nemo

When the big purge happened, the most peaceful and well adjusted Viltrumites died because they were deemed “weak”. We know this, the culture died and was replaced with the current regime and ideology. The best parents would have died too, the ones who would never think to kill their kids for being weak.

But the remaining Viltrumites would have still varied in how committed to the cause they were, even if they kept it secret. There would have been couples that really were in love, in private or no. Men and women who managed to crack each other’s hard exteriors and win the soft heart hidden inside.

For all the awful things that twisted love in the empire, the real thing never truly died. Children were still being born to parents that would do everything they could to prove they were strong enough to live. Couples still sacrificed their time for each other and for family. They were people, people vary in how warm they are and how much their career means to them.

The plague is what took out the romantics and the ones who desired children.

It killed the type of people who chose to get to know each other after training, slowly falling in love.

It killed the type who had “lesser” jobs and therefore more free time to enjoy another’s company and raise children.

It killed the generals and soldiers whose children and grandchildren loved their stories about other worlds.

It killed the ones that were getting by in a regime they didn’t fully agree with, but had to live in.

The 50 who survived were the strongest and most loyal to the regime. Thragg being the most deluded of them all and the face of their twisted beliefs.

It left individuals who would never have considered romance or parenthood. The ones who believed that there would always be someone having children

Some, like Anissa, didn’t want anything to do with opening up to somebody or “wasting time” on a child that may be weak. Or like Conquest, whose true love was violence, and only violence.

Others were overachievers that saw romance as a distraction from their training and missions.

I can easily see Nolan after hours in the training room, scoffing to himself at a couple who is spending time on “nothing”. He’s more concerned with the “important things”. Until Debbie corrected him at the baseball game, he hadn’t considered recreation as anything more than a distraction.

[Man was pouting over having to watch little league]

Maybe he never would have taken up writing, if not for the need to keep track of his old missions inconspicuously. Maybe book one started with a short draft that read like a brief report. I picture him begrudgingly going to a human library and checking out books on astronauts. Having to replay finer details of the mission in his head and change them to sound more human. Maybe that’s how he figured out he liked writing.

Kregg and Luthan probably never thought about romance and parenthood until it became their mission. Maybe they had never stopped to think that they might like it. And I doubt they’re the only ones.

If you’ve ever held someone else’s baby and felt scared you’d drop it, you wouldn’t be alone. But humans are pretty good at moving past that fear. We learn how to be gentle from our youth. We know how to handle an infant without hurting it.

Imagine being someone who never thought about having a child, from a world where it’s considered a waste of time with your long lifespan. And then you have to have a baby, because your people are dying off. You were never taught how to be gentle, you were never taught how to care for a baby. But now you must.

I think Nolan was the first to feel a deep, paranoid fear of crushing his child. If a baby Viltrumite is weak, and a human adult is like an ant, how weak must the half-human baby be? Man probably thought he could breathe on Mark wrong and he’d explode.

And then when the others had their kids, they felt the same way. [Except Thragg. He built different.] For the men, this was the easiest to deal with. Nolan, Kregg and Luthan could all leave their children with their wives. It’s normal for the baby to spend its early days close to mom. It gave them time to have breaks from the newfound fear and to get used to handling the baby despite it.

Thula had to handle the baby so much more, but she had a human husband to give her a break when she needed it. When the fear of accidentally crushing the baby got too loud to ignore.

I think the reason Anissa sought out a human husband after everything she did was because she couldn’t handle the baby on her own. Perhaps she thought it was because the babies were part human that all her peers were disgustingly shaken.

But that wasn’t it at all. They all would have still been petrified of hurting the babies even if they were full blooded. They were all petrified because they were responsible for fulfilling a mission none of them were prepared for. One where failure could mean extinction. For the first time in a long time, every new life was valuable in their eyes and the eyes of their regime.

It hadn’t felt so important to these people in particular when the empire flourished. They had never considered the love and sacrifices and fear of failure that “weaker” Viltrumites felt when they raised their kids in the heyday. They sacrificed their time for the cause and didn’t leave room for relationships. None of them knew how much their lives were about to change.

Family became a priority for them when it never was before.

Average child shenanigans surprised them because they never got to experience normal childhoods.

They had to learn how to respond to child’s play.

"I want do what you do, I want to be just like you."