Gretchen

Gretchen
Homeworld	Earth
Gender	Female
Hair Color	Purple
Voice Actor	Antoinette Spolar

Gretchen is a rejected girl that attends Skool and appears frequently. She is voiced by Antoinette Spolar.

Appearance

Gretchen is a girl with purple hair pulled back into three short ponytails. She has an overbite, and braces. She wears a short sleeved striped orange and purple dress, and a darker purple backpack.

She has a quite different outfit in Issue 15 of the comic series, instead wearing an orange sweater with a picture of a pumpkin on the chest, over what appears to be a green striped dress, as well as a large necklace, with no backpack. Oddly, this is only the case for this one issue, as her later appearances have her back in her regular clothing from the show.

Personality

Gretchen is dorky, superstitious, and genuinely kind-hearted. She has a crush on Dib, which he is blissfully unaware of, and barely acknowledges her at all. She is desperate for friends, and like Zim, Dib, Keef, and the other Reject kids, is outcasted from the other Skoolchildren. She often finds herself in incredibly awkward situations, most notably her adventures throughout Lice with Countess von Verminstrasser.

Role in Invader Zim

Gretchen is one of the more prominent of the children from Skool. She has had quite a few speaking roles compared to the other children, and is arguably the fourth most prominent after Keef, Poonchy, and Brian, before Zita, Jessica and Sara.

She serves her first major role in the episode "Bestest Friend", where she is tortured and experimented on by Zim as a series of tests to prove herself capable of a friendship with him. She, along with Melvin, lost to Keef. She appears again later in the episode, with Dirge, hesitant to enter Zim's house.

She has an even larger role in "Lice", where she repeatedly scratches her head, and makes inane comments while being dragged around by Countess von Verminstrasser, during an outbreak of lice.

She also appears in the Invader Zim Halloween special, the "Halloween Spectacular of Spooky Doom". She is seen trick-or-treating with the other Skoolchildren, and later appears with her Halloweenies counterpart, a grotesque monster with large mouth and pointed teeth, during Nightmare Bitters' violent escape from Dib's head.

In "Tak: The Hideous New Girl", it is heavily implied that she has a crush on Dib. She gives him a large stack of heart-shaped steaks for Valentine's Day, and she is later seen weeping when she sees him talking with Tak.

She would've played a more pivotal role in "Mopiness of Doom", although mute, being violently swung around by her headpiece by Zim.

Years later, she makes her debut, and serves an even larger role than her previous appearances, in Issue 15 of the Invader Zim comic series. She is depicted telling what she claims may be the origin of Ms. Bitters to the rest of her class. She believes Ms. Bitters is a super smart insect queen that commands other insects to gather information on humans to discover their weaknesses and carry out evil plans. This theory is quite possibly true, as Poonchy is horrified to see a "Bitters Bug" (like the ones Gretchen had described) crawling on the ceiling. The theory is also similar to Zim's role as an Invader, being an insectoid/humanoid who observes the humans and uses the information gathered to hatch a variety of evil schemes as attempts to take over the earth.

Gretchen has since appeared as a background character in a few other issues of the comic.

Appearances

Invader Zim (TV series)

Notable Roles

• Bestest Friend
• Dark Harvest
• Lice
• Halloween Spectacular of Spooky Doom
• Tak: The Hideous New Girl
• Mopiness of Doom (Unfinished)

Invader Zim (comic series)

• Issue 15
• Issue 17
• Issue 19

Trivia

• Like Zita, she's very popular among fans and has been featured in many fan fictions and pieces of fan art. Oftentimes she is paired with Dib, and occasionally Invader Skoodge.