Irken Zim - Tumblr Posts
También me pidió diseñar la vestimenta de los más altos e aquí los bocetos y algunas de mis prácticas de como dibujar la cabeza
Aquí estaba practicando como dibujar a los irkens del au de mi amix
Unos dibujos pendejos de la idea que los altos llegarán a la tierra con zim (se hacen pasar por sus padres)
Referencia a un vídeo de Antón Lofer
My favorite fanon thing with this show is when people frame Zim’s exile and the way his society looks down on him as like a poor ugly duckling who’s amazing potential was overlooked (that would be Skoodge) or like a divergent mind among heartless conformists and it’s like
no they don’t hate him because he’s different™ they hate him because you can’t leave him alone for 2 minutes without him remorselessly decimating his own kind. They’re understandably terrified of him.
To his people he’s like a dozen Jeffrey Dahmers stuffed into one broken computer. Red is leading a flight of ships across the galaxy to subjugate and exterminate other species and the full extent of Zim’s actions horrify and disgust him. Zim has accurately been called a monster by aliens and his own. Yeah, a monster they created in part, but the rap sheet is what it is. Even if Irk were some utopia, I can’t imagine what kinder and more lenient action you could take regarding handling him besides imprisonment or exactly what Red did. He can’t be reasoned with, he’s a manic loose canon, and every time you stick him in the same playpen as other Irkens, well, sometimes you lose a bunch of your most valuable soldiers, sometimes you lose a couple of almighty Tallests. Bro doesn’t just not value “other” life like the rest of them, he doesn’t even value Irken life. And then he turns around and brags about it. Brags about nearly annihilating their civilization like you should be giving him awards for cutting your brake lines and shooting you in the back. I don’t care if it was ‘just a misfire,’ I pity him and I’d still be gunning for his trial if I was among them too, if it takes away the gun!
*chef’s kiss* And you know what the REAL fucked up bit of irony is?
Zim isn’t even fighting alone. Dib is.
No matter what an antisocial, hazardous ally Zim makes, he STILL gets more barebones emotional support from the litany of defective machines he creates and surrounds himself with than Dib can reliably get from the very family he lives with. Zim STILL has a tool like Skoodge lining up to be his punching-bag/sidekick whether he wants that or not. He has an affectionate little companion in minimoose and an enthusiastic slave in GIR even if the latter is much less competent and even if Zim is emotionally willing to move on from them with barely a whiff of grief, thanks to the whole list of things probably wrong with his PAK.
He shoos off, mistreats, or outright destroys 99% of the beings crazy enough to team up with him, while Dib is. Freaking yearning for what Zim has and he can’t get it. He’s only some brooding works-alone antihero because he can’t get anyone else on his side. He’d love being in a whole team, he joined the Swollen Eyeballs for crying out loud. Gaz is the only close person who at least believes in Zim’s true identity, and for that she’s constantly dragged against her will into Dib’s antics. Literally refers to her as a sidekick, infodumps his updates on Zim to her, more than once contacted her for help when in a sticky situation no matter how delusional you’d have to be to assume Gaz gives one flying eff about exposing some idiot alien. Like, Dib wants them to be Dipper and Mabel Pines so badly it’s sad.
Tak shows up, shows the smallest bit of curiosity toward his hobby, and makes it clear that she has a bone to pick with Zim and it’s an entire buzzkill to Dib that Zim would barge in later and reveal that Tak is supposedly the same as him, if not a worse threat. One of the most genuinely hurt and snuffed out moments Dib has in the show was over finding out Dwicky was just humoring him at best and didn’t turn out to be a true partner in fighting the bad guy(s). Even with EVERYTHING else wrong and warped about Zib, his willingness to work with others, protect another Dib, and actively want a like-minded friend around him that isn’t a drone is not something he inherited from the parasite clinging to his skull.
There’s no “probably” about how that feeling of isolation is getting to him. “Vindicated” basically flayed that part of him open for all to see but it leaks through in every single time his eyes light up at being told by anyone that they’re here for him in this war.
Honest truth, with every episode of this messed up show I finish rewatching I’m more are more sure that Dib is just as incompetent and short-sighted when it comes to his “mission” as Zim is. But it’s so funny to me that while Zim just makes bad plans, has awful priorities, and improvises a lot by the seat of his pants, Dib’s incompetent in the classical bumbling villain sense. Like, he’s doing the right thing, he generally has clever approaches and insights, makes full use of his resources, yet,
He’s still aesthetically and narratively such an antihero, the poor dweeb.
Observe, my magnificent Venn diagram
Only thing I didn’t want to tack on that because it bears worth of some more elaboration: Both of these two are horrible about recklessly arming their nemesis with tons of free information and striking opportunity that can only be used against them.
And Dib is worse at this, like, so… so much worse. Zim will do the classic ‘Muahahaha, now that I have you right where I want you, here’s a detailed presentation of my entire insidious plan, Batman!’ routine while at least having the class to wait until the hero is being lowered over the acid vat or tied to the train tracks. Dib, as a villain? Would start reciting that same speech while in the middle of trying to kidnap the hero, about 3 and a half steps way too early. It’s actually crazy how fast he will telegraph his next move even when he’s not in a position of having a real advantage yet.
The first time the two met and Dib stood there loudly showing himself as the most perceptive and hostile human in range? And then stood there explaining alien sleep cuffs and what he was going to do with them? And then stood there declaring war and that he’d identified Zim’s base location, swinging said cuffs around in front of the gnome brigade? Granted, he wasn’t aware of Zim’s security at the time, but the essence of that sequence was a pattern that he was more than happy to keep repeating for the next couple seasons.
Also, Zim’s brutalism, while it went to some shudder inducing places, is more expected from a genocidal maniac born from a race of colonial supremacists. It’s part of his theatrics and it’s fun for him in the same way it’s fun for his leaders to blow up innocent ice cream space-trucks and unlucky planets. Dib gets mean with their face offs in a way that’s just dripping with spite. All the time spite. Trivial, personal, petulant spite. Even more than Tak and her grudge, which, should be a lot more surprising to me. But it’s really not.
What it did do instead was remind me of a very interesting quote I once heard, from a Cracked video about online gaming behavior, of all places,
I just hope you know that I’m literally asking myself that question every time I’m reminded of the topic, and with fear in my eyes. He’s in a psychological quagmire SO deep and yet completely of his own making.
A scene from Invader Zim I seem to find way creepier than anyone else does
It’s just weirdly good horror to me as a years later rewatch somehow. Dripping with menace.
Long time fans know this is one of the most theatric and chatty characters in the show, alone or not. He also more often than not gets over -ahem, denies- setback and mission fumbles in record time. Not here. Just the silence that lets you truly hear that eerie ass ambience in the background. Just watching him reviewing back collected surveillance, on presumably what’s supposed to be human child behavioral data (this was still season 1 after all), but he’s neither mocking the subjects nor boasting about himself for once. He’s not even complaining or getting into one of his spiels. It’s just that cut back to the reel of a dozen pains he’s suffered at the Skool, cut back to that stone still expression, cut back to the tapes. You don’t know if they’re all from a singularly horrible day or a pile of weeks of humiliations stacking on a camel’s back. You get nothing of explanation except for that quiet seething in his expression- The scariest kind of angry. It’s Zim, ruminating on a god’s honest murderous rage, toward this species that seems to only justify his contempt of them with every single interaction. Almost as if you can watch this and imagine his hatred just getting hotter and hotter for all mankind under the surface, and then narrowing in like a magnifying glass straight onto the worst and most frequent offender of all. Those four consecutive Dib clips are what finally seem to make him feel like he’s seen enough and he’s fully decided on beginning to craft what we later find out was the Moosey wormhole plan. If it was only about Dib standing in the way of the mission, like he frames it, this episode intro wouldn’t serve any purpose. It was about so much more than Dib probably ever thinks about, the axe forgets and all that.
To me this clip is like the one moment where I swear to Tallest Zim was feeling on a kind of Nny wavelength in that isolated instant,
AND it’s one of many moments where I shake my head remembering how Dib’s average Tuesday is spent more recklessly than poking a sleeping dragon in the eye with a stick.
Zim getting fucked up (highlights)
Roughly 2 minutes and 30 seconds of ZiM being an irredeemable monster
Let them know you really care this Valentine’s Day
Literally what other Irken even does this?! Refresh my memory if I’m wrong because Irkens actually do have a working construct of morality. Like they’re not actually that far and away from human psychology at all, other than the hyper militarized, imperialistic culture. On the whole they can be a cruel and very destructive people, but out of a tribalistic belief in their united supremacy. They have empathy- selectively applied to their own kind. They have respect- conditioned to yield literally upwards the chain of command. They understand loyalty and justice and even something akin to friendship.
Yes yes Zim’s a living symptom of a very diseased system, but it always grazes me just a little wrongly at how much I see other fans blaming all Irken society for the degree of Zim’s antisocial tendencies. Every bit of cruelty and scorn they have thrown his way, he has literally been earning from them since the day of his birth without a single hint of regret or intention to stop. Sizz-Lorr and Red and Purple and Poki are not a pack of bullies to him, they’re terrified and appalled of him, and they see him as the maniacal criminal he is. Red is, for all intents and purposes, also grossly callous toward his subjects and downright tyrannical to conquered races, and even he would call zim a monster for killing two previous Tallests. You’d think if he were some true purely self-interested dictator he’d maybe see the silver lining that it got him into his current position.
I don’t remotely think Zim even buys the idea much of Irken supremacy inherently, just Zim supremacy, and a little of that trickling down onto other Irkens abstractly, because they are lucky enough to the same species as ZiM. The harm he causes his brethren, though? He’s proud of it, the same as he is for acts of sadism against lesser kinds. He wants commendation just for showing off that he has the capabilities to destroy their entire way of life unchecked. He feels no remorse for the deaths of Miyuki and Spork, no shame for his devastation on their home planets. Skoodge (who I can only assume is cracked in the head for this) offers himself up to the guy as a faithful compadre again and again only for Zim to throw him to the wolves and unnecessarily endanger his life. Over and over we get shown the primary motivation behind his attempts to win the Tallests favor actually being fear of retribution from them, not any ernest desire for redemption. I swear a time or two, the longer he is away from his society the more times he lets slip his honest regard toward the flag he flies, and Dib is blissfully not listening carefully enough.
If Skoodge or Poki or any of the others didn’t make a stark enough contrast to Zim’s chaotic evil ass, there we always have Tak. Tak who did everything right, save for ending up an unlucky collateral of this idiot’s antics. Tak who arrived determined and bitter, barely holding back righteous fury, and doing all of the things that Zim isn’t- the actual work involved with repairing her status and earning her place back in Operation Impending Doom II. Zim thoroughly screwed up this poor soldier’s career and dream and he doesn’t have so much as an excuse or apology to offer when confronted. He completely understands Tak’s vendetta against him, and he doesn’t care.
Tak herself isn’t the kind of monster he is. To humans, yes, she’s the same if not an even worse threat because of her competence; and yet, she would have been a hero to Irk if she had succeeded and gotten Zim out of the way. She presumably had the explicit clearance of the Tallests to do this, she did her due dilligence in tracking down Zim and taking over an otherwise “unclaimed” world, and she truly believes she is acting above petty revenge- she uses all the logic of fairness and the rightful way of things to justify what she’s doing. She shouldn’t even be here and she shouldn’t have to be taking someone else’s assignment. Zim is the unhinged supervillain, and she’s taking back what he in a sense stole from her. She actually wants to serve her empire to her fullest capability possible.
Zim on the other hand just wants to see the world burn. Any world… Earth, Devastis, Mars, Irk, it truly does not matter that much. The sick pride in being the one who can burn the most things is its own reward to him.
Infamy and veneration are exactly the same feedback to this guy, as long as all eyes are on him while the crowd screams.
I mean, okay, the funny thing is that it’s a very common Trope to have the Evil Villain who does a lot of Evil things but is so deluded and full of bullshit self-justification that they earnestly believe that they are Good, even as on some level they know this is wrong. It's just something they cannot admit to themselves, and this denial is a fundamental part of their psyche. And Zim Invaderzim is… not that kind of character. Zim is very proudly and shamelessly horribly evil.
But also on some level he is that Trope…. for the other axis of the D&D Alignment System. Zim is a Chaotic Evil Villain who is obsessively dedicated to maintaining the self-delusion that he is Lawful Evil.
Scarlet Talks About [Invader Zim]
Highlight reel for the funny green alien show word vomits, HOO-AH! Updated March 2024
General Setting/Lore
• Irkens
- If you behead one…
- On the meaning of defective
- Speculative Insights I : Of Irk and empires
- Speculative Insights II : Diet, maggot skin, & lunch meats of evil
- Speculative Insights III : The Tallest and Control brains as morphic castes within a eusocial species
- Irken senses and edibility
- “Cuteness” through Irken eyes
- Small theory about Irken Hygiene (TBA)
- About auditory communication
• Misc.
- Vortian headcanons
Character Analysis
• Irken Zim
- The Trojan Horse PAK Headcanon/theory
- Top 8 members of his hypothetical fan club
- Tidbit on his strange relationship with prisoner 777
- Chaotic evil wearing lawful evil’s threads
• Dib Membrane
- How he carries a torch his father takes for granted
- In which a big head gives room for an even bigger mouth
- My poor insane antihero
• Zib
- A character autotopsy, figuratively
- A character autotopsy, literally (TBA)
- My poor insane antivillain
THIS IS A QUESTION PEOPLE ARE CAPABLE OF ASKING?!
THE ANSWER MY FRIEND IS
YES. ABSOLUTELY YES.
- He has the blood of countless beings on his hands
This little guy and his sidekick have killed or mangled a lot of sentient life. He’s non-lethally ruined scores more than that, especially within his own species. He raised an entire little civilization/cult once from the ground up, Spore-style, in the comics only to destroy them. He’s killed the show’s main antagonist and his direct rival at least once, on-screen too. Vaporized or blown up irrelevant side characters, launched domestic animals into the sun for no observable reason, etc. Anyone from outside the show, you understand what his kind does, right? They take over foreign planets from the inside, and then they call over backup to either subjugate the inhabitants, or wipe them clean off the face of existence before moving onto the next target. That’s the stakes here and his primary goal in all of this.
- He is a unrestrainable, cosmic-level threat dressed in moron’s threads
His comedic incompetence by no means dampens his ability to be a fearsome force; if anything, he is made all the more intimidating by his unpredictable and chaotic tendencies. He will go to absolutely asinine lengths or choose the most destructive/dangerous path to completing his goals possible on an impulsive, arbitrary whim. Opening a hole in the fabric of this dimension to impress his leaders, tampering with time travel to cripple his rival, blowing up a city to dispose of a lab accident, draining the entire ocean to throw the unholy mother of all water balloons at one kid who pissed him off. Even acting in neutral or “good” intentions, he has caused planetary scale harm to his own brethren multiple times, including the indirect assassination of 2-4 almighty tallests and corrupting their ultimate judicial authorities to madness.
Generally speaking, Zim gets what he wants, barring something that would outright break or end the show’s broader formula. From the surface it MAY look like he’s the idiot being strung along by Red and Purple, but truth be told, they are the ones wrapped around his little finger. Those two are rightfully scared of what he could do if their one effective method for keeping him away failed. He’s crazy, but not stupid by any means, given he’s the single most brilliant and powerful inventor in the whole series. Yes, even more than Membrane. The comics went further to demonstrate that his technology is hypothetically capable of outright destroying the universe or trapping all of its inhabitants into a perpetual time loop purgatory. Every character in Invader Zim is completely at the mercy of his protagonist plot armor.
- He purely looks out for himself and has zero sense of loyalty/honor
Being a useful ally to him rather than an opponent only tenuously, if at all, saves you from the disasters he leaves in his wake. He will betray those he works with on a dime the instant it becomes convenient to do so, and he’s a competent manipulator who uses humans and aliens alike to self-serving means only to immediately throw them under the bus or abandon them. Additionally, he’s proved himself the most unsoldierly soldier of the Irken military. It is very likely the reason that the role of invader was even appealing to him was because it allows for the freedom to operate absent of accountability to fellow comrades or supervision. His biggest “accomplishment” in training ended in the obliteration of his commanding officer and fellow team members. For the countless ways he has been a menance to his homeworld he has bragged in the place of showing remorse. Other Irkens are just as expendable npcs to him as the very creatures he’s actively trying to conquer, and it’s evident that his reverent feelings toward his leaders themselves don’t actually penetrate beyond a surface formality. To quote him directly, “I know not of sides, Earth Stink.”
- He is overtly monsterous and sadistic to the point of straining the boundaries for what a kid’s show can even allow
Oh, Hebert over there robbed a bank? How about the attempted and sometimes successful enslavement/genocide of all humanity? How about frakensteining an innocent schoolroom hamster into Godzilla? Bugs in chili? Zim put bologna into the genetic sequence of a 12 year old. One time, and I’m not exaggerating, he was the bug in Dib’s food! Ripped another child’s eyes out of the sockets and replaced them with hallucinating implants. Kidnapped and subjected hundreds of humans and many animals to fridge horror types of probing and experimentation. Swapped the brain of a witness with a regular squid’s. *cough cough* Dark Harvest. Don’t get me started about rubber pigs or muffins, but I could certainly keep going on. Zim is a brutal little bastard when he gets any opportunity to be. He doesn’t just want to beat his enemies, he wants to crush them with all of the unbridled glee of a bully cackling while burning ants with a magnifying glass.
- As Megamind would say: Presentation!
As we all know, it’s mostly a matter of theatrics and domination that really puts the “super” into the title supervillain, and goodness does this lil green man have a penchant for the dramatic. His maniacal laughter and his hammy mannerisms have reigned pretty iconic going on over 20 years now, after all. “Over the top” is likely one of the first things any fan of the show will think when asked to describe this guy in a nutshell, and justly so.
Taylor art by @tactilescream
Propaganda
Invader Zim: No Propaganda Submitted
Taylor Hebert: - She's the protagonist and main POV character
- She spends the first several arcs going from "insecure teen" to "widely feared supervillain" over the course of a few months
- Her actions are definitely villainous, from robbing a bank, to attempting taking over a city, to putting bugs in the chilli someone was cooking
Zim after Gir gave him his prize from the amusement park😔👈