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Miss Bitters
Voiced by: Lucille Bliss
"The universe is doomed. Doomed! DOOOOOOOMED!... Go home now."
Zim and Dib's pessimistic old crank teacher of an unclear species.
- Ambiguously Human: She's almost definitely not human, even if we assume she was one at some point in the now-distant past, but we're not quite sure what, exactly, she is. Sunlight burns her. The only possibility she's been willing to extend is her claim that she was a fairy princess when she was younger.
- Animal Motifs: Bugs and snakes. She's primarily associated with insects, such as her nightmare counterpart being a gigantic insectoid creature, her Leitmotif being the sound of cicadas, and even seemingly being part of a race of bug people in the comics. She also is snake-like in that she's capable of slithering around like a serpent, coiling around people, and even makes the noise of a rattlesnake sometimes when she speaks or is annoyed.
- The Cameo: She appears in the The Loud House episode "Linc Or Swim".
- Demoted to Extra: Due to Lucille Bliss passing away long before the film started production, Miss Bitters just made a non-speaking cameo at the beginning of Enter the Florpus.
- Devil in Plain Sight: She does little to nothing to hide how inhuman she is, but no one seems to be even remotely aware of her monstrous nature. Even Dib is convinced she's just a very creepy but otherwise normal old woman.
- Even Evil Has Standards: Despite the obvious hatred she has for her students, she thinks Dib is happier not knowing how meat replaced candy for Valentine's Day and even expressed "moral outrage" to the principal allowing the kids to celebrate the holiday.
- The Fair Folk: If what she said about formerly being a fairy princess is true, she is most certainly this rather than the friendlier type. Well, she is now.
- Grumpy Old Woman: Cantankerous as all hell and lives up to her name.
- Hates Everyone Equally: She hates her students, she hates their parents (who used to be her students), she hates the world she inhabits, and she hates the entire universe.
- Hidden Depths: For someone as perpetually angry, nihilistic and mean-spirited as Miss Bitters, she occasionally comments on how she used to have hopes and dreams, and that the world wasn't always such a hellhole in her time. She even apparently used to love someone.
- Horrifying the Horror: She is notably intimidated enough by the Skool Principal to concede to his demands that Valentine's Day be celebrated, even though she protested it due to some unknown incident involving it.
- Humanoid Abomination: According to one source, Miss Bitters didn't come to teach, as she's always existed on that land... the Skool was simply built around her.
- Laughably Evil: Her hatred of her students is so over-the-top it becomes a source of Black Comedy.Children, your performance was miserable. Your parents will all receive phone calls instructing them to love you less now.
- Leitmotif: Her presence is frequently heralded by the sound of cicadas.
- Living Shadow: She sometimes sneaks up on people by becoming their shadow. Literally.
- Meaningful Name: Her name reflects her bitter, nihilistic attitude.
- Multiple-Choice Past: She was supposedly a fairy princess once and went into space as a kid, until the rocket imploded. Meanwhile, tie-in materials claim that she's always been where she is now, and the skool was built around her. The 15th issue of Invader Zim (Oni) has the Skoolchildren theorize more backstories for her, such as being a golem created centuries ago to enact revenge on behalf of her creator and being part of a race of bug people planning to invade Earth.
- Noodle Incident: See Multiple-Choice Past. There were apparently supposed to be even more of them, but they got cut for one reason or another.
- Only Sane Woman: She's completely aware of just how god-awful a place that Earth is in the show, and this translates into her being relentlessly bitter, cynical, nihilistic, and misanthropic because of it. She even is outraged by the fact that Valentine's Day is allowed to be celebrated after a particularly horrible, yet completely mysterious incident involving it and chocolates which resulted in them being replaced with meat products instead.
- Pet the Dog: A minor one, but in part 1 of "Tak, the Hideous New Girl", she's outraged and appalled that Valentine's Day is allowed to be celebrated, and when Dib asks her why they've replaced the tradition of giving candy with giving out meat instead, she refuses to tell him and instead says that he does not want to know, in a genuinely cautionary tone, which marks the only time in the series that she's genuinely interested in protecting the (already gone, in Dib's case) innocence of her students, rather than her being a bitter, nihilistic, old crone.
- Perpetual Frowner: She has only two expressions and moods to go with them: irritated and infuriated.
- Sadist Teacher: She's a teacher and isn't very nice to her students.
- Snake People: She's tall and thin and swirls through the air and curls around people like a boa constrictor. Rattlesnake sounds show up when she speaks or gets annoyed.
- Straw Nihilist: Played for Laughs. She often gives lectures to her students on how there's no hope for anyone and that doom is the only thing to come in the end.
- Transplant: She was Squee's teacher before becoming a character in this show.
- Weakened by the Light: She has to wear heavy, hooded robes on the one occasion we see her leave the building.
- Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Implied at times by her numerous backstories.
- Was Once a Man: One of her backstories implies that she used to be human before she became whatever she is now.
- Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Nobody pays mind to the shadowy, sinister lady who seems to be human only in terms of her appearance. Granted, she doesn't do anything harmful aside from having an incredibly bitter and cynical view of the world that she isn't afraid to try and instill in other people, children included, and insulting them.
Skool Children
Voiced by: Phil Lamarr (The Letter M), Jim Wise (Willy), Paul Greenberg (Poonchy), Janice Kawaye (Sara), Antoinette Spolar (Aki, Gretchen, Jessica, Mary, Peyoopi, and Spoo), Rosearik Rikki Simons (Chunk and Pigboy), Mo Collins (Zita), Jason Marsden (Zootch and Torque Smacky), Jhonen Vasquez (Brian, Carl and Old Kid)
"We think Dib's even crazier than normal today! Can we use one of our Crazy Cards to send him to the Crazy House for Boys?"
—Zita
The other kids in the Skool which Zim and Dib attend, which includes Miss Bitters' class. They mostly act like normal kids and have absolutely no idea that Zim's an alien.
- Aerith and Bob: From Gretchen, Rob, and Carl, to Peyoopi, Keef, and Chunk.
- All Love Is Unrequited: Gretchen seems to have a crush on Dib, though he's more interested in chasing after Zim. In "Tak, the Hideous New Girl", she gives him a plate full of heart-shaped meat, and is later seen crying when she sees him talking to Tak.
- Alpha Bitch: Jessica appears to be one. She gossips about Zim snobbily in "Bestest Friend", and subsequently refers to a group of unpopular kids sitting together at a table as "rejects". She's also snobby in the comics.
- Amusing Injuries:Zootch: Argh! My organs!
- Anime Hair: Peyoopi
◊ - Butt-Monkey: Due to having Zim as a classmate, and Miss Bitters as a teacher.
- Braces of Orthodontic Overkill: Gretchen has huge braces that visibly stick out from her mouth, so much so that she looks as though she has no lower jaw.
- Demoted to Extra: In Enter The Florpus almost all of them aren't given speaking roles except for Poonchy during a gag in the earlier part of the movie, and none of them are referred to by name. The most they do is unwittingly help Zim's plan to transport Earth into the path of the Irken Armada along with every other child on the planet.
- Depending on the Artist: Poonchy's hair is usually purple, but in the comics and Enter the Florpus, it's orange.
- The Ditz: Willy doesn't even seem to be smart enough to speak.
- Everyone Has Standards: While they won't hesitate to pick on students, they seem to mark the line at discrimination against people for how they look. Some of the children call Dib out for calling Zim an alien just for how he looks in "The Nightmare Begins" and Zita calls Dib out for hurting Pigboy's feelings in "The Frycook What Came from All That Space" when he says that they aren't pigs.
- Evil Redhead: Chunk and Rob both have red hair and aren't very nice.
- Eye-Obscuring Hat: Carl wears a red stocking cap that completely hides his eyes.
- Freaky Is Cool: Dirge evidently has this opinion of his webbed fish toes, even though he compares himself to "some kind of horrrible fish boy", offering to show Zim them, which surprisingly unsettles and repulses him.
- Hidden Depths: Poonchy is apparently a child actor. He appears in an in-universe commercial for the restaurant Bloaty's Pizza Hog.
- Irony: They call Dib crazy, but some of them act (and are) even weirder than they accuse him of being.
- Jerk Jock: Downplayed by Torque Smacky, who is a burly kid that is always shown doing curls with a weight. While he's hardly a Lovable Jock, and shoves Zim to the ground just for looking at him funny, he tends to be fairly hands off compared to the other kids in terms of bullying and is the only one among them shown to actually be capable of having a civil (albeit one-sided) conversation with Dib.
- Jerkass Has a Point: While they're all generally shown to be mean-spirited little assholes no matter the context, their ostracization of Dib isn't without some legitimate ground. From what we see of his social interactions, Dib often aggressively forces his obsession with the paranormal onto others and ignores or dismisses their own interests as being unimportant. Flashbacks to his early childhood in "Bad, Bad Rubber Piggy" show him ruining another kid's birthday party because he mistook an alien-shaped punching bag for the real thing and harassing a child who may or may not have been a bigfoot simply for looking like a monster, despite him seemingly having been just minding his own business.
- Karma Houdini: Usually get away with how they treat Dib and sometimes Zim, totally scott-free.
- Karma Houdini Warranty: That said, some episodes have them hurt or traumatized by Zim's plans which they ignore Dib's warnings of.
- Kids Are Cruel: Dib's class makes no effort to hide how much they hate him. The only ones to be exempt from this are Gretchen, Keef and a handful of recurring kids who don't pick on Dib. Even Gretchen is seen laughing at Dib in "Room With a Moose" and "Frycook What Come From All That Space."
- No Indoor Voice: Screamy, who appears in the unfinished episode "Ten Minutes to Doom."
- No Name Given: The
One-Scene Wonder student president in "The Voting of the Doomed." - The Pig-Pen: Willy is disgustingly filthy.
- Recurring Extra: They're essentially minor characters who frequently appear in scenes taking place at Skool.
- The Stoic: Torque Smacky seems indifferent to anything that doesn't involve sports or excercising, and even those don't elicit much of a reaction from him.
- Teacher's Pet: Zita is the only student who Miss Bitters seems to like.
- Took a Level in Jerkass: In the earlier episodes, while they never liked Dib or Zim, they hardly did anything worse than make minor insults to them or talk badly about them behind their backs. Later episodes have several of them cruelly mocking and physically humiliating them, to the point where Zim attempts to trap them in an alternate dimension and Dib questions if they're even worth saving in A Room with a Moose. Everyone outright refuses to sit on the side of the bus as him, because it could damage some unexplained credibility they have.Rob: If we go over [to the other side of the bus], then we'd be near you.
Jessica: That doesn't sound cool.
Morla: Do you see our dilemma? - Vocal Dissonance: In "Tak, the Hideous New Girl", a female student yells "WIENERS ROCK!" in an adult man's voice.
- Weirdness Censor: No matter how obvious it is that Zim is an alien, they are too dumb or oblivious to see it. "The Frycook What Came From All That Space" has Sizz-Lorr burst in, kidnap Zim in front of the whole class, loudly announce he's returning to outer space, and blast off with a jetpack, and they act like nothing happened.
- Younger Than They Look: Old Kid, as his name implies, is a child that somehow looks like an elderly man.
Keef
Voiced by: Danny Cooksey
An overly optimistic schoolboy with an abnormal resistance to injury, Keef is the first (and likely only) human Zim attempts to make friends with.- Ambiguously Human: Not only incredibly durable, absorbent, and unnaturally optimistic, but he also has only three fingers, the same as Irkens.
- Birds of a Feather: The unproduced "Return of Keef" reveals that he and GIR naturally get along perfectly.
- Cheerful Child: Nothing that hasn't been stated before.
- Creepy Child: Despite being genuinely harmless to everybody except for Zim, even though the only threat he poses is potentially accidentally exposing his mission, he can be surprisingly creepy, as he essentially stalks Zim in Bestest Friend after the Irken dismisses him, and does all sorts of unsettling things like breaking into his house and even repeatedly cycling by it in a very disturbing fashion straight out of a horror film.
- Determinator: Keef never seems to lose his cheery demeanor and hopeless optimism, brushing off the most gruesome injuries with a cheeky smile.
- Dumbass Has a Point: In the unreleased episode "Return of Keef", he redecorates Dib's room and gets rid of his paranormal stuff, because it was "making him sad." Considering how ninety percent of Dib's suffering comes from his obsession with hunting monsters, it's hard to argue with that.
- Eye Scream: Zim's "friendship" present. Don't worry, he was fine by the next episode.
- Fiery Redhead: To the point where he literally explodes from enthusiasm at one point.
- Genre Blind: Considering the Crapsack World he lives in, you probably wouldn't be so perpetually cheerful if you were in his place.
- Hidden Depths: In his proper debut, he paints a recreation of Madonna and Child by Giovanni Bellini (with him and Zim substituting), suggesting he's quite a skilled artist for his age. And in Issue 15 of the comics, he shows himself to be a very creative storyteller.
- Keet: A very cheery and energetic boy. His name even sounds like the word!
- Kiddie Kid: Wears a shirt with rainbows on it, uses words like "bestest" and prefers skipping over walking. While all of the Skool children are idiots, Keef is one in a very distinctly childish way.
- Made of Iron: He's inexplicably highly resistant to pain. In fact, the main reason Zim chose him to be his best friend is because he endured the greatest amount of physical torture out of the candidates for the position.
- Not only does Keef suffer no lasting injuries from having his eyes torn out and possibly having them explode shortly after, he would have survived getting doused with a liquid that explodes when in contact with happy energy had "Return of Keef" been produced.
- Major Injury Underreaction: While he reacts to having his eyes ripped out like any reasonable person would, his response to falling off a rooftop and being caught in an explosion (which is implied to be his cybernetic eyes exploding) is simply to ask the squirrel he thinks is Zim if he doesn't like waffles.
- Nice Guy: Probably the nicest kid in Skool. Unfortunately, since he's in a Sadist Show, it does not end well for him.
- The Pollyanna: Keef is always friendly and cheerful, despite the Crapsack World he lives in.
- Stepford Smiler: Implied a few times. Before he meets Zim at the Rejects' lunch table, he looks unusually downtrodden like the rest of his friends. Later, he frowns briefly when his invitations to Zim's "Party" are rejected.
- The Thing That Would Not Leave: Zim has to rip out his eyes to get him to leave him alone once they become friends. Even then, the only reason that he does is because his robotic replacements trick him into thinking that a squirrel is Zim.
- Unexplained Recovery: Despite having his eyes ripped out and replaced with robotic ones and subsequently being blown up in "Bestest Friend", Keef is back to normal in subsequent appearances.
Groyna
A schoolgirl who temporarily teams up with Dib in issue 8 of the comics to investigate the infestation of alien pants Zim has brought to earth.
- Action Girl: Only a year higher than Dib, and yet a hardened fighter against a pants invasion.
- Ambiguously Gay: Despite calling Sheather her "best friend", the way she's openly emotional about reuniting,coupled with the fact that Sheather wears a single earring, suggests there's something closer going on between them.
- Eventually confirmed as such by Eric Trueheart.
- Badass Normal: She's a human skool-kid whose able to hold her own against alien parasites and is the only one sans Dib to escape infestation.
- Butch Lesbian: Implied to be this, and displays quite a few mannerisms.
- Determinator: She survived the pants invasion long enough to reunite and embrace her friend after the Ubertrouser was destroyed.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: In an unusual turn for this universe, Groyna actually reunites with Sheather after the pants invasion is over, and the two are last seen embracing with tears of joy.
- Emotional Bruiser: Groyna is clearly weeping as she fights her pants controlled friend.
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God-Created Canon Foreigner: Groyna was supposed to appear in the cancelled episode "Pants!". When the show was eventually given a comic continuation, she made her proper debut. - Hero of Another Story: Groyna is the last survivor of Zim's alien pants invasion plan. She's wise to the pants' habits of finding prey and has even killed a few over the last several days. Of course, since this is following Dib, we don't actually get much of her side of the story.
- Huge School Girl: Groyna is built like a bodybuilder and unusually athletic for a kid from this universe.
- The Lad-ette: She states she's a year ahead of Dib and captain of the School Vooleyball team.
- One-Shot Character: Thus far, she's only ever appeared in one issue, although Eric Trueheart has expressed interest in her returning.
- Only Sane Man: In contrast to the usually brainless masses who line up for whatever insidious fad Zim's promoting, Groyna resists all the way and even calls the alien pants for what they are.
- Tomboy with a Girly Streak: She is a female jock with a Brawn Hilda-ish appearance and an openly emotional personality, as seen by how she cries under stress and lovingly embraces her best friend once the two of them are reunited.
