How old. Is Zim.
Like canonly how old is he. I don't think hes..like an adult. I read some where he trained with red and purple before they were tallest.... He killed Miyuki can some one please give me some time lines here. Because at this rate (and because of how the tallest act.) Im guessing Zim is at max like...16... just really chaotic. Though Dib its just stated his 12. Which i feel like isn't correct either. Because that 12 is off the wiki. People have edited that wiki alot... CAN SOME ONE HAND ME EVIDENCE AND A TIME LINE PLEASE!?
There's no timeline unfortunately, and more than that there can't be one, because Invader Zim operates on a floating timeline both out of and in universe. Basically,
1. "Time warps" are a thing, meaning more time can pass for someone in a different part of space or on a different planet than for someone else in a different place. (From The Frycook What Came From All That Space, where Sizz-Lorr states that he's been trapped on Foodcourtia for decades since Zim left. Zim points out it hasn't been nearly that long since he left, which Sizz-Lorr explains away this way. There's also the time dilation field that Zim creates as a sorta related example in Walk For Your Lives. This stuff gets even weirder in the comics, including an issue where a bunch of irkens age rapidly in what seems like no time at all to people elsewhere due to wonky time shenanigans, and a Zim from an alternate universe who is aging backwards due to an accident during an experiment.)
2. There are canonical alternate universes in a similar way as Rick and Morty, which is further complicated by time travel ALSO being a thing that can happen. (Time travel is first established in Bad Bad Rubber Piggy, and continues to be used a lot in the comics, including an issue with an older Zim from the future. The alternate universe thing is pretty exclusively in the comics outside of it being implied by time travel and the way certain events sometimes "reset" and sometimes don't.)
3. Jhonen Vasquez lies. Let me repeat: This isn't a case of there just being no confirmed canon age until recently. He lies. Or rather he says whatever he thinks is funniest at the moment, or whatever he thinks the person asking him about it least expects or wants from him, meaning that he's made multiple self-contradictory statements about Zim's age. Sources on this being... way too numerous for me to list tbh. He's said himself that nothing he says about the series is trustworthy multiple times though. There's basically no "Word of God".
All of which means that this is EVEN LESS clear than it already seems on the surface. If someone tries to give you an estimate, they are guessing based on faulty assumptions.
The ONLY thing I feel like I can safely say we know for sure is that Zim and Dib are "equals". And they always have to be equals. Because that's in the show bible, which is what was used by writers and artists working on the series to keep character portrayal and tone relatively consistent. If they are ever portrayed as inequal, that's very literally out of character and about as inconsistent with the canon as it's possible to get. That's it. Interpret it however you want.
HOLD UP
Since there are alternate universes cannonly, then does that mean that the episodes didn't actually get reset? The show just continues on in a new in a different universe? That means Zim and Dib really just stay bologna in Bolognius Maximus and presumably were eaten by dogs, and Zim really does get flown into the sun and probably die in Hobo 13. What the fuck
Well, in the comics, it's explained as "anytime you make a slightly different choice, that creates another slightly different universe" (more or less).
So, yes, there's probably at least one universe where they stay bologna, and at least one where Zim gets annihilated in that star. But there's also at least one where those things get fixed and everyone survives.
We don't really have any way of knowing exactly which universe we're looking at at any given time outside of "these are all universes with a commonality that makes them appear very similar". Otherwise we'd be watching something that looks like the reality-collision part of Enter the Florpus.
Holy hot damn. So literally the Wiki is just a lie Dib probably isnt actually 12 but was 12 in the movie. The movie possibly being an INTIRE DIFFERENT TIME LINE OR UNIVERSE to the show?! This show has basically no canon except for small facts like their likes, dislikes, and Dib needing to calm down a tiny bit.
Wow. Damn this is why I love this fandom people here always manage to amaze me. Thank you @quietlii You explained that really well.
I don't remember if Dib's age is ever stated outright in the series, although he's consistently a schoolkid barring time travel, future-flashes or incidents with accelerated aging.
There's also cases like Dib's Wonderful Life of Doom, where Dib experienced an entire lifetime in what felt like real time to him inside a simulation but was actually probably closer to a minute or less outside the simulation.
Incidentally, the technology Zim used in that episode is probably the same or very similar to the technology used to educate irken smeets. Every irken has the entire collective memory of their whole civilization downloaded into them in a matter of seconds just a couple of minutes after their birth (according to The Trial and the comics). Imo that and the fact that irken PAKs are reused and can pass on personality traits to new smeets (again, from The Trial and the comics) is probably why Jhonen once said that every irken is older than any living thing on Earth. All of them have, technically, experienced multiple lifetimes while still infants, and can have personality traits passed on from hundreds if not thousands of previous incarnations. But Jhonen has also compared them to kids or teens and said that they're collectively immature (Red, Purple and Zim in particular though), which again imo, makes sense if they don't actually have their own life experience to back that up. And I guess that's another reason why the age thing is impossible to pin down. (Zim did get compared to Old Kid in the show lmao.)
The movie is very definitely a separate universe from the comics at least, and the major branching point seems to be whether or not Zim remembers what "Phase 2" is supposed to be (in the comics he does remember, while in EtF he doesn't, leading to the epiphany that sets off the events of the movie.) The unfinished episodes 10 Minutes to Doom, Return of Keef and The Trial probably happened in the EtF universe because there's references to them littered throughout the movie, but we have no way of knowing if they happened exactly the way they did in the released scripts and clips.
(I'm not totally sure about Mopiness of Doom, I don't remember if there's anything that outright confirms that it happened; it could be that Zim's depressive episode in EtF replaced his depressive episode from Mopiness of Doom for that universe, which would be an interesting inversion of character development between him and Dib now that I think about it-)
Before EtF the differences seemed like small details that could be explained away as "resetting", but now we have a clear example of exactly how a major split happens, and how two very different timelines can continue on completely independently of each other. The comics' explanation of how the alternate universes happen is also pretty recent.
Yeah there's a lot of misinformation and outdated stuff on the wiki tbh. With the series being as (relatively) old as it is there's a lot of stuff that's been lost and is difficult to reference, and a lot of fan theory that gets presented as canon (which is why I try to make as clear a distinction as I can between my personal interpretation and what actually happened), and things get taken out of context a lot.
I'm glad I could help! There are a lot of people who know much more about the series and its lore and history than I do though!!
Reblogging this because i love all this information being compiled somewhere, but yeah IZ is notorious for inconsistent lore! Which sucks that people argue over it so much because in my opinion that’s part of what allows it to have such a diverse and strong fandom: because it really is up to the fans to pick and choose what bits of information they want to integrate into their fanwork and what stuff they want to disregard, especially because we have things like unfinished episodes that can both be considered canon or possibly non-canon because they never made it into the show itself. It’s all over the place, and different people definitely seem to place different emphasis on different details. I’ve even argued that there’s different ways to characterize Dib for example based on what details you want to focus on and I even tend to pick and choose which comic issues I integrate into my own interpretations because they are written by different people who also had their own perspective on the characters.
It’s why fighting over this stuff instead of just embracing the different ways you can work with the canon material is so baffling to me. That’s why the age discourse is so irrelevant to me as well. I feel like once you try to justify the ages you’ve basically already missed the point because everyone has wildly different interpretations so in my opinion no one is right and just do what feels best to you.
And even beyond all of this the whole point of fandom is to reinterpret and reimagine characters outside their canon. I’ve been in fandoms where the transformative aspect was a big emphasis so I guess that always made sense to me and it’s why I don’t understand people that try to impose their interpretations of canon on others as the only way to enjoy things. Like sure I have my very specific headcanons and interpretations and might disagree with others but at the end of the day mine aren’t any better or make me better than anyone else, it’s just different and something that better caters to my personal tastes (key word: personal tastes). Even people who have ships they consider less controversial than say ZADR are still technically creating AUs whenever they imagine anything outside canon so their work isn’t anymore upholding canon than they like to act.
This is sort of a tangent on this post so you can disregard me, but it just seems to wild to me how hard people want to insist on hard canon evidence for how you’re allowed to say interpret characters ages while at the same time completely reimagining every other aspect of IZ and how they personally view the characters.
I highly encourage anyone to just take the bits from canon that resonate with them and play with it in a way that is personally fulfilling to them. That’s the secret to having fun and what fandom should be about. I love seeing all this information on IZ lore compiled!!
