WMG / Invader Zim

Zim is a virus, interpreting its orders through a pak.

Short version, at some point someone implanted a piece of malware into the irken network, probably in the leadup to operation impending doom one. It was meant to reach and eventually destroy the control brains but was purged from the systme before it could complete its goal. However it managed to infiltrate the pak programming system before being wiped and ended up becoming Zim as a means to collapse or at least hinder the irken empire.

Long version, every single thing Zim has ever done has been a hindrance to the Irken empire. Throughout his existence he's been shuffled from place to place and always somehow manages to bring destruction to his people, too much destruction. He's almost gifted at causing wanton mayhem and probably death on a grand scale but only when it's direct at his own empire. This troper has come to suspect that rather then being simply defective or broken this is Zim's purpose. He is a literal piece of malware operating out of a Pak, we've been repeatedly told that the computer in the Pak is the real mind and the body is just something to carry it around. If someone wanted to behead the Irken empire malware would be the ideal way to do it because they are ruled by computers.

At some point this malware ended up in the Irken computer network with instructions to A:Take out the control brains, B:If that was not immediately possible cause mass infrastructure damage, death, or other hindrance to the Irkens. It was attempting to do just that but a purge of it began leaving only a copy that had invaded the Pak system and ended up attached to an Irken soldier named Zim. For the next few centuries it repeatedly caused massive damage to the empire using Zim as a vessel, from the disaster of impending doom one, the death of one of the tallest, abandoning his post on foodcourtia, trapping one of it's most competent invaders in testing so she wouldn't be able to participate in the next invasion, constantly pestering the tallest, destroying the massive, and as revealed in the material released after the series was canceled eventually succeeding in corrupting the control brains beyond repair.

Zim is not consciously aware of this, the malware likely wouldn't be able to run a Pak alone so it's likely whatever programs were supposed to run Zim's body are simply slaved to it's control being fed false information. His main drives are a sense of extreme nationalism, need to destroy things, and a grotesquely bloated ego. All meant to keep him in the empire, in a position to cause damage, and unaware of his own nature.

• Somewhat related to this idea of a "virus" among the irken race.....

"Defective" Irkens infect their entire Generation.

Irkens that are born and activated defective, and didn't aquire or become a defective status later in life from whatever experience gone wrong, are created from paks that had naturally been created with faulty coding that infects the rest of the smeets in their generation like an infection or illness. This causes the normal, non defective Irkens to have defective traits, which is why you see some irkens have fear, sadness, tears, affection or empathy towards others or to servants, and others show none. Any generation that had no defectives are known to be much colder and calculating, they're perfect, as opposed to the more emotional ones.

All Irkens are known to be linked through their paks to the entire knowledge in the Irken Race and to the Control Brains, but each generation as a whole is also linked separately from eachother with a special link to their own hatchmates, considering new paks would need to be created for each new batch of Smeets as they come. As such, any defectives not caught early on then proceed to unknowingly spread their defectivity to new hosts, and these Irkens are never able to be the perfect soldiers they would have been had the Defective been found early. It shows in different ways and increases as long as the Defective is alive and able to cause more harm, and the Defective Irken in question also gets worse and worse as they get older, hence how Zim seems to become less and less stable.

Red, Purple, and Skoodge are all from Zim's personal generation, so they don't know it, but they have less than desirable personalities and traits that make them some portion of Defective, as is most of the Irken Race. Considering that entire generations probably exist at hundreds if not thousands of Smeets hatched at once and most dying by adulthood, this means most of the planet is this way: Passable, but always less than what they could have been, and the ones that aren't are the "Perfect Soldiers" that Zim speaks of so highly. They are literally perfect.

The Movie will have Zim become a Complete Monster.

Vasquez clearly wasn't happy about how people reacted to Nny. The movie will rectify a similar situation by taking on a darker tone and showing what a monstrous, abominable alien Zim can be. He might kill GIR,(or at least try to), plan to spread death and destruction to the rest of the universe(including his own kind, especially if he finally learns that his mission was a lie to get him out of the way), and torture Dib, mocking him over all the people he's failed to save. His sadism and callousness will get taken to the utmost extreme to clarify how he's not the Amusing Alien (or even Anti-Hero) fans like to portray on Tumblr and other fandom bases. A bit dark, but Plankton came pretty close as well.

• The Irken Empire itself could get this treatment. Calling to attention that no matter how cute and goofy they look, they're indeed genocidal invaders ruled by gluttonous monarchs bringing terror across the universe.
• Jossed. Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus is, if anything, Lighter and Softer than the series by a decent margin, and Zim is portrayed in a fairly sympathetic light as essentially a Jerkass Woobie.

Irkens are slightly evolved Orks

Irkens look, act and think like Orks. Their names even sound alike. Perhaps Irkens were the Orks' ancestors.

All the kids in the class and Ms. Bitters know Zim is an alien.

They just hate Dib more than the thought of the world being destroyed, so they feign ignorance to mess with him.

• Unlikely. In Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus, all the Skoolchildren were terrified when the Earth nearly gets sucked into the Florpus Hole thanks to Zim's actions to the point that they even followed Dib's command from holding their hands with the Membracelets to save the world, so yeah, they care about their home.

The world of Invader Zim was created by Delirium inside of her realm.

Look at her realm, and even herself. That's why the Negative Continuity exists, why everything is so crazy and pretty much everyone is idiots: because the personification of madness created it.

Dib is not a a Time Lord... yet.

He is one of the three founders of Time Lord society; The Other. The Other is the most mysterious founder of Time Lord society, unlike Rassilon and Omega, who are quite well known. However, The Other's fate is known: he threw himself into the Looms, which are what Time Lord society ended up using to reproduce. He was later reincarnated as The Doctor. The Doctor, as we know, is the Only Sane Man in a highly advanced culture that doesn't have an ounce of common sense among them. The reason for the whole "Earth" thing when Earth exists in the Whoniverse? Think about it: Gallifreyans became Time Lords via exposure the Time Vortex. Humans are also, unlike seemingly any other species, able to become Time Lords, by exposure to the Time Vortex in the womb. So, space and time are weird, so bam, history repeats. As for Zim? Perhaps he, in yet another moment of not thinking, accidentally fell into the Looms, or perhaps he and Dib both fell, and he too was reincarnated as The Master, but the Time Lord DNA kept him in check (and the tons of Time Lord DNA overrode his Irken looks) until the Drums made him crazy, at which point, it only made him competent. After all, how many human-hating aliens are that insanely hammy? Okay, a lot, but still. Plus, how many times has The Master managed to survive stuff without any sort of logic behind it? That's the episode by episode snap backs, still slightly working.

Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, I Feel Sick, Squee, and Invader Zim are all in the same Verse

Invader Zim is the one who created Filler Bunny to keep the suspicious humans distracted and happy while he continues his plan of world domination.

• It is actually confirmed, since the Aliens in "Abducted" appeared in a side story in one of the Johnny comics.
• Miss Bitters appears not only in Invader Zim but also other works of Vaques. So some even take place in the same city. At some point it was even stated that Johnny was the one to disturb Dib as a baby and is the reason why he is, as he is.

The Irkens were created as a slave race for some unknown alien species.

As noted on the Fridge Horror page, their PAKs simply could not have happened naturally. They don't have genitals and can't reproduce (meaning that this unknown race would completely control their gene pool), they are not naturally sapient (the PAK is their brain and contains their personality, meaning that you can essentially program anything into their minds), and they are small and easily-defeated in their natural form. Sounds like the perfect genetically-engineered workforce, no?

Gaz and Dib were created specifically to defeat Tak and Zim.

11 years before the events of the show, Professor Membrane somehow (possibly by time travel or prophesy device) learned of a future where two aliens invade the earth and their rivalry to claim credit for dominating the earth destroys the planet. In order to prevent this, he creates two children, at least one of which using his own DNA as a basis (Dib), each specifically designed to contrast their respective alien counterpart. Thus why Gaz is more powerful than Dib: because Tak is a greater threat.

• Highly unlikely. Professor Membrane never seems to comprehend the existence of aliens, even when flat out locked away in an alien prison cell in Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus, to the point of referring to Zim as Dib's, "little green friend". Granted, he does voluntarily let Dib pursue his interests as revealed by "Mopiness of Doom", but it's not as though Membrane is aware of the existence of aliens, even with proof to back it up. He never even attempts to stop Tak in "Tak: The Hideous New Girl" despite Zim and Dib talking about her right in front of Membrane. It's more likely that Dib and Gaz were unfazed by Tak's hypnotic flashes due to Jhonen having plans to reveal Dib and Gaz as being clones of Professor Membrane as opposed to naturally-born humans.

The hierarchy of being tall is an allusion.

Self-Explanatory.

The hierarchy of being tall is an illusion.

The Tallest are not that tall. Those hover suits are a dead giveaway - they just have extra-long robes with fake feet hanging out the bottom. Or maybe robotic suits.

• There is too much of a height difference. The question then becomes, are they still the tallest with it giving them the right to fake being even taller, or are they not tall at all but just working a good scam?
  • It seems obvious that the Tallest are simply puppets. The Man Behind the Man... may be a Master Computer that uses the Irkens as living weapons.
    • What makes that seem obvious?
    • Mostly since they don't seem to do anything practical.
• They are definitely robot suits. Have you seen their hands? They're like long robot antennae, not the stubby gloved fingers all other Irkens have.
  • The DVD Commentary mentions this. The waists of the Tallest slim down to mere cable-cords over the course of the series, "Bringing up the question of whether there is tallest in them at all".
    • Beh, Jhonen just likes drawing things with modular designs. Or, there are different subspecies of Irken, Zim amd Tak and Skoodge and whatnot are Invaders, so they have a lot in common. The tallest are not invaders, so they have different attributes, like the small waist and everything.
  • This is explained in fanon that the Tallest are the tallest Irkens in existence but have undergone major cybernetic enhancements to make them taller. They also lose their thumbs. They're not as tall as they're made out to be, but they are the tallest.
  • My interpretation was that they really were that tall, but that it was a result of severe gigantism, so they can't naturally support themselves without considerable cybernetic enhancement.
    • I don't know about that, as Sizz-Lor was almost as huge as the tallest, and he was downright athletic.
• So... basically, in terms of the allusion/metaphor, it means they stuff their pants and get all the ladies anyway. Nyeh nyeh nyeh!
• Minor thing, GIR eats a large amount of food, even though he doesn't need to, just like the tallest...

Backseat Drivers From Beyond the Stars was the final straw

You'll notice that the Tallest are mostly indifferent about Zim in Season 1, now that he's no longer a threat to Irk or Operation Impending Doom. They don't like him, but don't actively try to kill him and even occasionally entertain minor requests (like Zim's "inspection" in Walk For Your Lives"). But Zim hijacking the Massive, totaling it, nearly killing the Tallest by accidentally flinging them into a sun, leaving them vulnerable to attack from hostile forces and, worst of all, bruising their egos (Red had bragged about how no one would ever challenge them or the Massive? At the end of the episode, the Tallest are 'seething mad at Zim.

After this episode, Sizz-lor would find Zim and bring him back to Foodcourtia, and Zim would go on Trial for a defective PAK. I don't think either of those are coincidences; Zim's conduct in Backseat Drivers was the straw that broke the camel's back.

The Earth has already been taken over.

It's been taken over by whatever faction Dib's father Professor Membrane belongs to (or is enslaved by). The military is subservient as well. Zim is tolerated because he has solved more problems than he has caused, and he is a diversion for Dib.

• Specifically, the mice from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy are the ones in control. This earth is actually the Second Earth, and most of the people are so painfully stupid because the creators of the artificial life either greatly underestimated human's intelligence or didn't quite have the technology to make them as intelligent as they originally were.
• Or it was taken over by the furons, who abandoned the planet after getting enough Furon DNA, which was well before 1979, and Zim landed in a location where most humans have non-functioning Furon DNA (the second game suggests that humans who's DNA is rendered useless are complete idiots). Membrane's family are among the exceptions.
• The almighty tallest knew earth was already taken over before the irkens did. They sent Zim on a “mission” to earth to takeover when in reality, he was actually exiled to a planet that was already taken over.
  Tallest Red: (sips his soda) it was already taken over.

  Zim: What!!??? So I was sent to earth for nothing!?

  Dib: Earth was already Taken over!!?? By who?
  • This leave to Dib and Zim no choice but to team up to save earth from whoever responsible for taking over.

Countess Verminstrasser from Lice is Dib's real mother.

If not by birth, she might be Membrane's old fiance, and after they broke up due to differences in ideals,Membrane made a clone out of his and her DNA. He than secretly raised his "son" to share her obsessive personality while feigning disapproval. It helps remind him of her.

Zim is meant to force human evolution as much as conquer Earth.

Zim is the Tallest's tool for grooming humanity. The humans are both technologically advanced and predisposed to outrageous violence, but they are too immature (aka stoopid) as a species. Hopefully, the humans develop and become aware of and defeat the ruinously self-sabotaging Zim; they will then be approached by the Tallest and be recruited into the Irken empire as The Dragon to the Irken Big Bad. But if they fail, and Zim succeeds — then, hey, free planet. ^_^

• Evolution does not work that way.
  • Biological evolution doesn't. Cultural and technological evolution does.
• The Tallest didn't even know about Earth. You can't have a plan to improve something that you don't know even exists.
  • They claim they didn't know about it...

Professor Membrane knows the Irken are testing humanity.

His experiments are to find a way to impress them. He is, however, unaware of Zim's significance.

• If Dib and Gaz are clones, it could mean that since they're aren't as stupid as everyone else on the planet, they could be a resistance force for them if he doesn't gain their respect.
• I believe there was a throw away line of the proffessors that said "There are no Aliens!, non smart enough to reach our planet anyhow" see "Battle of the Planets"

Dib grows up to be Buzz Lightyear.

Somewhere along the way, Zim winds up in a suit a la Darth Vader, becoming Evil Emperor Zurg. GIR's brain is separated into parts to serve the entire Hornet army. This is why the Hornets appear mindless. They're all 1/100000th GIR.

• It also explains why they are less hyperactive.
  • Then what happens to Professor Membrane, Dib's father? In Toy Story 2, Zurg tells the other Buzz Lightyear that Zurg is his Father (in an obvious Star Wars parody). Also, Zurg is a bit of a generic supervillan at times, while Professor Membrane is always too serious.
    • Zurg said the same thing in Buzz Lightyear of Star Command to distract Buzz and gain the upper-hand in a battle, and then admits it's false.
  • A portion of GIR's core program also ends up in XR, explaining why he's somewhat hyper and often speaks in non-sequitors.

The entire series in Squee's hallucination.

Regularly during Squee!, the title character is seen drawing various things; one of the things he likes to draw is an alien that looks suspiciously like Zim. At the end of the series, Squee is placed in a mental institution to get rid of him for a while. As he is being strapped into an weird psychiatric chair, he sees Nny passing by the window. It is quite possible that this chair was meant to induce hallucinations for some horrible experiment; Squee seeing Nny would have kicked his fear response into overdrive. This explains why the world of Invader Zim is so crappy - what do you expect the name of the most squeamish kid in the world to come up with?

It also explains why the aliens who abducted Zim were so flanderised. When they first appeared in Squee!, they were somewhat menacing but still totally stupid. Squee only remembered their stupidity, and that became their defining trait when they came for Zim.

Finally, in the episode "Dib's Hallowe'en Spectacular of Spooky Doom", the supreme leader of all the monsters in Dib's head is an alternate Ms. Bitters. While this could indicate that the thing Dib ultimately fears the most is his teacher, we must remember that she taught Squee first; he, too, was supremely terrified of her. Who better to be the leader of the monsters than one of Squee's main sources of terror? Additionally, in that same episode, Nny makes a brief, dark, literally blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo; he also shows up in the background of one of Squee's "dreamy time" strips when he is being auctioned by an alien slave trader. It makes sense for Nny to show up in Squee's dream.

This presumably means that Dib is Squee and Zim is Pepito. Dib trying to stop Zim may be a mental allegory for Squee overcoming his fear of Pepito.

• Ok, while in general I find WMG kind of pointless, you have stumbled across some very interesting stuff.

Dib grows up to be Johnny the Homicidal Maniac

Ok, so it goes like this: While we pretty much know that IZ is set 20 Minutes into the Future, what we don't know is when exactly JTHM is set- IZ may well be its prequel. When you think about it, Dib's already got

• The beginning of insanity.
• The crappy childhood.
• The obsession with the paranormal.
• A damn fine trench coat.
• If you shaved the sides of his head, he'd bear a pretty good resemblance to Nny.
• There's always the possibility he just changed his name when he grew up.

This would also account for why Jhonen Vasquez wasn't tempted to slip a cameo by Nny in there somewhere... He was already the main character!

• Um... Nny DID have a cameo, it was the halloween episode. His shadow and eyes can be seen amongst the monster crowd. While you can say that this was a projection of Dib's mind and how he viewed how he would grow up, that is negated when we see Dib's REAL progection (the first monster to talk to him in the asylum). Amusingly, he is just a giant head on legs. Guess Dib really does think his head is big.

Squee grows up to become Membrane

• They both have a tendency to be constantly positive despite living in a Crapsack World.
• They both have black hair.
• It is stated by Word of God that Membrane is not a last name, and the good doctor's first name is never mentioned. For all we know, he could be Todd Casil.
  • It's not a last name, it's a first name.
• It would explain his stubborn disbelief of aliens and other supernatural phenomena. "Aliens can't exist because if they do, some of my horrible childhood memories might be accurate. Denial? I'm not in denial! You're in denial!"
• It's shown several times that IZ and JtHM exist in the same universe. Differing tech levels and a few other minor things suggest that Zim comes later.
• Membrane might not just be a workaholic. He might be trying to actively avoid his kids because his father's influence messed him up so badly; he's afraid of doing that to Dib and Gaz.
• His parents WOULD only get him socks for Christmas, but I'm not entirely sure he'd blame Santa, unless Santa is real in the IZ/JtHM universe (I figured Santa was only real once Zim created him.). Though, in his flashback, he just looks like a miniature version of his current self. Maybe in his mind, he imagines himself only as he is as an adult, and leaves his dark past behind.

Alternately, Squee grows up to be Agent Darkbooty.

Darkbooty looks identical to Squee's father, but personality-wise is nothing like him. This could be a result of Uncanny Family Resemblance.

Zim knows on some level that he has been exiled, and subconsciously doesn't want to conquer Earth.

If the Tallest don't like someone, then it doesn't matter if they are a successful Invader. A conquered Earth would lead to the Tallest being direct about it, just like they did to poor Skoodge. Thus, Zim keeps up his charade of conquest to prevent himself from facing the fact that his own species doesn't want him. Thus, he constantly puts GIR in charge of the crucial part of his plans.

• This also seems to explain why Zim stopped GIR from absorbing knowledge in the episode "GIR Goes Crazy And Stuff".
• This would also explain why, despite passing out in Zim's home at the end of Walk for Your Life, Dib is still alive by the next episode. If Zim really 100% cared about his mission, he would have taken advantage of the moment and killed Dib before he could wake up.
  • Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus confirms this. In fact, The Tallest and the Invader Fleet are destroyed (or at least sent to a Hell-like dimension that is on fire) and Zim embraces complete denial, pretending that they're still receiving his reports and are happy with him.

Zim is a failed Irken Super-Soldier experiment

The Irkens seem to be vat-grown cyborgs trained from birth to be living weapons. Zim was one of the latest projects to be a genius soldier; but With Great Power Comes Great Insanity, and he ended up going nuts and on a destructive rampage. He's shown that he can be an utterly ruthless ultimate survivor when his life is in danger; because of this, the Irkens didn't execute him, like they should have had no qualms about, but tried to trick him into getting as far away from them as possible.

On a subconscious level, Zim despises his role; he spends more time on Earth goofing around than trying to make successful plans to conquer it. Dib is not just a Worthy Opponent but also the closest thing he has to a friend (or more); if the series continued, then he would have engineered an Evil Plan to get Dib to take over the Irken world as revenge.

• I don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip up.
• Zim's not that smart. There was an episode that was written called "The Trial" where Zim would have been evaluated as an Irken. Their process of creation involves some sort of thing where all the knowledge of their ancestors is implanted into them, and they're more or less organic computers. Zim is an obvious failure and was condemned to execution in this episode. Naturally, it doesn't work.

Johnny the Homicidal Maniac is dead

We mostly agree that Zim is set 20 Minutes into the Future from his series, but Nny's lack of appearance is probably because he isn't around any more. If Squee is old enough to be Membrane, then it has to be several decades ahead, and let's face it — Johnny does not appear to be much healthier physically than he is mentally, and probably wouldn't like the prospect of getting old. If not suicide or ill health, then something else might have got him eventually. Maybe Squee/Membrane put him out of his misery.

• So...did he just leave the plane of existence or something?He ended up being kicked out of both heaven and hell for some reason.
  • ...yes. The world couldn't handle him.

GIR is the "puppet master" of the series

Not a new theory, by any means, but still good.

GIR is actively STOPPING Zim from taking over Earth. GIR is often the reason Zim's plans go to hell — GIR hides behind a mask of stupidity allowing him to get away with 'accidentally' screwing up Zim's plans.

The episode "GIR Goes Crazy and Stuff" only helps this theory along. With enough power, GIR immediately attempts to overthrow his master. It's also noted that GIR often lets strangers into Zim's house, not because he's an idiot, but because he's trying to expose Zim to these random people.

• So... GIR is Pinky?
• GIR did successfully conquer the world in Zim's absence. It was the aforementioned unfinished episode "The Trial".

It's all happening in real life — sort of

But the reason we know nothing about it is because it's not happening on Earth. During Zim's long... Long... LONG trip to earth, he and GIR bonded, in a more-than-just-friends way,(there was plenty of time for it), then due to the way GIR was built, he fell apart. The grief broke Zim's mind, and he started hallucinating that GIR was still functional, but hated him as well to avoid being forced to suffer such grief again. That's why humans are such idiots, and how Zim and The Tallest are still in contact, it's all in his mind.

• To expand on this, the Invader Zim universe is the real world, and we're the show. This Troper's mom, who's never seen the show, thought this.

The G in GIR stands for Graty

Which would make Zim the SlapChop. Think about it; the Graty is an undeniably awesome yet ultimately useless device that only grates cheese that's been cut into tiny pieces, packaged with an undeniably useless yet ultimately awesome device that sounds like it could butcher Cthulhu if it could hold more than a tiny handful of bikini.

Prof. Membrane is Johnny the Homicidal Maniac's illegitimate son.

It is insinuated in the seventh and last issue of JTHM that Johnny, before he went completely insane, may have had sex with some unnamed girl. He impregnated her, and she eventually gave birth to Membrane, which would explain why he, Dib, and Johnny all look similar. It also explains the 20 Minutes into the Future time leap.

Gaz is Haruhi.

And that Universe she imagined was just because it was all in the videogames she played during the addiction. She got so addicted that she continues to play them even after rebuilding the Universe to look like such thing.

• Alternatively, Haruhi suffered some trauma (perhaps Kyon and the others died or otherwise became lost to her) causing her to resent the world. So the world became darker and more cynical because she didn't want people to be happy when she wasn't. It also explains her non reaction to knowing for a fact that aliens and such are real, given that she spent most of her life believing they were out there. It's just that without Kyon and the others she can't find the enthusiasm to get excited by it (Plus there's the fact that Zim is probably not the ideal example of intelligent life on other worlds she'd have liked to meet)
• Or, both Dib and Gaz are manifestations of Haruhi. Gaz has her God-like powers and Dib has her enthusiasm of the paranormal.
• Or, this.
  • Please tell me that is actually being produced.

There are no female Irkens.

It's kinda weird that female Irkens have Tertiary Sexual Characteristics. Maybe it's not a male-female thing; maybe it's just a common mutation in Irkens that make the eyelashes, curled antennae, and higher voices. In Irken grammar, there's a special set of pronouns for this mutation; when it's translated into English, it's translated into she, and normal Irkens are translated he.When your species is grown in vats, this can be sustained.

• Actually, I think this may or may not be cannon, as Jhonen stated that Irkens don't have reproductive organs. This probably implies that Irkens are asexual, and some Irkens are just more feminine or masculine than others. Like Digimon.

Irkens Reproduce Orally.

Yes, it sounds odd but consider it for a moment. Irkens are shown to be made presently though technology (cloning most presumably) but before such technology came around they obviously had to reproduce biologically (unless Irkens were artificially created by some unknown third party as host for the PAK...but that is a speculation for another section). Jhonen said that Irkens don't have reproductive organs, and that is also shown in the show to be true. As a super-organ the squeedly spootch preforms all functions so therefore logically it is also responsible for reproduction, and via the mouth is the only access to the squeedly spootch (this may also explain why Irkens have unusually long tongues).

• So when Zim licks the screen in Door to Door we're basically getting a Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong?

Irkens are genderless.

The above guess mentions that "female" Irkens have Tertiary Sexual Characteristics. However, that troper seemed to mean that there are only male Irkens. However, Irkens are artificially created, as we see in a flashback, and seem to have no genatalia whatsoever. They wouldn't actually need to be either gender. To this troper, it seems much more likely that Irkens do not actually have genders at all. Any time we hear an Irken being referred to by a masculine or feminine pronoun is simply implying which gender to other species the individual more closely resembles.

• er, I believe you mean the Irkens are sexless. Gender is the mental component, and Irkens clearly display a mental gender split, some are "masculine" (the "Standard" Irken), and some are "feminine" (Irkens with curled antennae, eyelashes, and a higher voice). See Transformers, Tron or Digimon for examples of sexless entities that have gender.

Irkens are Asexual, but that was not always the case

The first Irkens reproduced more or less like humans, but as they moved towards mechanical reproduction they lost all sexual organs. Modern Irkens are technically not male or female, but retain aspects of gender because they are more or less harmless and provide diferent perspectives and offers resistance to bioweapons and other diseases (which is the same reason why Irkens are not all clones)

Irken genders are reversed from the obvious.

The ones that look like girls aren't female. A good many years before the time of the show, Irken society worked more like a social insect society, with many plain workers (the ones that seem to be male), a few frilly mating drones (the ones that seem to be female), and a much taller queen (or two). Currently, as Irkens are now vat grown (perhaps due to the problem of hatching enough baby Irkens to grow an army), the distinction between female and male, worker and drone, has dissolved, though they still have queens (under a different name and not responsible for producing massive amounts of eggs). Males are still being grown as the Control Brains likely want keep a few around in case of emergency. Zim and Tak are seen as being the opposite of their real gender due to their voices and to Irken spoken language being close enough to English that translators are not necessary (except with regards to a few unimportant things like pronouns...).

Zim and Tak are related to The Tallests

There are two theories for this one:

1) Through some weird mishap, Tak is the daughter of Tallest Purple, which is why they both have square purple eyes. (The beauty mark and lines on her mouth probably came from whomever the mother was.) Same thing with Zim and Tallest Red. Apparently, Zim takes after his mother.

• 1.5) The Tallests are brothers (they're probably twins); therefore, Zim and Tak are cousins.

2) Zim and Tak are brother and sister of the Tallests, who are brothers themselves. Making one Royally Screwed Up family.

3) Irken are "hatched" from test tube pods. It's likely that they're randomly genetically engineered Irkens. But they may have been based on the DNA of Allmighty Tallest Red and Purple!

4) Quite possibly. There's another theory that Zim is the son of Tallest Spork and the brother of Invader Zee. This one seems to have spawned from The Other Wiki.

• Hate to chop down your Epileptic Trees here, but don't all Irkens look pretty much alike? It's kind of hard◊ to tell them apart...
  • Some Irkens look more alike than others, yes, but note the distinct head/eye shapes.
  • Alike? Every Irken in that shot looks different!

-Building on that...

The Tallests are siblings, if not identical twins.

Without their armor, the only way you could tell them apart is by their eye color. As mentioned before, Irkens tend to look a lot alike by our standards, but these two are almost indistinguishable and happen to be exactly the same height in a society where height is everything. It would also explain why they're always seen together, bickering like teenagers but also maintaining an almost symbiotic malevolence and narcissism.

• This Troper agrees with this theory.
• Wait, this ISN'T already canon?

Dib is part Vortian.

Think about this for a while. Dib is an experiment created by Professor Membrane. Dib's hair looks kind of like the "hornflops" on a Vortian's head, but only one of them.

Here's the clincher: You know how Dib's pupils become triangular when he's stressed? In the episode "Backseat Drivers from Beyond the Stars", the Vortian leader of the Resisty's pupils go triangular in one scene. Maybe Membrane isn't so ignorant about aliens after all...

• Dib is not the only one whose pupils become triangular when he's hysterical. It happens to almost every character with pupils, including Zim with his costume on.
  • which can only mean one thing...Lard Nar (the Vortian leader of the Resisty) is part human!

Dib and Gaz's mother is alive.

It is never stated that Dib and Gaz's mother is dead. Allegedly, Dib is an experiment created by Membrane, and Gaz may quite possibly be one too. But who's to say that Membrane was the only donor of DNA for the experiment?

Membrane and his wife are simply divorced; the children were cloned after the separation took place. The kids probably still have contact with their mother, but the Professor has either full or almost full custody. This seems to explain both Gaz's endless rage, and Dib's stranger tendencies (like talking to himself.)

• For the record, it's also been alleged that Mrs. Membrane is in a jar somewhere. (Why is the real question.)
  • Hostile divorce?
  • It is possible that Membrane's wife died and Membrane has been so attached to her that he still keeps her ashes in a jar. Dib is definitely Membrane's younger clone, but Gaz's origin is not clear. It hasn't been stated that she's a clone, too. She might be Membrane's creation or his wife's clone, just like Dib is his own clone.

Membrane is an Ex Mad Scientist.

Think about it...some times he does have manic bouts of laughter that are very evil genius esque

• Ex? The man has a santa-fighting mecha and a perpetual energy device.

The Swollen Eyeball Network is a splinter group of Torchwood.

The original Torchwood has a goofy and devil-may-care attitude of their operation. The Swollen Eyeball became a group of their own due to its members being more serious and business-oriented in dealing with aliens.

Dib and Gir are linked somehow

Gir actually seems to be at his most coherent when talking to Dib, suddenly remembering Zim ordered him to call the Tallest, and agreeing to hide a camera in Zim's home and then doing just that (by Gir's standards, doing something counter to Zim's plan correctly is actually an improvement). While this could be explained by simply saying the universe hates Zim, you have to remember that it hates Dib just as much.

Zim and Dib each have one of the Eight Great Spells in their heads, or some equivalent of it.

Magic was established as legitimate many times during season two. Dib could've unknowingly gotten an amazingly powerful spell stuck in his head looking through the Spell Drives, though I don't know how Zim would've ended up with one. In any case, it would be an easy explination for the Snap Backs involving the death of Zim or Dib—the Universe rearranges itself to prevent the spells from disappearing, a la The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic. (GIR probably just has repair nanites in him somewhere.)

The people of earth are not as "stoopid" as they are portrayed

They just appear to be stupid to show how vastly more intelligent Zim and Dib are.

Zim's self-foiling is The Plan by another alien race to sabotage the Irken invasion

He single-handedly set the Irken invasion back more than any fleet or army ever could. All due to errors at creation. There is no way that's an accident.

Johnny the Homicidal Maniac is alive, in Membrane (Squee's) basement somewhere in cold storage

He might come in handy one day. Maybe Dib would have found him and unleashed him on the Irkens.

Or is possibly reincarnated in Dib.Membrane does constantly state that he is insane.....

Zim in secretly best friends with the Tallest

Why else would he still be alive today...unless if he has a higher purpose in the Irken culture, but only the Control Brains know this.

Zim is immortal and can't die through black magic

How else would he survive those many deaths in the series?black Magic?

• Maybe Irkens are just a little sturdier than humans?
  • Oh please. GIR, or perhaps the parents or whomever his mysteriously human Computer is, obviously retrieves the PAK whenever Zim's body is killed, and then uses his lab to clone up a fresh new body... with exactly the same genetic flaws as his original body. It's so obvious.

There is no invasion.

It's all a game created by two hyperactive young friends.

• Calvin and Hobbes?
• No, Wait, Ozy and Millie?
• Billy & Mandy, maybe?
• Digby "Dib" Edwards and Franklin "Zim" Zimmerman, two random, neighboring, probably-human inhabitants of the meta-reality of Invader Zim?

Dib and Gaz are a young Mulder and Scully.

The sister that Mulder, aka Dib, thought he lost when he was young was actually Scully. When Gaz, aka Scully, proved to be a little too good at stopping Zim, Zim somehow, miraculously, managed to separate Gaz from her family, but since she is way too competent for him to outright kill her, he instead had her memories wiped and had her placed with another family. There are no human/alien hybrids, that's just the cover story so that Mulder doesn't accidentally make Scully remember her childhood, at which point she will easily trounce Zim and any other aliens on Earth.

• Considering Mulder's and Scully's relationship, this theory is pure Squick.
• Alternatively, Dib will grow up to become Agent Cooper.

One or more of the crew working on the show suffers from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

This troper found all the intense close-ups and emphasis on disgusting details of everyday objects very telling in that regard.

The Irken are an offshoot race of the Orks.

They're green, they base their hierarchy on height, their entire existence is based around assaulting other worlds, and when "INVASION!" flashes on the screen they practically go into a Waagh. Best bet: they evolved from a Mek's experiments to tamper down the Waagh-instincts a little (in that they can go five minutes without violence).

• Alternatively, it's the other way around. Since the series takes place long before the 41st millenium, it's possible that the Irkens were the original "Brain Boyz". True, most Irken technology is built by enslaved races like the Vortians, but chances are that they were able to cobble together enough ideas from stolen technology to make what they think is impressive war tech (read: loud explodey things that only work because they think it will work).
• Another Alternate theory, the Irkens are the Old Ones first attempt at the Orks. The difference being that they grow taller as they get Smarter instead of Stronger. They were meant to be strategists and information gatherers. However, they turned out to be lazy as hell so the Old Ones just shelved them and got to work on the Orks.
  • Alternatively, the Orks picked a fight with the Irkens because there wasn't anything better to fight. Ergo, why there are no Irkens come the 41st Millennium.
• So, are the Almighty tallest the basis for the legends of Gork and Mork?
• Going off my prior edit here, the Irkens aren't seen in 40k because they get nommed by the Imperium of Man long before the Heresy. Zim doesn't conquer Earth - but instead leads Earth to Irken.

Zim is Xykon.

Word of God confirms that Xykon is from modern earth. But why does Xykon act so zany? And what does happen to Zim at the end? Simple: Xykon is Zim, only much smarter. How did Zim not get executed after his "Operation Impending Doom 1" stunt? Zim was a lich from the start, so he couldn't be killed. How come Zim's disguises always work? He crafts illusions. How did he blow up a planet by scratching his butt? He's an epic-level spellcaster, remember? Why does he prefer science over magic? It's fun that way.

• Well, word of a sick and delusional god who was obviously joking, but that aside I've always thought Xykon was quite eerily similar in personality to the Tallests...

The characters are at least indirectly implants from the characters of Death Note.

Zim is Light, a megalomaniac who is the "protagonist," Dib is L, the eccentric yet lovable detective "antagonist." GIR, Misa's implant, is the dumb sidekick who doesn't listen to the master. Mikami is...Minimoose, the later-added sidekick. Finally, the tallests are the shinigami. Not sure about Near or Mello, maybe one of them is Gaz. Tak is...C-Kira? Maybe BB?

• Check your dates; Death Note dates from 2003, Invader Zim from 2001. It's difficult to be an allusion or implant from something that doesn't yet exist. However, if one were to flip this theory...
  • When I said "implant" I actually meant something more in universe, such as a "reincarnation" or possibly a purgatory of a Failure Is the Only Option Crapsack World as punishment for their general bad behavior in life. Although, that does make sense...

Zim and Gir become Pinky and the Brain.

Dib transforms them into mice and throws them into a cage. Being mice, they can't tell the people what is going on. They are put into that one machine that makes them smart, and gain the ability to talk as well as some intelligence (Zim is the super-smart Brain, and GIR as Pinky is able to form more complete thoughts, though he keeps his randomness). Unfortunately, this knowledge has to go somewhere, so their memories are cleared. However, Zim remembers that, for some reason, he MUST take over the world.

Jossed in so many conceviable ways

The Irken society was belief in respect to elders that evolved into an aristocracy.

In the past, older people were wiser. Since older people are often tall, tall people were more likely to get respect. Soon, there were contests as to who were the tallest. After some time, these got bigger and bigger until the whole of Irk respected these tallests. They were voted to be the wise advisors to the president. They gained more and more power due to their supposed wisdom and eventually overpowered the president. Slowly, the president left the equation in favor of a wise government. The tallest Irken is now the one and only ruler, unless there is more than one tallest.

The whole show is the crazy hallucinations of The Brain, and Zim, Dib and Professor Membrane represent different aspects of his personality

Zim is the megalomaniac part how wants to Take Over the World, Membrane represent his genius and Dib is the part in he's brain that's fed up with the megalomania and fights the megalomaniac part (Zim). Other characters represent other pepole that brain know-G.I.R is Pinky, Tak is snowball and so on...I just can't find out what Gaz is...

• His preference for technology and disdain for humanity?

Professor Membrane is an Ex-Mad Scientist

Throughout the series he does have several bouts of evil laughter. This is a Crapsack World right?

• Oh, he still is. Santa-fighting mecha, perpetula energy machine, experiments with hamsters, likes to make ventriloquist dolls, was once seen fiddling with a spork... he still is.

Zim is autistic

Think about it for a little bit.

• Holy hell, that actually sorta makes sense. The loud, often unusual voice, the difficulty understanding other people's feelings, the obsessive fascination with very specific but often varying topics. ...Freaky. I think you just added a whole new layer to Zim for me.

Damn. And all I use my deviantart account for is troll fics.

• Having Asperger's syndrome myself, I would say this is rather unlikely. Zim may show some personality traits of autism, but there are just too many anomalies (like his mostly extraverted behavior). I would rather say he has Attention Deficit Disorder. A more likely candidate for Aspergers or autism would be Gaz. But then, I am not an expert.
  • This troper with actually-diagnosed and working to compensate instead of part of the growing lack of people who want an excuse for being socially lazy and rude... Aspergers' Syndrome would like to point out that the original guess (made by another troper) never mentioned Asperger's Syndrome. Just autism. I think that whatever reason Zim has for being the way he is is an Irken thing, or a socio-environmental thing that cxan present itself in any species, rather than a human genetic disorder.
• this troper also think zim doesn't actually have autism/aspergers but is the literal version of a certain metaphor [1]
• This troper agrees with the above troper.

• To this troper (who has Asperger's), Dib seems to have a lot of autistic traits. He has major difficulty with social interaction, a tendency to obsess, doesn't seem to realize when his own behavior is abnormal, also can be sort of loud, and has a somewhat black and white worldview. All of these behaviors are associated with mild autism or Asperger's.
• This troper (who has been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder) agrees with the ADD theory. Zim most likely would have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Just think! He doesn't follow directions, is loud and is either very lazy or very energetic, drifts off topic, is competitive, hardly pays attention to what anyone's saying, doesn't think things through, won't listen to authority figures and hates to be told what to do, prefers something happening more often than not... he fits the bill perfectly. I don't think autism or Asperger's plays a huge part in this.
• This troper actually has high-functioning autism and occasionally acts like Zim or Dib on accident. I think it is perfectly valid to say that BOTH of them have Autism, or Zim having the Irken equivilent. It also explains why they think he's a defect: He would have different thought patterns than a normal Irken, which could be mistaken for PAK coding errors.
• This troper would like to point out that basically every human in existence has at least one autistic trait or tendancy, and that autism is a sliding scale on which diagnosed autists are only part... a few traits present does not make autism, nor does a few traits absent make neurotypical. Also, Asperger's is just a specific form of autism distinguishable only in childhood, by adulthood the two are identical and the genetic component in each is about the same, so the "rather than a human genetic disorder" argument really isn't valid.

Dib is Nny's clone

• And, therefore, Gaz as well. After all, Dib looks just like a shorter version of Nny with a more consistent shirt design and more sanity.
  • Going with this idea, one could theorize that Dib was cloned with more of the physical traits in mind, while Gaz was cloned with more of the mental traits in mind. For evidence, see Game Slave 2.
  • Potential additional evidence. The episode where Dib gives Gaz pig senses. One of altered robot dolls looks a lot like Nail Bunny.

Irkens can breed much like humans

They just don't know how, and if an Irken did figure it out, the chances of actually getting smeets out of it are slim-to none, which explains why they use the vats. Yes, this troper has been reading fanfics. How did you know?!

The Irkens are puppets for the C'tan.

What are they going to do while the Necrons are sleeping? Suck the souls of the irkens out through their paks, of course!

The world of Invader Zim is our world in the near future (or at least the near future of 2001), rather than a World of Weirdness.

In one episode, Dib or the teacher mentions that in the past, it was required that school lunches contain actual food. After certain public organization cutbacks, schools started serving the carbohydrate/condiment combination, with the occasional Sandwich Day. The Game Slave 2 is when the Game Slave (a device released several years after 2004 after Nintendo was destroyed by a giant fish in a bear suit) went from GBA/DS to DS3/PSP (the graphics upgrade was likely meant to be ridiculously advanced and smooth and 3-D from the point of view of 2001). There are other, even more minor hints throughout the show that this is the case, and the mention that Valentine's Day once had cards and candy exchanged instead of meat.

• You mean its not already canon?

Humans do have squeedlyspooches.

Or at least female humans do.

• Nah, sorry, but they showed what a squeedlyspooch looks like, so your far reaching attempt to see sexual innuendo has failed.
  • I'll split the difference: the squeedlyspooch is an actual Irken organ that isn't a vagina, but Gaz one hundred percent was making a dirty reference that slipped the radar. For one, she has no way of knowing Irken anatomy, she's clearly just goofing on Dib, and there's not really any other human parts she could be referring to that would make sense for the joke. Secondly, Dib's reaction is to glance at her crotch and then visibly shudder; that's about as unsubtle as it gets, no?
• Alternatively, Gaz really is Irken. She was a part of Operation Impending Doom I, but, due to her Deadpan Snarker attitude, left before Zim caused a disaster that somehow made Irkens forget that there was a planet where Earth is. The only reason why the Earth isn't in her hands already is because Professor Membrane caught her while she was still in her Spittle Runner, forced her into her human disguise and stripped her of all Irken technology.
  • There's a fanfic for that. Minus the OID I part.

Ms. Bitters was telling the truth in her flashbacks.

She was an astronaut (possibly an alien astronaut) who died when something happened to her shuttle that her afterdeath memory blur rendered as implosion. For a while, she lived as a fairy princess, but then died or was electrocuted into forced metamorphosis (oh, please no one mention WMG/TimeLord...) and became the demonic creature we know and fear.

Tak's cat-SIR took its smoky abilities as camoflage because of Ms. Bitters' presence when they landed.

The fact that it actually looked like a cat was just because Tak's disguise unit and her use of it was so much better than Zim's use of his disguise unit and the unit itself.

The "G" stands for "Gumball".

GIR's a Gumball-issued Information Retrieval unit. As opposed to the Standard-issue Information Retrieval units. Because part of his brain is a gumball.

Scary Monkey is the prequel to Everybody Loves Hypnotoad.

Some glory to the Scary Monkey.

The monkey from Scary Monkey is the same scary monkey as the one in Chris Griffin's cupboard.

Remember that Invader Zim takes place 20 Minutes into the Future. Somewhere between Family Guy and Invader Zim, the monkey left the Griffins and started his own television career. Alternatively, the Scary Monkey show IS Family Guy and, by sheer chance, we see GIR watching it always at the points where Scary Monkey is on screen.

Minimoose was made from one of GIR's Piggie-type toys.

Zim took it, and he put SIR parts in it. And a hovermodule.

• Actually according to the unmade origin episode for minimoose, he's made from various Vortian doomsday devices, an advanced AI brain, and a toy.

GIR's disguise is that of a Mongoose Terrier.

These fierce, quick, but dull-headed beasts will be bred in the mid-to-late 2000s to combat the growing mongoose problem. Their enlarged craniums and bipedal locomotion would have allowed them to combat the growing mongoose problem in Malaysia, but the upper-class French and English developed a liking for the little fellows and soon after they would become a not-uncommon sight in the western world. GIR, therefore, is a mongoose dog.

Dib's spell cards were meant for Gaz.

Professor Membrane arranged for them to be dropped off in front of his child so that while his son might be a proper Mad Scientist one day, his daughter would be able to hone her growing mystical powers and eventually become as powerful a witch as he is a Phlebotinum-chef. For one reason or another, they were dumped in front of Dib instead, and he eventually developed a computer reader and Rolodex program to help him use the cards.

Spell Points regenerate.

Or the cards collect spell points from the ambient aether under certain conditions. Dib may well have been able to shrink his head had he waited a week and put a bowl of salt water under his laptop.

The Chihuahua and the squirrel are sentient alien species.

The squirrel looks like a squirrel, but consistently attracts GIR's attention and can kill a ten-year-old human with its bare paws and seemingly using no teeth. Madness looks (vaguely) like a chihuahua, but acts like a watcher and eventually a nonverbal Mysterious Informant. The squirrel wants the earth to itself, and Madness may work for the secret society that Dib joined. In addition, it's possible that GIR's narration was not unreliable on Mysterious Mysteries (aside from the squirrel eating Dib's crazy head), and the squirrel told GIR that it was going back to its home planet to fight the bad guys.

The Chihuahua is related to Pinky Garcia-Shapiro.

Or, since the world of Invader Zim seems to be in The Future, could be Pinky.

Professor Membrane is the Humans' Tallest.

He's tall, and smart, and...powerful... Ms. Bitters would be the Tallest if she weren't trapped in the school and hunched over.

• "...trapped in the school"? She was in the city crowd scene in the Christmas episode.

Professor Membrane is the reason Ms. Bitters is trapped in the school.

He went through a brief phase as a Ghostbuster. Streams were crossed For Science!.

Ms. Bitters was part of the necromancy Noodle Incident Professor Membrane keeps mentioning about Dib.

She died, twice, if she is to be believed. This is not at all incompatible with the guess directly above.

Professor Membrane is in charge of the Irkens.

He created Red and Purple, and possibly the Irken system itself. This is why they were a relatively diplomatic species only a few years ago, then suddenly turned to galactic conquest and the planet where Earth is is practically an urban legend despite being only barely off the edge of the The Big Board map (whether it's because he only recently took over before putting Red and Purple in power or because he got bored and left them to their own, warlike devices is up to the individual reader). His condescension of Dib's archnemesissing is either because he doesn't want to implicitly, explicitly, or by reverse psychology encourage Dib to break his stuff or because he knows what Zim is like.

Dib is an asthmatic.

Well, think about it. His obnoxious, wheezing laugh, the way he gags and chokes in small dust clouds... It would fit with the 'nerd' archetype.

Dib is an alien and Gaz knows.

She wasn't kidding when she asked Dib if he meant there was an alien in the room aside from himself. This is (part of) why she is unfazed by Zim (she doesn't care about GIR because she's Professor Membrane's daughter).

Sizz-Lor was banished to Foodcourtia because he's taller than the Tallest & they were afraid that he'd dethrone them

Look at him, he's ENOURMOUS! Normally the tallest have respect for tall Irkens, so why would he be working on foodcourtia instead of having some high-ranking military position? Simple. He was a threat to their rule!

• As much sense as this would make, officially, it's just because he's wider than he is tall.
• I have a different outlook. We know that snacking is a huge part of irken culture, so mabye the position of Fry-Lord is an honorable position fitting for one as tall as Sizz-Lor.
  • Sizz-Lor's incredible size was in fact due to his attempts to make himself taller with SCIENCE!! Evidently it didn't work out quite like he planned, judging by his stockiness, round head and scar above one of his eyes. That being said, while he didn't quite make it to Tallest, he was evidently tall and impressive enough that he was promoted to the Irken society's legendary Frylord. His cruddy position on Foodcourtia may well be because Operation Impending Doom II conscripted most of his employees, forcing him to fill positions himself whereas he would usually be an overseer position. Not being used to that kind of pitiful manual labor, and being trapped for twenty years thanks to Zim abandoning his post, he's become irritable and eager for his well earned vacation. His battlesuit and combat prowess? Simple to explain. The Frylord has competitors, both Irken and alien, and the only fitting solution to those competitors is to feed them to his customers. It's highly likely as well that many SHLOOGORGH restaurants and other eateries run by Sizz-Lor had to close down without his employees, and the one on Foodcourtia had to remain despite his clear objections because Foodcourtia is such a major player in the Frylord's budget and fame.

Professor Membrane is an Irken exile.

Not only is his technology roughly equal to that of the Irkens, but he posseses a lower-face-concealing cuff that many Irkens are seen wearing (most of whom are technichans), and his kids were created through cloning. He was exiled for being slightly taller than the Tallest and being much smarter. His refusal to believe in the paranormal probably has to do with either him refusing to accept the truth about his origins or desperately trying to keep it a secret.

Ms. Bitters is an Eldritch Abomination.

Her origin stories are probably describing her becoming of one and her arrival on Earth. Most likely, she was first fairy princess who was transformed into an Eldritch abomination via "bug zapper". Eventually, she traveled the cosmos doing....um....eldritch stuff...and, through some great cosmic event, "imploded", landing on Earth, possibly being implanted into/becoming some land. Eventually, the Skool was built. She took control of/became one with it shortly after it's completion, doomed to spend the rest of eterninty trapped there. She took on a slightly more human form, and posed as a human teacher, out to crush the hopes and dreams of generations to come.

Prof. Membrane is Dr. Robotnik

His hair is fake and under that giant collar is a giant nose/moustache combo. Also, under the collar is a voice modulator, so that Robotnik and Membrane sound nothing alike. He looks to be about the same height as Robotnik, & although Robotnik appears to be much fatter, it's just a really obvious fat suit (look at his mid-section in proportion to his arm & legs and then tell me I'm wrong). Also, Membrane is an amazing engineer, as is Robotnik.

• What does this make the other characters?
  • Nothing. If he wanted to have a secret alter ego, then why would he hang around with his enemies?
  • No, what I mean is, due to being in the same universe, what does this make various characters in the Sonic universe? Does this change things for thier history/origin? Is the part of America the Membrane family living in part of the "Eggman Empire" (Heavy pollution, advanced technology, Crapsack, etc.)?
  • Uh, sure, let's go with that.
• You should send this to Jhonen.
  • Good idea.

The room with a moose is actually where The Moose is sealed.

Initially, when Dib sees the Moose, his mind is incapable of comprehending it as anything other than an ordinary moose. The walnuts caused him to see it's true form. This is not shown, for the viewer's sanity.

This is in the same world as Mystery Science Theater 3000

• Takes place in the near future.
• The protagonist is a Genius Ditz.
• TV's Frank.
• Evidentally, there are many cheesy movies and TV shows.

Vampire Piggy Hunter is a Castlevania spinoff.

With the Silliness Switch turned on.

Gaz is Konata Izumi

Impossible hair color, Missing Mom, plays a hell of a lot of videogames, and spends most of the time with her eyes shut.

• Alternativly, her evil twin.

Dib will eventually defeat Zim.

• Because Zim is already an adult, but Dib is only 11. Zim will be no match for a tall, teenage, Badass Dib.

Dib and his family are actually SuperHeroes

Professor Membrane can shoot lasers from his hands and Gaz can warp the world around her. Dib's powers just haven't developed yet because he's a late bloomer.

• He seems to have great physical prowess, and maybe the power of Hollywood Hacking.

Mr.Dwicky is Squee.

Irken hierarchy is based on age, not height.

Irkens grow continuously throughout their lives, so their height corresponds directly to their age. Taller/older irkens automatically outrank others due to their(in theory) greater experience and wisdom. Red and Purple are ancient, decrepit irkens, hence their emaciated builds. Their rampant stupidity can either be attributed to senility, or...the fact that it's Invader Zim.

• In "The Trial" Zim and Red/Purple are the same age.
• That, and the fact that you don't get a name like The Almighty Tallest for being older than everyone else.

That guy was haunting the fork

• Mother of God...

The Planet Jackers found a way to re-ignite their Sun permanently without the need to throw planets into it

Now they just do it for fun.

Skoodge will conquer the universe.

Sure, he seems cute, but Skoodge is dangerous. Like other Irkens, he has no moral qualms about conquering planets, but unlike other Irkens, he's good at it. Not only was he the first invader to succeed in conquering a planet, it was the home of the slaughtering rat people! Then he survives getting shot out of a huge cannon, shows up without his PAK, and momentarily manages to escape from the hogulus. Clearly, Skoodge is a force to be reckoned with. When he figures out that the Tallests really don't value him at all, things will get interesting.

• And I for one welcome our Irken overlords.

Dib and Gaz's mother is Tallest Miyuki

• Miyuki came to Earth with a human disguise, a REALLY good one (As she was a scientist) and met Prof. Membrane. This was back in a time when Irk didn't want to kill everything that moved, and she fell in love with the Prof. She revealed her true idenitity to him, and since her disguise was so advanced, she could mate with a human, even if the children's DNA ended up with Irken in the mix. After living with the Prof. and having Gaz and Dib she was called back to Irk, as she was now the Tallest. Once back there, she was killed in that incident with Zim. Prof. Membrane was informed and his heart was broken. The new Tallest, Spork, brought on Irk's new attitude towards other races by telling them that Vortians killed Miyuki and Earth was forgotten (No one knew about Gaz and Dib). Meanwhile, on Earth, Prof. Membrane tried to forget his pain by becoming a skeptic, and convinced himself that Gaz and Dib were his clones. Dib and Gaz are part Irken, which is why Dib is obsessed with aliens and why Gaz is a master of technology.
  • This theory would be plausible if Dib weren't a clone of Professor Membrane. Unless the Word of God is a lie, I don't see this happening.
  • When is Word of God NOT a lie?
  • This would explain why Gaz has a squeedlyspooch.

Invader Zim is set in a 1984 society

There are cameras everywhere and everyone is in a state of perpetual stupidity. Ms. Bitters and Prof. Membrane are probably part of the Inner Party and the Swollen Eyeball Network is the resistence (if such a thing actually existed). The only reason Zim hasn't been taken in is because there is no rule for such an occurence as an alien invasion.

• At least the skool system is in this state. Voting of the Doomed pretty much confirmed it. Also, like 1984, nearly all the food that appears is vomit-inducing.

The episodes aired in Anachronic Order and Attack Of the Saucer Morons is supposed to be the series finale.

The episode ends with Zim being outed...twice!. Granted, the witnesses for the first time weren't exactly credible and probably wouldn't be that much of a threat to Zim's mission. The second group, however, seemed to be a fairly normal-looking set of people. Unless you chalk it all up to Rule of Funny or Zim pushing some kind of Reset Button after the fade-to-black, this must be what happened.

• Or "Attack of the Saucer Morons" was the second to last episode and "Hobo 13" was the last episode; after being discovered by humans, ZIM goes into hiding and contacts his Tallest for weapons to protect himself but pretends everything is the same. At the end of the episode, he DOES crash into the sun along with the other guy and they die.

At end of chapter Attack Of the Saucer Morons, Zim killed all the people who discovered their identity.

Zim is a Villain Protagonist and Ax-Crazy, Zim would have been able to do so without remorse.

• Yeah, that would definitely count as a reset button. I'm still partial to the the above guess (mainly because it's my own), but your's is very much in the realm of possibility, especially when you consider Vasquez's dark sense of humor.

Gaz isn't naturally mean, she's a Jerkass Woobie with a Freudian Excuse

As if being neglected by her father wasn't enough, her brother pretty much ignores her unless she's actively throttling him (notice how he almost never responds to her complaints of eating her food). This treatment has made her into the bitter, withdrawn little girl she is in the show.

Granted, she's mean in the babies flashback in Mysterious Mysteries, but here's my take on that. In her short life, she'd been aware that no one in her family really paid any attention to her. One day, it seemed like her older brother was finally spending time with her by playing blocks. When he spelled out aliens, she realized that his mind was elsewhere and that he probably didn't even notice she was there. She proceeded to get angry and storm away.

• I know this is a WMG, but it's a little unsettling how you're placing the largest amount of blame on the person she's most frequently seen to abuse. Gaz doesn't like it when Dib pays attention to her, she doesn't share his interests and finds that "his voice fills [her] with a terrible rage". We see her either telling him to shut up or simply walking away from him when he talks to her, she doesn't seek him out. She's shooed him away even when he was explicitly concerned for her welfare, because she was busy playing her game. It's not really established that he eats "her" food, he takes her to task for finishing off "his" and is met with a "you think you own all the cereal!" which comes off as a mite hypocritical. Pretty basic sibling territorial rivalry, there.
  • Way to break my heart, Troper! The idea that Gaz started off as a sweet little baby person and was conditioned by her just as innocent budding conspiracy theorist brother and neglectful scientist father into a scornful young gloom girl just tugs at me heartstrings so! The Woobie in her is strong.

Dib is actually older than Zim

We know next to nothing about how Irkens age after birth and they are given a PAK which has all the information they need for their job, so they look combat ready in a matter of minutes instead of years.

• In "Tak: The Hideous New Girl", Tak says that she and Zim met fifty years ago. Further Word of God sides against this as well, as in a chat session Jhonen Vasquez was asked about the character's ages and stated that Zim was "older than any human alive".

Invader Zim will return in 2012

it's the end of the world! it would be the sickest most twisted joke on earth!

• Don't know about the world ending but I speak for almost everyone in this filthy meat planet(Earth) when I say hopefully you're right.
• Jossed.

Gaz and Dib actually do have a mother.

A surrogate mother. Gaz and Dib were clones, but they were grown inside a human woman. And, Gaz was designed to be superior while Dib was made inferior. Once Dib learns this, he'll develop a massive inferiority complex and capture a bipedal nuclear tank, demanding Professor Membrane's remains. Only Gaz will be able to stop him.

Dib cannot die from damage to his head

He's got an entire dimension to contain in there! If he got shot in the forehead, a monster would just crawl out and maul the shooter.

The characters are in a Higurashi-like Ground Hog Day Loop

Based on the above theory that the show is shown in Anachronic Order, where Zim was discovered out of his disguise in Attack of the Saucer Morons, thus making it the series finale.

Well, not really. Some entity out there keeps hitting the Reset Button whenever something really bad happens. Usually that "really bad thing" is either Zim or Dib dieing. It happened twice; the first time was Attack of the Saucer Morons (where Zim was discovered and dissected off screen) and the other being Walk for Your Lives (Where Dib didn't fall unconscious, he actually died). Either there are two of them- one helping Zim and one helping Dib, or just one that resets things because he/she/it finds it hilarious to watch them fail.

• Zim wasn't dissected in Attack of the Saucer Morons, he simply imagined that he would be and opened his eyes to find everyone worshipping him instead.
  • I meant the very end, when he crashes into the convention with the sign that says: "Aliens: Real or Not?". (Or something along those lines.) The people attending said convention take him away; not the Saucer Morons.

Irken Paks are wired to make the wearer stupid to keep the Irken Empire from falling apart

Ages ago, the Irken leaders of the day probably put that system into the Paks to keep things more or less stable - since with an Empire's worth of aggressive and destructive creatures like the Irkens around, all it would take is one short Irken with a Napoleon complex to overthrow their society. With this kind of 'stupid system' in place, Irkens wouldn't think twice about the height system and would focus their destructive tendencies on other parts of the universe. Control Brains were then put in place to keep the Empire running properly.

• In addition, the reason Zim's Pak is considered defective is that he's actually too smart for the 'stupid system' to properly contain. That's how he can improve Irken technology that's supposed to already be 'the finest' and can invent new technology on the spot - though since his brain is still partially scrambled most of his inventions and plans go horribly wrong.

Gaz has a squeedlyspooch and Membrane's lying about not believing in aliens

Membrane stole all of the earliest tech he 'invented' from an Irken scout ship that was checking Earth for potential future use, killed the pilot and crew, and later put one of the squeedlyspooches he harvested into Gaz while he was making her to see what it would do. He surgically altered it and grafted on spare normal organs to keep anyone from finding out, but Gaz found his notes. And Membrane refuses to admit that aliens are real because then he'd lose his sweet monopoly on all the stuff he marketed as his own inventions.

The moose in the room could not have eaten the kids inside the bus

The bus is made out of metal. Mooses can't eat metal. Sure it could have chewed them up, but not exactly EATEN them.

• It's implied in that episode that the wormhole leads directly to the inside of the moose's mouth; if the moose is enormous, it could even swallow the bus whole.
  • When is that implied?
    • By the fact that we don't see the moose pick up the walnuts, but just chewing them.
    • Uhh, I always thought Room With A Moose was about CHEWING on NUTS? Dib's a guy? Anyone?
    • I always thought that the joke was that he was legitimately terrified of the Moose because it eats walnuts. I don't think Mooses can eat walnuts.

Zim, Red, and Purple have a vague three-way relationship

Zim likes Purple more than he likes Red, but Red likes Zim slightly more than Purple does. This is why Zim is so pleased when Purple calls him creepy and why Red let him talk for three hours in Backseat Drivers. This is also why Red panics immediately while Purple keeps his cool during Dib's Wonderful Life of Doom: Zim programmed them into the simulation from memory and made Red act more cowardly on purpose to make that version of Purple look better in comparison.

• Both Red and Purple are slightly semi-vaguely fond of Zim (as long as he's not currently destroying the Empire), which is why they keep answering his calls and occasionally humor his ego with cheering crowds.
  • This Troper thinks that the Tallest simply find Zim to be a massive joke (he is!), and enjoy watching him look foolish. No three-way necessary, vague or otherwise.

The Principal of the Skool is worse than Ms. Bitters and is the only one she fears

This is a possible explanation for Miss Bitters's submission in an argument with him,and the hellish fire that is shown when the phone goes back into the desk.

Dib and Gaz were created to be Brains and Brawn

Dib was created/cloned by Prof.Membrane to be the smartest being on the planet, and Gaz was cloned to be the strongest. But once Dib got old enough all he talked about was ghosts, and bigfoot, and an evil alien at school. Membrane thought he had failed with Dib and succeeded with Gaz. But, he had actually succeeded with both.

There was no Snap Back after the Planet Jackers episode.

The Earth is now in orbit around the Planet Jackers' star. Whenever there's a shot of the sun after that episode, it appears to be a red giant.

• But what about Battle of the Planets? Earth was clearly in its normal solar system then.
  • Anachronic Order Theory above might explain this.

Ms. Bitters is the reason why the world is so stupid.

She's an Eldritch Abomination who is siphoning off the intelligence of everyone on the planet to return to her true form. Being installed in Skool allows her to keep the people of Earth stupid, hell probably is responsible for its misspelling. Dib, Gaz, and Membrane are somewhat immune-the side-effects is Dib's mannerisms, Gaz's apathy, and Membrane's indifference. When she is fully restored after siphoning off all human intelligence? She'll destroy the entire universe hence why she is so full of DOOM when she lectures.

• Nah. She's just the only main teacher of the only Skool in the world, and teaches the students really poorly because of spite. To quote her when speaking to the parents of her current crop of students...

"When you were all my students, I said you'd all amount to nothing. And I was right; you're NOTHING!!!"

Dib's head really IS huge.

• Everyone keeps saying it. It could be a running gag, OR there could be more going on. Maybe an optical illusion, or other kind of field. Either way, Dib's head would have held an important plot point, had the series continued.

Zim messed with Dib's head during "Dib's Wonderful Life of Doom", and it stuck.

Let's face it, Dib seemed different in season 2. A little bit goofier, almost like a parody of his season 1 self. That's because Zim, whether intentionally or not, ended up permanently screwing up Dib's brain a little during "Dib's Wonderful Life of Doom".

• Considering that it left Dib as a very old man in a twelve-year-old body, you may be on to something.

Dib isn't actually a genetic experiment

Membrane slept with one of his many fangirls however-many-years ago. In order to maintain his son's respect as both his father and a super-genius scientist, he fabricated the story in case Dib ever asked who his mother was. Only problem was, he never did since he became too obsessed with cryptids and the supernatural to notice. So the documents and whatever Membrane threw together as evidence were put away and forgotten about. Cue Dib discovering them on accident and coming to the conclusion.

Membrane Created the Irken species.

There was some sort of huge war going on. America was losing and needed some sort of weapon. So they created project IRK to create a bio-engineered form of humans that could help them win. Membrane was able to produce biological disasters. They were human, but with messed up DNA that includes DNA based of cockroaches due to their ability to survive almost anything. Membrane was unable to fully create functional inside the creatures. In order to fix this, he created PAKs to work as fully-functional brains. They were created to be ruthless and antagonistic. America was able to win the war after which they had to figure out what to do with the horrible monstrosities.

Finally, they made a decision. The entire laboratory and the creations where they were made was sent out into space to never be seen again. The lab landed on a planet. There the creations decided to start a new life. They called themselves the irk after the project that created them. They used notes from the scientists in order to create more of their kind.

Their attempts to conquer the universe comes from the fact that they were created specifically for war. Their unintelligience comes from the fact that they weren't unable fully recreate the new species correctly. Finally, it explains why the Irken have so many simililarities to humans, both in form and in speech.

• One problem to your theory: Irkens are far older than man (or at least are capable of living longer), and Zim is at least a century old.
  • There was a time warp similair to the Frycook what came from all that space.

The timeline of the series is actually in between the events of the Pixar movies Up and Wall-E.

Think about it. What exactly caused that vacant lot that Zim found in "The Nightmare Begins?" Not to mention the world of Invader Zim's timeline was probably half-polluted, causing the red sky and Zim's reaction to polluted water - meaning all water! Wall-E takes place when future humans of the Invader Zim world realize they've really screwed up with all the pollution. The incredible technology in Wall-E was all made by Professor Membrane, funded by Buy-N-Large!

• Would Eve be a more advanced S.I.R unit, then? Technology stolen from the Irkens and used by the humans. She does have a "glitch" that allows her to have a personality. Or maybe Wall-E himself would be.

Iggins is of Saiyan descent.

His powers laid dormant for years, but the incident with the elevator awakened his true potential.

'Invader Zim' takes place in the same world as Paranoia Agent.

Think about it, the world is completely screwed up and paranormal things are going on all of the time. Look at Maromi, it's so much like Gir it's not even funny!

Zim's "defect" is the ability to love and genuinely care about others.

Zim is shown to have the ability to love in the episode "Parent Teacher Night" during a flashback to the scene of his "Birth". His first words were "I love you, cold unfeeling robot arm!" He is later shown to be a defect in the unreleased episode "The Trial". In addition, he is shown to care about Dib in the unreleased episode "Mopiness of Doom". Caring about ones enemies is definately a defect in an invasive species like the Irkens, so he hid this from everyone and tried to make up for it by destroying stuff. It didn't work.

• This is pretty much Fanon, even thought I don't remeber them actually SAYING Irkens don't feel.
  • You're to decide yourself whether or not this theory has been Jossed, but we see Skoodge visibly crying in the very first episode, a clear sign of emotion. However, Skoodge is just as much as an outcast as Zim and not a good canidate for what the "normal" Irken soldier would be, so... maybe...
    • Another point: Invader Larb was tearing up in the first episode also. "Why would you draw that?"

Membrane is the Emperor of Mankind still working in the semi-backround.

The man without whom this world falls into CHAOS!!Dib & Gaz are clearly Proto-Primarchs.

Iggins bursting from the wreckage of the elevator was an afterlife or (more likely) dying insanity.

He didn't survive... for long.

'Invader Zim' takes place in the same world as Higurashi: When They Cry.

Everybody is crazy, and they're all REALLY scary when angry. Really, it would've been just as violent if Nick wasn't so overprotective.

Gir has a crush on Gaz

He shoots her an overly-delighted smile in Bloaty's Pizza Hog, makes her dance with him in Tak The Hideous New Girl and gives her a kiss (again, in the Tak episode). Granted, it could just be a case of Gir being...well...Gir. Or, it could be that everyone's favorite evil minion has fallen in love.

My theory is, had the series continued, Gaz would eventually have become a Butt-Monkey due to this unwanted suitor...which would have been fair, given all that her brother goes through.

Zim really is a normal, human kid

Dib's just been tormenting him for so long with accusations of being an alien that he's formed a fantasy about it being true (thus caving to Dib's constant needling while also giving himself an imaginary escape from his stressful life). All the Irken scenes are imagined by Zim or are exaggerations of mundane events; he is so isolated from his own parents that he has incorporated them into his fantasy as well, and Gir is actually just a toy.In the first episode, Zim is simply returning to school after the summer (starting the school year late because of a stress-induced illness). The big allusion to this is when Zim says "Dib's always saying stuff; I remember that one time..." because he actually has known Dib for at least the past couple years—but Dib has been so intent on "exposing" Zim that he hasn't kept track of time and honestly believes Zim has only "just arrived" from space. Part of Zim just wants Dib to leave him alone, but he’s so attached to his fantasy that he keeps acting like an alien and making his situation worse.It turns out the whole series was very Calvin & Hobbes-inspired.

• Alternatively...

Dib really is crazy.

Zim is exactly what he claims to be: a human with a very rare skin condition. Unfortunately, Dib, who (as has already been established) has watched way too many Sci-Fi movies, refuses to believe that. The series is, in fact, told through Dib's mind; the parts with Zim, GIR, and the Tallest are how Dib imagines Zim's "evil plans" are like. All of the other humans in the world act so stupidly because that's how Dib sees them: surely, if they can't see the "obvious" fact that Zim is an alien, they must be stupid!

Dib is a failed experiment.

Sure we know that Dib is a clone of some sorts, but don't you think that his dad says "my poor, insane son" a little too often?This could contribute to Dib going insane if he happened to find out about it.

The world could use a good physiatrist

Any physiatrist can see a case of self denial on Zim's case and severe issues with Dib and Gaz if the did have a mom she most likley died not long before The Nightmare begins.

Nickelodeon will bring the show back, as in making new seasons

In the Nicktoons Unite! games, they tend to only have characters from shows where new episodes are being made for them (well... the playable ones anyway). Zim is playable in 'Globs of Doom', and in the upcoming Nicktoons MLB. Considering that he's the only playable character from a show that wasn't still airing new episodes at least three years ago...

• Several years later, the series hasn't gotten a new season yet, but it got a TV movie.

Professor Membrane is a AU Dr Insano.

He does stuff For Science!, has goggles/glasses/whatever, and is morally ambigous(yeah, I know Insano is evil, but he's more Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain than actual evil). Not to mention that he's a Large Ham. And admit it, this would be awesome.

G.I.R is actually a God of Insane Robots.

I can't elaborate, since the entire concept s so insane, I am unable to type it out completely. Waffle?

Keef is a human/irken hybrid.

When Zim puts Keef and two other kids through dangerous tasks that a normal human wouldn't endure, Keef is the most resistant. This is because these are all factors Zim would look for in one of his own kind.He also demonstrates some amazing climbing abilities, and apparently regenerates his eyes after Zim removes them. One possible explanation is that long ago, the Tallest banished an Irken to earth much like what they would later do to Zim. This agent eventually decided to abandon his mission, got married, and Keef was born. The reason Keef admires Zim so much is because he senses the two are somewhat alike.

If the series had continued.

Then..

• The team Zim (Zim, Gir, Skooge and Minimoose ) would have been a Quirky Miniboss Squad.
• Zim would have become a Elite Mook .

At the beginning of Dibship Rising...

Dib didn't just download his personality into Tak's ship - Her personality went into him! Meaning that from this point on, Tak's personality is hidden inside of Dib, waiting for just the right moment to take over.

• Or, alternatively, Tak's personality and Dib's both swapped places. The reason the ship really thought it was Dib was because it really WAS Dib! Of course, since it started emptying its own personality at the end, this means that Dib is dead. Or eternally stuck in a perpetual state of consciousness but unable to do anything. The reason Tak's personality doesn't act like herself is because she's adjusting to Dib's body. Later on, it is finally fully adjusted and just pretending to be Dib so that she can continue with her dastardly plans without drawing attention to herself. All while trying to contact the REAL TAK through working on her old body (Tak's Ship).

Dib is a clone, but not of Membrane

of this guy in the background◊, he looks just like Dib, even more than Membrane does, and clearly share his interest in the paranormal (he was one of the Children of the Bright and Shining Saucer and wears a UFO shirt)

Invader Zim really takes place in the vicinity of the Solar System.

It took Zim 6 months to travel from Conventia to Earth, and 6 light-months is only 1/8 the distance to the nearest star, not to mention that Zim made Mars into a spaceship, fought with Dib and drew it to the vicinity of Blorch during the same Irken meeting. Perhaps the comets of the Oort cloud collided and formed planets such as Irk, Blorch, Meekrob, Conventia, Foodcourtia, Callnowia etc. These planets eventually had sentient species develop on them and one of them (the Irkens) became villainous and power-thirsty while also being incredibly stupid.

• The Planet Jackers' star is Proxima Centauri.

Gir uses food as a robo organic fuel source.

All that food is going out some where. Sir units are depicted as very complex creations but as shown their bodies aren't hammerspace. The food he eats actually fuels him while he's activated as well as fuel the jet booster flyers. Gir has the abililty to sleep like any other organic life form instead of charging like a robot and he doesn't have to recharge or get "his batteries replaced" to fuel himself. Further supporting the fact that he's closer to an organic being as most or better yet any other robot. His body has the ability to convert food into automatic fuel.

Drake is Dib, Josh is Zim, Megan is Gaz

After an accident in Zim's lab, Zim, Dib. and Gaz's appearances are altered, and they get amnesia, Dib remembers that his name starts with a D, Gaz remebers there was a G in her name, and Zim, due to his alien mind, just forgets everything.

• In one episode Megan mentions a Pintendo 'GS' GS might as well mean gameslave, and Gameslaves might be made by Pintendo
• Drake and Josh don't always get along, which could be a couple of memories that came back
• Drake has a younger sister, at the series start . (And Megan has a G in it it, she could have just moved it to the middle of her name)

This backs up my 'Jade is an Irken' theory, in a way.

• Not to mention some out of character behavior between Drake and Josh that I noticed a couple times.
• "Sigh" [[Jossed]].
• What Josses it?
• Guess Genius.

Dib will eventually get an Isabella

Dib will eventually meet a girl who will secretly fall madly in love with him, and this girl will most likely want to be a writer, and use her 'writing' as an excuse for why she's following him around.

• Not secretly, but it does seem Gretchen at least had a crush on Dib in 'Tak: The Hideous New Girl' She was even sobbing when Dib was hanging out with Tak.

If Invader Zim was on Cartoon Network it would of never got cancelled.

Perfectly self explanotory.

• If Courage the Cowardly Dog lasted 4 seasons on Cartoon Network, Invader Zim surely would have.

Failing that Dib succeeds in his plot against paranormal terrors he will grow up to be LIKE Dale Gribble.

Or if he's just crazy that will just make it worst.

The main cast of Invader Zim are descended from the casts of the comics.

Devi D. is Dib and Gaz's mother, an all-grown-up Todd is Agent Darkbooty, Johnny is either dead or locked up in the asylum.

• Alternatively, Dib is the product of some sort of relations between Devi and Johnny, considering Dib's resemblance to our favorite serial killer.

Dib is Johnny reincarnated.

Self-explanatory, really.

Bologna is no longer made from animals, or even soy.

Otherwise, how could there be bologna DNA? Through genetic engineering, a new, simple organism was created that grows into bologna in its final, processed form, which is much more efficient than the old methods.

Gir is the Chaotic Neutral in the series.

Because his moral compass can shift in any direction at any given time(sudden duty mode).

The creator of Invader Zim wasn't ready to make it.

That's the main reason why it got cancelled. There's more than plenty of talk going around about why Invader Zim got cancelled, but the biggest reason is because the creator couldn't afford to keep the series running. The creator in question also knew that he/she didn't have enough money to keep the series running for a long time and knew they should of waited but instead they disregarded their better judgement and ran the invader series anyway with a broken budget. Leading to the cancellation of the shortly lived big hit series widely known as Invader Zim.

Invader Zim came from the Homestuck universe.

That explains the fans' persistent desire to ship characters together. As a traditional pairing based on human-like attraction it makes no sense. But as blackrom comedy it's so obvious it almost hurts. This whole time we've just been going after the wrong quadrant.

Bloody Gir is real and has been playing a significant role in IZ.

Since he mostly appears during Zim's unfortunate he's a malevolent enigmatic entity. It's him that's thwarting Zim's plan's by altering the enviorment around Zim.

Gaz has a crush on Zim

.In NanoZIM, Gaz beat up Zim in what she thought was a online video game. It is notable that she recognized Zim's voice and blink and you miss it when running for student president her mood reader sundenly jumps sky high when Zim starts talking. Maybe I'm just going with the fan preferred pairing but ...

What was so horrible about the room with a moose.

It's taken a long time to figure this out, but this code's been cracked.It's really horrifying when one discovers the true meaning of the moose room just like Dib did. Remember when Dib say that terrifying moose chew on the walnuts? He appeared to be enjoying them very much did he not. Even though the moose was chewing those nut for a very long time he would eventually be finished chewing them, hell it's not chewing gum. After a while after that the moose will obviously want more walnuts and with all the walnuts gone because the moose ate all of the walnuts the bus/death trap shot at him, the moose would eventually go insane and try to compensate for it's deprived desire for the walnuts it loved so much. After this the moose would start to see every living creature in that room(Dib and the stupid skoolchildren as walnuts), because one it'll be hungry as hell and two because that moose really loved those walnuts as stated previously, then the moose would devour the children like a lion devouring sacrifical lambs, while thinking the skoolchildren are walnuts. So Zim gave the moose a taste but not too much of something that it'll enjoy a lot, then lock it up with a bunch of people so when it finally goes insane from depravation it'll hallucinate the children as the desired food and then eat the children. The reason why the meaning of the moose room wasn't apparent to the viewers is because something that "HORRIBLE" as Dib said to to explicit.

The Tallest fear Zim.

Hence why they haven't destroyed Zim despite their apparent hatred of him.

Contradicting previous theories pertaining to this subject, Zim is trying to succeed in his diabolical mission and is not failing them on purpose. The reason why he is failing them is because Gir is secretly foiling his plans.

It's kind of obvious that Gir ruin's Zim's plans on purpose. The real mystery however is why is he doing this, what does he have to gain from protecting Earth. The answer to that question is all the pleasures Earth has to offer. Gir is depicted as really enjoying his stay on Earth especially for someone who's supposed to destroy it. Gir seems really attached to Earth pleasures and such will most likely loose them if Zim were to succeed in his mission. So he protects Earth by ruining Zim's plans, that is if they ever involve destroying the planet unless someone else(say Dib) is trying to stop Zim such as in "The girl who cried gnome". Gir seems to fail Zim when he needs him most apparently because as stated previously he wants Earth intact for as long as possible. MMMMMM tacos.

Johnny Is Dib And Thus Fears The Chihuahua.

The reason Nny (Johnny the Homicidal Maniac) is repulsed and terrified by the chihuahua he sees on his way home is because he is Dib all grown up. The chihuahua reminds him of a chihuahua that was seen around the neighborhood when he was a boy, one that freaked out Zim, his Rival/Almost-Friend. Nny/Dib on some level wants his memories to stay repressed. When he sees the chihuahua as an adult, he screams at a survey man who later comes to the house that "I lost it, but it knew! IT KNEW!" and never elaborates on what the dog knew. Perhaps, in his insanity, Nny/Dib began to think the chihuahua was Madness the Chihuahua from his childhood, and that it knew who he was, which is something he himself wants, on one of his more deep levels, to keep completely forgotten and hidden. Any sighting of a chihuahua, therefore, might give him a fleeting but clear memory of Zim, causing him to panic as part of him tries to banish it and another tries desperately to drag it to light.

Invader Zim takes place in modern days & Zim released a video on YouTube called “Crazy UFO Kid” & it went viral and NASAPLACE watched it.

How else would they know that Dib always rants on about aliens?

GIR would somehow gained control of all the SIR Units for an episode

Which would lead to an uprising against the Irken. But with Gir's mind it would be a very silly revolution.

Gaz is the reincarnation of a powerful witch.

She has retained much of the personality, powers, and knowledge of her previous life.

GIR Is Suicidal

Kind of self explanatory, but just in case it isn't: GIR constantly makes coments about wanting to explode, and is sad whenever a self-destruct is thwarted or simply doesn't happen. In the episode "Dibs Wonderful Life of Doom", ZIM commands GIR to self destruct, to which GIR responds with a loud, happy and relieved "FINALLY!!!!" and procedes to grin and explode happily.

• I thought about this too, and maybe it's because he's a defective robot, and living is nothing but pure pain for him. Perhaps he's a Stepford Smiler on top of that?

The whole series is a game of make-believe by Dib and Zim.

• Dib is a fan of alien invader series and somewhat of the outcast of the school. The Crapsack World of Invader Zim is Dib being pessimistic. His big head is an insult by his classmates.
• Zim is an orphan in foster care. He's Dib's only friend(no, not like that. Well, maybe.), and thus consistently goes along with his make-believe game. Zim has a major sweet tooth, so the Irkens like snacks.
• GIR is the hyperractive, fat younger brother of Zim. Despite how annyoing he is, Zim still loves him. GIR has a plushie mongoose and plays with the orphan dog.
• Gaz doesn't care about the make-believe game, explaining her True Neutral behaviour. Professor Membrane is busy at work, but will try to play part in Dib's game.
• Miss Bitters is their Sadist Teacher, like before, but isn't a Humanoid Abomination. She's simply such Nightmare Fuel to them they imagine her as this.
• The other Irkens are based off people that Dib and Zim know. Sizz-lor is in charge of Zim's favourite fast-food restaurant, who wants to make Zim pay for eating a meal without paying. The Tallest are the caretakers of Zim and GIR(that take what you will).

Zim knows his mission is fake.

If the series had continued, one of the characters would've given the Tallest A Reason You Suck Speech.

By none other than Zim himself, especially after the Tallests reveal his mission was a lie.

The Irkens don't conquer worlds for power, but for consumerism.

The Irkens seem to value snacks of all things as a resource as precious as coal is to us. Whenever they conquer a world, they seem more interested settling a parking lot or another food court. Hell, one of their main planets is Foodcourtia! It's likely that the Irkens started off as an incredibly sucsessful consumer race that supplied the rest of the universe with supplies, but felt that conquering other worlds and expanding their empire would allow more space for their many enterprises. The parts of the universe not conquered tolerate the Irkens because they're a major source of supplies. This might go to explain why places like Foodcourtia even have non-Irken customers, since any empires that wants to take over the universe for power's sake would pretty much become an enemy of the universe at this state. The Irkens' cloning and need for PAKs is because their bodies were to speed up production.

The baby in the bus in "Walk of Doom" was Stewie Griffin.

It sure looks like him...

Dib is a stoner & Zim actually is a human.

And the Almighty Tallest, Gir and the Irkens are all Dib’s hallucinations.

Irkens evolved from Helmacrons.

They're both bug-like, stupid narcissists bent on universal conquest. This also explains the Irkens' height system—since they got taller over the generations, shorter Irkens are presumed to be "less evolved."

The Tallests were subconsciously training Zim for something when they banished him to Earth.

Tak was actually after Zim's robot bee.

Her plan with the snacks was really just a spectacular effort to distract Zim, allowing Tak to sneak into his base and take the bee. Unfortunately, when she was drawn away by Zim in the final stages of her plan, she never got the chance to take it before she was defeated.

Mrs. Bitters is Gaz's "mother."

In a technical sense, at least. Since it's all-but-confirmed that Dib and Gaz are test tube babies, it wouldn't be unreasonable to think that Professor Membrane somehow got a hold of Mrs. Bitters's DNA and spliced it with his own to create Gaz. It would explain Gaz's affinity towards darkness, apparent supernatural powers, and lack of anything resembling a pleasant demeanor.

If the series had had a proper finale, the Tallest would have persuaded Dib to switch sides.

After ruthlessly destroying most of the Irken race, Dib confronts the Tallest, who ask the Armor-Piercing Question: Why are you fighting to save these idiots? Your own people think you're crazy, your allies can't fight their way out of a paper bag, nobody respects you, and after you defeat us, no one will believe you. These people aren't worth saving. You've proven yourself to be the best warrior in the Universe. Why should you put up with this mistreatment? Join us and we'll rule the Universe together.

Tak killed the real daughter of the Deelishus Weenie Corporation head and pulled a Dead Person Impersonation.

Because even in this show, people aren't so stupid as to ignore the weirdness of someone suddenly appearing claiming to be the daughter of an executive of a major corporation with no personal history.

Skooge wants revenge for the Tallest did to him.

They sent him on a suicide mission, and when he returned victorious, they shot him out of a cannon. Now he's biding his time as he plots his revenge: kill every Irken taller than him so he can be the Tallest.

Tak is appealing to us as a character because she used her eye trick on us.

Tak might have used her eyetrick on the VIEWERS long before she made that girl bite her eraser, we just didn't notice it. That's why she's so widely popular despite appearing in only one episode and getting her ass handed to her pretty badly by GIR of all people.

Year Zero will occur on Irk.

Think about it. Irk, the planet, is a hierarchy based entirely on height; and is extremely prejudiced towards anyone shorter than an individual Irken, thus basing this on appearance alone. As Irk's prejudice and discrimination continues to be accepted - and enforced - by the Government, most specifically the Tallests, the planet will fall into a state of chaos. Rebellions will form against the government for their actions, and the economy will be troubled. Civil wars will break out. The most particularly determined rebellion groups will make various assassination attempts at The Tallests - thus making no one able to be trusted unless a part of the Government themselves. Drones will be released by Irkens to watch whatever an individual of the Armada does, writes, or says. For this reason, the planet is living in a constant state of insecurity and fear.

Eventually, all hell breaks loose when one of the reigning Tallests at the time goes mad with power and assumes complete control over not only the entirety of the government (excluding the Control Brains) but every Irken citizen as well. Nothing on the planet will be able to go said without being watched or overheard due to the Armada's paranoia over who is or is not planning to rebel.

Eventually, a superior alien race will take notice of the Irkens' antics - not only their hierarchy, but the rest of their governmental corruption as well - and descend upon Irk, giving them a warning that if the government does not change its ways as soon as possible, this alien force will completely eliminate the Irken race. As a result of their pride and Irken nature, the Irkens will continue their corruption, until the said superior alien life force puts their plan into action and thus completely annihilates the Irkens and their planet.

Professor Membrane doesn't believe in alien invaders because he's Wrong Genre Savvy.

Professor Membrane considers the idea of traditional alien invasion to be absurd: any species intelligent enough to make interstellar travel would almost never need to invade other planets-they could just make their own. Even if they needed to invade planets for resources, that's all they care about-any super-advanced race dedicated to conquering for its own sake would be asking for it. What Professor Membrane doesn't know is that not only is there an alien race stupid enough to conquer other worlds for no good reason, but conquer worlds that can't even give them political power. Professor Membrane could very well know that Zim is an alien, but he assumes that a)Zim is just pretending to be an alien invader because it's cool or b)Zim is a complete idiot who deludes himself into thinking he works for a race of alien invaders. Of course, it's possible that Membrane does know about the Irkens and their intentions, but refuses to believe it because the idea that not even outer space is safe from stupidity would leave Membrane dead inside.

If this took place on Alternia, Zim and Dib would be calliginous for each other.

Goes without saying.

• Alternately: The Irken race experiences some variant on Kismesissitude, given their hateful nature; Zim has it bad for Dib, and is quite confused that his obvious romantic advances are being ignored.

GIR is actually the grand villain of the series.

ZIM was brainwashed into thinking he was GIR's master, while in reality GIR is his master, and he was sent to Earth to be disposed of by GIR. GIR is secretly a super genius, and he is actually the master of The Tallest. GIR all along was trying to make Zim's plans fail, with him just pretending to be stupid.

GIR's red-eyed mode is really his normal mode, which he hides in order not to make ZIM realize he has been tricked, ruining GIR's master plan. That plan would have been to take over the world himself. He knows ZIM's schemes are stupid, but he also knows that if one of ZIM's plans work one day, he can just push ZIM to the side and take over himself. So he simultaneously helps ZIM with his plans, and makes them backfire just so GIR can one day take over the world instead.

• That doesn't make any sense. How did the Tallest (Red, to be specific) construct GIR with old SIR parts and his (A.T. Red's) own pocket lint?

Zim is Jar Jar Binks reincarnated.

Both were banished for their clumsy and destructive behavior. Jar Jar knew that Palpatine wanted to take over the galaxy and helped him because he enjoyed it. When he became Zim, he still had the desire to take over worlds.

Negative Continuity exists because all of it is simply Zim imagining the worst-case scenario for each potential plan.

He never does actually go with any of them until one of gives him benefit as a worst-case scenario. Worst-case scenario, he'd run out of ideas after deciding that all of them would be useless or even hindering.

Invader Zim is coming back, but as a web comic.

I saw this posted on Tumblr, and it appears to NOT be by some random fan of the series. Any guesses?

• Confirmed, but it's a print comic book series.

GIR was designed as a test of the SIR unit software.

It's a commonly proposed theory that the "G" stands for "garbage." Which would make GIR's full name "Garbage Information Retrieval unit." I propose that this name actually means "a unit to retrieve garbage information," and not "a garbage unit to retrieve information."

In computer science, "garbage data" refers to data, usually retrieved erroneously, which was designed to be interpreted in another context, and is meaningless in the context for which it's retrieved. The classic example in gaming is Missingno, a beast in the original Pokemon games which could be encountered by forcing the game to load random encounter data from the player's name instead of from a random encounter data table.

Sometimes, to test the stability and correct functioning of a program, developers will throw garbage data at it *deliberately* and see what happens. So basically the idea is this is what GIR was made for. He basically works like an ordinary SIR unit, scanning and processing mission critical information. The chief difference is that GIR is programmed to regard *everything* as mission critical, most notably including *ambient garbage data*. That's why he notices stupid things and gets distracted by random stuff. He's taking everything in at equal priority, including things he shouldn't be taking in *at all*, and processing it all as equally important, even if there's no logical reason why it should be.

The point is to make sure the SIR unit AI doesn't crash, even in the event of unstable input. The test succeeded: GIR doesn't crash. He's exceptionally stupid, but that side effect was fully anticipated.

Also, the random junk the Tallest threw into his head wasn't his brain. His brain was hard coded into his hardware. The random junk was to seed the ambient garbage data. You know, so he has something meaningless to take in all the time.

Dib was one of the campers in the climax of Monsters University.

This is what got him interested in the paranormal.

Red & Blue.

Purple was originally blue tinted, but with the recent death of Tallest Miyuki they figured it'd be a bit tasteless for Blue to remain blue. He underwent surgery to change his eye color to purple... and it ended somewhat poorly, making him dumber than before, which is why Red is the more competent of the two by a landslide; it's highly possible their height prior to leadership granted them good military/political positions, explaining their competence in the first place. Being his best bud though, Red happily shares Purple's less clever mannerisms and humor, with both of them fully aware of Purple's damage but Purple being too damaged to really care about it and Red too happy with his best friend to dwell on it.

Gaz's eyes are close to closed all the time because of her secret habits.

While Dib fights against Zim in the open, Gaz secretly spends much of her sleep time trying to find her dad in the lab below the house. When he proves not to be around that time of night, which is pretty much the case year round, she does her usual distraught and pained crying about how much she misses her dad's love and then gets to work using his technology to interact with the Irken armada, having learned about Operation Impending Doom long before Dib overheard the Great Assigning for the successive Operation Impending Doom II. She discreetly learned about the nature of Zim's assignment, discovering right off the bat that he was never meant to arrive on a planet and for all intents and purposes isn't an Invader, thus her dismissal of him and opinion that he's so bad at world conquering that it doesn't matter. Furthermore, she influences the armada's direction and the supply drops and communications of the other real Invaders, trying to keep the invasion fleet FAR away from Earth, where she prefers to be alive and unenslaved. This takes up much of her sleep time, making her very tired all day and exceptionally cranky between such exhaustion and the sadness and anguish she hides, which she directs towards Dib primarily because she knows he can take her lashing like a champ after this long of being her brother and because he's part of the reason Professor Membrane doesn't often associate with his children as much as he should; he is embarrassed, which he admits fairly freely, at least to her, which brought out some particularly volatile, violent emotions in her when Dib was seemingly ruining one of her rare chances to be with their father in Future Dib. Her supernatural powers are a result of Professor Membrane's technology being misused by her from time to time while looking for him.

The comics will have a Time Skip.

vasquez has said that Zim has stayed the same, but what about the other characters? It would be funny if Dib were taller than Zim yet still unable to stop him permanently.

The comics will reveal that the Almighty Tallest have not checked in on Zim since the TV series.

They could say a line like, "We haven't watched Zim in a while." This would be very meta.

• If you mean for this to happen at the start of the comics, you were kinda close...

Invader Skoodge will be a prominent character in the comics.

There were plans for him to become Zim's roommate, but then the series got cancelled.

The comics will have a storyline in which Dib finds out how he was created.

This might have been explored on the show had it not been cancelled.

The comics will reveal Ms. Bitters' origins.

Word of God is that she is not human.

The Resisty will be recurring characters in the comics.

Vasquez did have plans for them, but then the show got cancelled.

Minimoose is actually a memory parasite.

He popped up out of nowhere, and Zim seemed to remember him fondly despite this, and according to Word of God, a flashback montage to past episodes would have crudely altered the scenes in question to include him. Clearly, he's a memory parasite that implanted Fake Memories into Zim and Gir, and which Zim never realized was just a parasite. As a result, it spread out onto the Invader Zim-verse Earth like a plague without anyone realizing it.

• Jossed, in the unreleased episode "Nubs of Doom" Minimoose is made to be a better sidekick than GIR. He was made of various technologies such as an unquestioning computer brain and Vortian doomsday tech.

Most Irkens are child soldiers

Irken lifetimes span at least a few hundred years (Word of God says Zim is older than any human on Earth), so it follows that they age very slowly. Your average Irken Invader is equivalent to a human 10 year old. Their intellectual prowess comes from their PAKs, which store hundreds of lifetimes worth of knowledge, but emotional maturity only comes with age which is why Irkens are so petty, vicious, and loud. They're essentially a planet of children and adolescents run by a few sole adults (the Control Brains). This can also explain why Irkens tend to be so short. They do grow over time, and you will see the occasional Early Bloomer like the Tallests, but most grow at a slower rate. Their violent, militant society and lifestyles ensure that the vast majority of Irkens don't grow into adulthood.

The show is an Alternate Universe to The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy

It was created when Billy was messing around in Grim's trunk again. Each character got an alternate universe counterpart. Billy's is Zim; aside from having the same voice, they're both pretty stupid and tend to hinder their own goals. Mandy's is Gaz since they have pretty much the same personality. Irwin became Dib, since they're both nerdy Chew Toys who are dark but not evil. Hard to say who GIR's counterpart is, but either Pud'n or Fred Fredburger could fit. Grim either became Vortian Prisoner 777 or one of the Tallests (alongside Boogey).

Or the show could be an Alternate Universe to Dexter's Laboratory

Dib is pretty similar to Dexter... They're both variations on the Mad Scientist and even have the same voice in the Japanese dub. Zim would probably be Mandark, going by this logic. Deedee has two counterparts: GIR (representing her destructiveness) and Gaz (representing her role as the hero's sister).

The mention of Invader Jim in the comic is a reference to the Japanese dub of the cartoon

In Japan, Zim's name is written as such: ジム. It's pronounced "Jimu" and can literally be translated as Jim. No wonder the Tallests thought one was the other...

Professor Membrane's first name is...

...Professor.

Gaz doesn't have a squeedlyspooch.

She just said that to shut him up.

Miss Bitters is actually a Irken Tallest

This is an idea that i had a long time. Many things about Miss Bitters don´t really add up. She is one of the weirdest characters in the show. At first look she is is REALLY creepy teacher. But if you look closer some things seem to be amiss. And from that you can make the connection to her being and alien, possibly even Irken.

• At one point she talks about once being an astronaut, until her ship imploded. Who is to say that she was an astronaut from earth? She could have easily been stranded on earth after the destruction of her ship. She also states she was once a "fairy princess" before flying into a bug zapper, which could be a metaphor.
• She is old. Really old. She was already a teacher in other works of Vasquez that took place years earlier. She also is there as long as the Skool and it was build around her.
• The Skool itself. Most Human buildings are pretty normal. But the Skool building is on another level of technology. Other that it only the Membrane household, Zim´s and Tak´s bases feature such advanced facilities. There are automated security drones, brainwashing tools, blackboards that transform into screens and exploding hall-passes. The whole building is also modular with phones that come from tables and floor plates that lower into the underground classrooms. You even have the segmented pipes with unintelligible function. All in all it sure feels pretty similar to the surface levels of Zim´s base.
• We never see her eat and the only human food that we see in her vicinity is a apple that is so old that it is black rotten and filled with maggots.
• Miss Bitters despises it to go outside. She states that it is because she can´t survive in sunlight, but what if in reality it was because of rain?
• Miss Bitters herself. It was outright stated that she is NOT human. Now take a picture of her and one of the Tallest and put those next to each other. They do look pretty similar, huh? A very lanky, frail and bowed body, with the horizontal neck and the too big head. The way she holds her arms and moves around way to flexible. It often seems as if she were hovering. And don´t these glasses look and move interestingly like Irken eyes? The one time she is outside in her cloak they even are a light purple. So could it be, that all these times she seems to do supernatural things, it is simply a camouflage device not coping correctly?

It is NOT water that burns Irken

So, we all know the very funny scenes in which Zim reacts to earthen things in hilarious ways. It rains and he gets burned by the rain like it is acid. But there are some clues that make it actually logical.The main one would be, the Orange-Red Sky.Now most will simply ignore it as artistic freedom, BUT there is such a thing in reality. City´s that suffer from extreme Smog sometimes have a orange-red sky because of all the pollution in the air. And with Smog comes what? Sour Rain.Additional, what is the other liquid that burns Zim? Soft drinks. And soft drinks are also acidic. We also never see Irken eat sour things, only sweet stuff like milkshakes, donuts and similar. So you could assume, that they have severe reactions to acidic substances.

• Additionally, meat is lightly acidic. (in addition to possible reactions because of incompatible biologies)

The series is in the imagination of one of the Tallest

They seem to dislike Zim, so one of them may create a reality in their mind where he gets sent to a confusing planet. It would explain why neither Dib or Zim completely succeed : Even in imaginations, the Irkens see themselves with superiority over others, and would not be beaten. However, they wouldn't want Zim to succeed on his mission, seeing how they think of him. In several parts of the series, we have Dib talking out loud, then saying something to cover it up. That could hint at someone seeing them, and having them cover it up. At another part, Zim remembers something even when he was long gone, which could be them filling up the parts. Zim so often is showed as a fool, which could be how he is seen by the Tallest. It would also explain why he so readily believed them—that's how they wanted it. And GIR would be to, well, probably just be cruel of something.

The plot of the revival movie...

Will be based on the unproduced season 2 finale, where Zim is forced to rescue Invader Tenn after she is exposed by the malfunctioning SIR Units on planet Meekrob. Dib and The Resisty will get involved, and the Meekrob race, sworn enemies of the Irken Empire, will finally make their true appearance, and enter an alliance with Dib and The Resisty against the Irkens. The final battle between Zim, Dib, the Irken Empire, The Resisty, and The Meekrob will commence, deciding the fate of earth and the galaxy forever...

• Jossed.

The PAK needs the body just as much as the body needs the PAK

The energy produced by the body is used to keep the PAK functional.

Dib and Gaz are children of Athena

Dib and Gaz don't ever talk about their mother, and Professor Membrane doesn't talk about a wife. Professor Membrane is a genius scientist, and Athena would certainly be attracted to him.
The Weirdness Censor is a result of the Mist, and it includes aliens. Dib and Gaz can see through it because demigods aren't as fooled as normal people.

Slouching is how Irkens flaunt their wealth

In a society where height determines social status, why would anyone slouch? In a society where money determines social status, why would anyone spend a lot of it? Being able to spend money and not care is a sign of having a lot of it, even if you don't have much. Slouching and reducing your height, even when you don't have much of it, is like that.

In the comics, the Snarl Beast had imprinted on Dib

Issue 10 of the comic sees Dib accidentally brought along by Zim on an expedition to capture the ludicrously deadly Sylvestran Snarl Beast. Which initially confronts Dib in the form of a cute little blue six-legged kitten. It acts extremely friendly towards him; it's not until Zim's remote-piloted robot hunter attacks that it turns into its monstrous true form, which has been interpreted on this series' Heartwarming Moments page as it actively trying to defend Dib. When Zim captures the Beast, he unknowingly locks Dib inside of it - and yet, when he opens the containment pod, Dib is perfectly unharmed and the Beast has reverted to its docile form. When it goes into its monster mode again, even though it's holding Dib in one of its mouth-hands, its posture suggests the body language equivalent of "Keep away! Mine! Don't touch!" This suggests that the Snarl Beast actually likes Dib and wants to protect him... unfortunately for Dib, it doesn't recognize that his fellow students aren't technically a threat.

The Irkens are a parody or satire of consumerism.

They conquer so many planets they don't know what to do with them, to the point of it being almost like a sport. Irken culture obsesses over snack food and other trivial things. At this point conquest goes beyond The Right of a Superior Species, Blood Knight tendencies or even doing it For the Evulz, but because they need more land for malls, hotels and other capitalist things. This is also how a species with only conquest on his mind hasn't gotten the ire of every other species and gotten blasted into oblivion-they are plenty of races they want as costumers, not slaves or extinct. The races they enslave or destroy are likely those who they can't buy, making them competition for being the biggest business in the cosmos.

The Tallest knew about Earth.

Earth was just so horrible they removed it from the map and pretend it doesn't exist, in hopes no sane Irken would go there. But since Zim isn't a sane Irken, they were hoping he would end up there. Didn't work.

Irken originally reproduced by inserting parasitic larvae into a host.

An off-hand line Zim gives during his introduction to the Skool children implies that Irken spawn from "wormbabies," which makes this troper think of parasites, such as tapeworms and flukes. There's an entire family of insects that reproduce in a similar manner, Pompilidae, otherwise known as spider wasps. While there are two separate genders of Irken, there seem to be no physical differences between the two aside from cosmetic appearances, all of which can be achieved by dressing in a certain manner and styling antennae or hairs in a certain fashion. This implies that the Irken are sexless, meaning that gender identity is irrelevant to what an Irken can or can't do. If they evolved this way, then it would stand to reason that it wouldn't matter what the Irken identified as, they could all sire children. Given that hermaphrodites typically cannot sire children if they have both parts at once, the likeliest scenario is that there was only one set of parts that used something any other being would have to reproduce. Under this logic, it would make sense for an evolutionary standpoint to exploit the thing every living being has: A body, and DNA. Thus, this troper believes that in the past, Irken would implant a wormbaby into a creature that wasn't another Irken, which would take the DNA of the host and use it to influence the resulting Smeet, in both physiology and personality. Once the Smeet was mature enough, it would detach itself from the host by making it explode, in typical Zim fashion, and go on to continue the cycle by eventually implanting another host with a wormbaby. Larger, more dangerous beasts result in taller Irken, so the Tallest are made leaders because they have genetics that indicate they're capable, powerful leaders.

Recap Kid will be killed off in the final issue of the Oni Press comic series.

Johnen Vasquez said in a Tumblr post that Recap Kid's heart would explode from hyperactivity before reaching adulthood, so it's clear that their days will be numbered once the series reaches its conclusion. As for how they die, either their heart gives out from being overexcited at how the comic book ends or they die from being unable to handle the fact that there won't be any further comics now that it's the last issue.

• Alternatively Recap Kid could be revived similarly to Dib in "Bad, Bad Rubber Piggy" or receive an artificial heart that can withstand their hyperness...or it might just explode as well.

GIR is a Psycho Prototype.

The G stands for "Guiding." The GIR unit is a model of robot meant as the next step up from the SIR unit, given sapience so they can come to their own conclusions about the information they retrieve, and so they can offer tactical advice to their assigned Invader. GIR has his parts thrown in the trash because they haven't finished working the bugs out, and the Tallest just slapped him together rather haphazardly, exacerbating his issues. The end result is the crazy robot everyone fell in love with.

If you take note, a SIR does nothing unless prompted. They are without a will of their own. GIR, meanwhile, when locked into duty mode, retains a degree of free will. He blitzes towards the nearest cop car and brings it back so Zim can interrogate the cop inside, without any sort of cue, and opts to usurp him when he believes Zim's idiocy will jeopardize the mission's chances of success.

Zim is actually the single most dangerous Irkin in their entire history.

Why else would the Tallest want him to go away? He'd probably disrupt their social order or something.

Tak, the Resisty and other abandoned plotlines are being actively saved for another season.

Why else would those plot threads that everyone's wanted resolved be completely ignored by both the comics and the TV movie? The simplest explaination is that they're being consciously saved for if the show itself ever actually gets another season (no matter how long it takes), as a new, full-length episodic season would probably be the best way to get them resolved, rather than a comic series with no sound or an hour-long movie.

Gaz's natural hair color isn't purple.

She actually has the same hair color as her father and brother. The reason it's purple is because she dyes it like that.

Sizz Lorr was deemed defective.

Hence why he is a Fry Cook instead of a Tallest. However, the damage to Irken society that a Tallest might be defective had them shuffle him into the position of Fry Cook.

Gaz will grow up to become the Distaff Counterpart of Nny.

Concept art by Aaron Alexovich depicts her as an adult with a similar fashion sense to Nny himself.

Irkens' heights are artificially stunted by the control brains in order to control the Irken social hierarchy.

This is done through hormonal programming in their PA Ks. ZIM is especially short since the brains don't want a defective Irken having too much power or heaven forbid becoming The Tallest. This is their only real way to control him.

Professor Membrane is an alien who doesn't believe in aliens.

Professor Membrane is an extraterrestrial, but he either doesn't think other "True" aliens exist beyond his species, or is just in denial of his true nature. (Also, given the usual level of absurdity the show operates on, Professor Membrane probably thinks of himself as a "Naturalized Earth Citizen" instead of an alien-and doesn't Dib know that, even if someone's an extraterrestrial, it's rude to just call them an alien? He raised his son better than that!)

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