#hmt adventures in zim journaling

[hermajestytak]

I've seen many fan interpretations of how Dark Harvest actually ends (beyond the sudden newspaper ending)

Now note that this isn't canon. The CANON answer is "negative continuity." If you ask the crew what happens after any sudden, non-conclusive ending, that's the answer you're going to get. Negative continuity is how everyone got their organs back

But that's not satisfying enough for me and many others, so continuity weirdness aside, how the hell did everyone get their organs back?

I've seen a couple of fan interpretations, most involving Dib confronting Zim for a true final showdown and others where Zim has to undo his xenotransplantations because his base doesn't recognize him as irken.

Both of these are valid, but I like to believe he just went around passing them back around once he was done with the nurse. Zim never treats his biological warcrimes with any sort of gravity, he doesn't even mind having human parts within his irken body. He treats the whole horror show like he's just sneakily borrowing everyone's pencils for a test.

So I like to imagine Zim, back to his normal self, just went around with a wagon full of gore like "Heyy thanks for the spleen, here ya go."

Everyone gets theirs back...except Dib. Dib HAD to get taken away after the press got him. He probably went through the same stuff Gaz went through in Enter the Florpus...for like a minute until his dad just gave him new lungs. Boom, easy fix!

Somewhere in Zim's base I like to imagine he just...still has Dib's original lungs somewhere. I'd call it a trophy, but they're not important enough for Zim to remember

[hermajestytak]

Another big thing I learned from both Dark Harvest and NanoZim: Zim KNOWS human anatomy

Zim may struggle with human social science (who doesn't?), but I and many others tend to underestimate his human anatomy knowledge. In order for Dark Harvest to have happened, Zim needed to both identify human organs just by looking at them AND immediately know where on a human's body body he needs to extract them from.

AND ZIM WASN'T WRONG ABOUT DIB'S ARM CONTROL NERVE, never forget that either!

[hermajestytak]

If y'all are curious, the reason why I'm studying Zim so heavily is because I love drawing and writing his soft side, but it's quite difficult to write Zim being affectionate without it feeling out of character. So my hope for this character analysis is to pin

WHAT makes Zim truly happy?

HOW would Zim show affection?

WHAT would it take for Zim to show that affection?

All without the lense of the almighty fanon

[hermajestytak]

I decided, just for fun and comparison, to take notes on all of Zim's characterization from the show bible & pilot

I'm only on the show bible and that took me 3 pages so far

3 fucking pages on a version of Zim that's not even canon

AND I HAVEN'T GOTTEN TO THE PILOT YET

[hermajestytak]

Hey! This is a stretch actually!

Upon rewatch and further inspection, I'm now confident this was actually just smeet Zim imprinting on the first thing he saw (in his case, the mechanical arm) and getting some sweet nostalgic comfort for a millisecond when getting picked up by his robo-mom

Zim wants parents so bad, somebody adopt him already