why are IZ ship names so weird? just making this cus apparently some people don’t know 👍
IZ ship name thingys aren’t necessarily always romance, just the relation the characters have to eachother
they’re formatted “_a_e/f/r” with _ being the first letters of the characters name, for more than two people it’s normally _a_a_e/f/r OR __a_e/f/r (for example praz_ or zadak_), also characters with two words as names have the first letter of both words put in (PM and LN being the most common)
e = enemies
f = friendship
r = romance
simple enough
but why is it like that?
on one of the older fansites (rwam i believe but i may be wrong) OCs were banned from fics so stuff like “zib” or “dim” would be taken down cus they sounded to much like OCs (which is kinda funny now cus zib is a canon character)
thus the _a_e/f/r came into play to still indicate the ship without being taken down, even when the site died the shipping convention stayed
“some people” aka me when i first joined the fandom
Og fan here but I wasnt big into the greater fandom culture as a kid, but dabbled and read a fanfic or two.
I always assumed it was because the main cast had such short (and strange) names that crafting a merged together ship name was extremely hard and would make differentiating between ships difficult. Also, if I saw 'zib' anywhere back then it was a fan kid instead of a ship name.
Also an old school fan, was consuming and posting IZ fanfic by summer 2002; was it because a fansite that banned mashup names? Because:
1) That doesn't explain why we didn't adopt the pretty-ubiquitous "name/name" slash that most other Western fandoms use to denote ships. Even on sites like FFnet (which had a massive, MASSIVE Invader Zim fic database) where, in the early 00s, most punctuation got stripped from summaries and you might not even have the option to use a slash, something like "ZimTak" is more obvious & clear without an explanation than "ZATR", and FFnet wouldn't be subjected to that "no OCs" pressure; and
2) I saw at least one other fandom briefly using the same format: a mixed-fandom fansite I no longer remember the name of that used the format for Pokémon, AAMR for Ash And Misty Romance and JAJR for Jessie And James Romance; I don't think this system was very popular compared to Pokémon's "------shipping" name format but somebody was out there using it, which suggests there might have been a brief window when other fandoms were using it as well and Invader Zim was just the only one where it stuck.
And if other fandoms were using it, which ones and for how long? Did they learn it from Invader Zim fandom; or did it first originate somewhere else, and IZ was just one of many fandoms that picked it up and the last major one today that's still using it?









