Application to The Last Voyages
Oct. 14th, 2019 03:16 pmUser Name/Nick: Fire
User DW: n/a
E-mail: on file
Other Characters: Bill Cipher,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tetractys
Character Name: (not-actually-an-Invader) Zim
Series: Invader Zim
Age: Zim is more than 60 by some uncertain amount of years. God only knows how Irken aging works, but Zim DOES stop growing in flashbacks after a certain point and he finished his alien education and was assigned a career, so it's safe to say he's considered an adult.
From When?: In "Plague of Babies," when the deadly waves of stupidness temporarily kill him, before his PAK shocks him back to life
Inmate/Warden: Inmate. Zim is currently trying to destroy all human life at the behest of a very evil alien empire. He seems to be enjoying himself a lot.
Arrival: So very against his will. Good luck even explaining the ship to him, frankly.
Abilities/Powers: Zim has some abilities stemming from his alien biology. Irkens appear to be pretty strong little bastards, able to lift things that weigh more than they do. They're also very bendy, and will squish or stretch before they break. They don't seem to sleep, and their diet consists mostly of sugar and snacks.
Zim's mind is a digital personality encoded into the cybernetic backpack he wears, which functions as his brain. When detached from Zim's body, his body will die within minutes while the PAK seeks out another host. Humans are not viable hosts, and a PAK trying to attach to them will kill them. The PAK also contains an absolutely ridiculous amount of tools and weapons that pop out of it whenever the plot requires it, including:
- four additional long spider-limbs made of metal that Zim can use to move more quickly, climb things, or stick to ceilings
- laser cutting-tools
- straight up laser guns
- a personal shield generator
- a barrage of sharp weapons
- jets useable for space travel that don't seem to work in-atmosphere
- a deployable helmet, also for space travel
- a communicator
- binoculars and night-vision enhancing goggles
- general little fiddly robot arms for holding things
- a personal emergency defibrillator
I am going to have Zim unable to activate most of these functions. He'll be keeping his defib and his communicator, that's all.
Personality: So, let's start with the Irken Empire, scourge of the universe. Irkens are like what would happen if ants gained individual sapience and FTL travel. Irkens destroy and consume planets out of a desire for conquest, rather than any particular need. They turn on and enslave their own allies, take over and commit genocide on planets they don't even know what to do with, and have a culture of utter obedience to hierarchy. (The tallest Irkens are the most powerful ones, and although Irkens don't keep other Irkens as slaves, the shortest earn so little and are in such demeaning jobs that the difference is nominal.) The society is controlled by massive AI "control brains," and Irkens are produced in factory assembly lines of child pods, uploaded immediately with knowledge, and sent to military training within minutes of hatching. Individuals are uniformed, assigned their life paths by a robotic system they don't question, and extremely disposable. An Invader is intended to be the best of the best, a single individual who is sent to an enemy planet (all non-Irken planets are enemy planets, of course) to infiltrate their obviously inferior society and prepare it to be kicked the fuck over by the Irken Armada, a roving swarm of Death Star-level atmospheric bombardment tech.
Zim, our ??hero??, is exactly what the Irken Empire was going for in a soldier, in... some ways. Zim is absolutely, passionately devoted to his leaders, and invests one hundred percent of his emotional self-worth into impressing them. Zim is very aggressive, and thinks everything that's not Irken is disgusting and worthy of being destroyed and exploded, and that everything that IS Irken is great and perfect and dope and awesome. Zim can be independent for long periods of time without his devotion wavering in any way at all - it's literally programmed into his PAK, as it probably is into all Irkens'. Zim is highly trained in both combat and military science, can build and program horrifying devices easily, can come up with incredibly complicated technological feats on the spot, and would probably have taken over the Earth several times by now... if he weren't such a, eh, well,
A lot of characters call Zim a dumbass, in not so many words. It's not exactly wrong, but it's not being very specific about the actual problem, either. Zim has tunnel vision, and has it bad. He'll get fixated on one aspect of solving a problem and totally ignore common sense, or the reason the problem is happening in the first place. There's a memorable episode where he gets stuck with a city-destroying explosion that came out of a time stasis field and therefore is exploding in super slow motion, on the day when the Tallest are supposed to inspect him. His thought process seems to be OH NO, I CAN'T HAVE SOMETHING GO WRONG WHEN THE TALLEST ARE INSPECTING -> NEED TO GET RID OF THIS OBVIOUSLY DANGEROUS EXPLOSION -> AH, I KNOW, I'LL JUST SPEED IT UP! Numerous people around him point out that this is a bad idea. He brushes them all off, because once he has gotten himself on JUST SPEED IT UP not even pointing out that he's going to fucking die and kill everybody else too will dissuade him. It's just really really really hard to shake him out of a bad idea using logic. It's a really, really bad idea to let him set his own goals. One notable part of his history is jumping the starting gun on his first round as an Invader, taking a giant robot and rampaging all over his home planet. The Zim Logic, of course, is DESTRUCTION! I USE A ROBOT AND DESTROY, BECAUSE INVADER! HA HA HA! FOR THE GLORY OF THE EMPIRE! the real people logic is, god no, oh my god, what, stop, you're killing your own people. Zim jumps to conclusions HARD, jumps to REALLY WILD conclusions, and is EXTREMELY DIFFICULT to dislodge from those conclusions. He doesn't seem to have any god damn idea what his priorities are, and is easily caught up in unimportant details of things rather than focusing on the big picture.
Zim will use an over-complicated means to solve a very simple problem, forget what the problem was in the first place, and end up at a conclusion that has nothing to do with what he started out wanting. A frequent thrust of episodes are things like. Zim wants to conquer the Earth -> Zim thinks that if he sells enough candy bars for his school, one of humanity's secrets will be exposed to him -> Zim creates a device to hypnotize all of the entire city into buying candy from him to be released from horrible apocalyptic visions. Obviously, at the third step, he could have just. Just used this device to conquer the Earth. Or, Zim wants to have a friend to appear more human -> The friend gets too attached -> Zim replaces his eyes with robot eyes ???. By the end of the episode, he has usually done something blatantly, horribly alien in an effort to appear more normal, through a convoluted series of non-logical ideas.
Zim, of course, thinks he is a genius. Zim is constantly amazed at how smart and impressive he is, and will announce as much aloud. Zim thinks he should be in charge of the universe, and is obviously the most deserving person, and this is really where the Irken programming starts to unravel. Zim's respect for his leaders is hard-wired, certainly felt in him sincerely, but is hollow. Zim has killed several of his leaders accidentally and felt no remorse for it. Zim has, in revealing moments, expressed that he simply thinks of the Tallest as someone he is grateful to have supporting him during his inevitable rise to ruler of everything, above the Empire itself. This is at the root of the reason why his own people disdain him. Zim talks back, Zim questions things as not being good enough for him, Zim is egocentric and gets in the way of other Irkens being good cogs in the machine. Zim cannot be constructively directed, because Zim is not devoted correctly, at his core.
Zim hears what he wants to hear, and what he wants to hear is that he's great. Zim is massively thirsty for validation. Zim's leaders keep trying to banish him, and the idea that they don't like him just never registers, because it doesn't fit with Zim's idea of how the world works. (i.e.: With himself at the center of it.) He is an incredibly dramatic, scene-chewing person, who turns everything into a huge deal because obviously if it's happening to him it's incredibly important, and everyone should know that he's playing his part correctly! Zim is invested in the idea of himself as an Evil Invader, a World Conqueror, a menace that surely the entire Earth would fear if only it knew. He puts a significant amount of his emotional well-being into getting people to be impressed by him and to feed his narrative, more in love with the story of himself than with actually doing his job right. Zim is bad at everything, you guys.
Barge Reactions: As part of the grand tradition of Zim not understanding things he doesn't like and constantly being terrified of being captured by human enemies, Zim will assume he did not die (WHO COULD POSSIBLY KILL ZIM?) and was in fact captured, onto this ship, where surely humans are trying to learn his secrets! NEVER!!
As part of the other grand tradition of the show resetting to normal every week even though Zim should really have been dead a bunch of times by now, Zim might actually refuse to remember that one time a flood turned him into a cat. Nope! That did not happen to Zim.
Path to Redemption: Zim. Needs. Good. Goals.
Zim needs something between a parent and a Dog Whisperer. Zim needs someone that is prepared to hurdle all of his neuroses and understand that his PAK is just Defective sometimes, but also to hold him accountable for the things he absolutely can help. He needs someone that speaks his 'language,' emotionally - someone very dramatic would be related to right away, but as long as they understand why he's so extra they don't actually need to sink to his level.
He needs clear boundaries set for him, clear punishments attached to wrongdoing in a very direct Pavlovian way. This will mean near-constant supervision at first, in order to drill into him what behavior is or isn't alright. He also needs clear validation and praise attached to doing something right, which he will beeline for like a bee to a thing that a bee makes a line to.
Honestly? Don't try to tell him that his mission is a lie until you've already got him questioning whether the Tallest are someone he really wants to serve anyway. He won't accept it. Use the fact that he, very rarely for an Irken, has independent ambition and questions a lot of things to lead him towards the idea of striking out on his own, then drop the bomb on him.
Zim really really really likes destroying shit, but he's also saved the world several times. He needs something, long-term, to put his energy into that he can find fulfilling, and he needs it drilled into him what collateral is or is not okay.
History: Zim was cracked out of an Irken growth pod and shocked to life sometime in the last century, where he immediately was assigned a name and downloaded with the whole of his species' knowledge. After hugging the cold, unfeeling robot arm that birthed him, he then claimed the download chamber as his "room," jammed the next baby down the line into the intake tube, and caused an overload that plunged the planet into darkness for four years. This is a pattern that will continue for awhile.
Zim underwent a childhood full of military simulations and training. Around age ten, he got impatient and planned an escape to the surface of Irk, hoping to see the planet he intended to "rule" some day, fully convinced that one day he would be a Tallest, one of the Irkens who are the more or less arbitrary rulers of society based on their height. He talked a classmate into coming with him, threw the classmate to painful robot security drones to aid his own escape, and caused a second overload of the whole planet. Irk is a bit shitty and very unequipped for any kind of deviation or independence, but Zim is shittier.
Upon reaching adulthood, he was assigned the job of military researcher because he "exploded everything he touched." He created a horror blob that straight up murdered the current leader of Irk, and was reassigned away from anything he could invent from now on.
The Irken Elite are a highly specialized branch of the military, and Zim apparently passed the tests for that somehow, but not before his horror blob killed yet another of the Tallest. Apparently not seeing a pattern, he was allowed to rise in the ranks to the rank of Invader. By this time, the current Tallest were contemporaries of his, who knew perfectly well that he was a little maniac and did not like him AT ALL. They gave him a job to stand in a circle of tape and not fucking touch anything. He did not do this job, and instead got in a robot and blew up a large portion of the planet.
He was finally banished for this one, to a planet called Foodcourtia that produces snacks for the Irken Empire. Snacks are surprisingly important to the culture, though, and although the job was hard and degrading it was probably not actually that much of a demotion. His overseer, Frylord Sizz-Lorr, is one of the tallest Irkens we meet. Also one of the smartest? Zim is the shortest Irken we meet that has any military rank whatsoever, which naturally gets him a lot of ridicule throughout all of this.
With Zim out of the way, the two modern Tallest try to restart the Invader program, calling the second attempt "Operation: Impending Doom 2." Zim catches wind of this on TV, steals a ship, abandons his banishment, and shows up totally uninvited. The Tallest, desperate to get rid of him at this point, assign him to a fake "secret mission," made up on the spot, to a planet that's represented on their map as a post-it note doodle and go out of their way to ruin a robot servant to be his companion by filling its head with pocket lint and garbage. They think this shit is hilarious. The Tallest are dicks.
The robot, GIR (a normal unit is called a SIR, Standard Information Retrieval, but GIR reportedly has no idea what the G stands for), will end up as the only ally Zim has on his stay on Earth throughout the entire series. Or, Zim thinks GIR is his ally, anyway. In reality, GIR is very childlike and doesn't care much for the mission as much as he cares for all the fun and food and TV that Earth has to offer.
Zim goes in the direction they sent him, and eventually ends up at Earth, which he assumes is his incredibly important secret mission. He makes a base in an American city which we never really get a name for, builds a huge alien base underneath a glowing green house, complete with robot residents and a disguise for himself and his robot. In order to access Earth's knowledge, Zim goes undercover as a student at a local elementary school.
Zim is immediately noticed as an alien by the local weird kid and paranormal investigator, Dib. This is because Zim's disguise is shitty, and does nothing to hide his green skin or lack of ears and nose, or, like, alien military uniform. Dib will end up as Zim's pretty-much-eternal rival, one of very few humans on Earth who knows Zim is an alien and definitely the only one who gives a shit. Humans in the Invader Zim universe are all very mean and very dumb and very gross.
This begins the cycle that lasts for most of the series, up to his pull point: Zim will try to take over earth. Dib will stop him. Dib will try to expose Zim. Zim will stop him. Zim will need GIR to do something critical to the mission, GIR will fail at it or refuse to do it. GIR will bring home something awful, and Zim will need to deal with it.
Then GIR actually kills him by accident. Whoops.
Sample Journal Entry: [The communicator clicks on to display... Oh no.
Okay, well, let's start with the inflatable mascot suit. It's very round and cartoonish, and has a baseball cap sewn to the top. The skin is an awful shade of pink, the eyes bulge out in opposite directions, and the name-tag slapped on the front says HUMaN. There's a little cape around its neck? A little briefcase? It has a fake dog sewn to it?
Poking out of the mouth of the disguise is a face with green skin and no nose and a grin that exposes a ridge of pink keratin that could only charitably be called teeth.
The face says this:]
Greetings, fellow dirt monkeys. I, too, am a human such as yourselves. I've been working here the whole time! My name is Warden... Fff..im... and I would loooove to hear about all of our latest plans to kidnap aliens away from their homes.
[Big grin, wide eyes. Wow! Very sincere, so much!]
I myself have kidnapped much alien scum, and am an ally who you should have noooo problem trusting.
[Both the arms of the suit go out, with a squeaky noise.]
I love to eat! And wash my hair. Iiiiiiincidentallyyyy - [Because clearly he's already sold you on his incredible illusion and should go in for the Prestige.] - what are the mechanisms by which YOU enjoy to kidnap inmate slaves? Mine seems to be a little faulty. I'd love some pointers! [The round, sausagelike hands of the suit clasp together, which makes the whole apparatus make another loud rubbery squeak, and the alien face tries to look sincere and innocent.]
Sample RP: A massive explosion and a screech rocks the Barge.
"YES! YES! ZIM WILL HAVE FREEDOM!"
A jetpack/tank/drone that has clearly been cobbled together from an assortment of common room appliances and garbage rockets up the aft stairwell, banging into walls and barely managing not to dislodge its passenger, a screaming Zim in a crash helmet.
"AWAY FROM MY PATH, HUMAN FILTH! I ESCAPE!"
The machine plows through the door to the deck and immediately begins disintegrating from the force of the impact, but not before it launches Zim head-first into the side of the bar. It loses more and more pieces, tearing itself to bits, before at last the pilot's seat rockets over the railing, on fire.
Zim struggles to his feet, groaning. The helmet is cracked, and he throws it away.
"Eh, uh, I - ... ZIM HAS MADE IT TO THE DECK!"
He puts both his fists into the air.
"VICTORY! IT IS SWEET! NONE HAVE STOPPED ME FROM MY CONQUEST!"
Special Notes: I'm taking backstory from unproduced TV scripts as canon, but treating the comic as more of a grey area that I can take flavor from. Zim is... even less redeemable in the comics, haha.
User DW: n/a
E-mail: on file
Other Characters: Bill Cipher,
tetractysCharacter Name: (not-actually-an-Invader) Zim
Series: Invader Zim
Age: Zim is more than 60 by some uncertain amount of years. God only knows how Irken aging works, but Zim DOES stop growing in flashbacks after a certain point and he finished his alien education and was assigned a career, so it's safe to say he's considered an adult.
From When?: In "Plague of Babies," when the deadly waves of stupidness temporarily kill him, before his PAK shocks him back to life
Inmate/Warden: Inmate. Zim is currently trying to destroy all human life at the behest of a very evil alien empire. He seems to be enjoying himself a lot.
Arrival: So very against his will. Good luck even explaining the ship to him, frankly.
Abilities/Powers: Zim has some abilities stemming from his alien biology. Irkens appear to be pretty strong little bastards, able to lift things that weigh more than they do. They're also very bendy, and will squish or stretch before they break. They don't seem to sleep, and their diet consists mostly of sugar and snacks.
Zim's mind is a digital personality encoded into the cybernetic backpack he wears, which functions as his brain. When detached from Zim's body, his body will die within minutes while the PAK seeks out another host. Humans are not viable hosts, and a PAK trying to attach to them will kill them. The PAK also contains an absolutely ridiculous amount of tools and weapons that pop out of it whenever the plot requires it, including:
- four additional long spider-limbs made of metal that Zim can use to move more quickly, climb things, or stick to ceilings
- laser cutting-tools
- straight up laser guns
- a personal shield generator
- a barrage of sharp weapons
- jets useable for space travel that don't seem to work in-atmosphere
- a deployable helmet, also for space travel
- a communicator
- binoculars and night-vision enhancing goggles
- general little fiddly robot arms for holding things
- a personal emergency defibrillator
I am going to have Zim unable to activate most of these functions. He'll be keeping his defib and his communicator, that's all.
Personality: So, let's start with the Irken Empire, scourge of the universe. Irkens are like what would happen if ants gained individual sapience and FTL travel. Irkens destroy and consume planets out of a desire for conquest, rather than any particular need. They turn on and enslave their own allies, take over and commit genocide on planets they don't even know what to do with, and have a culture of utter obedience to hierarchy. (The tallest Irkens are the most powerful ones, and although Irkens don't keep other Irkens as slaves, the shortest earn so little and are in such demeaning jobs that the difference is nominal.) The society is controlled by massive AI "control brains," and Irkens are produced in factory assembly lines of child pods, uploaded immediately with knowledge, and sent to military training within minutes of hatching. Individuals are uniformed, assigned their life paths by a robotic system they don't question, and extremely disposable. An Invader is intended to be the best of the best, a single individual who is sent to an enemy planet (all non-Irken planets are enemy planets, of course) to infiltrate their obviously inferior society and prepare it to be kicked the fuck over by the Irken Armada, a roving swarm of Death Star-level atmospheric bombardment tech.
Zim, our ??hero??, is exactly what the Irken Empire was going for in a soldier, in... some ways. Zim is absolutely, passionately devoted to his leaders, and invests one hundred percent of his emotional self-worth into impressing them. Zim is very aggressive, and thinks everything that's not Irken is disgusting and worthy of being destroyed and exploded, and that everything that IS Irken is great and perfect and dope and awesome. Zim can be independent for long periods of time without his devotion wavering in any way at all - it's literally programmed into his PAK, as it probably is into all Irkens'. Zim is highly trained in both combat and military science, can build and program horrifying devices easily, can come up with incredibly complicated technological feats on the spot, and would probably have taken over the Earth several times by now... if he weren't such a, eh, well,
A lot of characters call Zim a dumbass, in not so many words. It's not exactly wrong, but it's not being very specific about the actual problem, either. Zim has tunnel vision, and has it bad. He'll get fixated on one aspect of solving a problem and totally ignore common sense, or the reason the problem is happening in the first place. There's a memorable episode where he gets stuck with a city-destroying explosion that came out of a time stasis field and therefore is exploding in super slow motion, on the day when the Tallest are supposed to inspect him. His thought process seems to be OH NO, I CAN'T HAVE SOMETHING GO WRONG WHEN THE TALLEST ARE INSPECTING -> NEED TO GET RID OF THIS OBVIOUSLY DANGEROUS EXPLOSION -> AH, I KNOW, I'LL JUST SPEED IT UP! Numerous people around him point out that this is a bad idea. He brushes them all off, because once he has gotten himself on JUST SPEED IT UP not even pointing out that he's going to fucking die and kill everybody else too will dissuade him. It's just really really really hard to shake him out of a bad idea using logic. It's a really, really bad idea to let him set his own goals. One notable part of his history is jumping the starting gun on his first round as an Invader, taking a giant robot and rampaging all over his home planet. The Zim Logic, of course, is DESTRUCTION! I USE A ROBOT AND DESTROY, BECAUSE INVADER! HA HA HA! FOR THE GLORY OF THE EMPIRE! the real people logic is, god no, oh my god, what, stop, you're killing your own people. Zim jumps to conclusions HARD, jumps to REALLY WILD conclusions, and is EXTREMELY DIFFICULT to dislodge from those conclusions. He doesn't seem to have any god damn idea what his priorities are, and is easily caught up in unimportant details of things rather than focusing on the big picture.
Zim will use an over-complicated means to solve a very simple problem, forget what the problem was in the first place, and end up at a conclusion that has nothing to do with what he started out wanting. A frequent thrust of episodes are things like. Zim wants to conquer the Earth -> Zim thinks that if he sells enough candy bars for his school, one of humanity's secrets will be exposed to him -> Zim creates a device to hypnotize all of the entire city into buying candy from him to be released from horrible apocalyptic visions. Obviously, at the third step, he could have just. Just used this device to conquer the Earth. Or, Zim wants to have a friend to appear more human -> The friend gets too attached -> Zim replaces his eyes with robot eyes ???. By the end of the episode, he has usually done something blatantly, horribly alien in an effort to appear more normal, through a convoluted series of non-logical ideas.
Zim, of course, thinks he is a genius. Zim is constantly amazed at how smart and impressive he is, and will announce as much aloud. Zim thinks he should be in charge of the universe, and is obviously the most deserving person, and this is really where the Irken programming starts to unravel. Zim's respect for his leaders is hard-wired, certainly felt in him sincerely, but is hollow. Zim has killed several of his leaders accidentally and felt no remorse for it. Zim has, in revealing moments, expressed that he simply thinks of the Tallest as someone he is grateful to have supporting him during his inevitable rise to ruler of everything, above the Empire itself. This is at the root of the reason why his own people disdain him. Zim talks back, Zim questions things as not being good enough for him, Zim is egocentric and gets in the way of other Irkens being good cogs in the machine. Zim cannot be constructively directed, because Zim is not devoted correctly, at his core.
Zim hears what he wants to hear, and what he wants to hear is that he's great. Zim is massively thirsty for validation. Zim's leaders keep trying to banish him, and the idea that they don't like him just never registers, because it doesn't fit with Zim's idea of how the world works. (i.e.: With himself at the center of it.) He is an incredibly dramatic, scene-chewing person, who turns everything into a huge deal because obviously if it's happening to him it's incredibly important, and everyone should know that he's playing his part correctly! Zim is invested in the idea of himself as an Evil Invader, a World Conqueror, a menace that surely the entire Earth would fear if only it knew. He puts a significant amount of his emotional well-being into getting people to be impressed by him and to feed his narrative, more in love with the story of himself than with actually doing his job right. Zim is bad at everything, you guys.
Barge Reactions: As part of the grand tradition of Zim not understanding things he doesn't like and constantly being terrified of being captured by human enemies, Zim will assume he did not die (WHO COULD POSSIBLY KILL ZIM?) and was in fact captured, onto this ship, where surely humans are trying to learn his secrets! NEVER!!
As part of the other grand tradition of the show resetting to normal every week even though Zim should really have been dead a bunch of times by now, Zim might actually refuse to remember that one time a flood turned him into a cat. Nope! That did not happen to Zim.
Path to Redemption: Zim. Needs. Good. Goals.
Zim needs something between a parent and a Dog Whisperer. Zim needs someone that is prepared to hurdle all of his neuroses and understand that his PAK is just Defective sometimes, but also to hold him accountable for the things he absolutely can help. He needs someone that speaks his 'language,' emotionally - someone very dramatic would be related to right away, but as long as they understand why he's so extra they don't actually need to sink to his level.
He needs clear boundaries set for him, clear punishments attached to wrongdoing in a very direct Pavlovian way. This will mean near-constant supervision at first, in order to drill into him what behavior is or isn't alright. He also needs clear validation and praise attached to doing something right, which he will beeline for like a bee to a thing that a bee makes a line to.
Honestly? Don't try to tell him that his mission is a lie until you've already got him questioning whether the Tallest are someone he really wants to serve anyway. He won't accept it. Use the fact that he, very rarely for an Irken, has independent ambition and questions a lot of things to lead him towards the idea of striking out on his own, then drop the bomb on him.
Zim really really really likes destroying shit, but he's also saved the world several times. He needs something, long-term, to put his energy into that he can find fulfilling, and he needs it drilled into him what collateral is or is not okay.
History: Zim was cracked out of an Irken growth pod and shocked to life sometime in the last century, where he immediately was assigned a name and downloaded with the whole of his species' knowledge. After hugging the cold, unfeeling robot arm that birthed him, he then claimed the download chamber as his "room," jammed the next baby down the line into the intake tube, and caused an overload that plunged the planet into darkness for four years. This is a pattern that will continue for awhile.
Zim underwent a childhood full of military simulations and training. Around age ten, he got impatient and planned an escape to the surface of Irk, hoping to see the planet he intended to "rule" some day, fully convinced that one day he would be a Tallest, one of the Irkens who are the more or less arbitrary rulers of society based on their height. He talked a classmate into coming with him, threw the classmate to painful robot security drones to aid his own escape, and caused a second overload of the whole planet. Irk is a bit shitty and very unequipped for any kind of deviation or independence, but Zim is shittier.
Upon reaching adulthood, he was assigned the job of military researcher because he "exploded everything he touched." He created a horror blob that straight up murdered the current leader of Irk, and was reassigned away from anything he could invent from now on.
The Irken Elite are a highly specialized branch of the military, and Zim apparently passed the tests for that somehow, but not before his horror blob killed yet another of the Tallest. Apparently not seeing a pattern, he was allowed to rise in the ranks to the rank of Invader. By this time, the current Tallest were contemporaries of his, who knew perfectly well that he was a little maniac and did not like him AT ALL. They gave him a job to stand in a circle of tape and not fucking touch anything. He did not do this job, and instead got in a robot and blew up a large portion of the planet.
He was finally banished for this one, to a planet called Foodcourtia that produces snacks for the Irken Empire. Snacks are surprisingly important to the culture, though, and although the job was hard and degrading it was probably not actually that much of a demotion. His overseer, Frylord Sizz-Lorr, is one of the tallest Irkens we meet. Also one of the smartest? Zim is the shortest Irken we meet that has any military rank whatsoever, which naturally gets him a lot of ridicule throughout all of this.
With Zim out of the way, the two modern Tallest try to restart the Invader program, calling the second attempt "Operation: Impending Doom 2." Zim catches wind of this on TV, steals a ship, abandons his banishment, and shows up totally uninvited. The Tallest, desperate to get rid of him at this point, assign him to a fake "secret mission," made up on the spot, to a planet that's represented on their map as a post-it note doodle and go out of their way to ruin a robot servant to be his companion by filling its head with pocket lint and garbage. They think this shit is hilarious. The Tallest are dicks.
The robot, GIR (a normal unit is called a SIR, Standard Information Retrieval, but GIR reportedly has no idea what the G stands for), will end up as the only ally Zim has on his stay on Earth throughout the entire series. Or, Zim thinks GIR is his ally, anyway. In reality, GIR is very childlike and doesn't care much for the mission as much as he cares for all the fun and food and TV that Earth has to offer.
Zim goes in the direction they sent him, and eventually ends up at Earth, which he assumes is his incredibly important secret mission. He makes a base in an American city which we never really get a name for, builds a huge alien base underneath a glowing green house, complete with robot residents and a disguise for himself and his robot. In order to access Earth's knowledge, Zim goes undercover as a student at a local elementary school.
Zim is immediately noticed as an alien by the local weird kid and paranormal investigator, Dib. This is because Zim's disguise is shitty, and does nothing to hide his green skin or lack of ears and nose, or, like, alien military uniform. Dib will end up as Zim's pretty-much-eternal rival, one of very few humans on Earth who knows Zim is an alien and definitely the only one who gives a shit. Humans in the Invader Zim universe are all very mean and very dumb and very gross.
This begins the cycle that lasts for most of the series, up to his pull point: Zim will try to take over earth. Dib will stop him. Dib will try to expose Zim. Zim will stop him. Zim will need GIR to do something critical to the mission, GIR will fail at it or refuse to do it. GIR will bring home something awful, and Zim will need to deal with it.
Then GIR actually kills him by accident. Whoops.
Sample Journal Entry: [The communicator clicks on to display... Oh no.
Okay, well, let's start with the inflatable mascot suit. It's very round and cartoonish, and has a baseball cap sewn to the top. The skin is an awful shade of pink, the eyes bulge out in opposite directions, and the name-tag slapped on the front says HUMaN. There's a little cape around its neck? A little briefcase? It has a fake dog sewn to it?
Poking out of the mouth of the disguise is a face with green skin and no nose and a grin that exposes a ridge of pink keratin that could only charitably be called teeth.
The face says this:]
Greetings, fellow dirt monkeys. I, too, am a human such as yourselves. I've been working here the whole time! My name is Warden... Fff..im... and I would loooove to hear about all of our latest plans to kidnap aliens away from their homes.
[Big grin, wide eyes. Wow! Very sincere, so much!]
I myself have kidnapped much alien scum, and am an ally who you should have noooo problem trusting.
[Both the arms of the suit go out, with a squeaky noise.]
I love to eat! And wash my hair. Iiiiiiincidentallyyyy - [Because clearly he's already sold you on his incredible illusion and should go in for the Prestige.] - what are the mechanisms by which YOU enjoy to kidnap inmate slaves? Mine seems to be a little faulty. I'd love some pointers! [The round, sausagelike hands of the suit clasp together, which makes the whole apparatus make another loud rubbery squeak, and the alien face tries to look sincere and innocent.]
Sample RP: A massive explosion and a screech rocks the Barge.
"YES! YES! ZIM WILL HAVE FREEDOM!"
A jetpack/tank/drone that has clearly been cobbled together from an assortment of common room appliances and garbage rockets up the aft stairwell, banging into walls and barely managing not to dislodge its passenger, a screaming Zim in a crash helmet.
"AWAY FROM MY PATH, HUMAN FILTH! I ESCAPE!"
The machine plows through the door to the deck and immediately begins disintegrating from the force of the impact, but not before it launches Zim head-first into the side of the bar. It loses more and more pieces, tearing itself to bits, before at last the pilot's seat rockets over the railing, on fire.
Zim struggles to his feet, groaning. The helmet is cracked, and he throws it away.
"Eh, uh, I - ... ZIM HAS MADE IT TO THE DECK!"
He puts both his fists into the air.
"VICTORY! IT IS SWEET! NONE HAVE STOPPED ME FROM MY CONQUEST!"
Special Notes: I'm taking backstory from unproduced TV scripts as canon, but treating the comic as more of a grey area that I can take flavor from. Zim is... even less redeemable in the comics, haha.
