The Viltrumite Empire and Its Enactments of Racialization
(If this looks familiar, I posted it earlier this year, but took it down when I deleted all my posts. A dear mutual suggested I reupload it, so here it is, unchanged from the old version, despite the nagging urge to update it. Originally uploaded June 2025.)
The animated series Invincible presents the Viltrumite empire in the fantastical tone and symbols expected of space-faring superhumans bent on incorporating a planet of superheroes into the imperial fold of an interstellar empire. Conferred with this imagery is the language of racialized conflict, particularly observed where race is encoded in the subordinating process of building and enforcing the state and the other metonymic structures, such as the family, or the military. This is made most apparent in the climax of the first season, in which Mark Grayson, the child of a Korean-American woman and a Viltrumite who appears and is received as a white man on Earth, resists his father’s attempt at initiating him into the empire, first with appeals to Mark’s ideals as a hero, then by invoking Mark’s Viltrumite heritage as an irrefutable and essential characteristic that must consequently ingratiate him to the empire. Mark refuses this induction, and is nearly killed for it, as Nolan continually evokes his mother in concert with his chosen affiliation with Earth and a presumed weakness which he states is consequential of this bilocation.
This reception is not limited to Mark’s conflict with Nolan: rather, the ineluctability of the racially coded imagery in this conflict draws attention to the other interactions of racialization throughout the series, as white characters and characters of color each play out hegemonic dynamics during physical and verbal conflict. If Nolan’s paternalistic didacticism can be read as his attempt at coercively situating his racialized son with whiteness, then meaningful discursive gestures toward western chauvinism’s enforcement and treatment of its racialized subjects can be gleaned from his other interactions with explicit visual racialization, such as his asymmetrical methods of attacking the Guardians and his attempt at engendering hesitation in Mark toward Titan’s plight. The variance in the outcomes and presentations of these interactions can be read in other Viltrumite characters, including Mark’s attempt at evoking this paternal connection at Darkwing II and Angstrom Levy and the references to the narratives codifying castle doctrine, the symmetry between Nolan’s treatment of Debbie and Mark’s treatment of Amber, Lucan and Anissa’s contrasting attempts at offering assimilation, the latter Viltrumite’s idiosyncratic place of subordination within this hierarchy, and Conquest’s thorough brutalization of Mark as a dissident colonized body within the Viltrumite schema of identity.
This essay does not engage with the comic. The two works are separate (as stated by the showrunner, and as observed in the construction of these themes): nearly all of the racial substance read in the piece is original to the show. It succeeds where the comic wholly fails; or, the show’s writing team is correcting for the many missteps in the comic.
It is also worth mentioning that although there is meaningful discourse to be gleaned from the Viltrumite’s perception of their fantastical victims and subjects, this piece focuses on the deliberate presentation of race through the skin color of the human and Viltrumite characters. That is, their appearances are not incidental, and similar ideas can be found according to the identities that these characters inhabit.
The disparity in Nolan’s slaughter of the Guardians reflects the racialized lens through which he views the team, partially intricated in the Viltrumite perception of strength. Before the ambush begins, the signal by which he draws the Guardians is presumed to have originated from Darkwing, a Black man notably solitary and removed from the rest of the guardians, sufficiently enigmatic that the anomaly of his signal is immediately seen as cause for concern. In the fight itself, Darkwing and Alana—the newest to carry the legacy mantle of Green Ghost—are among the very first to die, Nolan predicting Darkwing’s attack from above and striking Alana where she keeps the stone that gives the bearer of the Green Ghost mantle their powers, ending that heroic lineage. In each case, Nolan’s victory required personal scrutiny of his respective targets: he expects Darkwing’s attack from behind, and knows that Alana’s inexperience and kindness would immobilize her upon seeing his gruesome death, therefore opening her up to an attack that her powers would have otherwise avoided, specifically targeting the placement of the stone, the artifact itself nor its location obvious at a glance.
By contrast, Immortal received no such scrutiny. Nolan kills him as Viltrumite executioners kill their prisoners, with a bladed palm to the neck. Nolan’s failure to predict Immortal’s resurrection ultimately leads to the clash that reveals the extent of his cruelty to his son, who therebefore assumed Nolan to be victimized by the Global Defense Agency. That is, Nolan’s inability to foretell these powers puts him at a disadvantage, a blind spot in his analysis of the team’s strengths that stands out from the aforementioned victims. Nolan had treated Immortal like a Viltrumite, in neither of their conflicts incorporating any of the analytical techniques by which he defeated Darkwing or Green Ghost—the alternate universe presented in the next season’s premiere goes further to reveal that it would only be upon a third altercation that Nolan would understand how to prevent his subsequent revival. Immortal does not elicit the suspicion and analysis that each led to Darkwing and Alana’s deaths; Nolan assumes, in both cases, that the two were governed under the same rules, just as Immortal was jealous of Nolan’s strength and speed. These two older white men each display competing, alike white masculinities.
Nolan’s perceiving white heroes possessing abilities like his own as defective Viltrumites is shared and reinforced with dismissal of Red Rush’s speed: “He can run fast” said of a man most effective in resisting his assault enminds the same masculine bravado that permeates Nolan’s taunts in his fights against the Immortal, Mark, and the Viltrumite Vidor. Nolan, too, relies on speed: his ability to cross the oceans in minutes is incorporated into his specific performance of domesticity with Debbie, traveling to foreign cafés, wineries, and restaurants in these rituals of romanticized exoticism, a palatable otherness that stands in contrast to Red Rush’s status as a Russian in an otherwise American team.
Nolan’s second evocation of racialized perception takes the focus away from the physical domination of the first, placing the locus of subtext instead in the house, where he leverages his expertise to dissuade Mark from a heroism explicitly aligned with the racialized characters of Debbie and Titan. The locality here illustrates the intersecting frameworks, the hierarchy of the family made commensurate to their respective engagement with the metaphysical spectacle that saturates their lives. Superheroic and domestic dynamics are unified, as Nolan speaks with a superiority and seniority contingent on his experience as an accomplished hero and on his position as the head of the family. The dinner table becomes a theater of physical, as well as political, power differentials. Nolan is the global juggernaut and the father; Mark is the novice hero and the son; Debbie is the civilian and the wife whom Nolan renders naïve and overly defined by pathos.
Nolan and Debbie’s perception of heroism tangibly diverge here, as Nolan insists that Mark use his strength for globalized conflicts, appealing to the scale of astronomical natural disasters, envisaging a heroic placelessness divorced of localized and politicized context, and Debbie encourages Mark to help Titan, whose sphere of influence is neither enclosed within the house nor expanded to the planet, instead focusing on a neighborhood and community steeped in economic exploitation, his family attending the very same recreation center at which Amber volunteers. Titan explicitly delineates his and Mark’s emotive relations to the disenfranchisement occurring in his community on the basis of their respective cultural ubiety: without any explicit context for Mark’s identity outside of the mantle, he correctly assumes Mark’s suburban upbringing based on his observable dislocation from such spaces in the scale of his heroism. The racialized impermeability of the house is observed in Nolan’s insistence that Mark keep his focus to global and spacial contexts, and in Titan’s understanding that such patterns would incline Mark to withhold assistance.
Revisiting the fight in the finale, Nolan’s brutal punishment for Mark’s refusal to enable Viltrumite imperialism is conveyed to the audience through two complementary thematic channels: the colorful world of superheroes which Mark was eager to join, a unique expression of this would-be colony, and the structure of the house, with Debbie inside as this possessed fulcrum around which their family is balanced. Nolan’s gestures toward these make evident his attempt to twist them into conduits for Viltrumite ideology, but where one fails, exposing Mark to the language that inspires him to resist, the other lingers, perfusing Mark’s conflict and philosophy through the second season.
During this fight, Mark frequently appeals to the first as a pacifying force in contrast to Nolan’s brutality. Notably, assumes that Nolan is brainwashed, a familiar narrative tool to display the dangerous potential a hero may possess while removing them from moral fault, a staple of the genre which the Maulers reference in the same episode, as they fail to do the same to Immortal. Indeed, Nolan’s training Mark was steeped in the conventions of the genre, each undercut with precepts of Viltrumite hegemony: saving the world from an asteroid reflects the lone agent making decisions for a planet without agency; dropping a villain to force a confession reflects the use of fear as a coercive tool; even striking Mark to test his strength reflects, at its simplest, the might makes right mentality that undercuts all Viltrumite doctrine. “I was wrong to raise you like them” makes this explicit, reflecting Nolan’s efforts to translocate the ideology of the empire onto the visual language of the superheroes. However, Nolan’s method of indoctrination instead develops in Mark the ideology to resist him. As superheroes are posited as a unique reflection of Earth—in contrast to Viltrumite and Coalition agents, who possess similar powers but are removed from the genre’s language—this language belongs to the potentially colonized, and with Debbie providing prominent pushes toward this methodology, the racialized.
This appeal to Debbie, as stated before, is not limited to the implicit. Nolan and Mark each structure their arguments around coordinate, enmeshed frameworks, exalting Debbie and the house as paired metonyms for their respective ideology: where Mark posits her as the supposed basis of their heroism, this drive to protect others and a glue for the house, Nolan renders this language more explicitly possessive, positing her as a “pet,” something dear yet ephemeral and without agency. Where Mark was born into the house, and has only known the house, even where characters like Titan illustrate it as stifling, Nolan adopted the house as synecdoche for the coercive structure of the empire. The agent of a vast empire has subsumed this racialized woman of this potential colony by adopting patterns and rituals that she would recognize. The physical ideology of the Viltrum Empire serves to strengthen the references to the western hegemony which codifies this bodily ownership. He recognized the house as a suitable vessel for his control, and by extension, Viltrumite control.
Even after Nolan’s departure, the house remains a vehicle for structuralized, and specifically racialized violence, wherein Debbie and Mark remain and Oliver is inducted. Invincible’s second season presents Nolan’s promise of subsumption into the Viltrumite empire, and the consequent aspirational whiteness, as lingering, contraposed conflicts casting Mark as at once a racialized subject of violence and a perpetrator of racialized interactions, viewed through a lens of fatherhood and the house. At once, the offer is an act of violence, an ideological and personal violation of Mark’s identity as it is rooted in humanity and racialization, and a threat, a gesture either deliberate or situational toward the imperial conquest of the Viltrumite Empire.
Mark first leverages the reputation of his father against Darkwing after spending the duration of their brief conflict denying any emotive or ideological connection to his father’s violence. His attitude suddenly departs from his typical insistence that he does not share his father’s cruelty, a belief he continues to espouse for nearly the rest of the season. It is when Darkwing takes him outside of Cecil’s hearing, in this fantastical realm that GDA surveillance cannot penetrate, that Mark invokes his father, and attributes violence to this descent. “Like you said—I’m Omni-Man’s son. You have no idea what I’m capable of” is Mark’s attempt at conveying an intrinsic, or at least deeply internalized, violence. It frames his typical separation from his father as an active process of restraining a brutality that he only lets slip once more in this season.
Mark’s connection to his father orbits the four physical conflicts between this threat and Angstrom’s confrontation, where it emerges again. Lucan vocally doubts Mark’s similarities to his father; Mark refuses to kill Thula before his father defeats her in his place; Mark aids the Guardians against the sequids to reject his father’s isolationism; and Mark refuses Anissa’s implication that accepting his place in the Empire is inevitable. Where Mark implicitly or explicitly distances himself from Nolan in those conflicts, Angstrom’s arrival at his house compels Mark to summon this imagery. The Black man entering the suburban house leads to an evocative anger Mark has never displayed before, nor since. “Stop threatening my family” renders the house as the origin of this rage, and Mark’s savage beatdown draws attention to Nolan’s brutality against him months earlier. The blows of the father, the superheroic paragon, the imperial agent, brought to bear against this man, again removed from the observation and thus judgment of others. “You have no idea what I’ve been through—how much I’ve been holding back” compares this instance of brutality to his threat against Darkwing, now expressing what he before merely indicated. Mark feels wrongly condemned, and protective of his mother. The anger he metes against Angstrom is filtered through Angstrom’s many instances of surviving Viltrumite subjugation, Mark’s acknowledgment that his father’s anger is imperial and fascist anger, and Debbie’s place as this presumed perpetual victim. It is, in all these context, racialized: the Black man who survived imperial occupation, the son wielding his white father’s anger, the Asian woman reduced to an object. As Mark steps into Nolan’s ideology, he elevates himself to the vengeful father, and reduces Angstrom and Debbie to existential children, disobedient and hapless, respectively.
This emotional expulsion immediately frightens Mark, and he comes to identify his anger’s semblance with Nolan’s. This marks the second time he realizes that this paternally-coded urge to protect a racialized woman from a racialized outside is part and parcel for the hegemonic cruelty that his father embodied: it was the impetus for his and Amber’s breakup. As she describes her lack of agency bound in her inability to defend herself against Mark’s enemies, Mark realizes that his instinctual desire to kill Anissa is not a valorized display of protectiveness, but indicative of the same mentalities that constituted his father’s brutality. He further reflects an understanding of this racialization: what he has done to Amber for months, Nolan had done to Debbie for years. The expectation for Debbie to be metaphysically inferior was a violation, as worth describing as the implicit physicalized threats prior to his departure. Even removed from the optics of superheroism, Nolan’s position as the physically eminent head of the house was violent.
Invincible’s second season therefore thrice depicts Black characters as victims of castle doctrine, the violent codification of the house, in turn a synecdochal reflection of the state, that reinforces and benefits whiteness; notably, each time this allusion is specifically accompanied by visual and verbal reference to Nolan Grayson in his role as an embodiment of imperial violence. That is, in contrast to other works, in which the anti-Black violence intrinsic to castle doctrine is a covert or unexamined byproduct of the author’s reification of the sanctity of the white family unit, Invincible makes clear that this is a harmful act of coercion and possession, monopolizing violence upon racialized subjects.
Mark’s appeal to Nolan’s power and authority are imbued with gestures to the higher colonial power which he represented, therefore lending this subjugation an imperialized emphasis. However, the question of Mark’s identity, indeed whether he can be compelled to assimilate fully into the empire and abandon any significant affiliation with Earth, pervades his conflicts with the Viltrumites, each of whom adduce it jointly with their physicality. That is, despite Mark’s ability to wield racialized and colonized violence in his father’s image, the Empire always casts him as defective agent and dissident subject.
Lucan, though visually racialized, is given the same treatment as other members of the imperial core. This is illustrated after the conclusion of the battle on Thraxa, whereupon Mark watches Viltrumites agents medevac Lucan and Nolan, where Kregg evaluates Mark’s worthiness on the basis of his ability to survive grievous injuries. Mark has to survive first, where he grants the soldiers immediate and equal medical attention. Furthermore, the ease with which he overpowers Mark and the brevity of their interaction better places the tone of his offer of assimilation into a gendered context: Mark’s identity is doubted on the basis of his physical strength, rather than ideology.
However, Anissa’s discourse with Mark demonstrates that she shares his metaphysical interposition: she is neither the white men who render racialized violence unto Mark nor the Black characters upon whom Mark metes racialized violence. This is twice made explicit: at the end of the season, Mark remembers Nolan, Cecil, and General Kregg’s words in sequence as resonant gestures to his and his father’s ideological resemblance, yet forecloses Anissa from this recollection, despite the inevitability of his identity saturating their conversation; after the fight, as Mark consoles Amber, he tells her “I wanted to kill her for putting a hand on you,” and describes this reaction as a source of shame, an emotional agony painted in the rhetoric of castle doctrine which Nolan wielded with Debbie as victim and which Mark would later wield against Angstrom. Though she invokes his identity, and evokes his racializing anger, she receives neither the traumatic reflection nor the force of this protective rage, collocating them in equivalent racial contexts, between these endpoints of subjugator and subjugated.
Kregg chastises Anissa upon her return to his ship, in an act that calls to mind the paternalistic control that Nolan and Cecil direct onto Mark. This scolding reframes the Empire’s order that Anissa induct Mark into a personal need to reestablish her place on the hierarchy, to move a step higher from being the only Viltrumite in such a subordinating dynamic. Though she is an emblazoned member of this imperial authority, she is not afforded the latitude that Mark is granted against either Nolan or Cecil: where he can approach with fist clenched, she is kept at a distance; where he defies Cecil’s fervent orders, Anissa is totally bound to her own. Kregg still treats Mark as a colonial subject, and thus the punishment for his defiance is far steeper, his planet sentenced to scorched earth, but this only follows three orders to conform interspersed throughout a long period without constant observation; Anissa, in turn, receives no punishment on a comparable scale, but she is given more thorough observation in scrutiny. Mark’s consanguinity with Nolan acts as an aegis against this social panopticon, coordinate to Anissa’s brownness, a more apparent racialization from which he is exempt. Lucan can become a Viltrumite first, and Mark can become the son of Nolan, but Kregg’s control denies Anissa this rhetorical shelter: she is only a younger, smaller, brown woman.
Kregg’s scrutiny of Anissa forms a parallel to the hierarchizing control he and Cecil enforce upon Mark, two older white men observe this racialized teenager with an unspoken promise of physical violation in response to any deviation. The similarity in these aspects of control reinforce Mark and Anissa as reflective intersubjectivity despite the uniqueness of their respective placement in these coercive systems, but also emphasizes the racism in this form of control. Mark is rendered a soldier in a proxy war, expected to carry out Viltrumite imperial interest with the threat of decimation overhead, and with a functional kill switch implanted covertly in the case he contradicts American imperial interest. The nonlethality and everpresence of the implant reflects the silent coercion that Anissa faces, the servant whose ideology aligns with the empire subject to a tacit and inescapable manipulation. Each man frames their mission in logic and numbers, but the bloodsoaked strike across Mark’s cheek and the screeching implant reducing him to spasms indicate a willingness to carry out violations of his bodily autonomy as a punishment.
This exploitation and assumption of Mark’s beholdenness to possessive, racializing authorities infest Conquest’s violence upon Mark. Conquest thoroughly effaces the fantastical rhetoric surrounding this domination and consequently centers the language of satisfaction and punishment around Mark’s status as a racialized member of this desired colony. Conquest will not believe Mark is a Viltrumite until he sees “[Mark’s] Viltrumite heart … beating in my hand”—if Mark is not a Viltrumite, then Conquest is not carrying out violence upon a potential peer, but a collapsed embodiment of the other. This is succeeded by Conquest using Mark’s body as a weapon to cause collateral, calling to mind the same punitive violence to which Nolan subjected Mark, and taking advantage of Mark’s physical durability to massacre the people of the planet he holds dear. Though Conquest, as a nominal personification of the bodily control of the Empire, elides all of Mark’s relations to this colonizing power, both those adopted through resistance or those impelled through coercion, his destruction repeats imagery that Nolan established years earlier—the destruction of the state in excelsis cannot be fully extricated from the father, from the hierarchy of the house.
Through race, Invincible explores the patterns of hegemonic structures, and the staggered interactions occurring between those placed on differentiated strata of these hierarchies, through imperial and domestic authority, between soldiers or between colonial subjects, and across the planes. Nolan’s internalization of Viltrumite imperial ideology borrows from and assimilates with the ideology of white supremacy and the ideology of the family; though Mark cannot escape his racialization, and has never willingly aligned himself with the empire, every gesture he makes to one of these structures incorporates the other by their nature. These connections cannot be elided, nor does Invincible attempt to do so: superficial cues are not sufficient to recognize the interactions between these positions, as Anissa’s darker skin does not exclusively reflect less privilege, but neither does her status in the empire solely reflect increased privilege. Where some shared racialization can create dialogue, as Mark and Anissa’s simultaneous recognition of the other’s circumstances permeates their interlocution, others lead to competing appeals to the authority with which they are aligned. The racialized violence and control that Mark himself can wield demonstrates that he exists at a philosophical crossroads, and that all evocations of this violence, regardless of whoever dispenses it, are made actively, even if subconsciously. It is a choice to reify these structures, rooted in their existential localities, and the systems with which they are familiar. In Invincible, as in reality, race is inescapable.
