Ms-scarletwings - Of Carmine Carnations

I don't remember why I drew this

If I had a nickel for every time an ostensibly non-horror puzzle game gobsmacked me in the face by taking a fearsome AI/sentient superstructure with unimaginable power, a capricious mechanical god-like who began the story looming over me with disdain,

and then for their sins, humbled them down into a state of terrified helplessness, their mind-body slowly eaten away bit by bit, left with barely a shred of life in the ruins of their own crumbling facility, using what little energy they had left comforting themselves with a melody that left me chilled through with dread and pity,

I would have two nickels, which isn’t a lot of nickels, but you probably know how the saying goes.

Just that silly moment where Dib deadass paused to weigh the pros and cons of taking an entire bus of peers down with him in a passive murder-suicide.

listen to his dichotomy again he wasn’t even self-arguing “leaving them for dead and saving only himself”; he was really considering if he was petty enough to go down with the ship and hand Zim the victory just to see those kids get what’s coming to them.

see how he almost considered letting them die. see how he questioned if they’re even worth saving. see how he only wanted to save himself. see how a dib corruption arc was right there on a silver platter

When you’re playing in the ocean and a piece of kelp brushes your leg

Yes, and many of us already know that that kind of absurd irony was heavily inspirational to the creator’s vision. The other thing though, is, I would say Dib still doesn’t even “outsmart” Zim very often. When you account for the dumb luck of the show’s comedy and Zim’s tendency to fumble his work all on his own I can’t recall that many actual big wins Dib has claimed over him. Most of Dib’s victories are literally passing “objective:survive” or obstructing while punching so far above his own weight class. He can and does outwit Zim and gain bits of progress in breaking through his defenses and secrets, but mostly in the gathering of little crumbs and the picking at the cracks the latter leaves everywhere in his own defective sloppiness.

Dib is incredibly fortunate that Zim underestimates him so much, but he’s all the luckier for how much Zim actually overestimates his threat to the mission, or else he wouldn’t be worthy of being treated like an equal combatant, he wouldn’t deserve this sheer degree of overthink and convoluted planning when it comes to getting rid of him; it wouldn’t be a show he’s meant to see and understand first. Zim could obliterate him in an instant like he has so, so, many others but Dib’s tryhard ‘strongest enemy you’ve ever faced before’ performance is working so well that Zim’s pride in large part now shields him from the more practical and less dramatic ends he could meet fighting against the guy.

I’m not saying this to gas Dib up and then immediately flick him back down, I’m saying this to remind us that these two are in yet more ways directly a parallel to each other.

These were tags left on this original post (thank you kindly @anonymoosen). They were directly about Dib, but I would nod my head just as hard back if they were about Zim, who, for all of his scrambled and incomprehensible thought processes, is arguably the most intelligent being in the universe. I’m complimenting Dib for the fact that he can also help us forget that even more chilling information and for being able to half-way keep up with the machinations of a literal alien genius in the first place. He’s not just an enemy of the Armada, but the only human alive who made himself an expert on the Irken race.

He is the first human being to discover and study Zim’s technology and much about his biology against all attempts to keep him at bay, but even more so, besides Fitzoo-Menga, an alien with bored billionaire level resources, he’s the only non-Irken to ever successfully reverse engineer or manipulate with a PAK, Zim’s PAK, and survive, at least in one timeline. And Fitzoo didn’t even do so with the cleanness that Zib seemed capable of.

There’s something actually scary about how Dib is a very appropriately immature and dorky and unwise 12 year old kid and still possesses utterly freakish intelligence canonically putting him as likely for the second or third smartest human alive on Earth.

Or rather there is a lot of scariness in how easy it is to forget that latter part because of the former.