Here I Go Again - Tumblr Posts
James Sullivan...Is it weird (what am I saying, of course it’s weird) that it reminds me of Sully from monsters inc? You know... the fluffy spotted monster thing?
Idk the plot but I looked it up on the wiki and it said that he had plans for ‘‘building a space colony’’ and ‘‘destroying the Earth’’ or something.
Maybe he had an old bestie named Michael Wazowski and one day he gave him an idea like ‘‘Using mainly spoons... we’re gonna build a utopia in space and destroy the Earth’’ and then they end up making a musical about using magic portal doors that is so successful that it finances the UTS.
ALIENZ, the musical X-travaganzah!
And Sully (yes, we’re calling the Space Sweepers villain Sully now) being like from our timeline with the musical being something about that time he and his best friend work for a futuristic architecture company and tried to make portals into rooms for saving up space.
Then, something goes wrong and the portal lead into space or the future or alternate dimensions and a little alien came through and they had to save it from being taken to area 51 or something, like the company is built around there.
And they are being contacted from the alien grand council lady from Lilo and Stitch while trying not to be found by the guys at area 51 who have brain-washed the public that aliens are evil and toxic. At some point Mike is all like ‘Put that thing back where it came from, or so help me’’ and the musical became the new CATS after its 2019 suicide and made the money that bought Disney that later financed UTS (after he uses the alien portals to move a few years into the future). Also Mike is not with him so that could play into whatever villain tragic past Sully has. Lol
P.S
Sorry guys named James Sullivan, I don’t personally know anyone with that name. I also don’t know any John Smiths (imagine that). That name reminds me of that guy in Pocahontas. But I know at least 3 guys named Thanos. Smh
Also I’m insisting that we call the bad guy from the Space Sweepers Sally from now on.
Here you go, Disney! Make a movie with a background like an Alien-Space-live-action remake of Monsters inc that makes a musical that ends up buying you, since you’re so keen of making jokes about your own tropes/ company in the last decades’ movies.
James Sullivan Space Sweepers (2021)
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.
#By the way this is probably one of the most important differences between him and Dib, and what makes Zib so… way he is.
no im not still thinking about how vegas' eyes slip from:
to
for a split second bc he doesn't instantly know who's interrupting them and i am absolutely Not Still thinking abt how his hand pulls pete further in protectively before he realises it's just macau:
and i definitely intend to stop thinking abt the implication that even broken-bodied in a hospital room, vegas would still switch right back to Vegas Theerapanyakul™ to protect pete
City lights look like flowing lava...
Viney yawns
Emira: Yeah being beautiful takes alot out of you doesn't it
Amity: Explains why Luz is pasted out right now
Luz mumble in her sleep because she stayed up late watching anime: A believing heart is my magic