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A Messy, Sedulous Necropsy of Zib Membrane

That’s what we call him right? Not Invader Zib? Hell if I know, we’ll let the tags decide.

Whatever he is christened by his author, enemies, or fans, this titular villain of the Zimvoid is such a mind blaster to me. I wish we had more time with him within the comics. I wish he had been a concept explored in the show. I wish he had a movie. I am having fun with a little hyperbole here, but I truly do find him just as interesting and potentially pivotal of an antagonist as Tak was, if not even more.

Both, of course, were so badly underutilized for sake of the series status quo. To that, Zib was a much bigger threat than Tak, and especially to that of the comics’ own. He potentially changes everything, and somehow absolutely nothing by the end. The TV show always had a more overt tone of cruelty and the macabre floating about its themes. These print issues? I don’t dislike them. It’s still recognizably invader Zim, and the more the merrier, content-wise, but longtime fans can feel that there was this change of essence in the transition. More obviously, in the art, but more subtly, there was an audible softening of that bluntly darker, cynical tone the show was made iconic for. To put it very generally, they lean a little more into the whackiness of this world, there’s a lot more dark comedy to be found in what I’ve seen so far rather than in your face darkness, and in the absence of the ost and voice acting the show accustomed us to, the comics leave a lot more room to be read as you wile. To me, they’re goofier and more episodic in spirit.

This all is not a critique or rating on the comics.. It’s purely, I feel, why Zib stuck out to me all the more jarringly in his context. His reveal was a genuine twist that brought forth stakes higher than arguably any other threat in the entire franchise. He represents a plausible while horrifying prophecy of our main characters if only they made worse decisions. The most interesting of all, for every piece of amazing information he fed to us, he bred dozens more questions about everything than he answered, from Irken machinations, to his ambivalent backstory, to the secrets hidden by the sum of his parts.

Though he was left evidently alive at the end of his story, I don’t see any chance for him making a return, so he is memorialized as another defeated one-off the writers have brisked past and left behind for good. Therefore, I’m here today to take what we got and present it on the metaphorical autopsy table. I want to really pull apart why this character alone pulled me back into the TV series, really just flay open the bits I can’t get out of my own head and dig harder until we find something or we run out of threads to tug at. Starting with the one already hanging out of my mouth, but

• B.E.F

“Bad End Friend” is a term I learned the meaning of within the last 12 hours or so of writing this, and I’m exuberant over that discovery. It’s a niche trope i didn’t know ive been a giant fan of since I was a child. Summed up, fictional characters from beloved media, typically, animated child protagonists… given the worst case scenario treatment. Their “bad ending”, whether that means a corruption arc, demonic possession, a lovecraftIan tragedy… usually something that’s anywhere along the lines of a fate worse than death to a full villainous turnover. As a treat. The concept is strongly associated with fanworks and AUs of popular media, but just as often this is something that becomes explored in the source material as well. A couple great examples I know would probably be Ice Prince Finn from Adventure Time or what happens in Undertale when you decide you want to run the most depraved playthrough possible. From a more mature story, “Evil” Morty is another validly arguable sample.

Besides a bit of a fondness I got going for certain dark or spooky themes in general, what I REALLY love about canonical BEFs the most is their utility as characterization tools. They’re the “having your cake and eating it too” option! The perfect way for an author to explore certain things about any character without actually committing to well… a bad ending.

Almost always, they are necessarily hypothetical or reversible. If they’re not reversible, they go often hand-in-hand with a little universe tampering to make happen. Sometimes, this means the story goes the way of time travel and branching off butterfly effects. Sometimes it means confirming multiverse theory, which can be the same thing depending on your semantical position.

And Zib crossed off the BEF qualifications by far and away. His implications are extremely dark given any pause think about them, and he’s a living, disturbing tragedy in aftermath. If you want to view a rigamarole about that aspect of his characterization as he appeared in the comics, someone else long beat me to that and I’m enthusiastically recommending a peek at their own work. I’m thrilled to do so and build a little upon that with those extended what-if-wonders.

• Lessons From a Lost Episode

Elephant in the room I haven’t seen someone ask yet, uh..

By show rules, isn’t Zib supposed to be a clear case of the writers committing the sin of retcon? By show I’m including the unaired scripts, including “10 Minutes to Doom”. In that one we had what looked like the potential setup for a Zib case, and it was deconstructed across the whole episode.

In short recap, Dib learned the hard and reckless way about the true nature of what Irken PAKs actually are. This is not an inventory bag, it is not “gear”. It’s the actual Irken entity- at least, the primary component.

Detaching it from the organic shell essentially caused a temporary split into two instances of Zim, desperately trying to connect back together under threat of obliteration.

Like let me be very clear about this,

The PAK is an autonomous instance of Zim’s consciousness, and it’s the main one. We’ve seen it act to save his life when his body has been out cold or flatlined, and he doesn’t appear the least bit disoriented or confused once “he” wakes and jumps back into the action. There’s no known separate computer assistant AI or security autopilot in there. That code, that program, IS Zim. As Long as the PAK is active, he is capable of staying fully conscious and able to react to what’s happening around him, and that’s what we’ve been seeing, his own actions.

Zim proved me right when Virooz tried to replace him and detached the PAK. Take note of his phrasing after the chair event™.

“I” activated the protocol. Immediately after Virooz ran off with my shell.

“I” Voluntarily chose to do so.

I don’t remember it playing out like that in “10 Minutes to Doom”.

Attaching to a new host wasn’t the first reflex. Dib was not the least bit aware that that he has literally holding the actual Zim captive in sense, and the latter was fighting like a cornered animal to escape him. Failing that, alongside the distance between him and his original body growing fast, he made a last desperate gambit, and he willingly connected himself into Dib’s body.

I can see why he thought this was better than nothing, no matter how repulsive the notion might have been. If he couldn’t fend Dib off physically, he could incapacitate him in some fashion by trying to overtake his will. Maybe give the shell a better chance to catch up, maybe in the longshot hope of being able to pilot dib in order to become whole with the correct host again. And you can say he succeeded, at least in dominating bodily control away from Dib, but at the cost of his already tenuously held sanity. This could be because of the interference of Dib’s own mind still resisting to fully submit, or malfunctions because of the biological incompatibility; however, the thing that Dib mentally becomes is only the basic idea of what “Zim” is. Instead of remembering it needs to reunite with its shell ASAP, the PAK mistakes Dib’s body for its own and goes through the manic motions of following the Invader mission. And it does this, weirdly enough, with almost no regard for blowing its cover.

When things are set right again, Zim’s later words near the episode ending revealed that he knew that was an unsustainable state.

Such a risk was not just accounted for, he was actually banking on it if that clock had hit zero. If Zim had truly lost, if he was really doomed to meet his end on this nasty rock in the middle of Nowhere, Space, then by every damned circuit in his being, he was going to take down this insolent fool boy and as many other humans possible with him. A dying act of vengeful rage.

• The Exceptional… Exception

Now, wouldn’t all of this be the definitive reason for Zib’s existence to be an aberrant impossibility? Yes, but actually no. Fun thing about multiverses is if something doesn’t work in one setting, you can just tweak a few dials and suddenly you have a world where the impossible becomes possible. But that’s a pretty cheap answer, isn’t it? So, what exactly was that crucial difference?

What happened in Zib’s timeline that went down so, so divergently from the events of 10 Minutes to Doom?

Because the only one who was in any position to explain it for us was Zib himself, and he’s proven to be one of the most unreliable of narrators. It’s as @dana-chan-the-control-brain already spared no effort to demonstrate, when he does tell us something about his past, his story is pocked with contradicting half-truths or outright lies. Ergo it helps to break down each recount of events to pick out the real facts.

Version 1: This is an alternate version of dib who defeated his complementing Zim (logically sensible) and went on to achieve all of the success and respect he sought after in his timeline (absolute bullshit). He kind of gestures and only implies about what has happened to his body while explaining that he came to his current understanding of Irken technology by studying it through Zim’s lab (a partial truth). He lets slip in passing that he has in fact fused with the PAK in order to learn how to alter and reprogram its coding, lessons he has applied to Number 2 in order to have a brainwashed pawn (also apparently true).

Version 2, when cornered and red handed: This is an alternate version of Dib who managed to specifically stop Zim's mission (Again, makes sense) but somehow could not convince the world of his findings or his warnings about the Irken Armada (*VERY eyebrow raising). Frustrated with the people’s lack of cooperation, he decides he has no choice but to physically merge with Zim’s PAK post-mortem (concerning and evidently mostly accurate), dominate the Earth himself, and enslave humans to help him in his efforts (highly troubling and probably true). The construction of his EMP super-weapon is successful, but ultimately led to the creation of the Zimvoid when the device was field tested (self evident, absolutely horrifying).

You know what I noticed was missing from both of these accounts? Exactly how his Zim was defeated. Which honestly could have been some beyond useful wisdom to pass along to the main Dib??? More than anything else? I’m not going to fault our boy for not pressing that matter better under the awing circumstance; however, there’s an implication I’ve been reading between lines. 

When Zib mentions “defeating” his own Zim, he’s talking about something different than ours.

When our Dib has always talked about “defeating” Zim, he’s meant incapacitation and capture. Throughout the show he explicitly wants to present Zim before an audience alive and whole. Yeah, he fantasizes about other people torturing or disassembling him for study, but HIS role was supposed to be reaping the fame for an undeniable, ground-breaking discovery. Conspiracies and cryptids are all this kid breathes and lives by! And as long as pop culture has always been fascinated with the paranormal, and he has to know this full well, people keep bringing forward hoax after hoax after scam. I mean there’s a freaking current one or few still going IRL about this exact topic. Dib would want no room left for being dismissed as another one of those con artists. 

Nonetheless, I actually doubt this is the reason Zib couldn’t get through to the scientific community. A genuine alien lifeform, even a dead one, could still be confirmed by any basic medical examination. The world thinks Dib is too crazy to listen to, but his father is still Professor Membrane. In "10 Minutes to Doom" OUR Dib got as close as having Membrane literally analyzing a PAK, or at worst, preparing to. “Ultimate Dib” gets his hands on the same thing and pulls a move I’d expect from an HP Lovecraft Protagonist instead.

We’re assuming way too much to what these two Dibs have in common, because this ^^^ is really what made the Zimvoid an outlier in the multiverse. That world didn’t only have a very different, more threatening Zim from the main timeline, it had the Dib who proved even more formidable, cunning, and ruthless, even before the fusion. 

He didn’t obtain that PAK ala the “10 minutes to Doom” accident, it’s a personal trophy. This is extra strange remembering that capturing an Irken is realistically more easy than killing one. They’re seriously more tenacious than kudzu and will even fight back in PAK form alone. I’m convinced that whatever sort of final showdown made the Ultimate Dib the victor, there are two optional endings on the table.

Option 1: There was not a body even left intact enough to bring in to research. Maybe Dib’s fault, maybe an accident, maybe even Zim’s own luck running out and his incompetent antics finally swallowed him (and possibly GIR). This theory assumes that the PAK was the only sort of remains to come into Dib’s recovery/possession.

Option 2: Curiosity Killed the cat,

but satisfaction brought it back.

Or, the one I personally headcanon. Dib… all Dibs, I assume, don’t just hate the Irken species. They are mesmerized by them, and all that they represent from his perspective. Firstly, the epic villain he gets to roleplay nemesis to in order to feel his own worth and importance. Secondly, an unknown wonder from beyond the boundaries of the cosmos. He’s not really a ghost buster or a Men In Black agent at heart, but a scientist, like his father. Underneath his contempt for Zim’s plans to destroy the world is a genuine and appropriately childish awe for alien presence, especially for Zim’s technology. His silent, dopey smile when Tak’s ship ended up in his backyard said more than words ever will.. 

Earlier in the show, a great deal of Dib’s time and effort was spent on trying to infiltrate the lower levels of Zim’s base. Sneaking into the house was hard enough, but the computer security can’t be bypassed like the gnomes. Not even by Zim himself unless he really is all himself. Perhaps you’re starting to sniff where I’m going with this one when I refer back to “Bolognius Maximus”. I’ve another reference that’s a little more on the nose, and a lot more… dark.

Were an expired Irken husk before you, you too might take your victory and cash in then. Still, who knows what sudden impulse may run through the head of a less humble version of yourself, one some could call greedier, obsessive to a fault, a screw or two loose, yet, a hell of a smart cookie. Smart enough to see it for what it actually was, the keys to a whole world of discovery that went so many layers deeper than they could ever imagine. It’s possible the Ultimate Dib already learned beforehand the same hard lessons about the PAKs that our own did, and took that understanding toward not repeating the same mistake this time. What happened to Zim? I think he was murdered in cold blood, body, and entity. “10 Minutes to Doom” showed us a fight between 2 brains clinging to one body, struggling until one overpowered another, but that’s not what this is. Through whatever means of science were available to him, this Dib has probably tried to “disarm” the technology by either erasing Zim’s consciousness out of it altogether, or by forcing the autonomous code into a kind of dormancy. His intentions were to render it back to its basic hardware without losing its precious knowledge and usefulness, something like the brain-filled tank that was wired into Skrang’s head. Zim’s PAK doesn’t cling onto his body like a parasitic teratoma this time; it’s merged in a literal sense with his nervous and circulatory system. As well, he has fooled the device’s ability to detect and reject a foreign host shell, the exact same way he deceived the the base’s security AI. If an Irken biology is what these measures authorize to command them and their secrets, then he had the tools on hand to give them just that- in an atrocity I like to call

the darker harvest.

Within this theory, there is not as much room to wonder exactly what became of Zim’s organic remains. 

But where Dib fucked up was, for the second time, in his ignorance to the true nature of what he was even playing with. That was a mistake that even the mighty Elder Brains of Judgementia lost themselves to; How much more vulnerable was the weak, human mind? Though Zim can be devoured, he can never be digested. In that fact was born this aberration against nature, sanity, and humanity alike.

"Have you ever heard of insect politics? Neither have I. Insects… don't have politics. They're very… brutal. No compassion, no compromise. We can't trust the insect. I'd like to become the first… insect politician. Y'see, I'd like to, but… I'm afraid, uh… I'm saying… I'm saying I - I'm an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over… and the insect is awake." - Seth Brundle, The Fly, 1986

By fusing what is half-mad and what is utterly mad, neither being was cured, only assimilated into the birth of a new madness. The madness of the creature that snickers behind the curtain in the Zimvoid. I rightfully fear that lonesome thing, but not I think as much as I pity him.

• Dejavu, or Re:Plagarism

One more thing about the Zimvoid arc I find curious is the way it makes you question more and more just how much of the aberration is actually still Dib, and how much of it is Zim's infection haunting him. He does nothing with all of his intellect, his resources, and his time in the void doing anything but surrounding himself in everything he claims he despises. He decries alien tyranny in one breath while lording over a homemade, cruel dictatorship in another. He calls for eradication of the very race who's technology and physiology he has thoroughly appropriated. He laments feeling unable to protect the Earth from the Armada alone, yet sneers literally through Irken teeth to insult humans as inferior and of no value to him any longer. Our Dib spent the whole damn show longing for the support of other people, but Zib pushes away potential allies in his arrogance. His broken timeline never became a Dibvoid instead because while only half of his mind can't stand Irkens, both of the souls inside him remember that they loathe and look down upon a Dib, deep inside.

The corruption goes as far as even subverting his own creativity. None of Zib's plans are wholly original. His anti-Irken weapon was already a concept blueprinted inside of that PAK before the merge. Our Dib has several times shown a propensity for some DIY ingenuity, sometimes dipping a toe into the supernatural. Zib entirely calls upon, scavenges and regurgitates Irken designs with a few modifications or upgrades. The Dib Virus, I think is his most uninspired creation yet, for it's original form was always something inside of Zim, even if the latter himself was not aware of the fact. Like all else, it is a weapon he has plundered, customized, and turned around on everyone else for his own selfish ends. This brief point I will end on one  more reflection. The one kind of help Zim ever allowed at his side were the likes of GIR and his own creations. Unable to connect and cooperate with his peers and own kind, his ego preferred to be around those defective machines he related to- drones to be owned by him and always loyally at his beck and call. A slave to admire him unconditionally is the only companionship he's ever been willing to admit to desiring.

And what was Number 2's purpose again? What role exactly were the arena combatants auditioning for, when you think about it?

Endearing through the Alien Lens: A Clue About the Primitive Irken?

I love literary xenobiology. I love it a whole lot, in fact. There’s a paradoxical line I dance across, between criticizing intelligent fictional aliens for their likeness to our species, and criticizing them for their unlikeness. It’s a pretentious and laughable dance between “Come on, the sky’s the limit, there’s no real reason for a bucket of different extraterrestrial races to just all be more flavors of quirky humanoids! Boring, show me something actually alien!!” and the yearn for the use of alien races as a funhouse mirror of mankind’s own evolution. I think the way Irkens nonchalantly dwell somewhere on that subjective tightrope is a good part of why I can’t seem to stop thinking about them.

They are inspired and yet creatively original. They are truly alien, and yet, they can still play foil to the bottomlessly decadent humanity that Vasquez’s Earth has set the stage for.

Before, in the very first brain dump I let loose about them, I noted a few of their parallels to the worst in Homo sapiens and the insects they resemble. This time, something is chewing on me that i haven’t seen another put into perspective. A something that seems contradictory to our collective view of the heartless, sexless, atomized conquerors that all of the cosmos will fear:

They… have parental instincts.

I didn’t necessarily say drives or wants; however, they undeniably havewhat seems to be an actual, instinctual “cuteness response”. Like us, like social pack animals which invest a great deal of resources and time into their young. Given that the closest thing that 100% of smeets born on the home world get to call a parental figure is a literal cold, unfeeling, automated machine, this seems kind of weird, doesn’t it? They’re not even born like mammals or nested like birds, they’re mass produced, like hived wasps or ants, miles beneath their actual society and out of the business of the adults. So, what the heck with them being written to be humanized with this baseless, arbitrary trait?

But, ah ah ah, nitpicker Scarlet, it’s not baseless. It’s only ✨vestigial✨

Y’all could probably make a good guess to what the cuteness response is and why it exists in Homo sapiens, but to sum up- it’s the phenomenon of when we see something we find “cute” and it makes us react to it in a protective, nurturing fashion- or also want to bite/squeeze things, weirdly, if it’s just too damn cute. Well, what do humans find cute? Things that resemble human infants, basically. It’s a biological reflex that makes us want to defend and provide care for our kind’s absurdly dependent and slow-developing young, rather than abandon them in the shrubbery like they’re just screamy, food-leeching paperweights.

“Pff, really? Well I must be special cause I don’t even LIKE babies. I think babies are icky gross, not cute! So, genetic instinct my ass!”

I hear you, sure, but what about… harp seals? Or koalas, or pandas and puppies and fawns and kittens? Or funny little cartoon blorbos? At bare minimum you’d have to be an alien yourself to feel nothing looking at photos of young hedgehogs

See, the fact that a lot of us may often find baby animals a great amount more endearing than even humans’ is not even in conflict with this understanding of cuteness.

The concept of the “baby schema” was formally proposed in 1943 by Konrad Lorenz, an Austrian ethologist. Fun fact is he was also the same researcher who originally observed and described imprinting behaviors, as seen in newly hatched waterfowl. Point is that his “Kindchenschema” idea grouped together a handful of infantile traits that make fireworks go off in the parts of your brain that wants to keep things alive and baby-talk to them. Included on the list were features like proportionally large heads, big eyes, round faces, short noses, etc. despite the name, the baby schema’s effect is something applied not to just actual babies, but children generally, and even in our reactions to non-human animals.

It’s the hypothesis behind both why we’ve jacked up the skulls of so many small dog breeds in the name of aesthetics and why we generally find the portraits on the left side of this image more appealing to look at than the ones on the right.

The consistency of these features across many species may also give some hint that they experience a similar phenonemon, especially given that these are traits shared among bird or mammalian offspring which require significant attention and protection to survive. And, it may also explain why this image likewise gives me a huge dose of that sweet, sweet response.

Awww, look at that lil’ mans! Look at his teeny noodle arms!! I just wanna pinch him like a marshmallow!

YOU are not immune to cuteness psychology, and neither are the proud Irken warriors. I’m going to cite Zim’s proclivity to what I can only describe as paternal bonding as a demonstration of this response, but before you go reminding me about his pak defects, it’s far from the only evidence that this is a natural Irken trait.

Check out little Timmy (importantly, the surrounding response to him), a hilariously out of place youngster who appeared briefly in the trial transcript for the sole purpose of a dark gag and to get us some lore revealed.

Take further note of the complimentary nature of smeets themselves.

Suddenly finding themselves alive, fresh Irken babies too, like the hatched gosling, begin to immediately seek an emotional attachment with the first animate thing they see. While mobile and fast learners, smeets are far from being able to truly fend for themselves. They’re tiny and naive and they need lots of mental enrichment/teaching. They also play and form something akin to friendships, much like human children. In the bygone era before Irkens were so reliant on Paks and all of the advanced technology of the modern empire, smeets would have been exceedingly vulnerable. All signs point to a phase in Irk’s natural history where they were once nurtured after by adults of their own kind, and commonly bonded with their caretakers. This could mean compact family units, or maybe even a communal raising situation, akin to penguin crèches (Personally I like to headcanon that the tallests/queens were traditionally the only breeding members of the population but that’s neither here or now). Either sense, the evolutionary remnants of a parental creature are still around.

Taking all that to note, instead of perceiving Zim as the bizarre outlier to the Irken condition when it comes to having this soft spot, I instead see him as an opportunity to see natural behaviors in action without the suppression of his militarized society and its distractions. Even someone as warped and selfish as he can be is still very, very full of love to give that he doesn’t even understand enough language to describe. He pretty clearly shows he has no cultural understanding or reference of cuteness, and still, he’s not so different in this “weakness” than the very humans he manipulated into fawning over Ultra Peepi. It just took an example his own sensibilities could relate to instead of an unfamiliar, repulsive alien rodent.

And when he’s given the rare circumstance to show that potential, well-

*(With the rough shape/size down, no nose, and huge, bug-like eyes, Li’l Meat man may actually be a great approximation of the key “smeet schema” features. More importantly, it was made to specifically resemble Zim himself)

- I feel that’s downright adorable.

On Defective Irkens

“It is theorized that Tak may also be an Irken defect because-“

“Say guys do you think Skoodge is defective? He did a thing he wasn’t told to do once do you suppose-“

“Service Drone Bob's contempt for the Tallest is extremely abnormal, even for most defective Irkens…”

“Hints of the comms officer being a defective are seen when-“

Ohhh mauling the fan wiki writers grr biting biting thrashing and then turning around to the rest of you before I’m done, you bet, for I have sat and listened for over 12 years of leaps and speculations of this sort and now I’m now one of the ones who gets to have what the cool kids these days call a hot take on the matter.

By the end of this I’M going to bring up and expose who I actually think may be the only other defective Irken(s) in the show besides Zim, whom I’m aghast I haven’t seen anyone suggest before.

But before anything else, I want to front one preassumption center and loud.

It took me a long time to guess at why very few people can ever seem to get on the same page of what it actually means to call an Irken defective. Implicitly, the bulk of what we are given is that something can be wrong with a member of this species, and Zim is our prime and singular clear example of that. So there’s a ton of trying to find patterns between Zim’s behavior and that of other Irken characters. Weirdly (to me), a lot of people have, in their efforts, chalked the status up to a sense of rebelliousness or insubordination- a defectiveness in the manner of D&D illithids, stomping out disloyal break-aways from the collective hive mind with punitive wrath. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a cool concept, and it’s definitely closer to my opinion at least than the comparisons to real life mental disorders or disabilities. Not knocking the comfort or the enthusiasm, obviously.

From my view of the canon, I hope it’s at least apparent to other fans that “defective” isn’t some empirical measurement or status to Irkens. Look at the way they determine the defects from normal society. IRL, if I have a faulty device on my hands, there’s some way out there to tell me in a clear cut fashion if there’s a problem and what exactly it is. If it’s code, it can be scanned and debugged. If it’s mechanical, something can be seen, fixed physically. Most organic health problems are only different in the complexity of the matter, but the entire purpose of medical research is to come close as we can to bridging that gap. In Irk’s people, that line is rapidly becoming one long smear of wet chalk. I’m going on like this because if defective paks were akin to hardware actually being damaged, as Purple had put it, it doesn’t make as much sense that they are neither “fixed” nor given real, concrete diagnostics. The only way we know of that the aliens are tested in a since on this merit is by existence evaluations. And existence evaluations are anything but empirical, impartial events. They’re worlds more political and cultural than clinical.

Digest the terms we keep seeing all around the concept: Innocent, justice, trial/evaluation, Judgementia, these are terms of judicial courts and moral weight and sentencing. In effective practice,

Irk labels defects by what one does, not by what one is.

Yet, defection is presented as if that’s not the case, and there are reasons for that. Reasons that reinforce the current power structures and promote what its leadership has decided is healthy for the broader society. When Zim was merely re-encoded from invader status to food service work, it was a more secluded evaluation, presumably done on Irk. His only seen witnesses then were the Tallests and the single control brain dishing the judgement. His existence evaluation, on the other hand, rings more similarly to the IRL historical practice of literal “show trials”. Show trials were something that existed way less for the actual crimes of the accused and so much more for their audience, which, show trials are always for an audience. Three main points about them off the Wikipedia cuff:

• Typically, the defendant of such has already been determined to be guilty (oftentimes of completely fabricated transgressions), and the trial serves mostly to make a massive public spectacle and warning of the accused.

• They tend to focus on retributive punishment over correction. The disproportional brutality and lack of mercy is often the point.

• Their goals are propagandistic in nature, and there’s many notable examples to be found in the history of Nazi Germany, the USSR, and in witch trials across the world (because it was never just Salem).

A formality? Well, that much they couldn’t have more brazenly admitted to. Retribution? There’s hardly a more absolute punitive sentence I could craft up over obliteration PLUS Damnatio Memoariae. And as for the degree of spectacle, I will let you make your own observation here.

Believe it or not, the part where my comparisons along this line end with Existence Evaluations is that their standard for taking place isn’t actually this cartoonishly oppressive one that some fans try to make it out to be. In “The Trial”, Zim was not having his data read for some binary is/is not determination… he was having his experiences and actions interpreted by how much damage he has done against the Armada. He said it himself, that hotseat is reserved for criminals. Likely outright traitors and maniacs. Those who have given cause to alert the brains to a genuine existential threat to their civilization and who have repeatedly failed every opportunity given to redeem themselves.

Defective doesn’t just mean “different” to Irk. We’ve hardly seen an exploration of what the median Irken example even is, because the more we see of any one of these characters, the more they show us their eccentric uniqueness and will. Yes, Irkens are authoritarian; yes they’re over-militarized; yes, they’re a supremacist breed aligned under one ruling military… but listen, they are not literally The Borg, or illithids.

The biggest victims of this government itself are those races it colonizes. Average civilians on the other hand, they get to largely enjoy all the vices and pains and indulgences of hyper-space-capitalism. The height-ocracy may limit their opportunities, but even the lowest drones among them are supposedly hired into their positions in return for wages. Irkens are pretty selfish, but in a rugged individualism sense. It’s a dystopia of atomization instead of collectivization. If everyone had agreed that “defective” had anything to do with arrogance, free will, or an ability to feel one’s sense of self worth, no one would ever be pointing to Skoodge as a possible example. That guy’s the poster boy for what it means to be a “tool” in the derogatory sense. I’m not forgetting that he technically never even left his job. He was fired and more or less forced into hiding, and he’s still not even that perturbed over the whole thing.

Moreover, it also takes some extreme acts of harm to justify such a trial. Real harm- not rebellious attitude or even disrespect to authority. The control brains and the tallests alone get to define that threshold, and neither Tak’s/Zim’s insubordination nor Bob’s audacity concerned them enough for a ticket to Judgementia. In fact, they really don’t seem that bothered at all by deserters and those that abandon their encoded function. Tak is likely to be merely the responsibility of her janitorial squadron, the same way that enforcing Zim’s banishment was the responsibility of his Frylord. Because Irk actually does have standards of justice and layers of bureaucracy to work within when it comes to dealing with true malice. Small fry problems are for the lower rungs of the ladder to handle, until they become a higher priority by necessity. Incompetency alone isn’t a crime, either. The go-to punishment for failure in one function is demotion to a lower position. These are the only Irkens formally not allowed to change jobs, making what they do a kind of communal service or forced labor sentencing. Remember how Tak’s motivation for leaving Dirt wasn’t solely dissatisfaction with the grunt labor? Remember how she kept justifying her actions by the logic of fairness and setting things right? Not to mention how she fully made the Tallest aware of what she was up to and how her plan was well crafted enough to probably work out exactly like she wanted. Tak is utterly as loyal to the empire and competent as any invader. She was genuinely just dealt a shitty hand, and her response to it is at least understandable.

She even went to great lengths to identify and specifically target Zim and to use a planet that otherwise had less than no value to the armada’s operations. She is a great foil to Zim, but I can’t see how she’s any bit defective, only full of rage that she was screwed over by the actions of a real disgrace to their species. Genuinely destructive cases like Zim are an incredible rarity. Such a rarity that I can only guess it took this long for him to go to Judgementia because his degree of dysfunction outright baffles the system. It also would appear that it’s an event of such significance that it can only be set into motion by the command of the ruling Tallest. By murdering a couple of them, and then being a clown show for a couple more, he inadvertently bought himself some time.

And the crazy thing to remember here is that Zim doesn’t even understand that his actions are an existential threat to the Empire- that he IS a whole supervillain to his planet. This is how effective Irken programming and the education plugs are. They’re supposed to do 99% of the work of setting up the population, even the lowest drones, for not turning out like traitors to their kin in the first place. ALL of them grew up on a steady diet of the same drip-fed propaganda and essentialist ideology as their most militant soldiers. So I can see the logic behind the conclusion that the only explanation for criminals in their society must be outright brain damage or corrupted data… and I’m not gonna lie I do openly headcanon that the latter case is exactly what happened to bad egg Zim.

The limits of only having the one example in him notwithstanding, I’m anything but against theorizing about who else could be “worthy” in the Irken sense to also stand before those brains, playing sweaty advocate for the worth of their continued existence and all. I just don’t see it in Bob, or the Comms officer, or any other invader. Tak, there may be some hypothetical ramp to that end, in her future, but as things are right now, I only see a candidate that has become comfortable right in the control brains’ biggest blind spot of all. See, eggs don’t always have to crack in order to go bad. Sometimes, maybe they just spoil. Sometimes, I believe just the right conditions and time can turn them downright rotten.

Dramatic musical flourish, please.

I forget whoever said the quote “Power doesn’t corrupt, It just exposes who people really are”, but I’m a huge fan of the fact that they did. In my opinion, it’s less about power itself and more about a complete lack of accountability that allows the weakest and most toxic seeds to really fester in a seat of authority. Indeed, we all know that there is something pathetic, and vapid, and cruel floating around The Massive’s bridge. I am saying I’d call Red defective, but I couldn’t be certain enough with myself to say that Purple’s largely the one carrying a lot of fault. His greatest sin is his negligence and enabling his companion. whoever we can say shoulders more of the blame, they have been running this horror show as a joint unit, so they will both bear the guilt. Without a doubt, these two are terrible- popular maybe, but terrible leaders. Like, more responsible for the near ruin of their home world and species than I can even pin on Zim at this point. By almost every measure once you hold them up to Miyuki’s and Spork’s barely few moments of would-be screen time, they’re the worst Tallests for the Empire we’ve ever known. It’s too bad that they have no one over them we know of to flag them for an existence evaluation, because I am assured that the real orchestrators of the Armada would be disgusted to look over their track records since they took power.

I mean, what can I remember just off the top of my head?

- Full awareness of Zim’s blackout-causing history before the beginning of Operation Impending Doom I and not keeping a close eye on him, removing him from his position, or keeping him away from the homeworld’s WoMDs

- Overseeing the shipment of faulty equipment to Invader Tenn (even if the packages had not been switched, the Megadoomer still had a potentially fatal flaw), and then presumably NOT giving her urgent guidance/assistance to avoid being captured by native hostiles

- Showing an egregious amount of immaturity and frivolity when making logistical decisions, such as the flight path of the Armada or how conquered planets are utilized

- Repeated abuses of their standing, trying to extra-judicially get rid of subjects over the pettiest reasons (if they had the formal authority to just vaporize Skoodge, Bob, OR Zim on the spot, they wouldn’t need to come up with convoluted and indirect methods that they only hope kill said targets)

- Upon Zim returning to them from his banishment: not sending him back to Foodcourtia and not refusing to humor his wishes to larp as an invader

- Oh yeah, also granting Zim at least some invader tech and allowing him to leave Conventia in what I assume is a ship he could have only stolen

- Still not dealing with Zim with extreme prejudice in a timely fashion after the events of Backseat Drivers from Beyond the stars, or investigating enough to find out and deal with prisoner 777

- HAVING WAITED THROUGH ALL OF THE ABOVE BEFORE SENDING FOR ZIM’S EXISTENCE EVALUATION

- Spending the bulk of their reign so far dicking around in space and gorging themselves. Seriously, Red showed us one act of proactive competence… and it was in order to fix a mess that they allowed Zim to get them into. Not to mention, the Resisty got away from that scrap after thoroughly humiliating their flagship.

Red, and by extension, Purple, are the almighty, Tallest threats to the entire Irken project of galactic conquest, as much as Zim would have loved all the credit in the universe. By what they’ve done, and who they are. He might be damaged, but them? There’s some defective moral character if I’ve ever seen.