wait you knoe what no, no we are not over, this has been bugging me for MONTH now
Please skip this whole rant if you're sick of hearing zadr age talk
I love Love LOOOVE jhonen vasquez. I respect it he doesn't like romanceee and gays and the rainbows. But Zim has always been a child, the puppet kiss exists because they have always been children. The cast sees them as kids, the bible, the whole show is set up with Zim and Dib being kids. Eqeals. That's the whole point.
I watched that interview where he said it, that he's an old grown man -ick- and that he fights with children in school - eye twiching- .. and it's for the art book by McDonnel and oh my gawd that piece of paper is my holy grail-anyway- he knows there are freaky people shipping Zim with Dib and my theory is he just intentionally aged him up, I imagine he must have seen some shit in the past to make him hate it this much...he even says that people ask him about it a lot and then said to ''enjoy what you enjoy''. I love how he's keen on ''It's just not the show'' :3 lmao like yes your show is still edgy don't worry I'm not going to take that away, I love Invader Zim for the show it is. He's so overprotective of his work I adore it.
Jhonen is such a loveble maaan when will he do a streaaammmmm, i need to give him money. And you know what I wish he will actually never see my art, becouse I know he'd hate it and I kind of accept that. (I'm crying in mr. corner typing this) I accept it.
I also love the idea that Irk just has child solders and child labor, because that's so dark, it's exactly how I interpreted the first episode.
If you see Zim as an adult in the show (excluding the shipping aspect) I have nothing against it,- like it gives me the ick because then it's like this adult seeking attention from a 12 year old boy... - but his age is literally up to interperatation because he's an alien, do wahtever you want until you don't ship adultzimxyoungdib.. BUTTT I haven't seen not even a single zadr shipper -at least the small time I have been here- who doesn't see them as equaly aged. Leave the zadr shippers aloneee. Let them beee, let us just have our headcanons, let us make them kiss, let us age them up and let us have fun with their dynamic. It's just SO MUCH FUN to ship themm For me It's like spirk but with an edge to it. Like muuuch more freakier. Mostly wholesome, but then it gets freakkyyy.
Also there are so many comment like ''i shipped it UNTIL i learned about THE TRUTH'' like cmon, just ship it and have fun
I'm new to the fandom and to this ship, which will probably be my hyperfixation for a whilllleeeee. I was a bit sad that it's so old, and the hype has died down...But It's probable I avoided harassment from many people by being so late to the hype.
okay can i talk about something that really ticks me off for a sec. rant below
i can't help but roll my eyes a little whenever i go onto someone's blog for their art or something and in their bio a big "ZADR DNI" or "IRKEN X CHILD DNI" is plastered.
like... y'all do realize there isn't really a confirmed age for ANY irken in the show, right?? there's conflicting and contradicting evidence for both adult zim and child zim. neither viewpoint is strictly canon. 99.99% of zadr shippers don't view it as a pedophilic extreme age gap pairing (the 00.01% probably exists, given that this is the internet, but i haven't seen any such thing myself), so it's really weird to act like they're bad people for something like that.
it's cool to have boundaries, but don't act like you have the moral high ground for having that specific boundary.
i was going back and forth on whether i should post this because i don't want to invite more discourse, im sick of ending up involved in it, but this is so straightforward that i felt it would be a crime to not point this out. this feels like the proof we've been looking for.
i can't confirm if this is official and i don't know why it wouldn't be, it just feels so surreal to me that i haven't seen anybody mention this yet if it actually is official.
Old reference guide from 2000. I'm not exactly sure how the production for shows works, but this is what they give to the animators/writers to help them understand the characters, right?
A series of Invader Zim reference material used during the show's production, plus The Ultimate Guide used for advertising and merchandiseSo
"Ages are generally unknown."
Am I missing something? Is there something I'm reading wrong here? Because that seems clear to me. If these are like instructions given to animators/writers, Jhonen essentially just said to them "we don't fuckin know what ages they're supposed to be lmao"
like we already know that he keeps saying different things about the ages and being unclear, but he just admitted here that it's supposed to be unclear, that it was written with the intention to be unknown. Is there fineprint im not looking at???? i genuinely feel like im completely glossing over some super secret section that says "by the way we lied there's an age gap in their rivalry lol" because why else would i have never seen anybody pull this up to explain why the ages are up to interpretation???????????
ok hey hi so i just wanna say as calmly as possible, even though i dont ship zadr myself, id prefer not to interact with anyone who aggressively hates on/outright attacks zadr shippers. you can not like the ship, thats completely fine! but id rather not associate myself with the kind who attacks or cyberbullies others for their views since thats a big problem in the fandom (since... forever lol)
i understand that some see zim as an adult and the ship as pedophilia or darkshipping or whatever it is, but im pretty sure a good bit of zadr shippers see zim as a child, going by earlier media that describes him as such (for example the show bible and magazines).
im not bullshitting abt the show bible this is in page 21
let me ALSO make it clear that you can absolutely see zim as an adult! ill be just as cool with you! even though jhonen said hes a kid in the show bible, his indecisive ass said this in a tweet years later!
so what the fuck, man? tf is his age? who do i attack online now? the answer is NO ONE. at this point, the only real answer is that zims age is up to the individual. no one. fuckin. knows. you can depict zim as a kid in your works. thats cool. you can depict zim as an adult in your works. thats cool.
as long as you dont ship adult zim with child dib. thats not cool. dont do that. but you know what you can do if you see someone shipping an adult with a child? "harass them into deleting their account?" NO, YOU DULL-WITTED GUSHKWEEGASPLORCH! block, scroll, move on. dont give that kind of person attention alongside of wasting your precious time and energy! at the end of the day, its the internet. what can you really do.
all things considered, to each their own. remember that zadf art i made a while back? notice how i put recap kid in there SPECIFYING that theyre both children in that art and no creepy shit is going on? you might need to squint really hard cuz apparently some people still reprimanded me on pinterest (of course) with the whole "zim is 160" hoax (hes not btw, remember that wikipedia can be changed by fans and isnt the most reliable) but its there, trust me
when in doubt, SPECIFY. lets all agree that shipping adults with kids is bad. hold on, im not finished, lets ALSO all agree that we all have the notoriously difficult cognitive ability to mind our own business! IMAGINE THAT! ok thx for reading byebye
I’m very confused on if ur for or against zadr… u reblogged a post about zim being an adult but also reblogged that post telling Jhonen to be quiet over not liking Zadr? I don’t care either way I’m just getting mixed messages
I reblogged that post because Jhonen’s blatant hypocrisy amused me.
when it comes to the zadr debate I mostly try not to think about it because it stresses me out, but I have enjoyed zadr content that has been set way in the future where Dib is in his thirties or something and everyone is mature. Everyone has their own headcanons so I don’t go after people for liking or disliking the ship or shipping it in the way that they do. My views on the ship are dependent on the circumstances of how it is portrayed.
sometimes i think about how when i was 17 and was in a proship safe ZaDr server (i want to make it clear i am not fully against the ship, i still ship ZaDr just not the problematic age gap vers) and i was sexually assaulted by one of the server members. who was an adult. i told the server owners and they asked me if i was comfortable with the person staying in the server and only KICKED them after i became uncomfortable. This person was able to rejoin the server and i had to beg for them to leave. anyway fuck proship and fuck the larger ZaDr community for allowing me to be fucking assaulted.
I dont wanna get myself involved in any more ZADR discourse, but I also don't want misinfo to spread around and people to get discouraged or anything like I had been for a while. So I'm going to say this: Zim in Invader Zim is most likely a child.
There are a plethora of reasons I think this, but if you don't care then scroll. I'm going to provide my reasoning under the cut.
My first reason is that from a writing standpoint, there is absolutely nothing appealing about the dynamic between Dib and Zim if Zim is an adult. What would or do you find enjoyment out of their dynamic if they are not meant to be foils of one another like the show HEAVILY implies them to be NUMEROUS TIMES? If Zim is a child, their dynamic becomes "2 children want parental approval and go against each other for it, when in reality the approval and love they seek is unattainable because the parental figures will never give them it. They would be better off being friends or allies, but instead keep fighting to be loved because they're dumb kids and don't realize that it's fruitless and dumb". If Zim is an adult, their dynamic becomes "Immature man cannot beat child". What is to be enjoyed or explored there?
My second reason is that Zim acts like a child in a multitude of different ways. His interactions with The Tallest, his general immaturity, and even how he surrounds himself. He goes to school. He has made himself robot parents to support that idea. He needs different disguises to act like an adult. Again, from a writing standpoint, if he was an adult infiltrating a school building and pretending to be a kid, that's just fucking weird. I don't think Jhonen is that type of person. I don't think the writers are that type of people.
Also on this subject is the episode Tak: The Hideous New Girl. At the point of the episode, Zim was trying to impress and "crush on" and be the boyfriend of this middle school girl. It doesn't matter if Tak was actually irken. It doesn't matter if she is the same age as him actually. It doesn't change that Zim was trying to get into a human relationship with what he thought was a middle school girl. If he is an adult, that's pretty fucking weird. Again, I don't think Jhonen is that type of person and I don't think the writers are that type of people.
The "flying ships before you were born" only proves that on Irk, he was an adult or at least the age that would permit him to fly ships. Calendars are manmade, why would irkens use the same years? Zim's age could also easily translate into human years into the late tween years. We also have to think logically about things.
Also, I sometimes feel like people are forgetting that Irk is a dystopian society. They are a hyper-militarized alien race that codes people's brains on the daily and does not wait for the children to grow up even a little before they start military training (or, at least training for military training). What morals prevent them from using child labor or child soldiers? We also have to remember that in accordance to The Trial, Zim was a smeet or older allowed into violent chemicals and resources that can kill, like it did Tallest Miyuki and Tallest Spork. That, in a way, proves that Irkens are not above dangerous child labor.
One other argument I have is that in Enter The Florpus, during the species change clip, Zim, Dib and Gaz switch species. The thing is, Dib and Gaz look the same as Zim in this clip. They don't become little smeets, they don't become tiny kids. They become Zim's age. Zim also does not become an old man in this clip. He stays the same as Dib and Gaz. Being that these are their canon human/irken translations, I don't see how someone could still defend this.
You could take all of this and say "Okay, but ZADR is still proship because they are abusive to each other so why are you so pressed". But like I said in a previous post, there is a major difference between "haha 2 people fight each other n get hurt haha" and "this adult man is grooming this child sexually". That's not funny. That isn't cartoony. That is a fully serious topic taken seriously in every single media that it is represented in. Cartoony unserious fighting has been a staple for years in animation and media. Grooming is not cartoony. That is why so many people have a problem with it. Some people don't enjoy shipping things that are seriously fucked up in the real world like that, or shipping proships.
This all started because of one singular tweet Jhonen made that you all believed. I bet if he tweeted "guys invader zim didnt actually happen and dib was hallucinating the whole time, lmao dream theory is canon", some of you would believe it.
I leave you off with this: "If it looks, sounds & acts like a kid, it's a kid, no matter if it's actually 1000 years old or not."
saw ur post ab anti zadrs and ur so right esp because those ones specifically are obsessed with wasting their time actively posting in the tag and going thru it and bitching and whining like “wahhh i keep seeing zadr on my feed and in character tags” whilst ignoring everybody and they mamas saying “just fucking block it”. at some point if you spend that much energy going on and on ab how you hate ships its safe to assume you really actually like it and are only blabbing ab hating it because you believe any random person who took one (1) joke ab zim being 500 seriously
Yeah, I mean I’m not going to pretend to understand what’s going on in the mind of someone who is going through the tags of something they so actively hate, but it is very exhausting for me as a zadr enjoyer to have to run into them when I do. Blocking the anti zadr tag and variations of it mostly keep them off my radar, but some of them still slip through.
And then sometimes you run into the people who have those really aggressive DNI banners in the general IZ tag that say things like “if you’re one of those zadr FREAKS don’t even LOOK at this post or I will KILL you” or some iteration of that. When all they really have to do if people tagging their work as a ship bothers them that much is put like. “Don’t tag as a ship” at the bottom. That’s part of what I mean about making the fandom hostile. Like, believe it or not, as a shipper, I can enjoy platonic and other non-romantic art of Zim and Dib for what they are. It seems intensely controlling to be trying to police how people tag their reblogs of your posts for their own blogs, but I can respect people’s wishes if they communicate it. Plus, I’m not really a content creator, so I guess I don’t really know what that’s like.
And you also find that level of toxicity within the zadr fandom with some people arguing that there are only certain ways zadr can be shipped. I don’t know, I just think that if you don’t like how some people are shipping zadr, you should just stay away from that. Plus, like. At its core, zadr comes from insanely toxic canon dynamics no matter how you frame it in fanworks. Like you still had to look at canon and say, “But what if I shipped these two?” So if you like zadr, it doesn’t make sense to me that you can even be arguing that one way is better than the other when at the end of the day, the source material is Invader Zim, in which Zim and Dib are deeply problematic characters.
I love the IZ/ZaDR fandom a lot. I do. And I am so deeply appreciative for all the creators in the fandom. A lot of IZ, specifically zadr, works have truly gotten me through some of the toughest moments in my life. That is not an exaggeration. But every so often, it gets really toxic in here, and it’s just so upsetting. Such is the nature of fandom, I suppose.
