(If this looks weird it's because I'm posting on my cellphone and I don't know how to do it)
I finally have enough art to make another LiS post!! Once again it's mostly True Colors because I can't stop thinking about these three. Ofc one of these is a redraw of that picture of the game!
Also, I wanted to do some Pride Month stuff for them :3
elitespacefreak
devlunar
I continue to see more people argue over Zim’s age (as well as the age of other irkens at times) with some claiming he’s an adult and others saying he’s a child/teen. I haven’t seen a lot of the reasons why people believe he’s an adult but here’s a statement made by Jhonen Vasquez in a commentary video that I’ve seen come up before: “The saddest thing is Zim is not a kid. He’s not a little kid. He acts like it but he’s like an old man basically.”
I see that he says “Zim is not a kid” and compares him to more of an old man but I’m not sure if this is confirmation that Zim is actually old for an irken. His exact age is kind of a mystery and though many say that he’s 160 earth years (or 16 irken years) I can’t be entirely sure about how reliable those sources are despite so many believing Jhonen said this. However, we can still predict that he’s not that old from what we see in the show and comics. In the comics, we’ve been able to see what more elderly irkens would look like in both issue 28 and 23, with Zim looking nothing like them.
Also, in issue 12, we see what Zim would look like in the future, (we could say 70+ years into the future based off how the baby gir took aged, though this could be a continuity error) where he actually looks and acts more mature, as if he’s now grown up. The future Zim even tells his younger self, “I can’t believe I was ever as young and stupid as you are!” like an adult would looking back at their adolescence.
Now looking at Jhonen’s statement again, he does say Zim isn’t a kid but notice that after he says, “The saddest thing is Zim is not a kid” he also rephrases it right after saying “He’s not a little kid”, as if trying to correct himself and specify that Zim is not a little kid. He could still be considered adolescent but not a very young child. Besides, Jhonen was only saying this as a little comment to a scene in the episode he was watching, saying this after Zim’s plan failed and he began acting childish to prove it was all intended and he still won, like a jealous little kid would.
In the show and canceled episodes, there’s still no solid evidence for either side of the argument but I have tried to make a point before that shipping Zim with one of the skool kids (specifically Dib) is not pedophilia using ‘Tak: The Hideous New Girl’ as evidence and what I said was the following; “..the show was never intended for romance which is kind of shown in “Tak the Hideous New Girl” yet also shows that if Zim assumed Tak was a normal skool kid he’d be a pedophile in that episode if he really was an adult.”
Of course, Tak ended up being irken too so okay, I’ll let the “he thought she was a skool kid” thing slide, but later, the episode presents more material to work with in figuring out his age. When Tak explains her backstory of how Zim ruined her life she said these two things: “It was fifty years ago, on the Irken military training planet, Devastis. I had been waiting years to take my final test to become one of the Irken elite soldiers and, should the need arise… to become one of the invaders” and “I pleaded with the control brain to let me take the test, but she said I would have to wait another seventy years.” Judging by what she said, we get the number 120 from adding the years she prepared for her test (70) and how long ago it was since she tried to take the test (50). Assuming she wasn’t actually 70 at the time and that when she was preparing for the final test she wasn’t doing it her entire life, we can add maybe 30 years and that still means she’d be just 150. If she really is 120 and Zim is just older or maybe they are the same age and around the 150 i predicted, that means the claim that Zim is 160 is pretty accurate and the “10 earth years = 1 irk year” idea is plausible. Interestingly enough, from what we can see in the canceled episode, “The Trial” it is likely that the other irken characters Skoodge, Tallest Red and Tallest Purple are around Zim’s age too and something you’ll notice in them is that they all seem young just like him. For Skoodge, outside of the occasional dialogue and his young appearance like Zim’s, there’s not much to say while the Tallests make more of the point here. Both the Tallests are immature despite their role as leaders, which came relatively earlier to them since Zim accidentally killed the previous Tallests, making Red and Purple take over.
Some people will say here “well irkens can just be childish like that, but they all still work in jobs so the ones we see are adults, right?” Fair point, but I still believe not all of them are and this idea can still be debunked. In the show, it’s obvious that they have far longer life spans (which is where the 10 earth years = 1 irk year thing may come from) and with their need to constantly move forward, train and conquer I highly doubt that they wait for their smeets to grow up and likely make them train and work as early as possible. As soon as they finish training and pass the test mentioned by Tak, they immediately start their work regardless of whether or not they’re actually mature. For all we know maybe they are called “adults” on irk but by earth standards they wouldn’t be, since on our planet, we wait awhile to educate our children and then allow them to get a job.
(One more thing. It’s not from the comics, show, or jhonen but from the voice actors. At conventions, the voice actors of zim and dib both tried appealing the fans with zadr. They are pretty well known but I’ll explain them for those who don’t recall it. During a Mopiness of doom script reading, Richard Horwitz (Zim’s voice actor) made a Zim puppet kiss Andy Berman’s (Dib) forehead where then the fans freaked out and the narrator on stage told Andy to put on the Dib puppet to make Zim and Dib kiss, where of course the puppets kissed and the audience got extremely excited. Another time a fan asked Andy Berman to say “I love you Zim” in Dib’s voice and he did it. I’ve heard of some zagr stuff before but I’ve never actually seen it so i can only take people’s word for it. But my point here is that if ships like zadr/zagr are pedophilic since some consider Zim an adult, then why would the people actually apart of the show be so willing and happy to support it? I know they’re just trying to make the fans happy but if it was really that bad of a ship i don’t think they would like it.)
To answer the question, “Is Zim an adult or not?” I believe he is not actually an adult or at least wouldn’t be as a human. It’s hard to understand the standards of an alien race but by my logic, I believe he’s still pretty young, like a teenager maybe. When it comes to people shipping an irken like Zim with one of the earth characters that we know are kids (such as Dib, Gaz, Keef, or whoever people want to ship him with), I don’t believe that they are pedophilic ships and I don’t think the people shipping them are gross. There is the problem that Zim would age far slower but that’s something fans would deal with in fanfics, so they can do whatever with that concept.
That’s all I have to say for now. Please understand I’m not trying to say I think anyone else is wrong, this is just my thought on the topic and I hope that you enjoyed reading my theory here.
(im sorry that this was soooo longg ;-;)
Alright ZaDr fandom, lets talk.
Above I’m sharing a bit of a similar (and older so it’s a bit outdated) analysis that argues against and for some of your points if anyone is interested but I’ll also be discussing things myself. This post will be quite long but I do implore you read through it all because I’ll be mentioning things I’ve never seen any other ZaDr/Anti-ZaDr discussion consider so please bear with me!
To start things off I want to touch on a few of OP’s points such as their argument that Zim acts too childish to be older although stated by the creator so lets begin.
This argument in general is a bit silly because the assumption that anyone who acts childish is a child is…very wrong. It’s also so wrong in fact, that in the show/comics themselves, adult human characters act childish as well or even arguably more idiotic than Zim and Dib combined. A great example would be President Man who is quite literally dumber than Dib, an eleven year old boy. Adults in IZ act like children. It’s just Jhonen’s humor, not a realistic portrayal of age. (Jhonen also stated “He acts like it but he’s an old man basically” so he’s aware Zim is childish and still confirms he’s not a child)
Adding to this, quite a few of the comics aren’t even written by Jhonen or the original IZ writers! (Including the ones you used as an example)
Jhonen is quite flexible and allowed the artists to bend the IZ world to their art style, his constraints on canon were soft, allowing many discrepancies to happen between show and comic (particularly visual) including Zim having five fingers, Irkens apparently having 4 arms, Zim’s PAK having more than 4 metallic arms, and this could absolutely include Irkens being shown “old”, etc etc (It’s also especially common to overly express things visually in comics for either comedic affect or helping the viewer understand the situation.)
Another counter for the aging thing is Sizz-Lor has canonically been around for longer than Zim and the Tallests but shows no similar signs of aging therefore Zim not being wrinkly doesn’t cancel out the fact he’s considered an adult or “old”. (It’s also really odd how you stated Jhonen was correcting himself by saying “He’s not a little kid” and then ignored the fact he went “he acts like it but he’s like an old man basically” directly after as though correcting himself again to imply he’s much older than just simply not a kid. It’s also worth noting that he says basically, implying that he isn’t really the direct meaning of being an old man but moreso the Irken equivalent of being pretty old)
Canon is also popularly inconsistent with things! Attention to detail isn’t the strong point of IZ and patterns are near nonexistent.
Now onto how your TAK argument is flawed. Zim was never really trying to love on TAK, and he was also attempting to blend into human society through the disguise of being just another school kid. He didn’t want to ruin his mission and took the opportunity of a human being vulnerable toward him to discover more. Knowing Zim he was probably only going to “like her” until she answered all his questions and then kick her out like he had with Keef. I also highly doubt Zim or Irkens in general understand complex concepts involving love such as age gaps and consent.
If your math was true and/or the whole 1 Irk year is 10 earth years claim is true or close to it, if it wasn’t already icky enough you’d be putting a 16 y/o with an 11 y/o who hasn’t even started puberty, it would mean that Dib would reach adulthood before Zim and Zim would still be a minor while Dib is 18+.
The argument that the VAs keep teasing the fans with these ships seems to have gained quite a bit of positive traction, but I’d like to mention that the VAs actually know very little abt their characters compared to Jhonen and these VAs in particular are people pleasers (especially Horvitz). Jhonen wasn’t even present at those specific events to have a say in what went on.
Richard Horvitz is just an old man trying to have fun and it’s obvious he isn’t thinking too deep of zim’s age, sure he made the puppets kiss but he also made sexual jokes about zim (https://twitter.com/LigmaZim/status/1088560659179102208) in more than on instance so that would make him an old man cracking sexual jokes about a minor, and if your belief that Zim is a minor is true, this should be quite inappropriate of him.
Either way, whether you believe Zim is an adult, a teen, or 16 y/o there’s a problem. It makes ZaDr either pedophilia or it means that the countless old fans of IZ who are adults now, are consciously thinking about, drawing, writing, and talking about children (Dib is 11-12 and that is unarguable) in sexual, abusive, intimate, and other nsfw situations. That. My friends. Is gross. Of course you get a slight pass if you’re under the age of 18 but there’s yet another issue.
The “It’s Fantasy” argument is bullshit. There have been countless real world instances of children, teens, and even adults reading fanfics, watching movies and reading books about things that are not okay in real life only to find themselves getting caught up in unhealthy relationships, hurting people, getting kinks for what media they’re consuming and so on simply because their brain was conditioned to think nothing of it and stop feeling uncomfortable towards it due to it being “fiction”. Media and art normalizes things and the fact people are obtaining access to the internet at younger and younger ages means bad news when younger audiences are browsing through the net, looking at content they’re growing a liking too that shouldn’t be there to begin with, and possibly ending up sensitive to grooming from creepy adults who truly want to harm them using the content as excuses for their behavior.
Now onto my final thought which is aging up for the purpose of sexualizing characters/putting characters in sexual relationships.
If you age up it means you the creator looked at a young character and consciously thought to yourself “I want an adult to fuck you” or “they should fuck…but how do I make it legal?”. It’s creepy, it could create bad habits, even without the intention of being gross it enhances the Pedo apologism in the media and gives genuine pedophiles the excuse that as long as they think of the child as an adult they aren’t overstepping boundaries and have every right to be into said child.
Anyway thank you for reading the entire post if you have, I greatly appreciate you for being willing to see my entire viewpoint!
I read your contrasting argument and you do make a good point, plus I have to thank you for writing a well thought out explanation since some people just say “no your wrong” and don’t go much further in rants like these. I agree that making a character that is a minor 18+ so they can have sex with another character is messed up. I really don’t support pedophilic behavior in any way, even fiction, sexualizing a child is indeed wrong (and portraying unhealthy relationships as acceptable because it’s in fantasy is not good either). I feel like I failed to address that when I mentioned the ships zagr/zadr I didn’t mean to justify a possibly 16+ character having sex with 11-year-olds, I meant shipping in a more innocent way but I still understand what you mean since many people obviously sexualize them. When I first joined this fandom I originally stuck with zadf but at some point, I thought zadr was alright too. I never thought much of it and never even considered that it could be pedophilia until I started seeing people calling zadr fans out for being pedos. I had and still can’t find 100% solid proof for either side of this argument but my original opinion that stayed with me as I looked into this was that Zim wasn’t an adult. Of course, I can’t tell for sure even when I try to find evidence but generally, I just felt like Zim couldn’t be that old, I just didn’t get that vibe from him at all. A lot of this feeling does indeed come from his childish behavior, the fact that he goes to skool with children and his lack of distinct features that would show his age. This makes it hard to tell how old he really is, especially when the creators don’t say much to support either side other than jhonen making a comment or another staff member joking about ships. Until we get a better answer from the crew, we are left to just guess based off what we know and can infer. To the people that think Zim is a kid, I think that’s alright because he doesn’t seem like an adult at all and to the people that think otherwise, that’s okay too (especially when it comes to ships where it can become a touchy subject). Anyone can prefer either side because we simply do not know and the main basis of our opinion can only come from how we feel about the character and from what we can infer. when it comes to specifically just shipping, obviously that is problematic regardless of his age. if its a kid now the person he’s shipped with will grow up faster and if he’s an adult, it’s still strange for him to like the other characters either romantically or sexually. However, people can still make AUs for these ships to work without being pedo. I’ve seen people give a human character a pak to age like Zim or make him human or something. Also, yes, i have seen people age the character up or have the story take place in the future but I still don’t see this as intended pedophilia everytime. This seems alright to me specially when its not simply to make the characters screw each other. I probably can’t make you change your thoughts on this, which is perfectly fine, I see that you’re only trying to make and share a opinion you see as most moral. (i’m not good at these things and typically, I’ll stay out of touchy arguments;-;) I’m only here to explain why and what would lead people to believe zim was not an adult (as well as justify shippers that did not intend to spark controversy).
Thank you for hearing me out. (Sorry for once again typing a lot)
Okay, I don’t usually pitch in because discourse generally irritates me since a lot of the time it’s senseless bullshit. But this seems to be a very honest and open - also casual, bravo - debate, so I’d like to throw in my two cents.
Just to preface, I took a lot of my upper level bachelor specific college courses with a teacher who was very into fandom, so we talked about that a lot. I’m going to try and approach this rhetorically since I’m not otherwise using my degree 🙃
Let’s start with the age argument.
No, we don’t have a set age for Zim, and I think we all know and can agree on the fact that Jhonen isn’t exactly always reliable with details - which is fine. Is he an adult? Is he a young adult? Is he legally able to give consent? Who knows, and who cares. Dib is canonically well under 18 so in that regard it doesn’t matter either way.
So no, shipping canon age Dib with Zim (at any age) is pedophiliac and is not okay. But that’s obvious so let’s move on.
There’s clearly an issue people have with aging characters up - and I don’t understand why (mostly, and I’ll get to that). I’ve mentioned this before but I’ll expand on it here: it is not a fandom requirement to portray characters exclusively as they exist in canon, age included. Jhonen is not a creator that generally caters to children, so it’s not far fetched to imagine that he expected his audience to be a little older, particularly given the show’s brand of humor. If not, at this point most of us have grown up and are out of our teen years if we’ve stuck around (and I know I’m showing my age). So there’s going to be adults that interact with this content, and there’s no getting around it.
That means that, and I’m going to say this as an adult myself, if we want to ethically interact with this content, especially given the canon age of the characters, aging up is a tool we use to be responsible content creators. Listen, when I was watching this show in middle school, I related to it because the characters were about my age at the time. But this fandom is in such a unique position to have stuck around to see its fanbase literally grow up. So naturally, we’re going to interact with the content differently. Not gonna lie to you, as a 24 year old woman, I’m not totally comfortable even writing G rated stuff about middle schoolers, it makes me feel weird. I would much prefer to age these characters up in such a way that gives me a better base to relate to them to, so that there’s a more familiar proximity between myself and them.
Don’t forget that people who make art generally make art for themselves. I write my fanfiction for me first and then share it, and because I no longer relate to middle schoolers, I won’t ever write them as middle schoolers. Simple as that. And that means that, if I’m going to portray them as legal adults (Zim is canonically older than Dib so for Earth’s purposes, if Dib is at least 18 then legally, by Earth standards, Zim is also at least 18 and considered a legal adult) I’m allowed to portray them in any situation that legal adults are legally allowed to be in.
Let’s relate this to the pedophilia grooming/apologism. I see this brought up in regards mainly against people who age these characters up for the sole purpose of fucking. And here’s where I’d like to draw a distinctive line: there is a major difference between aging these characters up in a way that makes their older age very apparent and then portraying them (visually usually but it can work in writing too) almost exactly as they are in canon while simply stating they are 18+. If I see fanart of the two of them goin at it and Dib’s tall with facial hair and piercings, and Zim at least looks like he’s matured in some fashion, I’m not going to really look twice or question whether or not they’re 18+ if the artist says so. But if I see fanart where they look exactly the same as they do in canon - and I mean exactly - then I got a problem with the artist slapping a “all characters portrayed are 18+” comment on it in a piss poor means of covering their ass. And I’ve seen content like this, mostly on deviantART. But that’s a huge distinction. The latter is what’s fueling pedophiliac apologism, because pedophiles aren’t interested in adults, they’re interestedin children, so child characters visually and honestly portrayed as adults (actual adults, not 14 but looks 24 bullshit) is not the same thing to them, otherwise they wouldn’t be pedophiles.
In my personal experience, and somehow even moreso on tumblr, I don’t see a lot of fanworks where the aging up isn’t obvious in some way. Generally when these characters are aged up they look aged up, or they’re very obviously written aged up. I haven’t been in a lot of situations where I really had to question the authenticity of the creator. So generally, as far as I’m concerned, the creators are doing their due diligence so that they can make their fanworks in an ethical manner. Again, my problem is with the people who draw the characters like they’re still in middle school and just make me take their word that they’re 18+, that’s pedophiliac.
As far as feeling grossed out that there’s so much nsfw content to the point where people feel like that’s the sole purpose creators are aging the characters up for in the first place: just block it. I’m not gonna sit here and try and justify the quantity of that content (again, provided the above) but I’m also not going to ignore the fact that I think a lot of these arguments are stemmed from the simple fact that some people just don’t like the ship and don’t want anyone else to like it either - so they try and paint the creators to look like pedophiles illegally indulging in their “mental disorder” as it’s being referred to now I guess. I’ve been around since the beginning (showing my age again) and I’ve seen children, at the time, treat their peers with such hate and malice over this ship that I simply do not tolerate arguments and rhetoric against it when it comes from a place of baseless contempt. That I have just as much of an issue with.
Before I get off my soapbox I wanted to touch specifically on a point @z1mzam made about fiction and media influencing consumers. I specifically disagree with the statement about children accessing (I’m assuming nsfw specifically) media that “shouldn’t be there to begin with.” When it comes to consuming media, it’s the responsibility of the consumer to make the distinction between things they should and shouldn’t be accessing, the creator has zero control over that and stating that certain media shouldn’t be on the internet to begin with doesn’t address the issue - again, considering the points I stated above about the difference between when the 18+ is ethical and when it’s a baseless ass-covering mechanic. If people who are accessing adult media illegally due to their age, that’s on them and the fact that they didn’t take the necessary steps to avoid such content. Sure, things slip through the cracks, not all creators are always as diligent as they should be with tagging/displaying their adult works, things happen. But it would have to happen on a much larger scale then occasional accidents for it have any real impact on the consumer, and at that point that responsibility falls onto them, and their legal guardians if they’re underage. We cannot punish artists for unethical and dishonest consumers.
However, we can step up when the content we’re seeing is legitimately pedophiliac in nature hiding behind a useless “all characters portrayed are 18+” wall when that’s (again, clearly and obviously) not the case. That’s a real problem, that’s legitimate pedophiliac apology and it’s not okay.
But we have to be responsible and recognize the difference.
