My Husband Says That They Need To Do This In A What If . . . Episode.

My husband says that they need to do this in a ‘What if . . .’ episode.

I agree.

i’m sure Thor will give him a ride home

You’re absolutely right.

‪The only bad guy who won in The Empire Strikes Back was Jabba.‬

I heard that when he originally asked Lady Gaga if he could do a parody of ‘Born this Way’ he was turned down by someone that wasn’t Lady Gaga, they hadn’t even asked her just told Weird Al that she had said ‘no’ so he posted it on his YouTube channel with a brief explanation that he had written it for an album but she had refused to let him officially publish it.

Word got back to Lady Gaga about the situation and she personally contacted him to apologize and explain that the person that he had spoken to hadn’t told her that he had made the request to do a parody of ‘Born this Way’.

Paraphrasing her ‘it’s the highest honor as a singer to have Weird Al do a parody of one of your songs.’

wholesome story :)

I will read this!!!!

I’m imagining Leia sitting on the Imperial Throne talking to a camera (is it Office style?) about how Vader randomly decided to name her Empress of the Galactic Empire (he claims that the Force led him to pick her) and by becoming Empress she inherited the late Emperor’s crazy, fanatical, deadly and possibly psychologically damaged/abused enforcer.

She talks about the headache of juggling running an Empire and trying to dismantle it without alerting suspicion of anyone in the Empire, including Vader, trying to help the Rebellion without actively helping them and how she can’t get a private meeting with her parents after an attempt on her life and Vader’s sticks like glue to her side. But she’s working on him letting her have a private audience with her parents as they wouldn’t be a threat to her

And how in all honesty Vader trailing after her like a lost puppy would be funny if it wasn’t so sad and terrifying that she’s won so much trust and affection from him by being nice to him and she doesn’t want to think about why he stayed so loyal to someone who treated him so poorly; like a slave or a droid.

Then she wonders aloud if they possibly could have gotten Vader on their side if they offered him a life that didn’t involve Palpatine controlling him before shrugging and saying that they’ll never know.

as much as i love vader getting to fuck palpatine over, as much as i think it's the best thing, and as much as i love AUs where everyone gets together to curbstomp the emperor, i always wanted to see an AU where palpatine dies unexpectedly from the complications of being a bitch just because:

palpatine never intended to die, in my mind, he just aimed to prolong his life through sith bullshit ad infinitum, so i don't think he ever officially established a successor or even a method of transitioning power. i think everyone collectively assumes vader is his heir, on account of vader being the only person with the horrendous job of actually having to talk to the emperor directly all the time. but there's not anything binding except for the fact that if darth vader wants the imperial throne, he can crush the litany of people who would like to stop him like bugs, and i think everyone would assume in turn that vader - a guy who is famous for his frothing at the mouth about the empire's Divine Vision For The Galaxy - would want the throne.

this is, categorically, false, because every single time he's thought about killing palpatine, he had someone else he wanted to hand the throne. this is an awkward situation in which everyone is waiting for vader to stake his claim on the throne in the immediate aftermath of palpatine's death, and vader's like [automated breath] i..... have...... rebels.... to kill......... but i think, as horrific at diplomacy as vader is, he's at least savvy enough to know that the second he corrects everyone and tries to cede the throne, the infighting as everyone makes a play for the throne would cause a ridiculous amount of unrest. so he can't just cede the throne, but he's next to incapable of being functional without serving His Imperial Majesty's Divine Vision, and he needs to choose a successor as fast as possible and then he can possibly consider finding a ditch to lay down in because his one last attachment to the mortal plane died.

i know it'd be more reasonable for vader to kick punt someone like tarkin at the throne, but consider that vader is, fundamentally, unreasonable. and at this point in time, he's also famous for being kind of a religious zealot, and he would absolutely choose this particular time of all the times to trust in the force. so he meditates, considers the sane options, but the force keeps lingering on senator leia organa from alderaan - and it's doing that because she's secretly his daughter, but he doesn't know that, and theoretically this is enough ahead of ANH that he doesn't even have an inclination that she's a rebel spy. but if the force wills it.

so leia, all of eighteen years old, is named empress by darth vader and he doesn't have the grace to tell her he's going to name her empress first, he just kind of goes in front of the imperial senate and does it. i think it would be utterly hilarious if vader handed the empire over to the rebels without knowing it, handed the empire over to his daughter without knowing it, and now leia has to figure out how to safely un-empire an empire while being empress without causing too much chaos.

which is not a job made easier by the wheezing war criminal who keeps kneeling in front of her and asking, "what is thy bidding, my master," because leia has unknowingly inherited the weirdest position in relation to vader anyone could have, and he's kind of relying on tradition to cope. i really just want you to imagine an ongoing bit where one of vader's cybernetic arms gets wrecked while he's suppressing a coup organized against the new empress, and he leaves it like that for weeks because palpatine always had to clear off significant changes like replacement prosthetics, and he keeps waiting for leia to do it. she finally snaps at him to just go and get it fixed, and vader's thrown into an array of distress because that is NOT how this works!!! his MASTER clears off his medical procedures, it ALWAYS works like that, and leia's confusion is bone-deep, because obviously that only makes sense to vader.

wouldn't vader notice the empire getting un-empired by the new secretly-a-rebel empress, you wonder. i would say that he probably wouldn't, because as horrific as palpatine was, he was also all of vader's will to live, up until the moment leia shows him a singular basic courtesy - like not being weirdly involved in the process of vader getting a new arm - and vader decides that he is going to froth at the mouth about Her Imperial Majesty's Divine Vision, instead, until she sees fit to grant him death.

i just think it would be really funny if leia had to deal with learning that vader, on top of being omnicidal and a war criminal, is also just really ridiculous as a person, and very annoying but in a sad way.

Well we know thanks to the last arc of TCW s5 that nanobots exist in Star Wars, that they can be programmed to explode, set on a timer (and possibly even detonate via remote) and still go off even if they were ingested; turning anyone unfortunate enough to unknowingly consume them into a walking, living bomb.

Of course it wouldn’t be as a devastating explosion as the one that damaged the Jedi Temple and killed just about everyone in the hangar; leaving only the one of the unwitting bomber’s hands behind.

My guess would be that the transmitter chips are really nanobots. Microscopic and impossible to completely remove from the person that they’re in before being caught and if you’re scanning for a chip you’re wasting your time.

The nanobots possibly aren’t always transmitting the location of the body their in but can be asked for the person’s location and if the slave isn’t where they should be and if the owner than chooses they can order the nanobots to detonate,

Alternatively they might transmit data at certain places and if they don’t have a reasonable to be there the nanobots explode.

Of course it might all be a lie just to keep slaves from running away but I don’t know; especially if Bad Batch has new information about the chips.

Slave chips are CANON?! I thought they were just a real popular fanon thing for extra angst

they are canon! and a kind of fascinating bit of worldbuilding, actually, i think.

the other major slave trade we see in canon is the market on zygerria, and transmitters don’t come up once in the arc, and zygerria actually has entirely alternate methods of controlling their population of slaves - so this leads me to believe the transmitters are a trademark of hutt slaves. creating a bomb that’s so small it needs a specific kind of scanner to be able to find it would be an expensive process even in a universe that’s technologically advanced and probably fairly costly, and then that would make purchasing that technology costly, so i don’t think it was universal in hutt territories especially among slaves that were traded between smaller buyers, but i think it was a trademark of slaves trafficked by the hutts specifically; because, realistically speaking, a method of controlling a person that destroys the actual “merchandise” isn’t useful to the vast majority of slaveowners, who are probably maxing out at a handful of slaves. but the hutts are incredibly, ludicrously wealthy, and detonating a transmitter was something they could do for kicks, and they probably used the fact that they implanted their slaves with unique controlling devices as, well - a marketing gimmick. a way to get an edge on their competitors.

that paragraph, by the way, viscerally grossed me out to write, so after taking a minute to cool down i’ll continue with more absolutely grotesque observations on space capitalism; so slavery flourishes in areas with low population and high demand for labor, right? because low population means managers would have to, dare i say it, pay workers competitively to get the influx of workers they need to meet the labor demand. but, naturally, that is the antithesis of profit, and the end goal of maximization of profit is always slavery - i can’t believe these are sentences i’m writing for a batshit insane meta on star wars, when that’s our real-world circumstances, this is hitting too close to home, but go off miss kirby - so i’m assuming the reason the slave trade has such roots in tatooine is that tatooine must have resources of incredible value. it’s canonically a planet that’s so garbage people had to invent ways to get water, which generally renders planets unlivable, but whatever’s on tatooine had to outweigh that immense living costs, and it also has to be important enough that jabba would centralize control there, despite the planet being specifically mostly unlivable to his whole giant slug species. i’d say a space power source of some kind, because those are always extremely lucrative investments - like kyber crystals, but as far as i’m aware, kyber crystals are specific to illum and sacred to the jedi, and the only other major use of them was in the death star, which was palpatine being palpatine. outside of that, there’s spice, considering that tatooine has implications as being extremely important to the drug trade - considering han’s job is to run drugs and we’re introduced to him on tatooine - and according to other canon phrases like “spice mines of kessel”, spice doesn’t come from a plant, and has to be actually mined. so like cocaine, if cocaine was, well, dirt. which is a lot more plausible for tatooine’s environmental conditions than tatooine having massive space coca plant greenhouses.

so, then it becomes profitable for the hutts to bully their way in, and traffic slaves to tatooine primarily for the purpose of being the labor behind their space drug trade, and then also slaves to serve as their personal entertainment, what have you; but with all that free labor, people who have workers that they actually pay are choked out of business because they’re gobbled up by people making bigger profits, and then, eventually, pretty much everyone has a slave or a couple and pretty much all of those slaves are descended from the hutt’s stock (i would like to vomit, thanks) so slave transmitters are then ubiquitous on tatooine when they’re not even a thing on zygerria whatsoever. but i still find the idea of a method of control being to outwardly, just, kill your slave? a little bit of a stretch, because that’s sort of considered a waste of investment, especially in situations where there’s a riot and a show of force would require the slaughter of a lot of slaves at once; i’m assuming that there has to be other features, like it doubles as, well, a torture device to inflict pain as punishment, and death happens to be the highest setting and the one that’s activated if a slave exits a certain programmed area. but that brings up all sorts of questions, like what’s the other endpoint of the device and what method does it use to transmit signals to something inside someone’s body, how are those signals untraceable so as to maintain the secrecy of where the bomb is, how is the safe range for a slave to wander without getting blown up decided and then programmed, and finally - how are they deactivated? or, can they be deactivated?

because this is all speculation, here, but it’s a common fandom thing that they can be deactivated, but what would that actually mean depending on how the device functions? is “deactivation” just eliminating the range threshold on the device, so a person doesn’t blow up if that range is exited, but otherwise the device is fully-functional, or is deactivating it actually rendering the device completely null? i’m going to be honest, i lean towards the first one, because i don’t think slaveowners are programming ways to free their slaves into their slave-controlling devices. i think the purpose of deactivating a transmitter was to transport a slave to a new location or to a new owner, and then otherwise the device remains functional, and ready to be reprogrammed from the endpoint device. i just don’t think it’d be in the MO of the hutts to implant slaves with bombs that can be turned off without removing the whole bomb, it sort of defeats the purpose of the whole endeavor, and defeats the purpose of what i think was their marketing gimmick - and all of this is really bad, wow. really garbage cans. i really hate trying to think like evil people sometimes.

@gospelofme I don’t know. I think that he was just standing there. Neither my MIL or BIL have said exactly what he was doing except that they saw him at a supermarket; they might not remember.

Guys. I CAN NOT!!