#does anybody ever give zim a fake last name in fanfic?

[emeraldspiral]

So in Globs of Doom there's a hub world and then there's doors that lead to the different stages that are labeled with the name of the location, like Bikini Bottom or Amity Park. But because the city Zim lives in doesn't have a name it's just called "Zim's Town", which is kinda funny, but also kinda highlights for me how annoying the trope of not naming things is. Like, more often than not it just makes things awkward rather than funny because you have to either write unnatural dialog to avoid saying a name or try to make a gag out of covering it up, and there's only so many times you can make the same joke about a name being smudged or drowned out by noise or someone asking "Hey what is your name?" Like, the one time they called Dib "Whateveryourlastnameis" in Dib's Wonderful Life wasn't even that funny, and people didn't even get that he wasn't supposed to have a last name because it was never made clear that "Membrane" was supposed to be his dad's first name and not a family name, and eventually they just gave up on that idea and made "Membrane" his canon last name in the comics/ETF.

I get that Jhonen wanted the city to feel like it could be any city in the US and not a specific real world city, but there's no reason giving it a made-up name would've taken away from that. And the name could've been really funny and thematically appropriate. It could've been a pun on the idea of it being a non-descript Anytown USA, or the idea of it being gross and polluted, or maybe named after an in-universe company that owns everything, like the Poop corporation, to show what a hyper-capitalistic hellscape it is.

So if you got to name the city in Invader Zim, what would you call it?

#invader zim #also #does anybody ever give zim a fake last name in fanfic? #i know he's gone by the aliases shminvader shmim and mike audience in the comics