Of Carmine Carnations

It’s just weirdly good horror to me as a years later rewatch somehow. Dripping with menace.

Long time fans know this is one of the most theatric and chatty characters in the show, alone or not. He also more often than not gets over -ahem, denies- setback and mission fumbles in record time. Not here. Just the silence that lets you truly hear that eerie ass ambience in the background. Just watching him reviewing back collected surveillance, on presumably what’s supposed to be human child behavioral data (this was still season 1 after all), but he’s neither mocking the subjects nor boasting about himself for once. He’s not even complaining of getting into one of his spiels. It’s just that cut back to the reel of a dozen pains he’s suffered at the Skool, cut back to that stone still expression, cut back to the tapes. You don’t know if they’re all from a singularly horrible day or a pile of weeks of humiliations stacking on a camel’s back. You get nothing of explanation except for that quiet seething in his expression- The scariest kind of angry. It’s Zim, ruminating on a god’s honest murderous rage, toward this species that seems to only justify his contempt of them with every single interaction. Almost as if you can watch this and imagine his hatred just getting hotter and hotter for all mankind under the surface, and then narrowing in like a magnifying glass straight onto the worst and most frequent offender of all. Those four consecutive Dib clips are what finally seem to make him feel like he’s seen enough and he’s fully decided on beginning to craft what we later find out was the Moosey wormhole plan. If it was only about Dib standing in the way of the mission, like he frames it, this episode intro wouldn’t serve any purpose. It was about so much more than Dib probably ever thinks about, the axe forgets and all that.

To me this clip is like the one moment where I swear to Tallest Zim was feeling on a kind of Nny wavelength in that isolated instant,

If I could elaborate a bit on my two cents. It goes well beyond wasps, but they are one of the biggest victims of it I’ve noticed. I make it no secret that my day job is in pest control. In real life, I have to deal with a lot of hearing people brag about illegally killing snakes or nagging me about every spider or ant found still alive on their porch step. I think it gives me a very ugly and very close-up perspective of the worst that fear, ignorance, and even hatred of nature has to offer. Funny enough, it gives me a very close-up and fascinating perspective of the other side of that conflict. I’ve been up close to bald faced hornets, yellow jackets, paper wasps more times than I can count and given them extremely justified reasons to bring me hell for it. And yet the more I work around them, the more I kind of fall in love with them. I’ve been doing this for over four years, hell, I even collect wasps on the side for hobby entomology, and I legitimately have never taken a wasp sting in my entire life. Fireants on the other hand I get attacked by all the freaking time (and yet I’d still swing the bat for all local Hymenopterans)

I don’t love wasps because I mythologize them from a distance. I love them the more I actually understand and learn about them. And I used to be someone who screamed at ran at the sight of them because that was the trajectory from growing up in southern America taught me to follow. Bees good, wasp bad is something you have hammered into your programming probably from toddlerhood on. And I can promise from experience there is literally no way back out of that without curiosity and facing up to years’ worth of being proudly self-reinforcing of that truth the way people are about things as ground level as “apples are good for you”. Recent cultural spooks like the killer hornets headlines haven’t helped.

People who have been stung have an extra layer of anger and often legit trauma confounded that of all things, actually, reminds me strongly of the rhetoric I see in cat and dog hating spaces. “Cats/dogs are horrible they have hurt me and I’m RIGHT to hate them” isn’t a statement of empirical fact, but lived experience that you attack via perceived invalidation. That’s where and why the defensiveness and aggro.

All of this to say with way too many words that our ultimate struggle as wannabe entomological loraxes is the difficulty of trying to use logic to bring people out of a conclusion they never logic’d themselves into.

And I don’t hate them. I feel bad for the beauty they have closed themselves off from. I hope one day they can find it.