Zim

"Victory! Victory for Zim!"

- Zim

Invader Zim (also simply known as Zim) is the titular protagonist villain of the franchise of the same name. He is an Irken serving the Irken Empire as an Invader. Because of his incompetence, Zim was banished to Earth by the Almighty Tallests under the guise of being sent to conquer it.

Although he is the main character, Zim is morally (and ethically) a villain, being overall a fairly tendentious, argumentative, confrontational, and unsympathetic character, though he occasionally shows some kindness towards certain characters. Nevertheless, he is prone to causing chaos and destruction for either himself, his own race, or Earth. However, in the pilot and first episode of the show, the main antagonist was Dib.

He was voiced by Richard Steven Horvitz, who also provided the voice of Kaos in the Skylanders franchise.

History
Zim is an Irken fellow born from Irk. When he was on O.I.D 1, he was assigning to Blorch, but accidentally used Irk as a target and ended up banned to Foodcourtia. After days passed, he later escaped and goes on O.I.D 2, where the Tallest fooled him that there was a secret planet that is mysterious, and never known what it was. Accompanying him on his exile mission was his robot assistant GIR.

Appearance
His skin is green, pink/red clothes, black gloves, pants, and shoes, a PAK on his back, and red eyes with two white pupils on each eye. The big pupil on an Irken eye was the main and the smallet pupil was connected to the main pupil.

Zim also has ruby-colored eyes; a very common trait in Irkens. It was also mentioned in Walk of Doom that Zim's eyes contain ocular implants. Since the eyes he was born with are not visibly different from subsequent appearances, it can be assumed that these implants are subcutaneous. As he considers himself to still be an Invader, he continues to wear the standard uniform: a red tunic-like garment with a pink collar and sleeves, as well as black boots and gloves.

He also possesses a pair of antennae; their exact function is unknown, but they seem to function like human eyebrows; rising and lowering to convey emotion. It is possible that they also function as an organ in place of ears, as they picked up vibrations in Battle of the Planets.

Personality
While most Irkens are expected to be ruthlessly loyal to the Empire, Zim is considered overzealous even by their standards: Brash, arrogant and overconfident, Zim's tendency to cause wanton destruction makes him a danger to himself and his own people, yet he still considers himself a mighty Irken warrior. In addition, he is acutely narcissistic, supercilious, and megalomaniacal, congratulating himself on even the smallest of successes; these, however, are rare.

Despite his self-proclaimed greatness, Zim rarely succeeds in his attempts, and is held up as a complete laughingstock by his own people - a fact that he is either oblivious to or simply chooses not to notice. Zim is cluelessly loyal and obedient to the Tallest, the Irken Empire, his planet and his people, and is willing to go to ridiculous lengths to please his leaders. However, his self-absorbed nature prevents him from acknowledging any of his failures, and he chooses only to speak about the better things that came from each incident.

Despite his frequent displays of stupidity, it is clear that Zim is highly intelligent in some respects - being a keen manipulator of tools and devices - but has absolutely no apparent interest in thinking things through, and wastes much of his time fretting about or dealing with unimportant "threats". Moreover, it is evident that he is more than capable of conquering the Earth, yet he hardly ever uses this capability properly, and has often been very close to taking over the planet, only to be thwarted by his own negligence.

One of Zim's abilities is his somewhat inconsistent skills at piloting; while in a tense situation he flies masterfully, but seems to crash on most other occasions, and his skills pale in comparison to opponents adept at hand-eye coordination or overall agility (such as Gaz). Zim also has admirable engineering ability; in Walk of Doom, he singlehandedly improved the SIR unit guidance system chip, and in Walk for Your Lives, he hand-built a variable time stasis field capable of altering individual time-fields. He is immensely proud of anything he creates, yet is often frustrated when his devices fail to live up to his grandiose expectations.

Even though Zim often affirms that he wishes to enslave Earth, it has been hinted that he would not actually want to rule it. In Attack of the Saucer Morons, Zim gained a group of human worshippers who would be willing to do his bidding, yet his only thought was escaping them. In the non-canon Nickelodeon Magazine special, in which Zim finally took over the world, he did not stay to rule for very long, instead leaving Earth forever to ride flying alien rabbits and drink soda.

Zim usually shows little to no affection, often claiming to "need no one", but he occasionally lets a softer side of him slip by accident. In Parent Teacher Night, when Zim thought back to when he was born, he remembered the first thing he ever said was that he loved the "cold, unfeeling robot arm" that "hatched" him from his incubation capsule and activated his PAK.

Strangely, it would seem that Zim also relies on the presence of his mortal enemy, Dib, for motivation. He said in A Room with a Moose that his mission might not be as "exciting" without Dib around to "annoy him", but also seems to dwell on the big-headed human quite a bit, sometimes more so than his actual mission. This importance was particularly highlighted in Mopiness of Doom: When Dib briefly decided to give up his pursuit of Zim, the Irken lost all motivation to take over Earth, or do anything in general.

Disguises worn in public
In order to blend in with the inhabitants of Earth, Zim has made a series of creative disguises. Zim often wears disguises to try to conceal his identity from the "earth-monkeys" that he plans to eventually conquer; they are often unconvincing and hastily constructed, but he knows that the humans are too oblivious to recognize that he is an extraterrestrial visitor anyway.

Zim's school disguise consists of some contact lenses and a bouffant wig. The contacts give his eyes a human appearance, and the wig covers his antennae; however, everything else about him, including his uniform and green skin, is left unchanged. He explains away his skin color and lack of ears as a skin condition in the The Nightmare Begins, and has passed off being caught without his contact lenses as a bad case of pinkeye. It was discovered in the first episode that the sleeve of his right glove can become a self-destruct device, most likely to get rid of an Irken soldier if they believe their mission has been compromised.

He occasionally wears an old man disguise, such as in Walk of Doom and other episodes, which he used throughout the first season. This disguise consists of a flowered hat and a white fake beard. It makes him resemble a short, crazy old man, and in Walk of Doom, he was mistaken for a hobo. In the second season of the show, Zim added another disguise to his arsenal: a floppy, huge-headed human suit with a cape, a sewed-on handbag and stuffed puppy, and a name tag reading 'human'.

ther costumes worn include a fat lady outfit used to hide the time field explosion in Walk for Your Lives; a bear suit (use unknown, possibly an I Feel Sick reference) in Battle of the Planets, a "Baby Inspector" disguise for interrogating "Noogums" (Plague of Babies), and the Santa Claus suit and Easter Platypus disguises used to manipulate the public in The Most Horrible X-mas Ever; the former was by far one of Zim's most ambitious and advanced disguises, being made from a Vortian liquid substance.

The Pilot also featured an over-sized robotic battle-suit shaped like Zim's school disguise for use in the food-fight that occurred.

Brief on-screen appearances of other Invaders in Walk for Your Lives and Planet Jackers showed that almost all other Invaders use even shoddier disguises, so Zim's ineptitude in this regard is not unique.

Background
Zim was sent into exile by the Almighty Tallests due to Zim accidentally almost destroying Irk with a massive robot assault walker destroying entire buildings and military vehicles in his path and possibly killing dozens of other Irkens and ruining Operation Impending Doom (OID 1 for short) for not knowing that he was attacking the wrong planet. As punishment, Zim was sent into exile and was sent to Food Courtia as punishment for almost toppling the Irken Empire. During the Great Assigning for Operation Impending Doom ll, Zim escaped and made it to Irk where he expected to be given an assigned planet but instead was given a sandwich and was told to leave. In response to his refusal to leave, Zim was sent to Earth unaware that the Tallests thought it was fake and was given GIR, a SIR unit (Self Information Retrieval Unti) made from garbage and other junk that was defected from the others.