#just in time to get into adulthood alongside dib

[murshmallauw]

wait, how old were zim & dib when they got married/had astra?? (sorry if you’ve answered this already😭)

When they got married Dib was 23 and Zim was on his mid 180s. Astra was born 2 years after that.

[emeraldspiral]

#i think about this fact and its psychological implications every single day#tangential to the post but it also makes irken age discourse 6000x funnier because#that singular detail makes irken aging so fundamentally removed from anything recognizably human#that there really is no reasonable comparison to make wrt mental development#WHICH INCIDENTALLY IS ALSO JUST. REALLY INTERESTING AS A SCIFI CONCEPT#AND SOMETHING I REALLY WISH THE FANDOM EXPLORED MORE

I think Rebecca Sugar must've found this idea interesting too, because it's yet another aspect of Irken Lore that seems to have been adapted into her work. Gems in Steven Universe are also born already "adults" by default and are put to work straight away serving whatever purpose, but their ages can also change depending on their mental state. There's no specific timeframe when a Gem is "supposed" to show mental and emotional growth, it just happens whenever.

A lot Zim age discourse and Tumblr Age Discourse in general operates under the reductive assumption that everything has to correspond 1:1 to human aging. Like "10 Irken years is the equivalent to 1 human year", which by that logic should mean that Zim stayed in diapers for decades, and if 160 were his real age, he'd be 16 when Dib is 12, which would make him too old for Dib, but when Dib is 22, Zim will only be 17, which would make Dib too old for Zim. Which makes no fucking sense.

It just seems more sensible to me that it works more like Gem aging. Zim and the rest of his race can remain mentally like children indefinitely, even after their bodies and brains have finished developing and they've been given all their adults rights, responsibilities, freedoms, and expectations. Because the conditions of their society don't provide them with quality socialization and experiences to cultivate healthy adulthood, and instead leaves them in a state of arrested development. But put Zim in a human skool, and he'll start mentally aging alongside his peers because he's getting experiences he never had on Irk. By necessity even, he has to grow up in order to remain on equal footing with Dib, because Dib isn't going to wait for him.

I think I read somewhere that the Asari from Mass Effect are like this too. Like, they live hundreds of years, so a 100 year old Asari is considered young, but still an adult. Not a child or a teenager. I think they're supposed to go through a phase of being a young swinging single for a while and it's around 400 or so that most of them decide they want to settle down and have kids, but some end up doing that at like 80 or 20, because they are still adults at that age and depending on who they're spending time with, like a much shorter-lived species such as humans, and what life experiences they have, some Asari just get to that point of wanting to settle down at a much earlier age.

If you think about it, it actually makes sense for Zim to overestimate how much of a threat human babies are, given that Irken smeets are born as basically mini adults, with a lifetime of knowledge implanted at birth.