I Also Love How He Just Waves His Arms Every Time He Wants To Ask The Teacher A Question Instead Of Hand Raising - Tumblr Posts

Hol up, at bare minimum I DO recall they actually did do an entire educational unit out of a Wilderness Survival Manual. Still a downgrade from a relevant textbook, but it’s something. Specifically, they were doing quiz prep on how to skin a moose in the bologna episode.

Why do I remember this? Because it puts me in stitches how authentically curious Zim became in learning about moose, in another case of just showing his quirky personal fascination for them.

You know what’s almost weird? Zim already had at least heard of the species before, since this ep came out after “Room With a Moose”, but here he’s asking if they can wield high powered projectiles like it’s the first mention.

It’s also intuitively absurd that he would go browsing a huge collection of wormhole purgatories to send his enemies to, and he was deadset on the moosey option. Though, I see a pretty smooth through line. Some point, he learned correctly somewhere that moose were an extremely dangerous species of native megafauna, that they also are one of a minority of wild animals on earth that can tend to be unafraid of/even willing to attack humans (making some humans afraid of them to point of carrying weapons for self defense), and that they live in one of the most inhospitable biomes on this entire dirt ball.

I don’t believe his knowledge went any deeper than the surface though, I think he is honestly just really impressed by power and originally thought moose were a lot more badass than they turned out to be. So, he finds out in Skool that actually, even if moose are pretty strong and hardy, they’re disappointingly stupid beasts that aren’t actually another potentially epic tool for reigning terror and fire down against humanity… bummer.

And when he got his easy opportunity to fix this by just designing a better moose, well,

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Thinking about how the main premise of Zim is "he's so stupid he thinks going to public skool is a good use of his time". But despite how much of the series took place at skool or dealt with things related to skool not once did we ever see any of the characters doing homework or taking a test. Literally the only assignment the class was ever given was caring for a fake baby for a week. Bitters wasn't kidding when she said they weren't doing dick to prepare them kids for the real world.