters. What we have matters. I’m tired of giving up happiness to contort myself into the shape of who Shane Hollander is supposed to be. The real me wants you and chooses you and this is how we can make it happen.

The whole team settles in with rapt attention, ready to roast the shit out of Roz over it via group chat, only to see. Well. It's a series of interview clips over the years. It's made up exclusively of three things. One, clips of Hollander "stealing" linguistically challenging questions that the whole team knows Rozanov hates. Two, clips of Rozanov derailing questions that are about Hollander's "representation of his community," which gossip on the street says makes Hollander uncomfortable. Three, Hollander and Rozanov commenting individually on the rivalry, with vicious comments such as. "He's of course a great player, but he'll find us difficult to beat." Such fire in Rozanov's comments are especially damning, given his whole chirp-king-schtick. The video editor, with all the obsession and perception of a true fangirl, makes sure to circle every instance where you can see the shadow of Hollander and Rozanov pressing their feet together - and in one instance holding hands - beneath the interview table. (You wouldn't see it unless you're looking for it - or unless someone circles it in red for you.)

The video finishes, and the team sits in a kind of shocked silence as the next video auto-plays. This one is a compilation of Rozanov chirping Hollander on the ice. Here, the editor has helpfully drawn an arrow to Hollander's face whenever he blushes. The editor has also inserted text overlays with comments like. "Look at how fiercely Rozanov insults his rival." And then puts smaller arrows pointing to Roz's body language, with helpful texts like "excited wiggle indicating absolute fury," and "besotted grin indicating deep hatred." The sarcasm is distressingly accurate in its point.

(Listen, the whole team knows what Roz looks like when he's chirping someone. This - this is not it. This is not it at all. This is him when he's being silly with people he really likes. What is going on.)

The video finishes, and this time someone has the presence of mind to stop the auto-play before another mind-breaking thing comes up.

Someone else, trying to lighten the silence with a joke, and maybe dismiss it all as a fever dream, says, "Montreal Jane? More like Montreal Shane, am I right?"

And. Well.

Once it's out there, there's no coming back from it.