#and thats not counting the draft in the form of a discord rant

[irkenheretic]

A Found Family AU With The Control Brains Could Actually Work, And Here’s Why

This all started as a spite-born joke, but honestly the more that I thought about it, the better it sounded to me. 

First off, this meta is gonna be going purely off canon materials. I will interpret certain lines to mean certain things, but there’ll be an alternate explanation if you don’t agree with that interpretation. 

Second, this meta is going to assume that the Control Brains are three- or more- separate entities. Which is actually supported because of this line:

Singular pronoun! 

Now that that’s out of the way, I’m gonna be judging this by a three-part metric, and going into what we actually know (and don’t know) about the Control Brains. (Spoilers: We don’t know much, and the most popular idea of their role in the Empire is pure fanon.)

Metric one is Do these characters like each other? (And if not, could these characters realistically like each other in the future?)

And judging by The Trial, I’d say... yes, actually! They seem to get along just fine. First off, they’re able to cooperate enough to conduct trial without fighting. Second, they don’t seem to be putting up with each other and act on amicable terms.

YMMV, but I see these lines as them quipping with each other. It’s kinda subtle, and lost in the fact that they both speak in monotone, but they seem kinda snarky in the same way Zim’s computer is. 

(And if they were annoyed by each other, we’d know- the Brains are capable of expressing emotions like annoyance, we see them get ticked off at Zim multiple times.)

And even if they didn’t like each other, or are only presenting as friendly to keep public image up, they could still feasibly like each other. The main appeal of ZADR/ZADF is that both Zim and Dib dislike each other but are in similar societal positions, with unique experiences that only the other can relate to. Therefore they could learn to connect using that shared experience. And whatever experience the Control Brains have being Control Brains, the only other beings that share that experience are other Brains. They’d end up getting along out of sheer desperation, at some point. You can’t spend eternity with someone and not like them at least a little eventually.

Which brings us to metric two: Do these characters deserve a family at all?

Again, I actually would argue yes. Hear me out.

So, it’s a popular (albeit unspoken) opinion in fandom that “good” characters deserve nice things like a family, and “bad” characters don’t. If you’re a fan of redemption arcs, the scope of what is a “good” character broadens, but there are still some characters even the most open-hearted of redemption-lovers won’t touch. The Control Brains, across the board, seem to fall into the latter category every single time. 

But what have they actually done wrong? Like, canonically.

In The Trial, they conduct Zim’s Existence Evaluation. This is their job and we can infer they’ve done it before.

In The Frycook What Came From All That Space, we see one of them re-encode Zim from Invader to Frycook. 

In Tak: The Hideous New Girl, one of them doesn’t let Tak retake her test.

And that’s it.

“But they rule the entire Empire-” Nope, that’s just fanon!

“But the Zim Wiki says-” In the words of Eric Trueheart, "The Invader ZIM fandom wiki is a wonderful labor of love by some very dedicated people, but it's wrong at least 25% of the time."

But fine. Let’s look at exactly what the Zim Wiki says. From the page of the Control Brains themselves, it says that the “Control Brains run the empire and their conclusions even have to be accepted by the Tallest, which means that the Tallest have no real authority over the people of Irk, and are simply figureheads (not unlike a constitutional monarchy).”

But when do we see this? Well, during the end of The Trial, the Tallest have no power to overturn their ruling. 

But do you know what that sounds like?

A FUCKING JUDGE.

If the President goes on trial, he still has to defer to the judge. That doesn’t mean that the judge is secretly in control of America and that the President is just a puppet on strings. It just means that the judge is doing his job and the President isn’t running around completely unchecked. (Please refrain from making the obvious President jokes on this post. I get it, I hate him too, but... please lemme have this post.)

There is no real evidence in the show proper to suggest that the Control Brains are all-powerful tyrants and that the Tallest are at their mercy.

And, really, would you talk like that to someone that held your life in their cold, unfeeling robot arms?

So, bottom line is, the Control Brains in the show act like judge, jury, and executioner in trials. That’s it, that’s all they do. Just because they’re called the Control Brains doesn’t mean they control everything. They could just control the trials. “Controller” could be the Irken word for “Judge,” and that’s where the name was derived from. Mechanical judges. 

“But they’re still defending awful things!” Okay, I see your point there, random person I made up to argue with on my meta post.

Which begs the question: Why? Why are the Brains acting like that? 

Well, they’re computers, right? Computers built to serve a purpose, and their purpose is this. That’s it, right? But they’re sentient. If they didn’t like it, they could protest! The fact that they don’t protest makes them complicit, and Bad Characters, right?

Guys... they’re computers.

What do you do to a computer that stops working the way you want it to?

We don’t know what the Brains think about their job. They could love it, they could hate it, they could see it as a necessary evil, they could be completely apathetic after centuries of doing it (if they’re even that old, which again, is not confirmed.)

But IF they didn’t like it... the hell are they supposed to do about it? They’re important pieces of machinery, possibly swarmed by techs ready to correct any sign of them not working right. They could have some sort of programmed-in limitation to keep them obedient. They could’ve tried, with disastrous results. They’re not like Zim. They can’t just quit. They’re computers rooted in place, closely watched for defects, and they have nowhere to go.

(And even if they did leave, who would take them in? Where could they go? Even if they downloaded themselves into PAKs or into robot bodies, the adjustment period from being a giant invulnerable heavily guarded computer to something that needs to actually fend for itself would be maddening and possibly dangerous.)

And honestly? I love Zim to bits, but he did wreck the planet and he did deserve exile. They’re just carrying out the sentence. He did cause many many disasters in Irk’s history. Plus, the Tallest were the ones that trialed him in the first place, but they have fans!

The worst thing they’ve done, unprovoked, is not let Tak retake her test. Or, more specifically, they made her wait to retake the test. We don’t even know why! Did they go “You couldn’t even get out of a room so we don’t want to send you to an enemy planet?” Did they go “You have to wait because half of Devastis is down and we’re working on half-power and half the space?” We don’t know! We literally do not know! (Plus that was only one of them.)

And I’m gonna say it: if Zib “I’m going to strand and brainwash Zims in order to commit multidimensional genocide” Membrane deserves a family, then so do the Control Brains because at least they didn’t do THAT in ACTUAL CANON.

There’s no good transition to metric three, so I’m just gonna say it: Do these characters want a family?

This part is short: We don’t know. 

They could think the idea of a family is stupid and antiquated. They could not know what a family is at all. They could want a family. They could see the entire Empire as their family. They could already see each other as a family. 

We don’t know! The concept of a family never comes up during their appearances, so we have no way to know their thoughts on the subject.

Good thing fandom is transformative and we can make headcanons n’junk! (And really, who doesn’t love a good old-fashioned “character/characters don’t want a family and are gruff and standoffish but over time warm up to the others and they end up super close” found family story?)

Anyway, that’s all I have to say about that. Also that the Control Brains are pretty funny characters in The Trial. 

I just like these guys a lot and I wish other people explored them more outside of the “these are the token evil badguys” role they fill every. Single. TIME.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.