Zim is the title character from the Nickelodeon animated series, Invader Zim. He is a short Irken considered defective but, despite his size, he feels that he is superior to his own people and most other races- he strongly dislikes humans. He believes his leaders, the Almighty Tallest, sent him on a "secret mission" to Earth, but in reality the Tallest simply wanted to get rid of him. After arriving on Earth, he joins the nearest school to begin his infiltration and becomes quick rivals with Dib, an avid preteen paranormal investigator. Zim wants to conquer the Earth, mostly to prove his superiority and impress his leaders. However, as he's only proven to be inept at everything except being an utter failure, he can be considered one of the strangest characters to appear in a children's show.
Statistics
Zim's age is unknown, although Jhonen Vasquez has stated in various interviews that Zim is older than any human being alive. In Tak, the Hideous New Girl, Tak, another Irken, claims that Zim had ruined her chances at becoming an Invader fifty years ago.
As a smeet (a baby Irken), Zim was created in an Irken incubation chamber and therefore has no siblings or parents.
His physical appearance is loosely based on the "typical alien" design, a hybrid between the Greys and earlier little green men cliches of 50's science fiction.
Zim's PAK
Zim, like all Irkens, was fused at birth with a mechanical device called a PAK. Zim's PAK provides him with life support, all the necessary nutrients for survival, and an array of different weapons and tools. These tools include a set of four spider-like mechanical legs, various devices for removing (and replacing!) organs, scanner pads, hand-held communicators, memory drive, charging cell, atmospheric processor and holographic transmitters. It can be 'rebooted' after a sudden shock to the system (Plague of Babies).
As documented in Eric Trueheart's scripted but not completed episode, The Trial, an Irken PAK contains all of a single Irken's memories, personality, and high scores. An Irken assigned to a specific task has their PAK 'encoded' for that task by an Irken Control Brain- similar to formatting a hard drive.
Zim's PAK, due to his actions after Impending Doom One, has him encoded as a Food Service Drone; this was part of his banishment to the Irken snacking planet Foodcourtia, and is confirmed by Frylord Sizz-Lorr during the episode Frycook What Came From All That Space.
In 'The Trial', Zim's true status was determined to be 'Defective'. Although a Defective is supposed to be an individual with a flawed Pak, it can be seen in the episode that the process of determining an Irken's 'defectiveness' is highly subjective.
In another scripted, but never completed episode by Rob Hummel, Ten Minutes to Doom, Zim loses his pack, which is then stolen by Dib. Zim himself begins to quickly deteriorate and it is revealed that Irkens can only survive ten minutes without their PAK. The PAK attatches itself to Dib and begins to assert Zim's personality in Dib. Although Zim is almost dead by the time he retrieves his PAK, once he has it back on he is very quickly rejuvinated. As Dib states in the episode, "This device... it IS ZIM. It's his brain and his life support. That means his body is just.... something to carry his PAK around."
It should be noted, however, that only Irken biology is compatible with the PAK. When Dib wears the PAK the madness of Zim's personality is far more overstated that usual. Zim later states that the PAK would've destroyed Dib.
Weaknesses and immunities
Zim is severely allergic to several Earth substances, including rain, meat, beans and most school lunches. However, this can't be considered a weakness exclusively to Zim, as the food in the cafeteria has been shown to be harmful to humans as well. Exposure to excessive grease leads to the creation of enormous hypnotic pimples. It's unclear whether these effects are due to Zim's alien biochemistry or because the Earth itself appears to be, in the timeframe of Invader Zim, excessively polluted. The episode Balognius Maximus offers an additional suggestion that the Irken body may be physiologically and biochemically much more delicate than a human's- Zim's genetic structure breaks down and turns into baloney much faster than Dib's after exposure to an identical infusion of balogna-DNA.
However, for each weakness Zim has found a compensatory mechanism - he discovered that bathing in white school glue repelled water, and that germs could be repelled by covering his body in meat and using conventional Earth disinfectant sprays (despite the meat then fusing to his flesh). He also discovered his pimples have hypnotic properties over humans.
It is also interesting to note that an unknown substance secreted by his skin kills lice.
Disguises worn in public
Zim often wears disguises to attempt to conceal his identity from the "pig-smellies" that he plans to eventually conquer; they are often poor or hastily constructed.
Zim's skool disguise consists of some contact lenses and a bouffant wig, not much better than Clark Kent's "disguise" of a pair of reading glasses. The contacts give his eyes a human appearance, and the wig covers his antennae; all 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, (The Nightmare Begins), and has passed off being caught without his contact lenses as a bad case of pinkeye.
He also adopts an old man disguise in Walk of Doom, which he uses throughout the first season. In the second season of the show Zim upgrades his disguise arsenal with a floppy, huge-headed human suit with a cape, a sewed-on handbag and a nametag reading 'human'.
Other costumes worn include Walk for Your Lives fat lady outfit, used to hide the timefield explosion, Battle of the Planets bear suit (use unknown, likely an I Feel Sick reference), Plague of Babies 'Baby Inspector' disguise for interorgating 'Noogums' and The Most Horrible X-mas Ever set of holiday disguises, the Santa suit and Easter Platypus disguises used to manipulate the public. The Pilot also has an oversize robotic battle-suit shapped like Zim's skool disguise for use in the food-fight that occurs.
Brief on-screen appearances of other Invaders in Walk For Your Lives and Planet Jackers, show that almost all the Invaders are using even shoddier disguises, so Zim's ineptness in this regard is not unique.
"The Trial" (cancelled episode)
Template:Spoiler In Eric Trueheart's unaired episode The Trial, much of Zim's history would have been revealed.
Zim is essentially the cause of most of planet Irk's disasters: a few minutes after his birth he jammed up a chute that created a blackout (Horrible Painful Overload Day) plunging Irk into darkness for five years. Later, an accident with a security robot caused another blackout (Horrible Painful Overload Day Part II), this one lasting for four years.
Trying to channel Zim's destructive tendencies, the then-Tallest reassigned Zim to the military station on Planet Vort, where he dismissed the design of the Massive as unworkable and then created an energy-absorbing monster that ingested an infinite energy source which proceeded to eat then-Tallest Miyuki. Years later, it returned to get it's collar and devoured Miyuki's successor, Tallest Spork.
Zim plunged half of the military planet Devastis into darkness when he used a maim bot on a malfunctioning snack machine, as seen in Tak, the Hideous New Girl. During Operation Impending Doom One, Zim was placed in a small circle and told to watch it, but he stole a Frontline Battlemech and destroyed half of Irk- as seen in brief in The Nightmare Begins. Sometime after this, he scratches his butt, causing the planet he's on to explode.
Incredibly, Zim is proud of all these 'achievements', and mistakes his Existence Evaluation for a party thrown in his honor. When he is finally declared defective, the Control Brains attempting to delete his PAK's data are themselves corrupted by Zim, and go insane themselves. Zim is rewarded with ten free minutes of piloting the Massive and declared 'the greatest Irken ever' by the insane Control Brains.
Overall it can be seen that Zim shows no remorse for people that are harmed due to his actions and almost never takes reponsibility for his mistakes. More or less he considers everyone else but him (even members of his own race) expendable for his goals. For example, in Hobo 13, Zim needlessly sent the soldiers under his command to their deaths when other, more effective methods could have been taken.
Voice actors
Zim has had several voice actors.
In Jhonen's original pilot episode, Zim's voice was provided first by Mark Hamill and then by Futurama voice actor Billy West. Jhonen Vasquez has stated in the DVD commentaries that he felt casting West as Zim would have created a situation where there would be two comedy science fiction-based cartoons on the air at the same time with the same lead voice. The pilot episode with Billy West's voiceover track is available as an extra feature on the 2nd disk of the Zim DVD set.
Angry Beavers voice actor Richard Horvitz revoiced Zim as a tester on the third pass of the pilot and was finally chosen to be the character's permanent voice for the remainder of the American series. This final version of the pilot is not currently available to the public in any form.
A female voice actor (Naomi Nagasawa) was cast as Zim for the Japanese dubbed version. So far, however, NO audio recordings of Zim's Japanese dub voice are available.
Personality
Zim is, as previously noted, an Irken with megalomaniacal, sociopathic and narcissistic tendencies. However, he's consistently portrayed as more of a danger to his own people than to the human race.
Zim is held up as a complete laughing-stock, a scapegoat, or a figure of contempt by his own species. Despite this, Zim's loyalty to his Empire and his belief in the questionable wisdom of the Tallest has never wavered to this point (plus he is totally oblivious to the fact that none of the other Irkens takes him seriously.)
His self-absorbed nature prevents him from seeing his failures, past and present. He claims to be proud of all the past disasters he has caused, and rarely acknowledges his defeats in his present mission on Earth (often blaming them on Gir, or other factors). When he is told by Tak that his "mission" was really an attempt to get rid of him, he simply rejects her statement as a lie. It is not clear whether Zim is aware of his failings in the eyes of his leaders and is desperately trying to compensate for them, or whether he really is just completely oblivious to the opinions of others- the series is not consistent on this point.
By turns this would-be Invader can be petulant, critical, paranoid, humorous, sarcastic, depressive, dramatic, and even occasionally whimsical. He is a walking mass of contradictions: he claims loudly, and often, to 'need no one', yet a softer-side occasionally slips through in unguarded moments, such as smeet-Zim hugging the robot arm in Parent-Teacher Night (or his subsequent sniffly-eyed look when the Robomom reaches toward him)
He is often curiously attached to random objects, such as his robot bee (Tak, the Hideous New Girl). He is immensely proud of anything he creates, yet is often frustrated when his devices fail to live up to his grandiose expectations.
It's clear that Zim has a crafty sort of intelligence, and is a keen manipulator of tools and devices, but has absolutely no ability (or apparent interest) to think things through to their logical conclusion. The fact that creating and unleashing a giant water balloon on the city from orbit in The Wettening will also destroy his house doesn't seem to enter his mind; when he hijacks the Massive in Backseat Drivers he only considers (incorrectly) that the Tallest will be appreciative of his efforts. Nor does he really consider the consequence of restoring the natural time-flow of a city-levelling explosion in Walk For Your Lives- at least, not until it's too late and his whole lab is tumbling down around his head. He thinks exactly as far as one step ahead, and sometimes not even that.
Zim clearly has the ability to destroy earth, but he doesn't seem to be able to utilise it properly. For instance, in Door to Door he hypnotises at least the entire town into buying candy so he can obtain a 'mystery prize', yet cannot see how to use the hypnosis itself as a way to gain control of the planet. Also, when he is accidentally sent a Megadoomer robot, he decides to use it to kill Dib, when the robot obviously has the destructive power to do better things.
Although Zim often states he wishes to enslave Earth, it seems unlikley that he would actually want to rule it. In Attack of the Saucer Morons, Zim gains a troupe of humans who would be willing to do his bidding. Zim, however, panics, and tries to escape from them. In the Nickelodeon Magazine Special, in which Zim finally takes over the world, he doesn't stay to rule for very long, instead leaving Earth forever (along with Dib, GIR and Minimoose) to ride alien bunny rabbits and drink soda. Whether this is because he detests human "stink beasts" or simply doesn't like ruling is unclear.
Overall, Zim's characterization is vivid and memorable, and this may account for his continuing popularity with the authors of fan fiction and fan art.