I Know This Is Old But I Wanted To Add That The Creator When Asked What Ship He Would Choose He Chose

i know this is old but i wanted to add that the creator when asked what ship he would choose he chose zim x gaz but apparently he choose that because he wanted to piss off zadr fans????? like dude if you find zadr weird why did you choose an equally weird ship to you?? with a person who is younger than dib??? you could have chosen anything else

but in all honesty if you don't like the ship that's fine you don't have to just don't harass people when we don't have solid proof yet until we get like actual solid proof of zim being an adult in earths terms I'm going to do what I like

but I do not like or condone sex or 18+ art or any type of media of adult actions like that with zadr cuz both of them are minors.

they're going to rule the world, hold hands and find comfort in each other and that's it >:]

My argument for whether or not Zim is an adult (I think not):

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 ;-;)