Endearing Through The Alien Lens: A Clue About The Primitive Irken?

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.

Oh love this absolute unit

He literally built like Spiderverse Kingpin

Also, when you think about it, he’s really only meant to be intimidating to Zim. Through that lens, he’s a sadistic prison warden.

Objectively… dude is a fast food manager,

and not even a terrible one. His other employees are presumably there of their own free will and aren’t miserable like Zim. Gashloog is explicitly there as a voluntary hire and gets to take regular breaks. Don’t forget that, rather than take his vacation sooner and F out of his post absent of Zim, he doesn’t leave his employees to shoulder the burden of fending for themselves in the middle of a Foodening. His hostility to Zim is because of a personal grudge and a desire to punish a legitimate menace who nearly wiped out their society on multiple occasions.

Relative to Irken standard, he seems like a fairly decent guy and a good leader???

sizz-lorr is so cute and for what. why's he so cute. isnt he supposed to be intimidating? hes just funny and has a silly round head with silly round eyes and a silly round body.

hes just like. ugh

This one I found on r/funny

My blood feels dull and heavy

There should be more here

Had all these plans for this place

I used to burn once upon a time

My veins miss the old poison

Strength enough only to drag my feet

Rattling chains, only my own Houses to Haunt

Held by the lungs and pulled

Bleeding time from a wound that won’t close

Hellish what I have to do

A charming tale about family, homemaking, and creation. Experience the matriarch’s realm for yourself here, alongside other cursed grounds.

lethargy hill, kitty horrorshow

from haunted cities volume 4 (2020)

Let's talk character design for a bit. I love our villains' designs, because SP incorporated so much into them. Personality, motive, and the fact that this is our own universe completely inhabited by animals are all aspects which are folded into the baddies' appearances like a stubby calzone. Just imagine a stubby calzone for a second. What a cutie.

Consider Arpeggio's design, for instance. The beret, bow tie, monocle and itty bitty mustache suggest he's sophisticated, classy, has accumulated a bunch of wealth; throw in there the fact that he's the game's final boss as well as his voice which we briefly heard in He Who Tames the Iron Horse and you already know we're facing an eccentric millionaire genius in the last episode without even meeting him yet. The haircut, beret and cape also hint at him being inspired by Renaissance artists, the designs in his intro cutscene referencing Da Vinci. If he's reserved as the final villain in the game and just such a huge threat, then why is he so little? He seems like a brainiac but could never be as menacing as Rajan. And there you have it: just a perfectly rounded character solely presented through his design.

It's all also reflected in the choice of species for each character. Black widows mate and kill: the Contessa. Roosters have a sense of abrasive moxie and eagerness to mate: Tsao. Bulldogs have an attitude with a mug similar to a gangster's: Muggshot (also the term underdog here, his bullies never considered him a threat and in the end he... um... murdered them? idk). It all goes hand-in-hand, it's just so effortlessly perfect, even when it doesn't have to be.

So, despite its initial trajectory, this post was always intended to be, and you guessed it, anti-Thieves in Time rhetoric. Because I was just thinking today about its villains and like, the choices are just so underwhelming. In the cutscenes, El Jefe wears a military uniform because he works in the military; the Grizz wears a tracksuit because... he's a rapper ?? I know I've addressed this like 89319821092 times already but what's with the choice of species too? We've done tiger already, next. They could have gone with anything else, even another cat animal like a puma would make more sense, just to push the design to its limits. Like it's nothing groundbreaking but it would make more sense for a cheetah to wear his sports tracksuit and have his skill set because it's a really fast animal. Where. Are. The. Ideas. I wanted new, exciting animals we never saw prior. Ant-eater, octopus, zebra, eagle, platypus. Give me an otter at this point, I'll take it. Why not utilise an animal's characteristics to come up with some innovative ideas instead of yet another tiger, or an elephant who is, guess what, fat, or a skunk who, and i can not stress this enough for the love of fuck, stinks. *Sigh*

So anyway, yet another post idea brought about by Thieves in Time slander. Will it ever end?

I don’t care who you are or what your overall opinion was of a Hero’s Tail or Spyro in general, this is still one of the funniest jokes experienced in any game I’ve ever played.