Jhonen Vasquez says Zim fans watch the show wrong and Iâm here to tell you why thatâs bullshit
âI watched a video - I couldnât get through all of it - of⊠the voice actors reading through one of the unused scriptsâ [audience sounds of disgust and mild shame]
Okay, bad start. People are already worried about the possibility of The Almighty Jhonen reprimanding them. Also he didnât get through the whole video but is apparently going to talk about it anyway because he feels the need to tell everyone just how big of an issue this is to him. So whatâs the issue anyway?
âAll you could hear during this episode were girls going âawwwww~â
Wait⊠youâre telling me we werenât supposed to think the episode Mopiness of Doom was cute? This is news to me and Iâm sure a lot of people in the audience felt the same. Also, fuck dude, maybe try not to make fun of the female fans for making their girly expressions of delight, alright? Itâs demeaning.
âI knew this before but it really put a spotlight on how so many of the fans are watching the show wrong.â
I canât even express properly how mad this remark makes me. Itâs mind-bogglingly insulting and rude. To think that he was faced by all of these people who enjoyed something he created enough to organize an entire convention dedicated to it, and he had the nerve to criticize them for somehow watching the show wrong? Unbelievable.
Itâs a fan convention, Jhonen. People are going to laugh, cry, and scream, and every one of those people are individuals who arenât going to react to things the same way you do. Itâs just a fact of life.
âItâs possible to watch a show wrong. They say that once you make something itâs no longer yours, itâs in the hands of whoever interprets it⊠Uh, also wrong.â [audience laughs but tbh I donât know why]
Giant bad opinion alert but I believe that heâs actually wrong. Of course an artist has their original intent imbedded in their creation, and that will arguably never go away, but itâs fans that make art thrive because they all take away something slightly different from it. Fans arenât just mindless consumers. They have imaginations and visions of their own. So really, you wouldnât get any massively creative fan communities without people âwatching the show wrong.â
âThe major tenets of the show are sarcasm, cruelty, and violence.â
Okay king edgelord I think we knew that. I was scarred witnessing that cruelty as a kid, thanks. Now Iâm older and I can appreciate all the awful stuff, but I can also think GIR is mega adorable and I can also ship ZaDr, and RaPr, and TaGr. Why? Because I enjoy doing so.
âAffection⊠warm-fuzzy things, anything that would inspire an âawww~â⊠Itâs not in the show.â
Even if we pretended that were true it wouldnât be true. I actually had to cut down the number of cute gifs I found because, letâs face it, this post is getting a little lengthy. I will mention Zimâs second adorable sidekick, Minimoose, since his entire speech in the Christmas episode was just ânyah!â It doesnât get much cuter than that, folks.
âSo when theyâre responding to that in that way you know thereâs something wrong with them.â [Jhonen points to his head and the audience laughs again]
The thing is that the girls werenât saying âawwwâ at characters punching each other in the face. If I recall correctly Mopiness of Doom doesnât even have much violence in it. They thought the episode was cute because it showed that Zim and Dib needed each otherâs rivalry to stay sane. Zim became depressed and lazy without Dib antagonizing him, and Dibâs attempts to become a scientist like his father suddenly made his life feel meaningless. The episode ends with their glorious reunion as enemies and then they playfully take turns calling each other names.
Iâm not surprised that ZaDr and ZaDf shippers like the episode so much at all and they definitely arenât crazy like Mr. Vasqueeze would be so eager to suggest.
Maybe if he watched until the end of the video he would have seen this:
Seriously, no comment? None at all?
