But We Already Knew That - Tumblr Posts
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.
A drawing of one of my favourite people in the entire universe, my brother!
Y’all are probably here for Ben 10 or my sub-par art but deal with my sappy thoughts for a sec lol.
My brother is one of the best people I’ve ever met and I am so eternally grateful for him. He is so kind-hearted and will always lend a hand to me if I need it. He dropped everything to help me turn stuff in on time for school. He’s always there to bounce silly ideas off of and lend a helping hand and a good book recommendation. He’s graduating this year and I wanted to wish him the best of luck on the path fate has set for him. Thank you so much for being the best older brother anyone could ask for. And thank you for being the best pod persons human ever! I love you so much!!
