#dib is functionally the same as sylvie

[emeraldspiral]

Thinking about how much the Zimvoid arc and Loki season 1 had in common.

Like, both of them star a villain protagonist who ends up trapped in an apocalyptic wasteland populated almost entirely by alternate versions of themselves, most of whom all suffer from the same vice of needing to scramble for power to prove their superiority while a handful of more enlightened versions of themselves reject competition in favor of cooperation. They even both have a kid version of themselves as the leader of the cooperative faction along with an older, wiser version, an aquatic version, and a huge beefcake version.

Of course because Loki is a drama and Invader Zim is a tragedy, the stories take different directions with their character arcs. In in a drama, the story is driven by characters having a flaw that they overcome or a false belief that is corrected, or possessing virtues that allow them to triumph, which all goes toward supporting whatever the story's thesis is. In a tragedy, the story is driven by characters who fail to overcome their flaws, who either never learn their lessons and change or just keep getting worse and worse, or who either abandon their virtues or let their vices win out over them, or whose virtues aren't enough for them to succeed without the support of the world around them backing them up.

Because Loki is a drama, Loki's story is about having his ego broken down so he can be built back up into a better man. He's humbled upon finding himself powerless in the TVA, forced to confront the ugly truth about himself and understand the neediness and insecurity at the root of his obsession with power and superiority. He meets other versions of himself who reflect his worst qualities back at him but also show him that he has the capacity to be better. He learns to be empathetic and care for other people besides himself and causes greater than his own ambitions, but also learns to love himself from falling for another version of him and recognizing that that all the qualities he admires her for are qualities that they share.

By contrast, Zim goes through his experience with the Zimvoid unchanged. Meeting other versions of himself and seeing them all compete for power doesn't make him self reflect on his own pettiness and meeting better versions of himself doesn't inspire him to do better. He doesn't learn to empathize with other versions of himself and doesn't learn to value himself for his own intrinsic qualities. If anything, the experience makes him worse because defeating all the Zims only reaffirms his false belief that his worth comes from his superiority over others.

Loki and the Zimvoid are essentially telling the same story, but the genre makes all the difference to the outcome.

One thing the Zimvoid does though that I really wish Loki had done is support its themes by making the villain another version of the protagonist.

Like, I remember when Loki season 1 first aired everyone was expecting Kang to be behind everything just because it would tie-in with the greater Marvel universe and I was saying I really hoped it would be Loki himself instead. Because Kang wasn't a character in the show until the very end. He had no personal relationship with Loki, he was just some guy we'd never met before. And literally everything else in the show was about Loki being in conflict with himself. It would've made so much more thematic sense if his line early on in the series about his plans to take over the TVA and become the most powerful being in existence was foreshadowing a reveal that one version of him had already done it and the reason he was pruning all other Loki variants who strayed from the path that would lead them to death was because he didn't want any other Lokis to overthrow him or mess up his timeline and throw him off the path that got him to where he was. Kang did end up still tempting Loki with the opportunity to have everything he ever wanted as a final test of his character growth, but it just didn't feel as impactful coming from a stranger as it would've from another Loki.

With the Zimvoid though, we got Zib as the absolute perfect villain for the story. A dark reflection of both our protagonists who are themselves mirrors of one another, reflecting all their worst qualities back at them and showing them the folly of basing their self-worth around proving their superiority over others.