Give the headcanon essay on Irken Love!! Gib!!!💖💕
When I think of Irkens and love, I think of the Guante line: Your job is to protect your family. And your family is everyone.
Irkens are, at the base, a eusocial species. This isn’t a Control Brain thing, this is something that was at the root of their society and their species before Brains, before PAKS, before technology and space travel. If anything, the implementation of those things made Irkens less of a hive mind, not more.
(The Empire, as of now, separates Irkens into individualized spaces, while still asking them to be part of a collective. It... causes problems.)
Irkens don’t have parents, siblings, spouses, cousins, or friends. Irkens have the “Us”.
What someone’s “Us” is depends on the Irken and the Irken’s encoding, but overall, it tends to be the group you’re part of. A Navigator or a Pilot’s Us is a fleet or an armada. A Smeetery Supervisor’s Us is their smeets and the other Supervisors.
Invader is such a revered encoding partially because it’s so demanding. Not only do you need to have expertise in several military fields, it’s a job you do alone and that isolation is taxing. (It’s also why the risk of going native is so high--without an Us that’s fulfilled by other Irkens, that Invader naturally goes looking for it elsewhere, which is what happens to Purple in “Final Exam”.) But even if they’re apart from other Irkens, they still have the Us of the Invasion as a whole. They still have an Us, it’s just one you only see like twice a year.
For a Tallest, because they’re the only ones with their encoding, their Us is the entire Irken Empire. Not that there’s much choice, they don’t have anyone else. Usually. Red and Purple are one of the uncommon (but not at all unheard of) cases of an Us being formed with just two Irkens. Since they get all the attachment and social bonds they need from each other, it hinders their ability to attach to the rest of the Empire like they’re supposed to.
Even then, while their tiny Us of two is top priority, they’re still Irkens and the rest of the Empire is still their Us. The same can be said for all other Irkens: groups within groups are just an Us within an Us.
It’s not so much that the individual doesn’t matter so much as that the individual is simply part of a whole that matters more. Your blood cells matter--if you bleed to death, you’ll find out real quick how much they matter. But a papercut’s different than a stab wound. Losing ten drops of blood is an inconvenience; losing ten pints is a death sentence. Likewise, the loss of one Irken is a statistic, but the loss of a thousand Irkens is a tragedy.
Irkens love their Us the same way you love your wife, not just your wife’s small intestine. You’re glad it exists, you’re glad the intestine keeps your wife alive and healthy, but that’s about it. A Commander loves their fleet, not Elite Skoodge. A Frylord loves their work staff, not Food Drone Gashloog. A Tallest loves The Irken Empire, not Invader Larb.
(This is the trouble with defectives. A defective, at the root, is an Irken that cannot or will not be part of the Us. And if you’re not Us... well. That can only mean you’re Them.)
Does this mean Irkens don’t have individual bonds or friendships? Absolutely not.
It’s uncommon for those bonds to be strong, and it’s unusual for those bonds to last beyond a few years.
Why? The same reason any species makes a lot of babies in the first place: most of those creatures aren’t going to live.
Before the Irkens went to war, they were busy being eaten all the time. If the mortality rate for your clutch, your fleet, or your squadron is going to be at least 50%. When everything wants to eat you, whoever you decided to bond to probably isn’t going to make it through the next five years.
But even if your war buddy gets devoured, who do you still have? The squadron. Who will you always have? The Empire. Investing your love in an individual is foolish, dangerous, and asking for heartbreak, which is why most Irkens don’t do it.
It’s a lousy investment. It’s a dumb investment.
The Tallest are pretty dumb. Zim’s kinda dumb sometimes, too. A lot of Irkens are, really.