it just occurred to me that darth vader, master engineer, probably looked at the death star plans at some point and noticed the flaw, but didn’t bother to tell anyone about it because he despised everyone who was involved in the project
Imagine being an uber driver and while giving some teen and his uncle a ride you end up getting pulled into a hostage situation/anti government rebellion forces
Han Solo did not sign up for this
To be fair, in this metaphor, the uber driver is in trouble with the local mob boss because he was ferrying cocaine and dumped it out the window when it looked like he might get pulled over, so…
So the uber driver hooks up with the sister of the guy who first hires him, and it turns out that their dad is the Deputy Sheriff, and things go downhill even faster than previously imagined when they hit up a local truckstop for a bite to eat, fuel drop and impromptu family reunion.
Truckstop’s run by an old friend who he won his car off that one time, and the dude’s hitting on the chick he’s hooking up with and it’s like come on man, don’t do this to me but then the girl’s dad is there and he gets hit over the head and shoved into the trunk of the cop car and it’s like oh, shit. Fuck. Chewie man, don’t let them take my car!
And then the kid, who had never been off the farm before he hired you, comes back with Green Beret-level skills to bust you out of jail and his sister, who was honestly kinda preppy, straight up MURDERS the mob boss. And then you get the plans to the DOD’s biggest single piece of equipment so you go to the middle of nowhere where it’s being built and you have some trouble with the locals, but somehow the annoying nerd speaks their language and manages to impress them, so you work together to infiltrate the military base. Oh, and the kid lets himself get captured so he can talk to his dad, and after a knock-down drag-out fight, the dad realizes that he’s been played his entire adult life by the corrupt politician overseeing everything, so he chucks the politician down the maintenance shaft of said politician’s high-rise just before it gets destroyed by the rebels, led by your friend in your truck that he borrowed with the promise that he wouldn’t put a scratch on it, but he knocks off your side mirror getting out of there.
hi i’m kitty i don’t know anything about star wars whoops
“What am I looking at?”
Lando leaned forward and laced his fingers together. “My taxes.” He paused, then gestured to Han. “Our taxes,” he corrected, with an unnecessarily rakish grin.
Leia squinted at the datapad. “Tax fraud.”
“Oh, no no no. Absolutely not. My accounting is impeccable.”
“I don’t see how it could be,” she said. “He’s a smuggler.”
“Hey,” Han began. He shut his mouth when Leia leveled him with a look. He opened it again to persist, but saw that Lando had a shit-eating grin as he watched their argument-in-potentia. Han glowered at Lando, and made him grin wider. Han huffed, hooking his thumbs on his belt.
“Legally, he’s a long-haul transport navigator,” Lando said, and Leia snorted. “Because he has a spouse at home—me—he qualifies for a higher income deduction as well as a few credits unique to the profession.”
“Wait, credits?” Han asked.
“Because he’s my dependent,” Lando continued, ignoring him.
“The hell I am.”
“That puts me in a unique legal position—not many people know about this, but in order to incentivize long-haul transportation, a spouse who claims a long-haul transport navigator as a dependent qualifies as a household caretaker, which is a kind of head of household that’s able to claim significantly more not only for themselves but for any other dependent spouses they may happen to have.”
“But his transport isn’t legal,” Leia said, fascinated. Han was pretending to understand the conversation, which would have been more convincing if he weren’t already fiddling with a kinetic sculpture on one of Lando’s shelves.
“It’s art.”
“What?”
“As far as my taxes are concerned,” Lando said, “Han transports art. They can’t prove that it isn’t. And I’m always careful to get the valuation right.”
“How do you know what I transport?” Han asked, indignant. A piece came off the sculpture in his hands. He looked down at it, then looked at Lando. He made a hasty attempt to reattach the piece. The entire sculpture collapsed. Han took his hands from it, and attempted to lean casually against the shelves with his elbow to block it from view.
“They call me,” Lando said.
“No,” Leia gasped, delighted.
“Yes,” Lando said, grinning again. “They know I’m his partner. They know I can’t be sure I’m getting my fair share unless I know exactly what he’s getting. So they call me.”
“What!” Han stood straighter, his brow furrowed and his face all twisted into an incredulous pout of anger.
“They might have been able to catch him smuggling,” Lando said to Leia, still not addressing Han.
“They would never,” Han sneered.
“But they’re never going to get him on tax evasion. There’s no way he would have been paying taxes on his own.”
“It never even occurred to me that he would,” Leia said.
“I’m right here,” Han reminded them.
“So you can see why I can’t divorce him,” Lando said.
“I don’t follow,” Leia said.
“My household caretaker status is the foundation of all of this,” he said, pointing to the datapad. “I divorce Han and the whole thing collapses.”
“Collapses how?” Leia asked, narrowing her eyes.
“Cloud City goes bankrupt.”
Han choked.
“How many people have you married?” Leia demanded.
“Leia, you know that you’re my favorite wife-in-law,” Lando said, “but I don’t think I’m comfortable discussing that aspect of my personal life.”
The pile of former-sculpture slid from the shelf, and clattered to the floor.
100% certain han and lando once got married for a scam and forgot to have it annulled so they were technically married for several years and one day lando comes in and goes “real quick: are we solo-calrissian or calrissian-solo? also, i want a divorce” and han is like baby no where did i go wrong we can still fix this
#ostensibly it was for a scam but we all know the truth#they forget to get divorced until han is getting married again#do you think polyamorous marriage is legal in star wars#it has to be right#so han is accidentally married to like three people#and leia is kind of annoyed by this so he goes to lando#who doesn’t understand the problem because legally speaking he is married to a city-state#he solves a lot of problems by marrying them#he also creates a lot of problems but those are for future lando#not current lando who is currently explaining that he has built a complex tax scheme on his marriages#and his marriage to han is loadbearing#do you have any idea what this would do to his tax deductions han#it would destroy them#han hasn’t paid space taxes in years but it turns out he’s lando’s dependent and lando has actually been collecting a refund this whole time#han is offended and wants his refunds but lando is like no fuck you#if you did your own space taxes you’d be paying twice what i’m getting
Okay but if Han is neither living with Lando nor having <%50 of his supporting costs covered by Lando he wouldn’t be a dependent? Also spouses aren’t dependents, they are spouses, they get a personal exemption.
So what really would have to be happening here is that Lando is filing for them as Married Filing Jointly. And the only way for that to make sense without having any income listed for Han is if he’s claiming that Han is a stay-at-home house husband. Which is 100% more hilarious, if you ask me.
Especially because when Han and Leia get married that doesn’t change? Leia is off running the New Republic, so Han is totally home with Ben. And every April Leia and Lando have an epic game a sabac to determine who gets Han’s personal exemption that year.
those are the rules for federal tax law in america, on earth, where only human beings can be married to a single other human being at any given time
if we are assuming that in space it is possible to be polyamorously married to various forms of alien, humanoid and otherwise, with variable lifespans and definitions of intimacy, we must also assume that the rules around the tax laws created to incentivize marriage must also be different
‘married filing jointly’ makes very little sense for situations where you are married to three people who each have their own spouses who may not be married to you, and furthermore the tax status is only necessary if what you are trying to encourage is long-term monogamous relationships (which i don’t think the empire or the republic particularly care about). and dependency rules about co-habitation do not make sense for species whose biology or culture negates the possibility of co-habitation even in closely intimate relationships (and definitely doesn’t make sense if someone’s job requires them to spend most of their time traveling through space hauling cargo, or if the government has mandated they work on another planet for some unspecified period of time)
(there is also no meaningful definition of ‘annually’ in the context of space taxes, and therefore taxation periods must be defined per-planet as lived on by the head of household)
(we must also assume that each planet has its own tax structure, and therefore what we are worried about here are republican or empirical taxes, or as they are colloquially known, ‘space taxes’, the taxes you pay to the space government as opposed to your planetary government)
in theory we could assume that the space government simply doesn’t incentivize marriage, because why would they, but that doesn’t work for fic purposes. therefore the most logical reason for the incentive is liability. in that case, each marriage would define one person as the head of household, and the other as a dependent–with the head of household being the person who is legally liable for the other’s taxes and whatnots. if a HoH also has legal access to the assets of their dependents, in order to maintain the household, this creates a set of checks and balances (as it were).
the person in a marriage defined as head of household must therefore be someone that the dependent trusts to be able to keep their shit in order, and the person defined as a dependent must be someone the head of household trusts not to totally bail on them with a bunch of federal property. who’s who therefore becomes a personal choice between the married individuals.
if we assume this stacks, then let’s say person A is married to person B, and person B is also married to person C. if person A is HoH in the first marriage, and person B is HoH in the second marriage, person A still gets access to all the assets of person C as the dependent of their dependent. this means if your husband is thinking about marrying some fucking rando, you’re incentivized to make sure everything is on the level so you don’t have some shady motherfucker with complete access to your assets, or alternately, the ability to make you legally liable for serious space crimes. this is the primary disincentive for fraud–marrying someone who wants to commit fraud is a fast track to either getting all your shit stolen or else ending up in jail for a crime you didn’t commit.
alternately, if lando is married to han, and leia is married to han, and lando and leia are both HoH, things get theoretically complicated. things can get split up according to various formulas, or one of them (leia, it’s leia) can claim more limited benefits in exchange for giving up the majority, as well as surrendering access to han’s assets or liability for his dumb horseshit (”don’t look at me, call his husband, i’m not responsible for that dingus i just have the option to be. you think i want access to his checking account? he’s got three dollars and a pack of gum in there.”). marriage in that case is more a matter of having familial access to your spouse (hospital visitation, etc).
the majority of incentives (in the form of exemptions, credits, etc) would be for the HoHs of dependents who do work the government particularly needs done, because government contractors are the ones the government is most worried about bailing off to nowhere planet with a bunch of stuff. a liability-based system makes it possible for the space government to go to their spouse like “hey… your husband took off with all our shit, pay up please”. therefore having certain kinds of dependent would alter the type of HoH someone is in order to determine what benefits they receive and what liabilities they are assumed to have taken on.
that’s the logic i used, anyway
There could also easily be multiple layers of government levying taxes, not just the Republic/Empire. There could be people demanding your money at anything from the city level (somebody‘s gotta pay for all that stuff Vader ripped out of wall with the Force while fighting Luke in Cloud City), to the national level (somebody’s gotta pay for all those dresses Padme wears), to the planetary level (somebody’s gotta pay for Padme’s dresses: THE SEQUEL), to the system level (somebody had to pay for the Trade Federation to equip combat robots with walky-talkies), all of whom have their own arcane sets of rules about Space Marriage. Lando’s marriage status is a complex 3-dimensional legal web across four jurisdictions.
There’s one planet where Han is legally married to the Millennium Falcon’s hyperdrive. It’s a long story.
– Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon go to a jungle planet – there are many, many bugs – Obi-Wan literally cannot take two seconds to relieve himself without bugs ‘hitting below the belt’, so to speak – naturally, bug bites on delicate parts ensue – so, so much itching! – Qui-Gon, as is fitting, is a hilarious dick about it – then:
OBi-WAN THOUGHT THAT THE LIVING FORCE SHOULD GO SUCK HIS DICK
god fucking bless, that is pure Obi-Wan Kenobi sullenness right there
theres a jedi in a 2003 star wars cartoon whos just shaggy. from scooby doo
The expanded universe is ridiculous sometimes. There was an editor at Lucasfilm that would always put “master” in front of the names of Jedi, so to test her, a writer created a minor jedi named Soon Bayts. The editor changed his name, and now there’s a canon Jedi out there named Master Bayts
Plot Designing 