Application to The Wake
Personal Information
Name: Allison
Age: 23
Personal LJ: cannibal_herpes
Email / AIM / MSN: Email is allisonhodges2@gmail.com, plurk is cannibal-herpes, AIM is over9000dads (plurk and email are easiest to get in contact)
Current Character(s): None! :(
Character Information
Character Name: Dib
Fandom: Invader Zim
Source: Wikipedia of episode listing with summary
Wikipedia of Dib's personality
Character History:
Little is known about Dib prior to the arrival of Irken Invader Zim on Earth, but small glimpses into his past reveal that he was always tremendously obsessed with tracking, filming, and capturing supernatural creatures, that most of his life he was ignored and unappreciated by everyone in his world, that at one point he successfully raised the dead, and that more than once he has ended up inside a mental institution. Dib's last name is never revealed, and interviews with creators of the show have hinted that this is because Dib is actually a clone of his father, Professor Membrane, which may also be why his missing mother is never mentioned. If he is a clone, Dib is ignorant of this information. He recalls possibly being abducted as a baby.
While eleven years old, late one night Dib intercepted a transmission that would change his life. After overhearing part of the ceremony for an alien invasion labeled Operation Impending Doom 2, Dib soon realized the earth could be in grave danger. This was confirmed months later when a green-skinned creature lacking ears or nose entered his classroom and attempted to grill the teacher on planetary defenses. Jumping to the obvious conclusion, Dib declared self-proclaimed "Zim" an alien, but no one seemed to either believe him or care.
Not giving up, Dib confronted Zim after school let out with a pair of alien sleep cuffs, leading to a tremendous chase up to Zim's front door, where Dib lost his cuffs and went home empty-handed.Undeterred, Dib next attempted to sneak into Zim's base and managed to come away with incriminating photos, but lost these when Zim created and piloted a nanobot to dive into Dib's body and erase the memory of where he'd hidden the files.
During the course of their antagonistic relationship, Dib and Zim fell into a regular pattern: Zim would try to destroy the Earth and Dib would take measures to foil Zim's plans and expose him for the alien threat he was. Much of the time, the two seemed to be evenly matched, and came to both loathe and respect one another, although Dib quickly caught on to Zim's personality flaws and the fact that he was pretty dumb for a technologically superior alien.
At one point, Zim grew so annoyed over Dib's constant interference that he attempted to go back in time and stop Dib from ever becoming a threat to him. This plan eventually backfired when Dib's body grew so damaged and broken from the havoc Zim was wreaking on his younger self that Dib's father Professor Membrane invented a battlesuit for his son to live and operate inside. Eventually Zim had to concede defeat and restored the timeline to its original order. When Zim inadvertently released a monster hamster upon an unsuspecting world and was unable to control it for his own gains, he and Dib struck up their first temporary alliance to rid the world of the creature.
After an unsuccessful break into Zim's base leading to his capture, Dib was set free by his younger sister Gaz, marking the first time she became part of struggle between humans and aliens; however, Dib found to his immense disappointment that his sister didn't care much for saving the earth or for her own brother, and was only rescuing him in order to return home in time for their annual family dinner night with their father. In future events, Gaz admitted to knowing Zim was an alien all along, but unlike Dib, she quickly realized that Zim was too much of an idiot to successfully take over Earth by himself and that Dib had a tendency to make things worse.
One of Dib's greatest challenges occurred when Zim eventually discovered that the planet Mars was in fact a gigantic spaceship invented by an extinct species, with which he meant to drive it to Earth and use it to squash the Earthlings on the surface of the planet. With the help of one of his Swollen Eyeball compatriots, Dib managed to secure passage to Mercury and take command of the ship-planet as well, combating Zim and thwarting his efforts before the Earth was destroyed.
Soon after this, Dib experimented with his father's equipment in the week leading up to Halloween, in order to try and peek into other dimensional worlds for inspiration on spooky costume ideas. Instead, he inadvertently opened up an anomaly that forced him against his will to keep traveling back and forth between his world and a nightmare world of his own imagination. After being locked up in an asylum and escaping, Dib ran to Zim for help, but ended up pulling the both of them fully into his nightmare world. The two banded together in order to find a way out, but Dib betrayed the treaty and left Zim to rot. After being captured by the nightmare creatures (who wished to use Dib's head as a transporter into his own world), Dib was rescued by Zim and the two of them managed to escape the nightmare world and keep the creatures at bay.
Even cable exposure didn't seem to win Dib too many points in exposing Zim; getting his tape onto his favorite show Mysterious Mysteries of Strange Mystery did little to convince anyone watching, and only served to make him look even more crazy than before. As the series progressed, Zim's focus seemed to turn less towards destroying the Earth and more towards destroying Dib personally, since Dib became the main reason all of Zim's plans kept failing. After failing to stop him by creating a robotic Dib duplicate, unsuccessfully piloting a "Megadoomer 3000" to march up to Dib's house and destroy him, and unable to even destroy him in a slow-moving explosion, Zim seemed obsessed with finding a way of getting rid of his greatest adversary.
In a cruel mental exercise and in retaliation for Dib throwing a muffin at Zim at lunch one day, Zim constructed an elaborate fantasy scenario in which Dib received everything he had ever wanted or dreamed of; recognition and exposure, appreciation, legitimacy, saving the earth, destroying the Irken race, and living a full and happy life as the recipient of the "Greatest Person Ever To Live" award. Unfortunately Dib in real time was trapped in Zim's base, being fed a holographic scenario, so that Zim could verify that Dib was the muffin-thrower and build him up only to crush him by (appropriately) hitting him with another muffin.
Soon after this, a new girl called Tak arrived in Dib and Zim's classroom and proceeded to make friends with Dib while at the same time harboring a curious hatred towards Zim. Dib immediately took a liking to Tak and happily shared his alien theories with her, unaware that she was actually an Irken Invader herself, come to Earth to kick Zim offplanet and take over Earth for herself to get back in her leader's good graces. Once exposed for the alien she was, Dib teamed up with Zim again, aided by Gaz and Zim's robot GIR, to bring Tak down for good. After shutting down her Earth-destroying machine while Zim distracted Tak by fighting with her in outer space (and eventually ejecting her into the void), Dib returned home, somewhat let down by the fact that most of his battles end in stalemates and that he felt no less closer to destroying Zim than he had from the very beginning. At that point, Tak's damaged Irken ship crashlanded in Dib's backyard, which he dragged into his garage and began to repair.
Using the controls in Tak's ship, Dib was able to fight Zim in previously unknown ways. After using the driver's pod to try and take control of Zim's leaders ship, Dib set to overriding Tak's personality inside the ship, replacing it with his own. This turned out to be a bad idea, since at first Tak's ship believed itself to actually be Dib, and went through various stages of unrest, homicidal aggression, and then depression as it realized what a horrible life Dib actually had before manual deleting all its own memories so it wouldn't have to suffer.
At one point, Dib actually came close to having a real ally in his school counselor Mr. Dwicky, who agreed to come with him on his hunt for Zim and actually witnessed and came to believe in real alien life. Unfortunately, a third party of aliens arrived and offered Mr. Dwicky passage on their ship, which he excitedly accepted; Dib and Zim were left to fight out their battles alone once more.
In their last aired battle, Dib fought Zim over control of Christmas, when Zim put on a Santa Claus suit in order to seduce the Earth's population into traveling to the North Pole to be teleported off planet and used as slave labor. After a narrow close call and with a great deal of help from his sister Gaz, Dib used Tak's fully repaired ship to fly to Zim's location, and used his father's arsenal of weaponry to kill the out-of-control Santa Suit. Zim then tricked the crowd into pummeling Dib for "killing" Santa Claus.
Character Personality: Obsessed with the paranormal practically from birth, Dib has always struggled to claim legitimacy in a world both too ignorant and too hostile to understand him or take him seriously. Because of this, he seems to suffer from severely low self-esteem but manages to keep going despite most everyone he knows either hating or ignoring him. Although the vast majority of Earthlings fail to comprehend the threats he faces on a daily basis, Dib is incredibly determined to protect his species and his home planet. He may in fact be a genius (at least compared to most humans, who seem to be abnormally stupid), but his innate ability to annoy nearly anyone who talks with him by rambling endlessly on about his work negates this positive trait.
Dib harbors an insatiable spirit of curiosity and loves to investigate anything strange, unordinary, or unusual. While understandably hostile towards any alien out to take over the Earth, Dib is still attracted to the idea that humankind is not alone in the universe, and often expresses a desire to leave his home planet to go exploring among the stars. He expresses little interest in the "real" science of his father's life, and all attempts at leaving behind his life of paranormal studies have led to general misery and disappointment.
Equal parts frustrated and sad at being the only one capable of understanding and combating serious threats to the Earth, Dib is a loner and a social outcast, unaccepted by his family, his schoolmates, or his fellow citizens. He is especially prone to physical and mental bullying and suffers this with a resigned attitude, knowing he lacks the time or strength of will to fight both his battles against humans and aliens. He is often mocked by creatures of many races for being born with an unusually large head, and most often reacts with disdained objections.
Dib seems to like keeping in contact with secret and high-ranking organizations, although they in turn are not always pleased to see him. He is an active member of the Swollen Eyeballs, a secret society involved with exposing the likes of the paranormal to the world, and oftentimes is able to share information with his fellow Eyeballs and feel, for once, accepted. In this society, he refers to himself as Agent Mothman, most likely a reference to the paranormal claims of a "mothman" flying around in West Virginia in 1966, a creature who warns of disaster before it strikes. He also has a bit of a reputation with government agencies (NASA, the FBI, the local police, the military), and seems a sort of infamous annoyance when talking with them about the paranormal.
More often than not, people around Dib like to label him as crazy and admittedly this is not entirely unjustified. While most of Dib's paranormal claims turn out to be true, the doggedly obsessive way he forces others into considering his ideas combined with his frantic manner of expressing himself lead most people into condemning him as insane. More than once, Dib has ended up inside a mental institution or in a straightjacket because of the intolerance others have for his outlandish ideas. Even his father has referred to him within hearing distance as "my poor insane son."
Despite his occupation as self-described Sole Defender of Earth, Dib sometimes edges into a morally grey state of being, where he will do despicable things in the name of a greater good (ie., saving the planet). He has willingly infected his sister with a curse rather than experiment on himself, harassed dozens of humans and paranormal creatures in the name of parascience, mentally tormented his adversaries and shown callous disregard in regards to many people. Dib has no trouble justifying to himself stepping over others to find a solution to his problems because he firmly believes he is humanity's greatest (and perhaps only) hope.
Although Dib is a firm believer in most paranormal studies, he does keep a firm, skeptical mind out for hacks and frauds, and is able to logically deduce many obvious situations that others around him find hopeless or uninteresting. He is resilient in the face of obvious adversity, but is also his own greatest enemy in that he manages to alienate nearly everyone around him. He takes persistance to the eleventh degree and can't manage to let any stone go unturned, and has an almost insane obsessive compulsive need to investigate anything and document everything.
Dib is incredibly lonely and craves attention, companionship, and legitimacy, which not even his family provides. He has no friends and no companions aside from his little sister Gaz, who hates him. Despite his hatred of Zim and his keen desire to see him exposed for what he is, Dib has a reluctant respect for the alien purely because Zim recognizes him as a threat, thereby offering him the slightest shred of verification. When someone gives Dib even the tiniest bit of support, he becomes immensely loyal and appreciative, and will willingly share every part of his life with that person until he inevitably drives them away. Because he is so alone most of the time, Dib has picked up a tendency to talk aloud to himself, explaining his thoughts as they occur and monologuing his latest obsession.
Though he is incredibly clever when compared to most humans (and it seems, most aliens), Dib sometimes allows his intolerance and impatience of those around him to overwhelm his common sense, at which point he dissolves into rants and tics. He doesn't quite know when to pick his battles, and he definitely does not know when to shut up or allow someone else to win an argument. However, if he is firmly proven wrong, Dib has no qualms about apologizing when necessary. Occasionally Dib will see a need to work together with an enemy to reach a common goal, and has little difficulty in trusting in his temporary allies. He is also not above betraying said allies if he sees an easier way towards achieving his goals.
Over time, Dib has become even more self-critical, and whereas before he was firmly argumentative whenever the size of his head was brought up, in later episodes he has conceded to both the possibility that he has an overly large head and that he may be insane. Very serious for a boy his age, Dib rarely laughs and only seems to take pleasure from watching his hard work come to fruition. Most of his life is out of his own control due to either his family or his school, so Dib seems to take small victories where he can find them.
With no mother and a father always out, Dib has learned to become extraordinarily self-sufficient and independent for a boy his age, and has grown used to taking care of himself and occasionally his sister Gaz. Already with more common sense than most people three times his age, Dib still manages to let little details slip by his notice, which inevitably lead to his failure. While competent on a personal level, both his age and the hostility of others towards him are major hinderances to Dib, and lead to many of his missions ending in utter failure. Oftentimes he will grow discouraged but resolve to do better the next time.
Powers and Abilities: Though super athletic for a boy his size, Dib has no supernatural powers. He is one of the most intelligent people on Planet Earth but lacks the maturity to temper his intellect with reserve or subtlety. He has an immense affinity for technology and can pilot and operate alien ships and devices, and seems to be halfway decent at missions of infiltration. He also keeps an array of paranormal weaponry along with his laptop and cameras as ever-trusty companions to his mission of discovery and exposure.
Samples
Network:
Hey! Hey! Alien space monsters! Giant robots! And...other weird, paranormal, sciency-guys! You can hear me out there, right? Right?
Okay. Just checking.
Hello, from Earth! Man, some of you are just...incredible to look at! I mean, how does this interdimensional travel thingy work, anyway? Are all of you just stuck here? Am I stuck here too? Does this mean we can be friends?
Man. A real friend....
Uh. Anyway! I would....just like to know...what you're planning on doing! To the Earth. I mean, I won't tell if you had secret alien plans to destroy humanity. Or, you know. Stuff like that.
...I'm normal, you know.
Third Person:
Sitting in the dark and squinting from the neon glare of his computer monitors, Dib studied the most recent footage he had of alien life on Earth. It wasn't the best he'd shot and half the tape was out of focus from running around in terror, but Dib was happy with it. Or at least satisfied enough to edit out the unimportant, boring footage of when he'd stuffed himself inside Zim's wall, and prepare the copies to send off to the usual suspects: the Swollen Eyeballs, Mysterious Mysteries, NASAplace, the FBI, and anyone else he hoped would give his video even the slightest chance.
The house was dead silent at this hour, but Dib seemed to rarely sleep these days. The excitement of new footage to work with always kept him up past when reasonable eleven-year-olds should be asleep, but no one seemed to care when he went to bed. Come to think of it, no one seemed to care when he woke up, either. Or...if he..
Dib shook his head, and rubbed at his eyes under his glasses. Lack of sleep was definitely getting to him, and dwelling on bad experiences wasn't going to get these copies printed and mailed off any faster. Maybe if he hurried, he could drop them in the mailbox next to his house and be back in time for the 3am rerunning of Mysterious Mysteries. Then sleep, then back out tomorrow to get more footage and exploit the hole in Zim's security system for as long as he could. Dib didn't harbor any expectation that he'd be able to film in that one location for very long and it was always incredibly risky to sneak into the alien's base, but hopefully the risk would all be worth it someday.
Someone, somewhere out there, would one day realize what an incredible person he was. He hoped.
Name: Allison
Age: 23
Personal LJ: cannibal_herpes
Email / AIM / MSN: Email is allisonhodges2@gmail.com, plurk is cannibal-herpes, AIM is over9000dads (plurk and email are easiest to get in contact)
Current Character(s): None! :(
Character Information
Character Name: Dib
Fandom: Invader Zim
Source: Wikipedia of episode listing with summary
Wikipedia of Dib's personality
Character History:
Little is known about Dib prior to the arrival of Irken Invader Zim on Earth, but small glimpses into his past reveal that he was always tremendously obsessed with tracking, filming, and capturing supernatural creatures, that most of his life he was ignored and unappreciated by everyone in his world, that at one point he successfully raised the dead, and that more than once he has ended up inside a mental institution. Dib's last name is never revealed, and interviews with creators of the show have hinted that this is because Dib is actually a clone of his father, Professor Membrane, which may also be why his missing mother is never mentioned. If he is a clone, Dib is ignorant of this information. He recalls possibly being abducted as a baby.
While eleven years old, late one night Dib intercepted a transmission that would change his life. After overhearing part of the ceremony for an alien invasion labeled Operation Impending Doom 2, Dib soon realized the earth could be in grave danger. This was confirmed months later when a green-skinned creature lacking ears or nose entered his classroom and attempted to grill the teacher on planetary defenses. Jumping to the obvious conclusion, Dib declared self-proclaimed "Zim" an alien, but no one seemed to either believe him or care.
Not giving up, Dib confronted Zim after school let out with a pair of alien sleep cuffs, leading to a tremendous chase up to Zim's front door, where Dib lost his cuffs and went home empty-handed.Undeterred, Dib next attempted to sneak into Zim's base and managed to come away with incriminating photos, but lost these when Zim created and piloted a nanobot to dive into Dib's body and erase the memory of where he'd hidden the files.
During the course of their antagonistic relationship, Dib and Zim fell into a regular pattern: Zim would try to destroy the Earth and Dib would take measures to foil Zim's plans and expose him for the alien threat he was. Much of the time, the two seemed to be evenly matched, and came to both loathe and respect one another, although Dib quickly caught on to Zim's personality flaws and the fact that he was pretty dumb for a technologically superior alien.
At one point, Zim grew so annoyed over Dib's constant interference that he attempted to go back in time and stop Dib from ever becoming a threat to him. This plan eventually backfired when Dib's body grew so damaged and broken from the havoc Zim was wreaking on his younger self that Dib's father Professor Membrane invented a battlesuit for his son to live and operate inside. Eventually Zim had to concede defeat and restored the timeline to its original order. When Zim inadvertently released a monster hamster upon an unsuspecting world and was unable to control it for his own gains, he and Dib struck up their first temporary alliance to rid the world of the creature.
After an unsuccessful break into Zim's base leading to his capture, Dib was set free by his younger sister Gaz, marking the first time she became part of struggle between humans and aliens; however, Dib found to his immense disappointment that his sister didn't care much for saving the earth or for her own brother, and was only rescuing him in order to return home in time for their annual family dinner night with their father. In future events, Gaz admitted to knowing Zim was an alien all along, but unlike Dib, she quickly realized that Zim was too much of an idiot to successfully take over Earth by himself and that Dib had a tendency to make things worse.
One of Dib's greatest challenges occurred when Zim eventually discovered that the planet Mars was in fact a gigantic spaceship invented by an extinct species, with which he meant to drive it to Earth and use it to squash the Earthlings on the surface of the planet. With the help of one of his Swollen Eyeball compatriots, Dib managed to secure passage to Mercury and take command of the ship-planet as well, combating Zim and thwarting his efforts before the Earth was destroyed.
Soon after this, Dib experimented with his father's equipment in the week leading up to Halloween, in order to try and peek into other dimensional worlds for inspiration on spooky costume ideas. Instead, he inadvertently opened up an anomaly that forced him against his will to keep traveling back and forth between his world and a nightmare world of his own imagination. After being locked up in an asylum and escaping, Dib ran to Zim for help, but ended up pulling the both of them fully into his nightmare world. The two banded together in order to find a way out, but Dib betrayed the treaty and left Zim to rot. After being captured by the nightmare creatures (who wished to use Dib's head as a transporter into his own world), Dib was rescued by Zim and the two of them managed to escape the nightmare world and keep the creatures at bay.
Even cable exposure didn't seem to win Dib too many points in exposing Zim; getting his tape onto his favorite show Mysterious Mysteries of Strange Mystery did little to convince anyone watching, and only served to make him look even more crazy than before. As the series progressed, Zim's focus seemed to turn less towards destroying the Earth and more towards destroying Dib personally, since Dib became the main reason all of Zim's plans kept failing. After failing to stop him by creating a robotic Dib duplicate, unsuccessfully piloting a "Megadoomer 3000" to march up to Dib's house and destroy him, and unable to even destroy him in a slow-moving explosion, Zim seemed obsessed with finding a way of getting rid of his greatest adversary.
In a cruel mental exercise and in retaliation for Dib throwing a muffin at Zim at lunch one day, Zim constructed an elaborate fantasy scenario in which Dib received everything he had ever wanted or dreamed of; recognition and exposure, appreciation, legitimacy, saving the earth, destroying the Irken race, and living a full and happy life as the recipient of the "Greatest Person Ever To Live" award. Unfortunately Dib in real time was trapped in Zim's base, being fed a holographic scenario, so that Zim could verify that Dib was the muffin-thrower and build him up only to crush him by (appropriately) hitting him with another muffin.
Soon after this, a new girl called Tak arrived in Dib and Zim's classroom and proceeded to make friends with Dib while at the same time harboring a curious hatred towards Zim. Dib immediately took a liking to Tak and happily shared his alien theories with her, unaware that she was actually an Irken Invader herself, come to Earth to kick Zim offplanet and take over Earth for herself to get back in her leader's good graces. Once exposed for the alien she was, Dib teamed up with Zim again, aided by Gaz and Zim's robot GIR, to bring Tak down for good. After shutting down her Earth-destroying machine while Zim distracted Tak by fighting with her in outer space (and eventually ejecting her into the void), Dib returned home, somewhat let down by the fact that most of his battles end in stalemates and that he felt no less closer to destroying Zim than he had from the very beginning. At that point, Tak's damaged Irken ship crashlanded in Dib's backyard, which he dragged into his garage and began to repair.
Using the controls in Tak's ship, Dib was able to fight Zim in previously unknown ways. After using the driver's pod to try and take control of Zim's leaders ship, Dib set to overriding Tak's personality inside the ship, replacing it with his own. This turned out to be a bad idea, since at first Tak's ship believed itself to actually be Dib, and went through various stages of unrest, homicidal aggression, and then depression as it realized what a horrible life Dib actually had before manual deleting all its own memories so it wouldn't have to suffer.
At one point, Dib actually came close to having a real ally in his school counselor Mr. Dwicky, who agreed to come with him on his hunt for Zim and actually witnessed and came to believe in real alien life. Unfortunately, a third party of aliens arrived and offered Mr. Dwicky passage on their ship, which he excitedly accepted; Dib and Zim were left to fight out their battles alone once more.
In their last aired battle, Dib fought Zim over control of Christmas, when Zim put on a Santa Claus suit in order to seduce the Earth's population into traveling to the North Pole to be teleported off planet and used as slave labor. After a narrow close call and with a great deal of help from his sister Gaz, Dib used Tak's fully repaired ship to fly to Zim's location, and used his father's arsenal of weaponry to kill the out-of-control Santa Suit. Zim then tricked the crowd into pummeling Dib for "killing" Santa Claus.
Character Personality: Obsessed with the paranormal practically from birth, Dib has always struggled to claim legitimacy in a world both too ignorant and too hostile to understand him or take him seriously. Because of this, he seems to suffer from severely low self-esteem but manages to keep going despite most everyone he knows either hating or ignoring him. Although the vast majority of Earthlings fail to comprehend the threats he faces on a daily basis, Dib is incredibly determined to protect his species and his home planet. He may in fact be a genius (at least compared to most humans, who seem to be abnormally stupid), but his innate ability to annoy nearly anyone who talks with him by rambling endlessly on about his work negates this positive trait.
Dib harbors an insatiable spirit of curiosity and loves to investigate anything strange, unordinary, or unusual. While understandably hostile towards any alien out to take over the Earth, Dib is still attracted to the idea that humankind is not alone in the universe, and often expresses a desire to leave his home planet to go exploring among the stars. He expresses little interest in the "real" science of his father's life, and all attempts at leaving behind his life of paranormal studies have led to general misery and disappointment.
Equal parts frustrated and sad at being the only one capable of understanding and combating serious threats to the Earth, Dib is a loner and a social outcast, unaccepted by his family, his schoolmates, or his fellow citizens. He is especially prone to physical and mental bullying and suffers this with a resigned attitude, knowing he lacks the time or strength of will to fight both his battles against humans and aliens. He is often mocked by creatures of many races for being born with an unusually large head, and most often reacts with disdained objections.
Dib seems to like keeping in contact with secret and high-ranking organizations, although they in turn are not always pleased to see him. He is an active member of the Swollen Eyeballs, a secret society involved with exposing the likes of the paranormal to the world, and oftentimes is able to share information with his fellow Eyeballs and feel, for once, accepted. In this society, he refers to himself as Agent Mothman, most likely a reference to the paranormal claims of a "mothman" flying around in West Virginia in 1966, a creature who warns of disaster before it strikes. He also has a bit of a reputation with government agencies (NASA, the FBI, the local police, the military), and seems a sort of infamous annoyance when talking with them about the paranormal.
More often than not, people around Dib like to label him as crazy and admittedly this is not entirely unjustified. While most of Dib's paranormal claims turn out to be true, the doggedly obsessive way he forces others into considering his ideas combined with his frantic manner of expressing himself lead most people into condemning him as insane. More than once, Dib has ended up inside a mental institution or in a straightjacket because of the intolerance others have for his outlandish ideas. Even his father has referred to him within hearing distance as "my poor insane son."
Despite his occupation as self-described Sole Defender of Earth, Dib sometimes edges into a morally grey state of being, where he will do despicable things in the name of a greater good (ie., saving the planet). He has willingly infected his sister with a curse rather than experiment on himself, harassed dozens of humans and paranormal creatures in the name of parascience, mentally tormented his adversaries and shown callous disregard in regards to many people. Dib has no trouble justifying to himself stepping over others to find a solution to his problems because he firmly believes he is humanity's greatest (and perhaps only) hope.
Although Dib is a firm believer in most paranormal studies, he does keep a firm, skeptical mind out for hacks and frauds, and is able to logically deduce many obvious situations that others around him find hopeless or uninteresting. He is resilient in the face of obvious adversity, but is also his own greatest enemy in that he manages to alienate nearly everyone around him. He takes persistance to the eleventh degree and can't manage to let any stone go unturned, and has an almost insane obsessive compulsive need to investigate anything and document everything.
Dib is incredibly lonely and craves attention, companionship, and legitimacy, which not even his family provides. He has no friends and no companions aside from his little sister Gaz, who hates him. Despite his hatred of Zim and his keen desire to see him exposed for what he is, Dib has a reluctant respect for the alien purely because Zim recognizes him as a threat, thereby offering him the slightest shred of verification. When someone gives Dib even the tiniest bit of support, he becomes immensely loyal and appreciative, and will willingly share every part of his life with that person until he inevitably drives them away. Because he is so alone most of the time, Dib has picked up a tendency to talk aloud to himself, explaining his thoughts as they occur and monologuing his latest obsession.
Though he is incredibly clever when compared to most humans (and it seems, most aliens), Dib sometimes allows his intolerance and impatience of those around him to overwhelm his common sense, at which point he dissolves into rants and tics. He doesn't quite know when to pick his battles, and he definitely does not know when to shut up or allow someone else to win an argument. However, if he is firmly proven wrong, Dib has no qualms about apologizing when necessary. Occasionally Dib will see a need to work together with an enemy to reach a common goal, and has little difficulty in trusting in his temporary allies. He is also not above betraying said allies if he sees an easier way towards achieving his goals.
Over time, Dib has become even more self-critical, and whereas before he was firmly argumentative whenever the size of his head was brought up, in later episodes he has conceded to both the possibility that he has an overly large head and that he may be insane. Very serious for a boy his age, Dib rarely laughs and only seems to take pleasure from watching his hard work come to fruition. Most of his life is out of his own control due to either his family or his school, so Dib seems to take small victories where he can find them.
With no mother and a father always out, Dib has learned to become extraordinarily self-sufficient and independent for a boy his age, and has grown used to taking care of himself and occasionally his sister Gaz. Already with more common sense than most people three times his age, Dib still manages to let little details slip by his notice, which inevitably lead to his failure. While competent on a personal level, both his age and the hostility of others towards him are major hinderances to Dib, and lead to many of his missions ending in utter failure. Oftentimes he will grow discouraged but resolve to do better the next time.
Powers and Abilities: Though super athletic for a boy his size, Dib has no supernatural powers. He is one of the most intelligent people on Planet Earth but lacks the maturity to temper his intellect with reserve or subtlety. He has an immense affinity for technology and can pilot and operate alien ships and devices, and seems to be halfway decent at missions of infiltration. He also keeps an array of paranormal weaponry along with his laptop and cameras as ever-trusty companions to his mission of discovery and exposure.
Samples
Network:
Hey! Hey! Alien space monsters! Giant robots! And...other weird, paranormal, sciency-guys! You can hear me out there, right? Right?
Okay. Just checking.
Hello, from Earth! Man, some of you are just...incredible to look at! I mean, how does this interdimensional travel thingy work, anyway? Are all of you just stuck here? Am I stuck here too? Does this mean we can be friends?
Man. A real friend....
Uh. Anyway! I would....just like to know...what you're planning on doing! To the Earth. I mean, I won't tell if you had secret alien plans to destroy humanity. Or, you know. Stuff like that.
...I'm normal, you know.
Third Person:
Sitting in the dark and squinting from the neon glare of his computer monitors, Dib studied the most recent footage he had of alien life on Earth. It wasn't the best he'd shot and half the tape was out of focus from running around in terror, but Dib was happy with it. Or at least satisfied enough to edit out the unimportant, boring footage of when he'd stuffed himself inside Zim's wall, and prepare the copies to send off to the usual suspects: the Swollen Eyeballs, Mysterious Mysteries, NASAplace, the FBI, and anyone else he hoped would give his video even the slightest chance.
The house was dead silent at this hour, but Dib seemed to rarely sleep these days. The excitement of new footage to work with always kept him up past when reasonable eleven-year-olds should be asleep, but no one seemed to care when he went to bed. Come to think of it, no one seemed to care when he woke up, either. Or...if he..
Dib shook his head, and rubbed at his eyes under his glasses. Lack of sleep was definitely getting to him, and dwelling on bad experiences wasn't going to get these copies printed and mailed off any faster. Maybe if he hurried, he could drop them in the mailbox next to his house and be back in time for the 3am rerunning of Mysterious Mysteries. Then sleep, then back out tomorrow to get more footage and exploit the hole in Zim's security system for as long as he could. Dib didn't harbor any expectation that he'd be able to film in that one location for very long and it was always incredibly risky to sneak into the alien's base, but hopefully the risk would all be worth it someday.
Someone, somewhere out there, would one day realize what an incredible person he was. He hoped.