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CHARACTER NAME: Zim
FANDOM: Invader Zim
CANON: Vindicated! When he's on his way to get the superweapons from the fake aliens!Dib and Dwicky.
WHAT THEY LOST: Any straight-up water (regardless of amount of pollution) touched externally will cause him to burn horribly.
ABOUT THE CHARACTER:
(Note: I'm going to be using a lot of background from unfinished episodes. Though they were never animated and aired the scripts and audio were completely finished, so if Nick hadn't cancelled the show they would have been actual episodes. They provide some much-needed background regarding the Irken Empire. The transcripts and readings are here. Ten Minutes to Doom, Mopiness of Doom and The Trial are the ones to look at.)
HERE IS ZIM'S LIFE STORY:
The Irken birthing process is pretty weird. It involves some kind of futuristic Matrix-esque cloning hatcheries, and metal backpacks called I.D. PAKs that are attached to the Irken baby's spine upon being 'hatched'. The PAK is then downloaded with all the knowledge of the Irken Empire, as well as a personality and name for the baby. Essentially, the PAK is the Irken's actual brain, and their body is just a convenient way to carry the PAK around.
Zim's PAK happened to be broken. This resulted in 40 schmillion errors when all that downloading went on, and presumably explains why Zim is so... Zim. He's a defective Irken.
When Zim was two minutes old he caused Horrible Painful Overload Day, the day in which Irk was plunged into darkness for five years, by causing the Irken baby activation chamber to malfunction after creating a blockage in one of the delivery tubes. This blockage was other Irken babies.
When Zim was slightly older he caused Horrible Painful Overload Day part II, after he decides to escape to the surface of Irk with another Irken, Skoodge. This time Irk was plunged into four years of darkness. Jump ahead a bit more to planet Vort, where Zim was placed in research and development. He creates an infinite energy absorbing creature, named Cthulhu, who gets a hold of an infinite energy producing thingy, proceeds to grow to insane size and eat the Irken Empire's leader, Almighty Tallest Miyuki. Fastforward to Zim being trained as an invader - Cthulhu shows up again and eats the Irken Empire's next leader, Almighty Tallest Spork.
Next up is Operation Impending Doom I! The plan in which the Irken Empire invaders and conquers a ton of planets because they're like that. Zim singlehandedly ruins the Operation after getting control of a frontline battle mech while still on Irk (nearly wiping out all of Irk in the process). The newest Tallest, Red and Purple, exile him to Foodcourtia, where he must serve under the Frylord Sizz-lor and do the usual demeaning fastfood grunt work - except it's a hundred times worse because it's an alien planet and Jhonen Vasquez can get pretty gross. Zim 'quits' being exiled when he hears about Operation Impending Doom II. Despite not being invited, he heads to planet Conventia, where the Operation was about to begin.
Zim is unsurprisingly eager to show off his Invaderness for real, but Red and Purple are a lot less enthusiastic. With him being the Irken Empire's biggest liability, they decide to send him on a wild goose chase to invade a "secret" planet that, in reality, is empty space.
... Except that's where Earth is! Zim believes them, of course, and after receiving his SIR Unit, GIR, sets off to complete his super secret mission. He lands on Earth, sets up a base in the most conspicuous way, and creates the worst disguises ever for himself and GIR. (Of course, terrible disguises seems to be an Irken thing, and not a Zim thing.) After this Zim, deciding they need to learn about Earth's weaknesses, enrolls himself in an elementary school, because that somehow makes perfect sense. Unfortunately, he ends up in the same class as Dib, a child with a very large head and an obsession in anything and everything paranormal. Dib immediately recognizes Zim as an alien, but the rest of the class rejects the idea.
Thus begins Dib and Zim's amazingly stupid rivalry.
Zim makes several attempts to conquer Earth. Most of these plans are very dumb, like the time he tried to mutate the class hamster and use its cuteness to take over. Dib sometimes thwarts him - other times Zim's own stupidity gets the better of him and he fails spectacularly. Zim also makes attempts to fit in, such as acquiring a best friend, bringing his robotic parents to Parent Teacher Night. Other times Zim's plans are actually pretty good, like using a hypno-zit to hypnotize people, but he has the worst goals in mind. Receive a giant battlemech of doom? Instead of using it to take over the world he tries to blow up Dib. Steal most of Earth's water? It gets used in a gigantic water balloon of vengence against Dib, who threw a water balloon at him earlier. The frosting on this horrible cake was likely the time he kidnaps Dib and has him live out his entire life in a holochamber without realizing it, for the sole reason of getting Dib to admit that he threw a muffin at Zim's head earlier in the day. And then, with Dib helpless in his lab, all Zim does is throw a muffin at his head in revenge.
Though Dib and Zim are definitely archenemies there are times when they will reluctantly work together. When one of the most competent Irkens (Tak) shows up on Earth and plans to hollow it out and fill it with snacks as an offering to the Tallest, they team up to take her down. (Gaz pretty much does all the work.) There was also the time the two of them got stuck in an alternate reality that existed in Dib's head, though they both manage to backstab each other there. The series unfortunately ends with Zim attempting to use a technoliquid Santa Claus suit to force all of humanity into slave labour. It doesn't work.
Zim is a narcissistic, egotistical, sadistic megalomaniac who is mocked by his entire species. He's not even a real invader - his PAK has him encoded as a frycook. But he's far too self-absorbed to ever admit this, if he even remembers. Zim has a tendency to have delusions of grandeur - when he was young he was adamant that he was going to become the Almighty Tallest, and older he's convinced he's an excellent Irken Elite and a more than capable invader. Anyone attempting to tell him otherwise simply gets ignored. Any failures in his evil plots routinely get overlooked as well. It's common for him to still try and declare victory even after he's failed miserably. In the rare times he isn't ignoring his failures, he blames them on others, refusing to take responsibility. Basically, he acts very childish, despite not being a child.
He has destructive moodswings, often jumping from calm to screaming anger and then to indifferent in the span of several minutes. His most consistent emotions are his loyalty towards the Tallest, his rivalry with Dib, and his hatred of humans and Earth. The former is, in fact, one of the few personality aspects his defective PAK gets right... but even then, Zim's loyalty towards the Tallest is ten times greater than any other Irken, to the point where he knows things about them. It's utterly creepy. Even though they openly despise him and have attempted to kill him on occasion Zim remains steadfast in his allegiance. However, even this aspect of him is deadly - it was because of his enthusiasm in becoming an invader that he nearly destroyed Irk in Operation Impending Doom I. On that note, Zim takes a great amount of pride in any destruction he commits, whether it's inadvertantly towards the Irken Empire or directed at something else. He never seems to care when his destructive tendencies ruin his own base, as in The Wettening and Walk for Your Lives.
If he had a modicum of patience and common sense, and maybe a few dozen less errors in his PAK, he'd actually be a good invader. He's shown throughout the series that he has a lot of engineering and technical skills, creating a time stasis field and Cthulhu, and he certainly has the drive when Dib is around to be his archnemesis. With no Dib, however, that motivation is killed. In Mopiness of Doom, after Dib switches from paranormal science to real science, it only takes about two minutes for Zim to become a lazy, ratridden couch potato who cries when he's out of snacks. Though Zim would love to do nothing more than liquify Dib's organs or melt his face off, their antagonistic relationship is clearly important to him. Throughout the show Zim gradually changes his opinion of Dib: he begins by thinking of him as just an annoyance to destroy, but eventually develops a grudging respect for him and associates taking over the world with defeating Dib, as Dib is the only one to ever really take him seriously and actively try to stop him from invading. It's both cute and sad, really.
In addition to having an archenemy Zim also has several sidekicks. He is not a team player, though. Hobo 13 is the best example of this: first Zim demands to be the leader of the group without allowing any input from anyone else, and then proceeds to order them all around while ignoring their protests. Even when they have better suggestions for dealing with obstacles Zim silences them and forces them to go along with his plans which inevitably lead to the rest of the team being horribly injured or removed from the training exercise. Essentially, Zim only uses his teammates as stepping stones to finish the exercise, with absolutely no concern for their wellbeing whatsoever. He only ever makes a halfhearted attempt to fake caring when their drill seargant calls him on it; this attempt lasts all of a few minutes before Zim simply gives up and walks off without caring that he's leaving Skoodge - a fellow Irken, no less! - to get horribly mauled by alien pig boars. He even sends one of his teammates to their doom when he had absolutely no reason to - by throwing him at vicious-looking flying aliens when he could have easily just... not done it and not suffered any repercussions. He doesn't show quite this amount of antisocial sadism towards GIR and Minimoose, though he regularly gets exasperated and angry with them for not living up to his grandoise expectations. He also bosses them around constantly by way of yelling and expecting total obedience. Still, he doesn't completely hate them, and on occasion has actually been nice to GIR.
Zim also has a paranoid streak. This was most prominently seen during the entire episode of Germs, and also commonly seen in the amount of times he freaks out over humans capturing and performing experiments on him. That seems to be a real fear of his, and even after Germs he's shown to be a pretty big germophobe. Another fear of his is anything related to Halloween, mostly because he believes that children in costumes are going to eat his organs and drink his blood. Dib's headspace reality only amplifies that fear with the introduction of real monsters.
Finally, for the most part Zim is not a real threat, but there are a few instances in the show when he actually has been. Those instances have turned out amazingly creepy (Dark Harvest) and usually do not involve conquering the planet (often it's saving it instead).