While I liked Billy and Mandy well enough, I can’t think of much to say about Mandy as a character. She kind of ends up being only a plot device and one-dimensionally “mean.”



People also tend to remember Gaz as just a “mean” character, but when you look back on her and rewatch episodes of Zim that prominently feature her, she is completely sympathetic.



She likes spending time with her dad, but he barely ever has any time for her or Dib, which is one of the reasons she’s always so bitter. A whole episode revolves around how they only get one dinner together per year and how intent she is on not missing that. Meanwhile, her brother shows absolutely no respect for her feelings, privacy, or property and never shuts the hell up about his obsession with an alien that Gaz herself points out is too incompetent to worry about.



She’s just a little kid who absorbs herself in video games because she’s emotionally neglected by her family and even that escape is constantly interrupted.



Invader Zim had a lot more to it than what popular consensus seems to remember it for, and I do worry that the upcoming animated special is going to lose a lot of that. The comic revival certainly has, with around 70% of issues thus far feeling like a kind of watered-down, “lolrandom” impression of what the show was really like. It definitely wasn’t either just silly or just “dark,” and every character in it was pretty complex.

