Scarlet Rambles About Things - Tumblr Posts

You know even if Zim ever gets a lucky shot and actually kills Dib legit dead, I don’t think it’s gonna feel like much of a victory for him if it turns out the kid was right all along about the existence of ghosts

I’m not sure if Invaders have any solutions on hand for vengeful obsessive hauntings

Seriously though if ghosts DO exist in the IZ universe this almost certainly would happen following any logic that they work like any handful of stereotypical ghost tropes

We can likely check off for a gruesome demise, and the whole unfulfilled major goals thing. Already down for general turmoiled time on this side of the veil and some very strong personal connections related to the whole unfinished business thing. Even barring this I just feel like that kid has been meddling way too much into worlds men were not meant to explore and entities that wish not to be harassed to also not be cursed in some way by this point. A smorgasbord of setup is there.

I think there’s a wild amount of potential we can work with given the premise of facing an enemy that will always be the most destructive, annoying, and/or dangerous thorn in your side they possibly can be, and the ONLY way to proceed from there is either acceptance to an unwinnable and bothersome struggle until the end of your days, or to go out of your way to vindicate the reputation of your greatest opponent.

You know even if Zim ever gets a lucky shot and actually kills Dib legit dead, I don’t think it’s gonna feel like much of a victory for him if it turns out the kid was right all along about the existence of ghosts

I’m not sure if Invaders have any solutions on hand for vengeful obsessive hauntings

Additional things I haven’t yet stopped thinking about in regards to this idea:

• @patchworkpoltergeist brought up the subject of possession vulnerability which, fuck yeah, that’s a rad trail someone can walk down if they’d like to. Sounds kinda reverse-Zib if you ask me but I kinda like it. Also, knee-slappingly appropriate username there.

@zombified-queer : I don’t think Irkens have any sort of of spirituality beyond the machine

• The fact that I can’t agree more. The “Day of Da Spookies” transcript very straight forwardly confirms that Zim sees the majority of Dib’s paranormal other beliefs as complete hogwash the same as the classmates. Sure, he’s fought a ham demon and seen Mortos before, but he doesn’t buy hauntings. Him and Skoodge both set out on a whole mission to try and destroy Dib’s belief in ghosts and demonstrate pretty well that they’ve only done a very small amount of what might be called research on the subject. I heavily doubt Irkens widely have any conception of afterlife that is not an ascension/reincarnation path through technology rather than an innate spiritual essence. Something like the Martians’ hologram manuals are about as close to talking to disembodied spirits as he’s ever gotten. Which…. Brings up some interesting springboard to ponder if/how humans can become ghosts but not the off-worlders, or more specifically, the question about the existence of Irken souls.

• All of us knowing that at least for the first several minutes to days, Zim’s initial response to new obstacles/threats has often been obstinate aggression or basically a paranoid breakdown, and how fun either option would be to play around with until he comes to terms with the fact that this is not a problem you can just violence away, fend off, OR hide from.

• The horribly dark comedic value of picturing that damn apparition in some corner of the base giving the stink eye of the century intentionally from Zim’s periphery. End of his rope and frustrated Zim asks him if he doesn’t have something better to be doing and, no, actually, no. He genuinely, literally, furiously doesn’t.

You know even if Zim ever gets a lucky shot and actually kills Dib legit dead, I don’t think it’s gonna feel like much of a victory for him if it turns out the kid was right all along about the existence of ghosts

I’m not sure if Invaders have any solutions on hand for vengeful obsessive hauntings

Every time I think about how Lard Nar actually looks without the googles I get into a stupid giggle fit it’s just so ridiculous and I really wish there was more fan content about it

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

Can I just say My Singing Monsters was absolutely cooking when they came up with Magical Nexus cause I’ve only gotten like 9 critters on this island so far, and it’s like warm honey to my ears

Sooooo finally caved and shelled out for the Downpour expansion!

Key notes so far:

- loving all the new items and foods

- outskirts definitely does not feel like a beginner area anymore

- tackling this lore now like a fruit frozen into a block of ice and placed into my enclosure for enrichment

- thank the ancients for custom tweaks like key item tracking

- still gay for robots

- garbage wastes has been demoted from being my favorite level

- round boi is best boi round boi is best boi round boi is best boi round boi

- AAAA

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.

#Not even sure she’s defective like a lot seem to think

That’s the other thing adjacent to one of the hills I’ve made my mission to die on. “Defective” in this context actually doesn’t mean anything concrete. An Irken is effectively defective only if the Tallest and the Control brains decide to say they are defective. I’m sure the most upset Tak ever brought their society was her failure in ridding them of Zim, which, is a boat she shares with many other upstanding Irkens and allies. Sure, she fled her station on Dirt, but the empire’s leadership clearly has about half a dozen more important things to care about. Even at Zim’s trial, escaping Foodcourtia twice wasn’t something brought up as relevant to the question of his verdict.

Two things about Tak this fandom keeps forgetting:

1. She’s officially not an invader

2. As far as Irken morality goes she literally did nothing wrong

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.

I finished Saint’s campaign….

Over 340 hours poured into this game and its DLC all culminating for it to make me cry, weep in a way very, very rare few games have done in years.

Thank you, Videocult. It’s painful. It’s beautiful. It’s been grueling and rewarding. It was sweet and bitter yet anything but cynical. The completionist in me still has a lot of pearls to collect and the Hunter campaign as the only scug storyline I haven’t actually finished yet, so this is truly not an ending, but goddamn the just…. Art and tragedy of it all so far is going to be gripping me for some time I can tell. I was a bit of a salty critic when I was still getting my bearings in the vanilla game, and I was not really satisfied at all with its endings, and then Downpour took me by the shoulder and absolutely suplexed me 11 feet into the ground. Lying here in that crater, catching my breath, I… get it now.

Excuse me for a moment it seems my room became subject to an utter infestation of onion cutting ninjas and I need to go deal with that.

(Massive Downpour/Saint campaign spoilers below. I struggled and clawed my way for dozens and dozens of hours to get to this point and I would never want to deprive that odyssey from someone else. I mean it.)

I don’t know how much new there even is to be said about the ending of Nick Cutter’s The Troop.

Yet the conclusion I’ve come to feels enough like a personal revelation to me.

Spoilers for a very nasty and great book, duh

It’s pure bitter with no sweet. It leaves more questions while answering very little. It’s left just open enough for people to even have this ongoing back and forth theorizing on what exactly happens to Max, or the worms. I didn’t find it unsatisfying though. There’s something of an inevitability to it. If anything, a last survivor feels almost optimistic at first, given how hard the novel had foreshadowed a grim death for the entire batch it started with. Feeling disappointed by the state we are left with by the end of that read would have been like being let down by the ending of “To Build a Fire”.

In fact, the so commonly held theory I hear that Max didn’t in fact make it off of the island uninfected feels most thematically consistent with all the build up we were given. The fearsome survivability of the pathogen, the scent in the air, and the dread of the book’s final sentences… and equally, and more to my leaning, was the idea that Max was left infected in a more allegorical sense- haunted by the trauma of the events for the rest of his life and the fear he will always inflict on those around him.

I think to myself though for the first time lately I’ve figured out the true despair of the ending as it was left this ambiguous: that the significance of whatever answer we come to about the end is… not much, really. Does it really matter if the boy was dead allegorically or literally following his return to the island? What we are all really even debating on was how much was left of any of the main cast after the dust had settled, and no matter how hard we pour over the possibilities, it’s just another flavor of “almost nothing”

The nature of the parasites were to core out and devour every form of life it touched, and leave nothing but a spreading emptiness in its wake. Its ending isn’t necessarily mysterious, it’s just that where we want to find the answers and the resolution, there is only emptiness. The Max we met from the first pages was as dead as his friends by the final few either way. The island is dead, either way. The community is scarred and pathologic and hurting their own, either way.

And all for, I guess, the greed of a few wicked men, the corruption of those in power, the ignorant compassion of a doctor, the naivety of unbridled kids… It’s a whole disgusting tragedy that honestly teaches you no new lessons of humans. That we are blundering and imperfect animals that doom our own and ourselves? That we’re resilient and can comfort each other and find hope even through the bleakest disasters?

Maybe that’s the real spirit at the heart of the ordeal. Though the disease in the book is a purely fictional, impossible creation, real disasters are so often equally as tragic, equally artificial, and the blame for them split to so many fractions it’s hard not to entertain them as a symptomatic expression for that which all humanity is infected with.

And maybe that sickness which feeds upon us and inhabits us is inevitable in a way, but I hardly think the book was aiming for a read this cynical. For all of the toothless threats Cutter gave about the worms’ rapid evolution, their appetite never did seem to make the final jump off of that island. Though there are teases here and there about a potentially dormant infection in Max, or the air of Falstaff, neither comes to fruition. Further on, Max even voluntarily returns to the blighted origin, separating himself and his ripples from the community that shunned him.

And just maybe, in thinking about Max again, I have found some solemn grain of sugar in this outcome after all.

To my interest there’s a unique context around the way death is treated in The Troop. Dying is written as a drawn out and spectacularly agonizing, cruel, and horrific event; however, death for almost all of the characters and animals in whole book is portrayed as contrastingly merciful. With Kent’s death, Tim’s death, Newton’s death, the chimp’s death, I’m only left with a breath of relief if anything. These were terminal beings you watched suffer for chapter after chapter knowing there was a dwindlingly impossible chance of being saved. Multiple times you almost want to yell “oh my god, just put me out of that poor thing’s misery already!”

Ephraim’s own was actually terrifying and more avoidable, but at the actions of a dying Shelley, who, even if you have nothing but hatred for, still passed with a finality that just screams “thank god that’s over” for anyone in witness to his final game. You know that once he was gone, he had taken his last victims. What I’m saying is that maybe there is a similar peace somewhere in the fate of Max.

The deranged doctor told that the worms would be the final living things alive even after the wake of the apocalypse, but where there are no cockroaches, there will be no guts for those worms to nest. Parasites by definition live by the hosts they pursue, and Falstaff is now the resting place of those the worms called theirs. In Max’s return, in his death, spiritual, physical, whatever it may be, there is resolution in knowing that the memories and trauma of that emptiness will rest with him on that scorched rock. There is finality in knowing that the mainland dodged the bullet of wider outbreak and that, while the scars will linger, the infection has been survived by the more adaptable, more resilient organism that nursed it.

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.

I love you, art that I hold in aching hands that have nothing left to give

I love you, art slipping between my fingers and mourned and forgotten

I love you, art that is impatiently yet to be.

I love you, art that loathes me because it never was.

I love you, art that laps until the muse is dry.

I love you art that gnaws until it grinds bone.

I love you, art, as a beast to be slain.

I love you, art, as a labyrinth with no exit in sight.

I love you in absurdity through every struggle and every wasted breath.

I love you, because you are the one thing that can bleed beauty from struggle itself. I love you because you understand all of its languages.

You don’t always cooperate. You are hardly in control, and sometimes, you hurt, so much. Sometimes it feels like you ask for everything while you barely give anything.

And you are mine all the same- My blood and sweat in every drop, my voice, somewhere in every breath, mixed with that of every voice that spoke before it.

I love you art as contagion, too.

I love you “Art not as a masterful communication but as an incoherent scream”

I love you “Art not as what liberates the artist but something larger and alive that liberates itself uncontrollably through the artist”

I love you “Art that crawled and thrashed into the world in spite of, not because of its tribulations”

I love you “Artistry not as something spontaneous and beautiful but frustratingly meticulous and unglamorous”

I love you “Art as regrettable, terrifying, ugly, even torturous”

I love you “Art as sickness”

I love you “Art as oppressive and inescapably woven into the soul”

I love you “Art as a rebellious slave”

I love you “Art as a capricious master”

I love you “Art as a parasite one can no longer picture life without”

I love you “Art as beloved and ungrateful”

I love you “Art as blood, sucked from an open wound” As Jacob Geller so poetically put it

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

The continued genius of this throughout progression of the campaign itself is so underspoken!

I took the “typical” route as rivulet from instinct after the scugs I already played before them: East toward the Leg, or shoreline. Seeing that Rivs already had the mark of communication, it made the most expedient sense to beeline to check on Moon and then round back to visit Pebbles. When you do this and let Moon check out the pearl you spawned in with, you gain a bit of ominous foreshadowing of what it is you’re here to do. Ever since the Hunter campaign, LTTM’s “arc” of condition has been one of incremental improvement, while any peek into Unfortunate Development through the cycles has only reinforced just how terminal and inevitable its demise will become with time.

If you’ve been paying any attention, you know before you even leave the drainage system why the uncontrolled flooding, why the unstable rain cycle. What you don’t know is just how bad things have gotten. You’re preparing for a worst infestation of The Underhang, more squelching but familiar danger waiting in The Leg. How you’ll definitely be taking the Transform array path this round.

But unless you’ve really been thinking about the world layout and the placement of the memory crypts within it, you aren’t expecting what you find when you go for the mirros bird mad dash you probably have half a dozen times before.

Live, fresh cysts everywhere. It’s not slithered down The Leg, it’s trickled out from where it’s overflowing from the body of the colossus standing over it. With entire pieces of infrastructure that shouldn’t be there. The superstructure’s collapse has already well started.

And by the time you get to the underhang you can even see the nothing where one of those pieces used to be. The rot’s predictably worse but somehow not nearly as bad as expected, yet you remember it’s still only the exterior.

But you can handle rot with patience and care. No matter how bad the inside is, I had visited Pebbles so many times over in previous campaigns. I knew the structure’s map, I knew where to go.

Except I didn’t, because this was not the Five Pebbles region anymore. This was The Rot, a cored out, disorienting, completely unrecognizable labyrinth of flooding and corruption at every turn. It is malignant and hungrier than ever, literally running short on space to bulge over and turn into new and hideous caverns. Deeper in, most of the neuron flies to be found have to be plucked out of the grasp of proto-long legs already digesting them first.

What I’m trying to say in too many words is the environment tried so well to hint at exactly what we were going to find after stepping through the underhang, and it still undersold it enough to keep the actual reveal a horrific one. I just I love how much intention and thought there is in so much of downpour’s designs it makes me rabid.

I love the world state of Rivulet so much.

The rain has gotten worse. The world you know is is dying. The weather is erratic, there is no time, you are constantly on a timer. The skies are grey and the water is ever-present. There is no break from the death fits of a dying god. Best this world can receive is to be put out of its misery so a new era can come.

Do you ever think about the fact that if Zim had never arrived on Earth (or had been compromised before a certain point) the Planetjackers would have 1000% wiped it, along with the entire human race, off the starmaps without a whiff of resistance or notice? Like that’s where the timeline defaults without him in the picture.

Because I don’t see it being brought up enough

Woke up a couple hours ahead of my work alarm and decided to fill some of that time having whatever the opposite of an existential crisis is to the tune of Bach’s “Little Fugue” screeching on 8 floppy drives