The Agony Of Being Unable To Explain To Anyone I Know IRL Why Not Stanley Is One Of The Funniest Pieces

The agony of being unable to explain to anyone I know IRL why Not Stanley is one of the funniest pieces of media I keep coming back to because my sense of humor was so long ago rendered beyond unsalvagable

Anyway here’s a compilation of some of the parts I mentally reference or quote to myself unhealthily often

Dib idly humming Flibba Dibba Hoinka Smeedge (it’s still stuck in his head from the whole Florpus adventure) at the Skool and Zim groaning when he recognizes the tune. Shouts at him to cut it out immediately. Turns out at some point that song was basically the space equivalent of “Friday” or “What Does the Fox Say” and he could never stand it. The lyrics are also absurdly vulgar in another language.

He should really get those joints checked out

Oh, I think I got a spacebug science ask . . . if Irkens make various bug noises (chirps, clicks, hissing, whathaveyou), how do they do it?

Thank you for throwing me a real curve ball on this one. I’ve actually been pretty stumped. At first, I wanted to hand wave this off with the simple ‘oh pretty much like any Earth vertebrate’ considering that they do in fact breathe air, can choke, visibly speak from the mouth, etc. but then I started running back into the rabbit hole question of how Irken breathing/airflow even works, since no one knows if they have lungs or an insectoid setup or something of the like to begin with. I have always theorized that the PAK is heavily integrated with their body’s circulation and gas exchange but there’s not much I have to go on with to guess at the exact machinations. It’s not that I have NO ideas, it’s that when you start taking inspiration from nature absent of canon pointers, you kind of literally can’t run out of equally plausible ideas.

Original point being that laughing, clicking, hissing... I mean, this is all stuff we can do just fine with tongues, teeth, and a larynx. Occam’s razor says ditto for them.

Except for this one thing that screams so distinctly arthropod to me.

See there was this one little moment in Dark Harvest that I’ve been majorly obsessed with. There’s this… sound that is part of the ost right before the big chase. When the lights are flipped off. It could be a strange choice of ambience but I swear it feels like the implication was that it was actually coming from Zim. And the reason I can’t stop thinking about it is because it sounds damn near identical to, of all things, hermit crab chirping. Take a listen to what I mean

Congrats btw if this is how you learn hermit crabs can even do such a thing. In the wild this is actually a way they communicate stress and aggression to other crabs, as in during fights over shells or when trying to warn an attacker to back off.

Their method for it is something called stridulation, which is essentially big word talk for rubbing together certain body parts like an acoustic instrument. Lots of other invertebrates produce sounds in the same manner. In the crab case, it’s a leg on leg or legs on shell kind of action. In crickets, think leg to wing or wing to wing. By no means universal either, though. Cicadas are a surprising example of insect that sounds off primarily through other means. Their mating calls are produced with tymbal structures located on either side of their abdomen.

As nutshell fashion as I can describe the tymbals, they’re a combo of complex membrane and stiff ribs that produce sound by flexing and clicking together really, really fast. I focus in on these at all because they are personally my favorite pet theory behind a secondary, possibly vestigial way for mature Irkens to produce sound :) and I needed some alternate idea because the one other moment in the show that got me on this thought spiral- if you remember that screaming back and forth Zim got into with Dib in Backseat Drivers. You know, the “ISN’T IT” bit? I’ve pointed out before, but if you listen closely enough Zim is so angry in that exchange that the way he vibrates angrily is actually audible. Like there’s this odd noise accompanying the rage shakes I can only describe as “skittery”

Animation :^]

"With a friend, we're going to animate a scene from 'The Trial.' Here's a shot I took!"