NOT Dib Slander - Tumblr Posts

One of my favorite things about the character of Dib is that on one hand he’s genuinely geeking out about the existence of extraterrestrial life and he can barely contain his overflowing awe and intrigue at the marvels of their technology and unknown biology,

And then on the other hand he’s probably also daydreaming about the entire armada cinematically exploding to the chorus melody of “I Wish They’d All Just Die” or “Goodbye Moonmen” because it’s the only mental exercise that can hold him back from strangling a skool classmate from green to blue in broad daylight.

Yknow when you watch IZ again binge style it’s really funny looking at how quickly Dib’s main victory layout pivoted from “capture the alien” to “expose the alien” to “just keep foiling his attempts to destroy the world while still looking for a lucky opportunity to go back on the offense” like it would be really sad if he didn’t still have all of the confident swagger of a 12 year old boy who thinks he’s the protagonist despite it all. But seriously it’s also funny. Because that would be literally any of us as soon as we realized Zim is damn near impossible to actually apprehend. Like credit to Dib for once because my game plan would have switched to outright assassination by season 2, since it’s seemingly more feasible to straight up kill an Irken than to try and incapacitate one. And killing one seems like the kind of difficulty that would have had me dead or hiding in a bunker by season 3.

So this is part of a big spiel I went off on about the nature of Zim and Dib’s rivalry but I didn’t want to live in fear that the context for this particular point wasn’t understood

“[…] it's not really the fate of the Earth that's at stake when it's time for prank wars gone awry and school showdowns. No matter what either of them claim, it's a whole different ballgame when the stakes are actually ego. The muffin throw, the Bologna virus, The Food Fight, and The Wettening were not even really scuffles to the death if you take notice. Those battles were about both of them each trying to send a message to the other in one long-going argument. Zim's is a statement about the inherent supremacy of his species, and Dib's is a middle finger that shouts not to underestimate humans so quickly. You ever listen to "Impress Your Creators" by Tub Ring??

The ending part of that song is Dib's entire spirit”

Cause irrelevant to the whole zim vs dib thing, this specific vibe is like 85% of why Dib’s such a great character to me. Why it’s so easy to root for him as both antagonist and protagonist, and why even though I’m usually a sucker for villains, I respect the hell out of the hero he’s trying to play. Mostly though why this is just his 2nd top character song in my head.

The whole gist of “impress your creators” is this: A pod of advanced aliens shows up on earth, introduce themselves as essentially humanity’s gods, and then ominously inform us that we have 10 years and only one chance to do our best to “impress them”. Vague instructions and an implied threat of obliteration from a strange and super advanced kind. No pressure. They fly back out. One decade passes, they return as promised, and THIS was the big reveal for what humans did with all that time and hard work.

Do you slander Dib out of spite, or because watching the little loser try to get his way and utterly failing is fascinating to document, or maybe because justice should be made to the idiocy and disfuncional braincells of his character? Or maybe all three of them? Perhaps a secret fourth thing, even?

I slander Dib because he slanders my peop- uh I mean, yes. You’re mostly right. He’s a great antiheroic antagonist, warts and all, and he deserves a fair slice of the justice pie in this post Florpus era now more than ever, me thinks. Don’t let the updated art style or the fandom blobofication fool any, especially the newer riders. This has always been a Vasquez setting and if there’s two beautiful things I’ve learned are true to Johnen’s work, it’s that his universe(s)

• are quite whacky

• refuse to leave room in the spotlight for Gary Sues and wee pwecious cinnamon rolls

And I respect the fuck out of both of these qualities. This isn’t “haha ESH” family guy kinda writing, it’s writing that doesn’t fear gritty textures or unsanded corners for its characters. It’s also I think a huge part of how they were able to stay so engaging and fascinating over so much content while having relatively minuscule serialized character development- Why Dib episodes work on their own even without Zim, why Zim episodes still work even when taking place completely off of Earth, and why we can’t ever stfu about either of them so many years later. They already came in with a full deck of dimensions, flaws, and personal conflicts that you can stretch out for an enormous amount of entertainment. If you make a character that I am just as happy to root for as I am giddy to laugh at their failures, I think you’ve done something neat.

I don’t think it comes out of spite, though. Judge it whatever you will, but I think I slander this boy for sake of tough love. Pretending it’s spite is just funnier (-᷅ w -᷄)

All the same, if you really want the tea on the not so secret fourth thing, Dib, for all his Dibness…. is frankly a notoriously relatable twerp. Out of the mainest main cast, I’ve at least found his deal the easiest to empathize with.

A final note, on the topic of my general regard toward Dib “Agent Mothman” Membrane:

And it’s NOT even an obsession with aliens specifically… it’s an obsession with the unknown and yet to be explored. Absent of Zim forcing his attention and top priority towards the perpetual invasion, he doesn’t really have a particular worm for extraterrestrials burrowing through his head. He’s jumping at any cryptic lead that enters his field of view in his spare time. He’s scrutinizing for potential yetis/bigfeets, he’s raising the dead, and he’s probably going around poking vampiric beehives and god only knows what other antics a 12 year old with that kind of plot armor can get around to. He’s just as enthusiastic and curious to “figure out” arcane spells and futuristic unearthly tech alike. In a simulation of all his dreams come true he segwayed right through his false victory over Zim and onto the next hunt for ghosts, and then the likes of Nessie’s kin.

Of course space would be absolutely wondrous to him. It’s one of the last true frontiers standing before mankind, and what is left to be learned about it completely dwarfs, no, transcends the comparative speck of work we’ve accomplished so far. I’d make a fair wager that he feels the same about the oceans and the worlds beneath worlds, and in between.

The juxtaposition between his life’s passion and Professor Membrane’s is so ironic it actually almost hurts.

And I’ve seen it that way for a very long time, because invader Zim is a crazyass world full of crazyass things that are real as a heart attack. This isn’t real life where people actually are likely in need of urgent medical treatment if they spend several years screaming about a school classmate being an interloper from the stars or a Sasquatch using their power tools. Dib actually does know what he’s talking about to at least a point further than many other believers and investigators within the show. Nothing about his problem with dad is “science vs pseudoscience” like it would be if they existed in a grounded and consistent universe.

To Dib, this is ALL correctly perceived as just more science. Supernatural would honestly be a misnomer for his special interest if you think about it. How can something be above nature, and also occur naturally? Magic and monsters are parts of the same world, and the fact that they break the known rules only means to Dib that there’s more complexity to the rules he needs to keep learning. He’s not even “bad” at the conventional research his father expects of him, he’s a prodigy study to the point that it bores him to tears.

Because why would he want to keep himself restrained to things already tried and known when there’s so much more out there? He doesn’t want the maximum potential of his achievements to be dragging his feet down a path paved to him by those before, least of all probably his father.

You wanna hear a hot take about where his disagreement with the professor actually stems from??

Dib Membrane is the most scientifically-minded character in Invader Zim.

Literally no one else so consistently represents that inquirious faucet of the human condition. For better or worse Dib has to be scratching an itch to keep turning over every odd stone off the beaten road and to pursue that which he doesn’t understand- All for no other ultimate reason than to know, record, and tell. Contrast that with the most renowned scientist of the human race: a man of authoritative knowledge and very little compromise with the unknowns, as in the TRUE unknowns. I’m not saying Professor membrane doesn’t have intellectual curiosity, far from it, but it’s not actually the main driver behind his research. And that is neither an insult to his work because his main priority is actually extremely utilitarian and helpful to society. The world literally needs a man like him to function, and his entire character represents what most laymen think an ideal “scientist” is, a super smarts guy who knows everything and builds the world we live in. In his position, it’s probably very hard not to develop some arrogance regarding what he thinks he’s learned about the universe.

Dib’s hobby is where you really watch the curiosity in Membrane comes to blows with the stereotype he was made in the image of. Earlier on you believe the problem is that he’s just an evidence based rationalist who needed proof of Dib’s claims.

Except we have seen this hope completely shattered from about the Florpus movie and onward. Professor membrane is smart, but he is not inherently that much more rational than most humans. There is the established science, and there are unquestionable, concrete rules about the universe he just cannot compromise on because he has not considered their exceptions possible. He roughly said it himself once that aliens probably do exist, but not the technology that could bring them face to face with him. that’s the exact premise in his head that stopped him from engaging with the Irken Spittlerunner sitting in his garage. Based on the laws he spent his entire life utilizing in his work, it shouldn’t exist. It can’t exist. But his son is a very imaginative and crafty kid. Him building something like that as a cry for attention is possible under the known laws of reality, so there’s the working conclusion for the spaceship. All of membrane’s denial throughout the movie becomes a lot less absurd and a lot more predictable when you realize this is just how his internal logic tree works. A bug-eyed alien using a tiny purple moose to spaghettify the entire planet through a multi-dimensional portal??? NOT👏SCIENTIFICALLY👏POSSIBLE. That’s an absolutely ludicrous proposal!

Some kind of hallucinogenic psychosis? Well, that’s happened to people before, the human mind is a very flawed machine, after all. What are you gonna do, right? Bet it’s just a remarkably vivid dream. And that’s a bummer because it really raises the bar and the possible futility of what Dib is trying to accomplish. Even if he switched gears off of the alien thing and made a breakthrough somewhere else, it is always going to be the same struggle with his father, because what Dib loves to study is exclusively things that make everything we know about the world no longer make sense- Things that elude traditional means of research and things that require a humility that his society has long abandoned to be known. Things that you will never see if you don’t have the modesty to accept that you haven’t reached the end of history and exploration. Professor Membrane is without reservation, a brilliant mind, and a force of ultimate good in the world. He’s the colloquial understanding of science, the cemented, the accepted, the undefeatable, and the merciless enemy to blind faith.

And yet, Dib Membrane better represents the actual history and theory of the scientific pursuit- one that was fueled by curiosity and awe at the world, one that has persisted despite all sabotage and violence that tried to hold it back, one that never grew complacent, one that made power upset countless times over, one that had to constantly adapt, and one that doesn’t dismiss or flee its challengers because it sprints headfirst into them.

TL/DR: I eternally fucking love the characterization in this series; Taking my hat off in sorrow for Dib because so much of the family rift here is that the professor has raised a superior successor to Membrane Labs, even if he’s stubbornly coping too hard to appreciate that now.

You know, the movie doesn’t explicitly draw attention to it, but I just love Dib’s wonder-filled big-eyed look when Zim pulls out his star map hologram. 

It connects very well with the movie’s opening

And even as far back as the ending of ‘Tak, the Hideous New Girl’

That Dib’s obsession with aliens is, fundamentally, born of a true sense of excitement and wonder of the mysteries of outer space. 

“Haha ha remember how Zim actually killed Dib on screen for a moment in that one episode? So dark right?”

Yeah Haha ha ha remember when Zim also screwed up in that same episode by turning their beef so personal and traumatic that after Dib survived, he stopped even thinking of capturing him, and he just rushed into dude’s base with the open intention to fucking end Zim and GIR both on the spot in broad daylight?

“Thinking all day about Zim remorselessly killed/crippled a child-“

And? We knew he was capable of that from episode one I’m thinking all night about the terrifyingly canon threshold that exists between current Dib and a scenario like this

Something else I really appreciate about Dib as a character, something I should have brought up ages ago,

He has more reason than any single person in the show to have a completely cynical and outright hateful reaction to aliens, not just for everything Irkens have put him through, but because he has been paranoid about all of the trope-typical conspiratorial hypotheticals about outer worlders as hostile invaders long before he ever confirmed any.

Amazingly and against what you expect, he seldom lets any of this actually express as a blanket bigotry against unfamiliar aliens on first encounter. The Plookesians appear and he’s still just wholly focused with Zim. The Meekrob show up to his place in Zim’s simulation and he’s understandably confused/concerned, but still leans toward trusting their spiel. I like to wonder whether he only reacted to Zim the way he did because of the latter’s obvious attempts to blend in and borderline threaten humans from the moment he opened his mouth, or if it was actually after learning about the Irken empire that he calmed down a bit, realizing there was an entire nuanced galactic ecosystem out there also facing his same problem.

Either way what I’m talking about demonstrated itself most strongly in these panels from the comics.