Ok so I saw that one of the posts was scheduled for April Fools and like. Usually I don't do anything because I don't like lying or messing with people, but this was kinda obligatory and it felt light-hearted and non-targeted enough.
If you're not familiar with the upload schedule, the normal update is still coming, at the scheduled time! That's 5pm UK time :)
Zim would assume Dib is aroace before he himself thought about it. Not because Zim is so smart and insightful or something (are we talking about the same alien? I'm not sure if he knows what aroace means) but because he thinks Dib is smarter/better than other humans and therefore would simply not have the weakness of feeling romantic/sexual attraction. Like why would he doesn't he know better? Of course he does otherwise how would he foil Zim's plans if he's dumb enough to indulge in that shit
the boy is a soldier, Dib, he ain't here to play.
He's here to ✨ WIN ✨
I would make this an animatic instead of a rushed edit, but the original audio is lost in the void that is the internet, so... you get this instead, haha.
Silly random irken sleep headcanons because I felt like doing unreasonably complicated and illogical mental gymnastics. That is my favorite way of engaging in fandom thank you for noticing :3
There's a little more info under the cut. Please ignore my suddenly completely different way of drawing irkens! I felt like that idk x)
So as you can see I simply decided that irkens are actually very sleepy little guys, they just kinda... Learned to hide it? And then learned to hide it even more because I'm pretty sure most of them are trained to just kinda cover their 15-ish hours of sleep by level 1 and level 2 naps which results in various mental health problems that are viewed simply as "irken character" because of how long they were doing it and also it makes level 3 sleeping ever again really hard and they might never learn to do that again even if they really, really try. Because y'know. Irken society wasn't awful enough already, I had to make it worse! :3
I'm thinking the open-eyed sleeping is something that's meant to deceive enemies into thinking the irken isn't really asleep and can still defend/attack at any moment. This kind of sleep mostly just lets the brain rest a little since their muscles are still stiff and ready to start moving. So like. We can see why neglecting actual long sleep is a bad idea. Them missing a nap will just result in them sleeping longer until they're fully rested, (that's also not very good since when I say you can't wake them I MEAN YOU CAN'T WAKE THEM THEY'RE COMPLETELY DEFENSELESS) them not sleeping normally will lead to their body desperately trying to catch up on that rest with (sometimes unvoluntary) extra naps which is absolutely impossible but it can't just sleep because sleep is for safe environments and NO environment is safe anymore. So basically yea. Little sleep-deprived anxious bugs. They've been eating on my brain for a while. Happy to share them with you :3
Dib meets one of the tallest in person and uh... is actually rather awed. He kinda gets it now. Zim is like "see?! the tallest are great!"
The story that goes with this is that Dib becomes ill, but oddly, with a somewhat rare Irken disease (stemming from a long term complication from when Zim's PAK attached to him way back when, it messed with something internally in Dib's body). So Zim takes Dib along with him to meet Red, to get Dib some Irken medicine/cure. Red has a huge crush on Zim so he tends to give him whatever he asks for (or gives him SOMETHING anyway, if he can't give him what he wants), and Zim knows this, although maybe a little in denial about the actual crush part.
aka: the "Dib gets to visit Irk and experience a bunch of Irken Culture" fic :D