Iz Zib - Tumblr Posts
@melodyofthevoid I wanted to make fanart of the royalty au So here’s a little thing from when Zib was escaping prison (also this was my first time using oil pastels so sorry if it’s weird)
Here’s a transparent Zib with an empty speech bubble thing I made
When I saw those for the first time I immediately gave a ton of my ocs little claws
I love Zib's little claws <3
And it's not just the style because these are Dib's hands in the same issue
Zibs back!
Sorry for the lack of zib lately
Looks like I’m marrying the roach boy
Doing one of these but with my mutuals after seeing this image on my dash today!!
..Y'know he may be the god of war but.. I'm not mad. No, no not at all. :)
@xxgalacticambitionsxx @hatbox-apologist @ghostingyourass79 @kittieshauntedourfantasy @emerald194 @thatonerabbit @comical-icicle
Hello invader zim fandom sorry I’ve been gone have a mind electric animatic about zib I made at 1 am
Theres some flashing in it so if you can’t see flashing stuff don’t watch it
I’m so tired I have no idea how I made this in an hour and a half or why i would do that
Because this was made at 1am with no reference everything is weird and at one point you can see I accidentally started drawing a Pak on zims head
ROUGH ANIMATION IS...ROUGH.
I seriously haven’t been normal ever since I found out about the Zimvoid arc
Trivial Zib Headcanons
- He speaks with Dib’s voice but with Zim’s inflections and quirky word emphasis bleeding through the angrier or more excited he gets.
- He picked up the 🅱️ean allergy.
- His laughter would straddle the line between adorkable and distressingly unhinged.
- He fills a lot of downtime in the void up with video games, watching Zims compete in blood sports, and kicking said Zims’ asses at video games just to stay (somewhat) sane.
- He treats number Two the way Boston Dynamics treats their robots during his training sessions. To keep him on his toes, he explains, like a liar.
- Neck pain™
- He once went through a panicked, awkward phase where his human teeth started falling out. Utterly flipped his shit until he realized the new ones were coming in to replace them.
- He emits a smell like almonds when he gets nervous or stressed.
- If/when he sleeps he makes hermit crab noises instead of snoring.
You know admittedly that’s a pretty clever idea for- w
wait
Wait wait wait
Wait hol up wait wait just
….That was your intellectual property?!? Buddy what the fuck were you planning for?
Woopsie, I Put Too Much Effort Into A Character Song Playlist (Zib)
Just showing off some contextual brain worms. Feel free to toy with it as hyperfix fuel, art/fic ideas, a discussion starter, or just to know what’s been rattling around in my ears lately. Addition suggestions welcome. No particular order to arrangement.
Breakdown/Preview below:
Outer Science, English Ver. [Kuraiinu]
Song artist: Jin (covered by Kuraiinu, English lyrics by Kuraiinu)
Fact of fun: The story told in the original song is part of a whole rabbit hole of a work, the Kagerou Project. Outer Science is specifically about one very bad ending out of a huge branch of connected timelines and possible “routes”.
Sorter’s note: This badass track is a huge favorite of mine both with and without even considering this character list, but holy shit did I find it appropriate for this purpose- from the action, the vibes, and especially for it to center around another villain as utterly maniacal as the star of the list. In my little headspace I love to imagine it mostly addressed from Zib’s perspective toward our main timeline’s Dib.
Sample lyrics:
[Does it matter when you, will soon awaken anew
That I’m reveling in every suffering just like a demon?
“Ahh why! No! Why!” you howl and cry
“I never wanted this” you lie..!
Look into my own eyes, there lies your fate and demise
And I know there another fated eloquent master awaits]
[Ahh, not enough, I can’t evade the desire
To eat up their darkened hearts upon the pyre
Taking ahold of every one of their lives
I’m buried in their eyes
Ahh, it’s also in you, deep down inside
The power bigger than them all, Combining Eyes..?
Yes, within this sad tragedy
You are the “queen”]
[How pitiful to live and die
Time and again you all defy
Though it will end the same, you keep resetting the game
Remiss and pain all aflame
Crying, howling, ever writhing]
Broadcast Illusion
Song artist: GHOST & Pals
Fact of fun: This is effectively a remake of one of GHOST’s earlier works, “Colorbars” and was the last song released as part of their Communications project before the series cancellation.
Sorter’s note: With the instrumental stylizations and dark themes of this piece outright, I hope my associations with the favored freak become self evident.
Sample lyrics:
[We’ll wake up in a singular reality
The death of a nation
A toxic reaction
So scream and shout, make a whole lotta noise
Don’t be afraid, let the night run out
Well, after all, it’s a television show
A telecast promoting vertigo]
[A moment in time to reconcile
Came a little too late, and now it’s gone
A moment in history
Produced by the broken and thrown away
And I’m already here
For you to see, for you to see, to see you
I’ve always been here]
Goodbye Moonmen
Song artist: Ryan Elder (Cover by Shadyvox)
Fact of fun: It’s generally accepted that this song was composed in a way to parody/tribute the musical style of David Bowie
Sorter’s note: I felt this one fitted Zib to the point of comedy. The original context of the song was literally about a universe-wide genocide with xenophobic motivations. To me this might as well have been going through his head in canon had he gotten his way.
Sample Lyrics:
[The worlds can be one together
Cosmos without hatred
Stars like diamonds in your eyes
The ground can be space, space, space, space, space
With feet marchin' towards a peaceful sky
All the moonmen want things their way
But we make sure they see the sun
Goodbye, moonmen
You say goodbye, moonmen
Goodbye, moonmen
Goodbye, moonmen
Oh, goodbye]
Final Transmission (Remix)
Song artist: Remixed by The Living Tombstone
Fact of fun: The original version was by Temporal Walker & Voodoopony
Sorter’s note: Delicious Title. Pretty darn catchy on its own. Trippy AND sad when you think about it for too long.
Sample Lyrics:
[He feels it in his stomach and in his bones
The weight is lifted now, he's never going home
Drifting in silence, now he's all alone
Difference is that now, there's no need to atone
Spaceman, that's what they said he was
Head up in the clouds, he never put up a fuss…]
[Eyelids getting heavy, sleep it off now kid
Everyone now knows exactly what you did
Go on, finish up the fuse that you lit
It doesn't matter now, cause we'll see you in a bit
Tapestry of nightlights above and below
Sanity coiled tight, the Earth he'll out grow
Amnesty a slight, too late to forego
Vanity benight, all to do now is let go]
Control
Song artist: Halsey (pitch edit presumably by Lunarex)
Sample Lyrics:
[I paced around for hours on empty
I jumped at the slightest of sounds
And I couldn't stand the person inside me
I turned all the mirrors around
I'm bigger than my body
I'm colder than this home
I'm meaner than my demons
I'm bigger than these bones
And all the kids cried out, "Please stop, you're scaring me"
I can't help this awful energy
God damn right, you should be scared of me
Who is in control?
I'm well acquainted with villains that live in my head
They beg me to write them so they'll never die when I'm dead]
Bacterial Contamination [Bookiezz]
Song artist: Kanimiso-P (covered by Bookiezz)
Fact of fun: The original music video with Hatsune Miku is super famous for good reason, and it’s actually a terrifying piece of art. The song by itself carries a really sad story involving themes of alienation, the vicious cycle of bullying, and possibly suicide, depending on how you interpret its ambiguous ending. There’s also a lot of body horror in the fashion of arthropod imagery, and that’s neat. This pick happens to be my favorite version of it, something about the part with the laughter still gives me actual chills.
Sorter’s note: I’m keeping it a secret for now what segment of the song I’m referring to but I actually started working on storyboarding for a brief animation of Zib to an audio snippet earlier this month.
Sample lyrics (approx. translated):
[Bacterial Contamination
You're not worth believing in my mind
Recently my "common sense" has corroded
I can't even hold my purity
The contamination is spreading
You’ll want to become stronger
Even if I barely survive
It hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts]
[My contamination has healed
I’ve been starting to feel much better
All because I transmitted it to her
Aha Aha Aha AHAHAHA…
Bacterial Contamination
Everyone's infected wounds keep bleeding
Killing themselves from contamination
They can't even die with grace now
The contamination has spread
None of you are here; you're dead in my mind
I'm eventually alone
It hurts (x13)]
The Distortionist -
Song Artist: GHOST & Pals
Sorter’s note: Oh hey look, a ditty specifically about gaslighty, abusive assholes for the self loathing bug bastard that started his own cult.
Sample Lyrics:
[Surely you can see the problem
I don't wanna lose my own reflection
A deplorable perception of me
Was none other than an image of you
You're making a wreck of broken glass and leaving me a fuckin' mess!
Bending light in a way that shows exactly how the story goes]
[In all this madness, it's madness
Oh-ho, it's sickening, it's sickening
You know it's unfair, it's unfair
How you distorted my reflection
You know it's too late…
You're lost in a world of funhouse mirrors, twisted for eternity
Bending light in a way that shows refraction of hypocrisy
Whimsical, dear, your lies are clear, now, who the hell would've ever guessed?
Play my games and abide my ways, there's no way you can compensate]
CORROSION
Song Artist: R.I.P.
Sorter’s note: I’m just gonna let “I've lived in fear my whole life; I'll give you a taste, you can't change my mind” speak for itself. This is one of the more tragedy flavored ones.
Sample Lyrics:
[Don't you know? I'm truly evil, and
Everybody 'round me's dropping dead!
Overflowing, oddly gleeful, and
You're all blue and cold, yet painted red!
Undergone drastic changes
Oh, it's the only thing that's left for me
All along I've known it's wrong
But I can't fix what I am
It's all I know
Low and behold!
I'm truly evil, and
You're a person standing in my way!
Have I shown I can be lethal
I'll leave them all to rot and to decay
Hold on tight, it will be painful
Oh, it's more than your weak mind can conceive
You're all blind, I'll take what's mine
Oh, I wish I could restrain
It's all I can be]
Wake Up!
Song Artist: Oomph!
Fact of fun: The German version of this song goes really hard too.
Sorter’s note: This one was selected more to reflect the broader nature of the Zimvoid and the hierarchy itself.
Sample Lyrics:
[Got no time for waiting
Got no time to waste
Everywhere machines here
Set a deadly pace
Got no time for questions
You have work to do
Got no time to stand now
If you stop, you lose]
[Your life is seeping through your fingers like sand
And time, it flies like the wind
You run in circles and you're losing your mind
But all you want is to win
Just breathe in
Then breathe out
Wake up! Now you're stuck in this game
And even if you run, the score is the same
Wake up! Now you're stuck in this game
You're just stuck in this game]
Confrontation
Song Artist: Frank Wildhorn, Et al.
Fact of fun: yeah yeah it’s from that Jekyll and Hyde Musical. The one people been making animatics of forever and they had every right to be because it’s still good decades later.
Sorter’s note: A little red meat for some of you who like to toy with the two minds, one body idea/headcanon, or your cute little corruption arc narratives.
Sample Lyrics:
[This is not a dream, my friend
And it will never end!
This one is the nightmare that goes on!
Hyde is here to stay,
No matter what you may pretend,
And He'll flourish, long after you're gone!
Soon you will die, and my memory will hide you!
You cannot choose but to lose control.
You can't control me! I live deep inside you!
Each day you'll feel me devour your soul!]
Amygdala’s Ragdoll -
Song Artist: GHOST & Pals
Fact of fun: For some reason the chorus of this caught on as a little animation trend once. Think they dubbed it the Trypophobia Meme. If I do actually ever do something with it myself, I know I’m not calling it that.
Sample Lyrics:
[Today something changed
I figured it’s true
The frontal lobe placed me behind my own strings
‘Cus I defy the way the game works
I’ll say it again, I’m only getting worse]
[Say we take what had been torn apart
Say we mend any patchwork discord
Turning eyes to the trypo-puppeteer
Waiting for the world to burn
So, One two three, and we’ll tie the tourniquet
Larvae eating away at everything
Word goes ‘round, I’m the trypo-puppeteer
Laugh along, I’m spreading holes
Now I know this has always been my fault
and I can’t inhale anymore]
Honorable Mentions:
• C e n t i p e d e by GHOST & Pals, omitted for personal and practical reasons.
• Honey I’m Home, another GHOST hit, omitted because most of my Zib association with that goes along with my personal “darker harvest” theory/headcannon
A Messy, Sedulous Necropsy of Zib Membrane
That’s what we call him right? Not Invader Zib? Hell if I know, we’ll let the tags decide.
Whatever he is christened by his author, enemies, or fans, this titular villain of the Zimvoid is such a mind blaster to me. I wish we had more time with him within the comics. I wish he had been a concept explored in the show. I wish he had a movie. I am having fun with a little hyperbole here, but I truly do find him just as interesting and potentially pivotal of an antagonist as Tak was, if not even more.
Both, of course, were so badly underutilized for sake of the series status quo. To that, Zib was a much bigger threat than Tak, and especially to that of the comics’ own. He potentially changes everything, and somehow absolutely nothing by the end. The TV show always had a more overt tone of cruelty and the macabre floating about its themes. These print issues? I don’t dislike them. It’s still recognizably invader Zim, and the more the merrier, content-wise, but longtime fans can feel that there was this change of essence in the transition. More obviously, in the art, but more subtly, there was an audible softening of that bluntly darker, cynical tone the show was made iconic for. To put it very generally, they lean a little more into the whackiness of this world, there’s a lot more dark comedy to be found in what I’ve seen so far rather than in your face darkness, and in the absence of the ost and voice acting the show accustomed us to, the comics leave a lot more room to be read as you wile. To me, they’re goofier and more episodic in spirit.
This all is not a critique or rating on the comics.. It’s purely, I feel, why Zib stuck out to me all the more jarringly in his context. His reveal was a genuine twist that brought forth stakes higher than arguably any other threat in the entire franchise. He represents a plausible while horrifying prophecy of our main characters if only they made worse decisions. The most interesting of all, for every piece of amazing information he fed to us, he bred dozens more questions about everything than he answered, from Irken machinations, to his ambivalent backstory, to the secrets hidden by the sum of his parts.
Though he was left evidently alive at the end of his story, I don’t see any chance for him making a return, so he is memorialized as another defeated one-off the writers have brisked past and left behind for good. Therefore, I’m here today to take what we got and present it on the metaphorical autopsy table. I want to really pull apart why this character alone pulled me back into the TV series, really just flay open the bits I can’t get out of my own head and dig harder until we find something or we run out of threads to tug at. Starting with the one already hanging out of my mouth, but
• B.E.F
“Bad End Friend” is a term I learned the meaning of within the last 12 hours or so of writing this, and I’m exuberant over that discovery. It’s a niche trope i didn’t know ive been a giant fan of since I was a child. Summed up, fictional characters from beloved media, typically, animated child protagonists… given the worst case scenario treatment. Their “bad ending”, whether that means a corruption arc, demonic possession, a lovecraftIan tragedy… usually something that’s anywhere along the lines of a fate worse than death to a full villainous turnover. As a treat. The concept is strongly associated with fanworks and AUs of popular media, but just as often this is something that becomes explored in the source material as well. A couple great examples I know would probably be Ice Prince Finn from Adventure Time or what happens in Undertale when you decide you want to run the most depraved playthrough possible. From a more mature story, “Evil” Morty is another validly arguable sample.
Besides a bit of a fondness I got going for certain dark or spooky themes in general, what I REALLY love about canonical BEFs the most is their utility as characterization tools. They’re the “having your cake and eating it too” option! The perfect way for an author to explore certain things about any character without actually committing to well… a bad ending.
Almost always, they are necessarily hypothetical or reversible. If they’re not reversible, they go often hand-in-hand with a little universe tampering to make happen. Sometimes, this means the story goes the way of time travel and branching off butterfly effects. Sometimes it means confirming multiverse theory, which can be the same thing depending on your semantical position.
And Zib crossed off the BEF qualifications by far and away. His implications are extremely dark given any pause think about them, and he’s a living, disturbing tragedy in aftermath. If you want to view a rigamarole about that aspect of his characterization as he appeared in the comics, someone else long beat me to that and I’m enthusiastically recommending a peek at their own work. I’m thrilled to do so and build a little upon that with those extended what-if-wonders.
• Lessons From a Lost Episode
Elephant in the room I haven’t seen someone ask yet, uh..
By show rules, isn’t Zib supposed to be a clear case of the writers committing the sin of retcon? By show I’m including the unaired scripts, including “10 Minutes to Doom”. In that one we had what looked like the potential setup for a Zib case, and it was deconstructed across the whole episode.
In short recap, Dib learned the hard and reckless way about the true nature of what Irken PAKs actually are. This is not an inventory bag, it is not “gear”. It’s the actual Irken entity- at least, the primary component.
Detaching it from the organic shell essentially caused a temporary split into two instances of Zim, desperately trying to connect back together under threat of obliteration.
Like let me be very clear about this,
The PAK is an autonomous instance of Zim’s consciousness, and it’s the main one. We’ve seen it act to save his life when his body has been out cold or flatlined, and he doesn’t appear the least bit disoriented or confused once “he” wakes and jumps back into the action. There’s no known separate computer assistant AI or security autopilot in there. That code, that program, IS Zim. As Long as the PAK is active, he is capable of staying fully conscious and able to react to what’s happening around him, and that’s what we’ve been seeing, his own actions.
Zim proved me right when Virooz tried to replace him and detached the PAK. Take note of his phrasing after the chair event™.
“I” activated the protocol. Immediately after Virooz ran off with my shell.
“I” Voluntarily chose to do so.
I don’t remember it playing out like that in “10 Minutes to Doom”.
Attaching to a new host wasn’t the first reflex. Dib was not the least bit aware that that he has literally holding the actual Zim captive in sense, and the latter was fighting like a cornered animal to escape him. Failing that, alongside the distance between him and his original body growing fast, he made a last desperate gambit, and he willingly connected himself into Dib’s body.
I can see why he thought this was better than nothing, no matter how repulsive the notion might have been. If he couldn’t fend Dib off physically, he could incapacitate him in some fashion by trying to overtake his will. Maybe give the shell a better chance to catch up, maybe in the longshot hope of being able to pilot dib in order to become whole with the correct host again. And you can say he succeeded, at least in dominating bodily control away from Dib, but at the cost of his already tenuously held sanity. This could be because of the interference of Dib’s own mind still resisting to fully submit, or malfunctions because of the biological incompatibility; however, the thing that Dib mentally becomes is only the basic idea of what “Zim” is. Instead of remembering it needs to reunite with its shell ASAP, the PAK mistakes Dib’s body for its own and goes through the manic motions of following the Invader mission. And it does this, weirdly enough, with almost no regard for blowing its cover.
When things are set right again, Zim’s later words near the episode ending revealed that he knew that was an unsustainable state.
Such a risk was not just accounted for, he was actually banking on it if that clock had hit zero. If Zim had truly lost, if he was really doomed to meet his end on this nasty rock in the middle of Nowhere, Space, then by every damned circuit in his being, he was going to take down this insolent fool boy and as many other humans possible with him. A dying act of vengeful rage.
• The Exceptional… Exception
Now, wouldn’t all of this be the definitive reason for Zib’s existence to be an aberrant impossibility? Yes, but actually no. Fun thing about multiverses is if something doesn’t work in one setting, you can just tweak a few dials and suddenly you have a world where the impossible becomes possible. But that’s a pretty cheap answer, isn’t it? So, what exactly was that crucial difference?
What happened in Zib’s timeline that went down so, so divergently from the events of 10 Minutes to Doom?
Because the only one who was in any position to explain it for us was Zib himself, and he’s proven to be one of the most unreliable of narrators. It’s as @dana-chan-the-control-brain already spared no effort to demonstrate, when he does tell us something about his past, his story is pocked with contradicting half-truths or outright lies. Ergo it helps to break down each recount of events to pick out the real facts.
Version 1: This is an alternate version of dib who defeated his complementing Zim (logically sensible) and went on to achieve all of the success and respect he sought after in his timeline (absolute bullshit). He kind of gestures and only implies about what has happened to his body while explaining that he came to his current understanding of Irken technology by studying it through Zim’s lab (a partial truth). He lets slip in passing that he has in fact fused with the PAK in order to learn how to alter and reprogram its coding, lessons he has applied to Number 2 in order to have a brainwashed pawn (also apparently true).
Version 2, when cornered and red handed: This is an alternate version of Dib who managed to specifically stop Zim's mission (Again, makes sense) but somehow could not convince the world of his findings or his warnings about the Irken Armada (*VERY eyebrow raising). Frustrated with the people’s lack of cooperation, he decides he has no choice but to physically merge with Zim’s PAK post-mortem (concerning and evidently mostly accurate), dominate the Earth himself, and enslave humans to help him in his efforts (highly troubling and probably true). The construction of his EMP super-weapon is successful, but ultimately led to the creation of the Zimvoid when the device was field tested (self evident, absolutely horrifying).
You know what I noticed was missing from both of these accounts? Exactly how his Zim was defeated. Which honestly could have been some beyond useful wisdom to pass along to the main Dib??? More than anything else? I’m not going to fault our boy for not pressing that matter better under the awing circumstance; however, there’s an implication I’ve been reading between lines.
When Zib mentions “defeating” his own Zim, he’s talking about something different than ours.
When our Dib has always talked about “defeating” Zim, he’s meant incapacitation and capture. Throughout the show he explicitly wants to present Zim before an audience alive and whole. Yeah, he fantasizes about other people torturing or disassembling him for study, but HIS role was supposed to be reaping the fame for an undeniable, ground-breaking discovery. Conspiracies and cryptids are all this kid breathes and lives by! And as long as pop culture has always been fascinated with the paranormal, and he has to know this full well, people keep bringing forward hoax after hoax after scam. I mean there’s a freaking current one or few still going IRL about this exact topic. Dib would want no room left for being dismissed as another one of those con artists.
Nonetheless, I actually doubt this is the reason Zib couldn’t get through to the scientific community. A genuine alien lifeform, even a dead one, could still be confirmed by any basic medical examination. The world thinks Dib is too crazy to listen to, but his father is still Professor Membrane. In "10 Minutes to Doom" OUR Dib got as close as having Membrane literally analyzing a PAK, or at worst, preparing to. “Ultimate Dib” gets his hands on the same thing and pulls a move I’d expect from an HP Lovecraft Protagonist instead.
We’re assuming way too much to what these two Dibs have in common, because this ^^^ is really what made the Zimvoid an outlier in the multiverse. That world didn’t only have a very different, more threatening Zim from the main timeline, it had the Dib who proved even more formidable, cunning, and ruthless, even before the fusion.
He didn’t obtain that PAK ala the “10 minutes to Doom” accident, it’s a personal trophy. This is extra strange remembering that capturing an Irken is realistically more easy than killing one. They’re seriously more tenacious than kudzu and will even fight back in PAK form alone. I’m convinced that whatever sort of final showdown made the Ultimate Dib the victor, there are two optional endings on the table.
Option 1: There was not a body even left intact enough to bring in to research. Maybe Dib’s fault, maybe an accident, maybe even Zim’s own luck running out and his incompetent antics finally swallowed him (and possibly GIR). This theory assumes that the PAK was the only sort of remains to come into Dib’s recovery/possession.
Option 2: Curiosity Killed the cat,
but satisfaction brought it back.
Or, the one I personally headcanon. Dib… all Dibs, I assume, don’t just hate the Irken species. They are mesmerized by them, and all that they represent from his perspective. Firstly, the epic villain he gets to roleplay nemesis to in order to feel his own worth and importance. Secondly, an unknown wonder from beyond the boundaries of the cosmos. He’s not really a ghost buster or a Men In Black agent at heart, but a scientist, like his father. Underneath his contempt for Zim’s plans to destroy the world is a genuine and appropriately childish awe for alien presence, especially for Zim’s technology. His silent, dopey smile when Tak’s ship ended up in his backyard said more than words ever will..
Earlier in the show, a great deal of Dib’s time and effort was spent on trying to infiltrate the lower levels of Zim’s base. Sneaking into the house was hard enough, but the computer security can’t be bypassed like the gnomes. Not even by Zim himself unless he really is all himself. Perhaps you’re starting to sniff where I’m going with this one when I refer back to “Bolognius Maximus”. I’ve another reference that’s a little more on the nose, and a lot more… dark.
Were an expired Irken husk before you, you too might take your victory and cash in then. Still, who knows what sudden impulse may run through the head of a less humble version of yourself, one some could call greedier, obsessive to a fault, a screw or two loose, yet, a hell of a smart cookie. Smart enough to see it for what it actually was, the keys to a whole world of discovery that went so many layers deeper than they could ever imagine. It’s possible the Ultimate Dib already learned beforehand the same hard lessons about the PAKs that our own did, and took that understanding toward not repeating the same mistake this time. What happened to Zim? I think he was murdered in cold blood, body, and entity. “10 Minutes to Doom” showed us a fight between 2 brains clinging to one body, struggling until one overpowered another, but that’s not what this is. Through whatever means of science were available to him, this Dib has probably tried to “disarm” the technology by either erasing Zim’s consciousness out of it altogether, or by forcing the autonomous code into a kind of dormancy. His intentions were to render it back to its basic hardware without losing its precious knowledge and usefulness, something like the brain-filled tank that was wired into Skrang’s head. Zim’s PAK doesn’t cling onto his body like a parasitic teratoma this time; it’s merged in a literal sense with his nervous and circulatory system. As well, he has fooled the device’s ability to detect and reject a foreign host shell, the exact same way he deceived the the base’s security AI. If an Irken biology is what these measures authorize to command them and their secrets, then he had the tools on hand to give them just that- in an atrocity I like to call
the darker harvest.
Within this theory, there is not as much room to wonder exactly what became of Zim’s organic remains.
But where Dib fucked up was, for the second time, in his ignorance to the true nature of what he was even playing with. That was a mistake that even the mighty Elder Brains of Judgementia lost themselves to; How much more vulnerable was the weak, human mind? Though Zim can be devoured, he can never be digested. In that fact was born this aberration against nature, sanity, and humanity alike.
"Have you ever heard of insect politics? Neither have I. Insects… don't have politics. They're very… brutal. No compassion, no compromise. We can't trust the insect. I'd like to become the first… insect politician. Y'see, I'd like to, but… I'm afraid, uh… I'm saying… I'm saying I - I'm an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over… and the insect is awake." - Seth Brundle, The Fly, 1986
By fusing what is half-mad and what is utterly mad, neither being was cured, only assimilated into the birth of a new madness. The madness of the creature that snickers behind the curtain in the Zimvoid. I rightfully fear that lonesome thing, but not I think as much as I pity him.
• Dejavu, or Re:Plagarism
One more thing about the Zimvoid arc I find curious is the way it makes you question more and more just how much of the aberration is actually still Dib, and how much of it is Zim's infection haunting him. He does nothing with all of his intellect, his resources, and his time in the void doing anything but surrounding himself in everything he claims he despises. He decries alien tyranny in one breath while lording over a homemade, cruel dictatorship in another. He calls for eradication of the very race who's technology and physiology he has thoroughly appropriated. He laments feeling unable to protect the Earth from the Armada alone, yet sneers literally through Irken teeth to insult humans as inferior and of no value to him any longer. Our Dib spent the whole damn show longing for the support of other people, but Zib pushes away potential allies in his arrogance. His broken timeline never became a Dibvoid instead because while only half of his mind can't stand Irkens, both of the souls inside him remember that they loathe and look down upon a Dib, deep inside.
The corruption goes as far as even subverting his own creativity. None of Zib's plans are wholly original. His anti-Irken weapon was already a concept blueprinted inside of that PAK before the merge. Our Dib has several times shown a propensity for some DIY ingenuity, sometimes dipping a toe into the supernatural. Zib entirely calls upon, scavenges and regurgitates Irken designs with a few modifications or upgrades. The Dib Virus, I think is his most uninspired creation yet, for it's original form was always something inside of Zim, even if the latter himself was not aware of the fact. Like all else, it is a weapon he has plundered, customized, and turned around on everyone else for his own selfish ends. This brief point I will end on one  more reflection. The one kind of help Zim ever allowed at his side were the likes of GIR and his own creations. Unable to connect and cooperate with his peers and own kind, his ego preferred to be around those defective machines he related to- drones to be owned by him and always loyally at his beck and call. A slave to admire him unconditionally is the only companionship he's ever been willing to admit to desiring.
And what was Number 2's purpose again? What role exactly were the arena combatants auditioning for, when you think about it?
Well no joke, hecc you too. I literally had to stop myself short from finishing a sentence during drafting this that started off “the closest we ever did get to see to what that ability to introspect would do to him was Zib because-“
And I stopped because I realized that Zib is really squirmy and hard to use as an example for much on this front, because Dib’s still the dominant majority of that fusion. But damn you this is such a delicious tangent. The most I brought myself to speak of it without poking was this here in the tags
Like they’re literally mirrors of the worst in each other in a lot of ways but the bit that distinguishes them the MOST to me is that Zim is the sorest loser and Dib is a sore fucking winner. Zim could never cope with being in Dib’s position and knowing it. That selective mental blindness to failure is all he has because whenever he DOES have to accept defeat, at best he throws a screaming, rampaging tantrum.
At worst, he can’t go on if he can’t see a way to bounce back, or if he loses his faith in that glorified version of himself. That’s why his crash in Enter the Florpus Happens. That’s why “Mopiness of Doom” happens. Dib, the arch nemesis, is necessary for that inner narrative to not expire. Zim knows he’s the main character, and protagonists, especially those of legends are only as compelling as the monsters they slay. He needs his antagonist to validate his invasion, because Red/Purple’s half-hearted humoring can only give him so much juice when he’s witnessing his own stagnation in the field and every other invader speeding past him in their progress. Everyone else on Earth is either pathetically unthreatening, or they don’t give him the time of day.
Dib’s the godsend excuse he needs to explain why the he’s not living up to his expectations- Someone else to be “the problem” so he doesn’t have to have that band snap (spiral into an introspective depression or meltdown). He’s not even aware that this is the nature of their symbiosis. I fully believe he would kill Dib again, just as remorselessly as in “Bad, Bad Rubber Piggy” if given the chance. And he would celebrate… until it dawns on him that he still can’t conquer the earth and that Dib’s defeat actually didn’t slay the dragon. Zim is freaking pitiful to me in how jacked up and kind of destined for self implosion he is. He only thrives and feels his self worth in a constant state of conflict and chaos, neither winning or losing.
In other words, he’s a perfect war machine. An enthusiastic tool of perpetual conflict and mass destruction,
if only he could actually be controlled. Then he’d be the best thing to happen to Irkens since nachos. Sucks for them, though, he’s designed not to be.
However, I digress. As for Dib, there’s no effing way that twerp has any clue either about what’s going on in Zim’s head/back. He doesn’t even have enough of the full picture to guess at it, and besides, he has his own priorities and his own savior of the world complex he needs Zim for in just a similar fashion. But while Zim is teetering on the edge of that aforementioned lovecraftian brand of melodramatic darkness, Dib can actually take a narrative punch.
This kid doesn’t have the luxury of a malfunctioning neurology that auto-slaps down offense or uncomfortable information. Neither does he have decades of military propaganda that propped him up as the universe’s pinnacle species since birth. He’s a freaking 12 year old human boy. He for a decent part, at least much better than Zim, knows his own size and position in the galaxy. This alien is the invader, and he’s playing home team on defense. In fact, Dib has seemingly lived most of his damn life so far on defense. He doesn’t have a lot of victories he can hold onto for a boost and he doesn’t forget it. He doesn’t have reliable allies or servants. He has ONE human being he somewhat gets along with and can have occasionally positive interactions with. Yeah, it’s sad to see that it’s led to him developing a remarkably negative self image and some amount of self loathing, but Dib has actually, somehow, managed himself pretty well under that. He gets up after falls fine, he shrugs off near-death close calls, and he looks this overpowered, lunatic bug freak right in the spider eyes and says to himself “Yeah. This is the fight I’m choosing, and I’m going to win because I have to.” Zim’s bubble wrapped. Dib is tempered in flame, with a self image that has nowhere to go but up.
And he actually still has a hobby or two outside of Zim. He’s arrogant in his own way, but not to the point of inhumanity. He’s an antagonist, but Zim is a villain. If Zim wins, there’s a timer ticking to some point where he still comes freaking undone and is unsatisfied. If Dib wins, really wins, that fixes Dib. And that’s a perfectly logical narrative to weave, given the facts. But goddamn is dib really awful at taking a W without being really overcompensative about it.
Yet…the Zib case.
Your question, right.
My answer, at least under the web I’ve weaved, is definitely the latter option. Where I considered some fear I had of the idea of Dib’s ability to put together and not sugarcoat shit with Zim’s whole life story, banishment and fake invasion and sabotaging his own leaders and all… you’d especially worry for that seeing that Dib’s seemingly conquered the PAK in some fashion, given that it hasn’t killed him and Zim’s personality is either erased or dormant…
but that’s not what actually happened. Instead, we actually did see Dib being the one who survived, but not untainted by the merge. He was just the next host for the PAK’s double edged sword- superior intellect at the cost of bearing the involuntary madness, warts and all. If that sickness could overcome the collective control brains, how tf was a single human’s mind supposed to stand a chance against the same corruption?
Potential spoiler for anyone who never caught up on og Adventure time, but in other words, Dib basically did the equivalent of murdering the ice king, and then slapping the cursed crown onto his own big fat head in a reckless grasp for power. Which, in adventure time, messing with the ice crown does not go well. For anyone. Ever. It’s the classic folly of he who fucks around with things beyond his limited understanding, in his ignorance, isn’t ready to contend with the consequences.
Fuck around, the universe lets you find out, no matter who or what you think you are.
And the funny thing is, if you actually read Lovecraft, that’s the real core soul of his horror, not repulsion of the spooky scary monsters just because they’re out of this world.
But the horror of Zib is that he smoothly rose up to both embrace and embody the paradox that keeps Zim going, but with Dib’s sense to competently see a plan through setbacks. Zib is the brutality of the invader, given the humanity to empathize with others well enough to make them believe his lies too. He’s Zim’s ferocity and Dib’s cynical bitterness given control back, and that’s what makes him the most dangerous entity in the entire franchise.
So there was a note under my post about Zim hovering a finger over the self destruct switch on his first day on Earth that just cracked open something in my mind.
Cause…Oh. Oh hecc you, @murhuedur. You actually touched on like, my favorite thing about this character, period. I really like this take, I do. It’s a good one. I ponder, still,
In my own opinion, it’s actually genuine confidence and arrogance, but Zim’s delusions of grandeur are as a thin rubber band. They can stretch out to wild lengths and remain malleable enough to bend around truth as he wills,
But there’s a hard limit out there eventually, and should reality require him to stretch his cognitive dissonance just too far, it’s a violent snap-back to full clarity. I don’t think he’s faking it or always lying to everyone else about what hot shit he is, because I think he fully believes those lies about as fast as he can speak them, even if he will later realize he was wrong after a cosmic punch to the face.
Like, Zim’s smart, but smart people aren’t inherently rational ones. Within Zim, the tallest, hell, maybe even Skoodge, there’s sometimes this very short-sighted flippancy about what is objectively true/false that peeks out every now and again in their psychology. I mean, humans sometimes do this too when it’s convenient to their interests, just, obviously not to goofy cartoon character levels if they want to function in society.
Zim has whatever this flaw is and cranked up to 11, maybe as a side effect of his PAK defects. Sometimes it gets him into DEEP shit, but it’s also his biggest mental shield. Zim has like no fortitude against spiraling into a full on depression or a justifiable panic attack over the smallest concession of being an absolute failure to his race. That weaponized denial that makes him so dangerous to himself and others also keeps him together and motivated forward. But it’s not largely a conscious lie he’s telling himself. It’s genuine faith he’s trying to manifest into matter through sheer force of his will.
His dogmatic mantra, “I am Zim” and what it means to him is a statement he holds on such conviction it overpowered and hijacked the ego of 3 control brains at once.
If I were inserting him into DnD he’d have the wisdom stat of a stale poptart and a 20+ thrown into charisma. He’s faking it without even understanding he’s faking it.
But were he completely detached from reality, he’d be WAY more likely than even now to accidentally get himself killed. While a narcissistic level of self esteem is what lets him ignore and selectively unhear inconvenient truths, the adrenaline of immediate life or death danger is what grounds him back in the real world. You notice over time that as self-sabotaging as he normally is, he seems to act his most rational and competent when he’s suddenly put against the grindstone and self preservation HAS to jump into the driver’s seat. He basically survives his day to day on a tightrope between a falsely glorious narrative of himself, and his perceptive anxiety both tugging him to land on either side of the fence when something big happens.
In “The Trial”, he wastes very little time on his expected bullshit or his confidence in being able to just win over the approval of his judges.. by virtue of being his awesome self. He spent most of that ordeal on the verge of a heart attack, squirmed to find an escape, and actually tried to DENY causing the death of two Almighty Tallests (reminder that he usually owns up to his atrocities with downright offensive pride). He understood the full gravity of an existence evaluation and how cooked his goose was. As soon as the situation resolves and he’s no longer in that danger, it’s right back to full trust of his status as an invader, and in Red and Purple as his biggest fans. When his disguise starts to slip in front of Skool kids he knows are dumb as a bag of rocks, he can silver tongue his way around that without skipping a beat. Losing his disguise in front of a bunch of alien-obsessed adults? Uh oh, pants-shitting terror, this is potentially game-over levels of bad, immediately gtfo of here. Stand there, chest beat, and scold the obviously rogue duty-mode Gir all day until the second it actually tries to kill you and you suddenly have to realize you’re not the one holding the cards anymore to save your own life.
The other way this quirk of his really shows through is in his selective memory. Zim has this skill to repress down and push away unpleasant experiences that I think some of us can only dream we had. I love it because it’s equal parts a comedic and analytical goldmine.
Tak, who actually posed a legit threat to his entire mission and tried herself to chip through that massive wall of denial he’s shielded in- same Tak who’s powerful af ship was stolen and desecrated by Zim’s arch nemesis… she’s not just an afterthought in his mind after that mess. He’s literally pushed that one out of his thoughts altogether in the comics. Like she, and Skoodge, who he can’t fucking stand, might as well have never even existed, even while GIR’s trying to remind him. That time he played around with time travel and it was one of the biggest clusterfucks he quickly lost control of? The bologna incident he stooped so low as to ask dib to help him with? You must be thinking of someone else. Nope. Not a thing. Lalala, can’t even hear you. This is also what makes it no wonder he deeply struggles with actually learning from certain mistakes.
From an outsider’s eye this behavior of his is baffling. It makes him look actually insane or at least obnoxiously obstinate. And I think both assumptions are half right, because this is clearly not the result of mere stupidity. Those truths are simply wayyyy too discordant with his view of himself to devote surface memory to, or too uncomfortable, unless and until, of course, you confront him with them in a fashion where that rubber band has to snap, that bubble pops, and he instantly sobers out of that complacency.
Literally god forbid he ever stops being defective in this way or is given the ability to reckon with the reality of his situation and his history all at once. I’m not even just talking about his job or banishment. I’m talking about his entire life. This chaotic, flexible, incoherent mindstate is the only branch he’s holding onto from dropping into a much more horrifying chasm beneath himself, the depth of which we can only guess. I straight up have no idea what he would do or what could happen to him if he could, even for a moment, rationally comprehend his every action, memory, and empirical truth all at the same time. Seriously, leave that Pak’s Gordian Knot be, or I imagine there could be an HP Lovecraft type of breakdown in the making.
Okay so literally neither writing the necropsy post nor finishing the Skoodge animation has been able to burn the brainworms out, so I need to reach for the nuclear option. Freakin, y’all, fandom, weirdos, help me. I got impulses to begin a little Zib animation and I’m gridlocked by my options. Help settle this so I can stop procrastinating.
SO LIKE, HEAR ME OUT,
I Have No GIR and I Must Scream
Comic main Dib: Pretty much the same as Florpus
Zib The Ultimate Dib: There is an important distinction that must be drawn between the words “dissection” and “vivisection”. A distinction that would appear to be lost on this guy.
The difference between pilot, series and movie Dibs is just the amount of time they would hesitate before dissecting Zim (and would they hesitate at all)
I mean obviously not just that but you know what I mean
Aha! Now that I finally have some more time on my hands, I can consult with the results of that poll I put out and * blinking rapidly * well WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH THIS?! YA SILLIES TIED IT.
Alight, put the ball back in my court, will you.. well looks like Contamination’s (yes yes may we all point and laugh at the original typo) what you’re getting, muahahaaha!
This is going to be a headache to finish I just know it already.