Something Else I Really Appreciate About Dib As A Character, Something I Should Have Brought Up Ages

Something else I really appreciate about Dib as a character, something I should have brought up ages ago,

He has more reason than any single person in the show to have a completely cynical and outright hateful reaction to aliens, not just for everything Irkens have put him through, but because he has been paranoid about all of the trope-typical conspiratorial hypotheticals about outer worlders as hostile invaders long before he ever confirmed any.

Amazingly and against what you expect, he seldom lets any of this actually express as a blanket bigotry against unfamiliar aliens on first encounter. The Plookesians appear and he’s still just wholly focused with Zim. The Meekrob show up to his place in Zim’s simulation and he’s understandably confused/concerned, but still leans toward trusting their spiel. I like to wonder whether he only reacted to Zim the way he did because of the latter’s obvious attempts to blend in and borderline threaten humans from the moment he opened his mouth, or if it was actually after learning about the Irken empire that he calmed down a bit, realizing there was an entire nuanced galactic ecosystem out there also facing his same problem.

Either way what I’m talking about demonstrated itself most strongly in these panels from the comics.

Least unhinged Sliverist chatroom be like

"I should kill myself": self-serving, reactionary

"we should all kill ourselves": building community and connection, ideologically correct

Grandmother’s Garden level loading/area transition screens hit in that some different kinda way I tell you, especially on replays, for their foreshadowing-

Bloodbells gather on their steel arms

scaled feet tacky with old blood

presaging some violence, calamity

taking their seats to wait for

the show to start

if you put your hands to the ground

and go real still, you can feel them

thumping down beneath the dirt

angry

suffocating forever, being drained

It feels like a coat made of leather leaves

it throbs and whispers

vital but not warm

you can feel fluid moving around inside of it

Somewhere there are places where

grass catches water from the sky

and if you run outside with no shoes or socks the ground is gentle and sweet

and nothing is buried there that can’t be talked about

She likes the song of crickets

And the swirling of the flies

And the way the scarlet locusts

Seem to hunger for her eyes

There’s blood beneath her fingernails

And bile on her boots

And a stirring in her stomach

From the singing of the roots

She shares her bed with insects

She sleeps away the light

Pretty soon her skin will blossom

So her veins can drink the night

Stay inside honey

watch your cartoons

you don't need to see what i'm doing out here

A. True. True.

B. listen forget the lift to the airport; everyone knows damn well that for Zim that shrimp would dive onto a freaking grenade & Zim would also absolutely ask him to dive onto a freaking grenade. But he would not accept that ride.

In other Q&A notes, at one point Jhonen described Skoodge as "the kind of guy who would drive you to an airport" and I've never heard a better description for Skoodge's entire personality

Body

post im sure everyone had read or written themselves before, but can we talk about how fucked up it must have been for pebbles to be activated after his construction was finished, and how one of the first things he must have learned is how he is a replacement for someone else, and an unwanted one at that. how the concept of him was hated before he was even completed, how he was attached to another iterator because he was meant to function as her double with a different coat of paint.

he activates into a world that already knows and hates him for something he had no control in. ancients hate him because thats not their iterator, thats not their home. iterators hate him because thats not their friend, thats the new shiny thing meant to make her obsolete.

his citizens aren't his, theyre hers. his systems, his water supply, his grounds, they arent his. theyre hers. he was just placed here afterwards, an intruder into somebody elses home despite how welcoming she is. imagine having a reputation like that before youve even begun to live.

why wouldnt he be bitter? how long does it take for anyone to see him as something other than "moons little replacement with a bad attitude we didnt ask for"? how long does it take for someone to treat him as more than an extension of moon? was the name erratic pulse only to talk in sliverist chats, or maybe used way before that, to escape everything attached to the name five pebbles?

maybe if he was the next one to find the secret to ascension, he would be looked at differently. he would do something that moon has not. his peers speak sliver of straws name with reverence and respect, and maybe, if he followed in her footsteps or at least got close, he wouldn't be five pebbles, little sibling and replacement to moon. he would be five pebbles, the second iterator ever to send out the triple affirmative.

this isnt a "wah pebbles is innocent and can do no wrong!!" post. i just think its interesting to consider exactly the kind of world pebbles was brought into. how he must have been seen before he was even more than an empty metal box.

i think he was so reckless, so attached to suns, so avoidant of moon, and so unwilling to stop his work even when it risked moons life, because he needed to prove that he was worth something as his own iterator. prove it to everyone else, or maybe just himself.

he may be "godlike in comparison", but that kind of treatment would give anyone horrible self esteem issues.