#but because a cycle of exclusionary discipline is kind of what's been following Zim his entire life

[sapphorror]

You know, Zim is actually pretty smart (relatively speaking, anyway) when it comes to holding back around his classmates and playing the helpless victim in public, even when it means taking shit from them until he can serve karmic justice indirectly. And that's a very fun character trait/surprising point of patience and competency on his part, but I do think it'd be REALLY fun if some random kid actually pissed him off enough for him to just like, snap their fucking arm in broad daylight. He wasn't even trying to severely hurt them, he just wanted to get them off of him. It's not his fault that humans are too fragile to take the most basic disarm maneuver taught to Irken smeets—and by the way, Dib did not cry NEARLY as much when Zim did the same thing to him, so it seems like this is mostly just a 'you' problem.

Naturally this line of argument does not persuade the faculty out of suspending him, but it was worth it. Dib is trying really hard not to find the situation funny lest he come off as endorsing Zim's evil, but like. The alien who physically and psychologically tortures him on a weekendly basis just hospitalized one of the assholes who'd been so convinced of his obvious harmlessness and that is, in fact, very funny. Maybe there's an upside to having a totally amoral genocide-happy Z-list supervillain at your school if Dib can watch these people suffer AND maintain his perfectly faultless moral purity.