Wheatons Law - Tumblr Posts

My last two braincells staring at this discourse hot plate I’ve avoided touching for this long like

And ah….

Fuck it. Someone is going to ask me sooner or later or start over-assuming a world of stuff and I’d rather be on the record than not about the elephant in the room if we get to that point. It’s a question I care to try answering genuinely.

So, I wasn’t really an active participant in the larger “fandom” back when fanbase culture, especially on tumblr, was memorably a whole different ballgame. If anything, I just remember being in high school and seeing this ship actually held up as so omnipresent and near rabidly supported among same-aged fans that it makes the current popularity of it feel almost niche by comparison.

Note I said feel, because lord knows I don’t have any actual backing on this besides a personal anecdote. Someone mentioned a valid point about how people who invest a lot of energy into character shipping generally calmed the hell down relative to what it looked like in the early 2010s and I have to agree with that perspective. But I’m also rambling really off-topic now.

I don’t Ship ZaDR and in fact I actually could be counted in that crowd of strong dislikers of it. Like 7/10 times I’m a personal cringer and those 3/10 times is probs under special circumstances. I just know a lot of it squicks me out for the hopefully obvious reasons unless you tweak ages and get way into OOC range. Most of the kind of ZaDR content that would gross me tf out is, I remind myself all the time, usually from pretty young fans who just don’t understand the gap is there and how steep it is in canon. It’s not just a numbers technicality. Zim being roughly 16 in Irk years does not translate to his equivalence to a 16 Earth-year old human anymore than we can say a 6 year old… idk, kobold is developmentally level to a 6 old human child. (For non DnD fans, Kobolds are full egg-laying adults at that age even though they can live to be around 120).

Dib is a human tween, and Zim is not just at the maturity rate for his species, he’s got over an earth century of military training/service and a little fry cooking on his resume. He went through the same underground educational class with The current Tallests. Zim, Skoodge, Red, and Purple are all from the same-aged generation of Irken stock. It’s sometimes easy to forget that when Zim’s a uniquely petite, whimsical creature and the characters he spends the most time interacting with are literal middle schoolers. Imagine shipping Red with Dib instead and you might realize we really let the height, mannerisms, and voice shape a lot of perception here. Or hey, maybe that’s just my take.

I can’t make any definitive comment on the dozens of iterations of ZaDR that are changing canon factors around since A. I don’t go looking for and researching any of that out of a personal disinterest. B. Something something, idk. Eat, Drink, and be Merry, and C. It’s flatly easier and I have more to say about the show as it exists because that’s the material I have on hand to speak for. I’m not here for high school tier media literacy and moralizing shit-flinging over imaginary scenarios about imaginary people either, just continuing a Fan to Fans dialogue on the matter.

So, as best as I can manage to be both some pretend outside observer and also in a position to agree with ZaDR hate, these are the main points I believe driving the most disapproval of this ship (as perceived on face value)

• ZaDR is a ship between characters which are unquestionably considered to be an adult and child by the canon setting.

Zim, is around 16 in Irk Years, 126-150+ something or older in Earth years, and “we have no actual idea” in equivalent human years, but definitely past that of cultural and physical adult maturity. There’s no real if, ands, or buts about that reality of the show and I think this is the single thing most driving the modern push against the ship or at least the vitriolic intensity behind that push. The fact that it’s remembered as a children’s cartoon makes anything that remotely smells like a pedophilla-adjacent topic, even if/when that smell comes from kneejerk assumptions or rumors, does to shipping discourse what mishandled gasoline does to an open bonfire. Predictably and reliably. And that is something that’s been ticking up in many other fandoms right now, just so happening to also include this one.

• ZaDR taken literally is very arguably incomprehensible outside of an OOC or AU context.

And this is the kind of thing I would otherwise love to have some fervent and good faith in-depth conversations with other fans about and elaborate on if they want to contest that, but as far as I have seen, most ZaDR shippers don’t to any degree of aggressiveness that antis try to characterize of them (appealing again to limited experience). And that’s something respectable in its own right if I’m making a correct observation. Like as far as I know these characters it's borderline a stretch already to conclude that Irkens, which are uniformly asexual cyborgs, will readily bond and affectionate in a way comparable to human romantic love.

• Jhonen Vasquez openly doesn’t like ZaDR.

Not that it matters to my opinion or that there’s any prescriptive weight to his stance, but I’d wager it’s probably from some combination of the above two points. Though, those who hate the ship enough to devote entire websites or blogs to fill their time up maintaining a crusade with probably point to Vasquez’s input here more like a post-hoc justification rather than an original motivation. But it gets brought up enough that I found it worth keeping in mind in understanding the crowd.

• A possible contrarian sentiment against what can be viewed as a recent trend of every canon hero/villain rivalry becoming an etl within common fanon. Maybe also a contrarian sentiment against romantically shipping every fictional duo with a speck of chemistry by default when a friendship interpretation is no less valid.

This idea I’m kind of just speculating about instead of reporting on. Maybe also projecting…Was just kind of a gut hunch that I can understand, even if I’d still find it more than anything else on the table to be a trivial reason to be downright destructive or confrontational about broad fandom engagement. It’s also a point not remotely unique to IZ pairings. I’d feel the same way if I saw people shipping Doofensmirtz and Perry the Platypus, or, SpongeBob and squidward in a “Problematics discussion aside, this just feels like a random bandwagon because someone could” sense. I really wouldn’t be hasty to assume this is homophia based, as I have seen some people suggest, because it’s actually a complaint I see way more often from queer aromantics and asexuals (who I emphasize with, being on the grey spectrum) than straight people, but that could also be the selection bias of my circles talking. When I actually was poking a nose around the web and getting through puberty in early 2010s America, ZaDR shipping was something I associated more with the same straight girls who were borderline obnoxiously obsessed with mlm relationships (anyone else remember the hayday of the Yaoi fangirl trope?) than actual LGBT+ people trying to find representation.

But yeah I just really don’t enjoy ZaDR myself and I do sometimes get annoyed at how it’s basically the most popular and well known ship within IZ as a community. But it’s also kind of fascinating as like, a phenomenon? The entire radioactive shitstorm surrounding and watching it gain over a decade of internet history (god I feel old now) and most of all I just find it very intimidating to be both so everywhere yet at the same time so freaking gd in range of some loud hornet nests.

So in the anyway, idk, I hope that was an honest, somewhat solid contribution to the conversation here, at risk of alienating some of you if my tone came across wrong 👉👈

Btw if there’s any false impression I really hope I did not send out above all, it is any ambiguity or hypocrisy around the pro-ship stance in my intro. Just because I find iterations of ZaDR disgustang and not aligned with my view of the canon doesn’t mean any terminally online antiship/pp nonsense claims me as an ally or promoter of it, capeesh?

i know its probably not my place to ask, but im genuinely curious why so many people absolutely hate zadr? like i got the message that people didnt like zadr but i never got the reason why, yknow?