Dib (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
pronetoprobing) wrote2013-01-19 12:08 pm
pronetoprobing) wrote2013-01-19 12:08 pm
Angelii Essay
In introduction
This is a story about change.
It's also a story about friendship, acceptance, understanding, patience, hysteria, aliens, and organ removal.
But mainly it's about one kid who found a family.
A year ago, Dib entered Nautilus a paranoid, hysterical, invasive boy who couldn't Bend for months, who had little to no regard for the privacy of others, who yelled and exaggerated and tried to take on the world by himself, never trusting in the good of other people and never willing to extend a hand out to those who were truly in need of it.
This is his coming of age story.
On pride and teamwork
One of Dib's biggest changes is his evolution from working as an individual and loner to learning how to work as part of a greater team. Key to Dib's characterization prior to entering Nautilus is how absolutely alone in the universe he is: his family ignores him, his classmates hate him, and the one person to pay him any sort of attention is his mortal enemy. When solving problems, Dib has always been very much on his own and has learned to be self-reliant and severely independent. Other people, even his own family, can't be relied on or trusted enough to help when push comes to shove, and while he hadn't yet become jaded over this, there was a resigned, sullen acceptance within Dib that knew that he was on his own.
Speaking to his pride, in Dib's world every adult he's encountered - with the two exceptions being his teacher and his father - is an absolute moron who constantly underestimates his ability and constantly gets in his way of saving the world. This was an early stereotype he struggled with dismissing on his first arriving in Nautilus, where not only were the adults smart and capable, they actually worked together as a group to solve things (a completely alien concept to the stand-alone Dib). When problems struck in Dib's early days of Nautilus, he often felt, as usual, that only he had the capacity to stop it and that the adults (who were rightfully concerned he would get hurt) were only standing in his way because they didn't understand him. He was proud and a little cocky because he'd spent so much time being the only intelligent person in a universe of morons that he didn't often take the time to value the input of other people.
Gradually, Dib began to come around to the idea that problems in Nautilus are far more easily solved as a group. Bending, especially, proved to him that a group working together is stronger than any individual, no matter how strong or smart that individual might be. His pride too took a few massive hits, especially during the days of the Dark Aeon where he was forced to come to grips with the idea that he could no longer be a one-man army and was in fact actually hurting the people around him by thinking he could take it on by himself. Though most of Dib's pre-Nautilus one-man shows were not a result of pride and more the fact that he really is the only person capable of taking down threats in his own world, there was still a small, hard nugget of vanity in him that was gradually dispelled by his growing realization that teamwork was far more valuable a tool than he'd ever realized.
Altogether, Dib has surrendered pride and individual importance and the notion of ever acting alone in a bad situation and has instead embraced the power of the group protectorate.
On paranoia and trust
Dib has always been extremely and absolutely paranoid.
A worst-case-scenario survivalist, Dib has seen bad situations hit catastrophic levels of horror and as such has always been on the lookout for the next big threat, oftentimes blowing a situation wildly out of proportion in his fervor to destroy threats before they have a chance to happen. Every odd creature, every little thing out of place, every story that doesn't quite match up is grounds for suspicion, investigation, stalking, and exposure. And while this behavior was somewhat justified given the context of his own crapsack world, in Nautilus it led only to a series of misunderstandings, hurt feelings, and countless invasions of privacy. From stalking his housemates to leading a presentation against his alien nemesis to believing that every new Wakened needed to be thoroughly screened and vetted, Dib overall had never made a good first impression on people due to his extreme paranoia.
It's taken a year, but Dib eventually had to grow to learn that not every strange, odd creature was going to turn out to be a world-destroying nutjob and through trial and error learn that his behavior was rude, hurtful, and downright nasty and invasive. Allowing people to keep their secrets and ceasing his pre-emptive strikes against perceived or imagined threats significantly cut down his conflicts, most of which were manufactured by his own paranoia. In return, Dib was rewarded by being able to watch those he had trusted manifest not into horrible, harmful monsters, but some of his closest friends.
Jumping back to his new-found appreciation of the idea of teamwork, Dib in learning to be part of a team had to also learn how to trust that team. Being alone and individual for so long and knowing that every adult in his life was a disappointment waiting to happen, it took a considerably longer time for Dib to trust not only in his own family members but also to give the new Wakened - the strangers - the benefit of the doubt. Trusting new people and giving them the chance to make or break it without treating them like criminals first and good citizens only after they'd proved themselves was a monumental shift in philosophy, and helped to turn Dib from a pessimist into a social optimist. With the people he did know, Dib had to give into the idea that sometimes there were people who did know what was better for him than he did himself, and accept a loss of freedom for the price of keeping the household peace.
Trusting others is ultimately a sacrifice of autonomy and preparedness for Dib, but in the end led to stronger, better friendships and a tighter, happier family.
On mortality and immortality
Despite the very real day to day dangers Dib constantly faced down in his world, the threat of actual, real death had never really sunk in. Dib is eleven years old, and often had that perceived idea of invincibility that most children have: no matter what he does, he knows that somehow, in some way, he won't really suffer permanent injury or death. Even when he does actually die in series, it's fixed within the course of a single day and he's none the worse for it. Dib, who's actually had his DNA turned into literal bologna, has never really had to face the serious concept that one day, he will die.
Ultimately that changed in Nautilus when back in the beginning of the year he discovered the unhappy realization that his organs were slowly falling to pieces. For someone who regularly scales up the sides of buildings and puts his body through hell on a day to day basis, facing actual physical limitations and realizing he can no longer push himself as hard as he used to was a very real and terrifying concept. For the first time in his life, Dib felt the conscious realization that his abilities were capped and there was actually a ceiling he could hit in terms of how far he could make himself stretch to reach his goals. Facing the idea that he had limited physical prowess forced Dib to slow down and take appreciation of the brevity of life and the inevitability of one's eventual death, which is a heavy concept to grasp for an eleven-year-old. The illusion of youthful invulnerability was permanently shattered, which ultimately led Dib to greater appreciate life, now that he knew he could not always have enough of it.
But if his organ failure led to his acceptance of his own mortality, the idea of people coming back from the dead in Nautilus gave him a greater appreciation of how he would spend the incredible amount of time spread out before him, even past his own (likely repeating) deaths awaiting him in the future. Since death was no longer a barrier and in all likelihood as a Wakened Dib would live much longer than his organs wanted to dictate, he had to come to terms with the idea that the friends he made in Nautilus were likely going to be people he was planning to spend eternity with. Petty fights and squabbles seem much less important given the enormous amount of time spread out in front of him, and led Dib to learn that some things were just not worth fighting over: what was an argument over who forgot to cook breakfast given the idea that these were the people he would be sharing the universe with?
Through Nautilus and his own limitations Dib grew to have a greater understanding of both mortality and immortality, ultimately making him slow down and appreciate the time given to him; something he had always been too frantic to consider before.
On calmness and peace of mind
Dib is frantic.
Constantly in motion, Dib has always run his life at a breakneck speed, fast-paced and rarely slowing down to enjoy the moment or to stop to consider alternatives. Well-deserving of Caesar's nickname for him - monito, or little monkey - Dib is always moving and always active. Despite his brains, Dib for the longest time was emotionally driven and was often led to commit instant knee-jerk reactions, scared of running out of time in which to act. Jumping to conclusions is something that Dib did extremely often, more often than not due to his habit of needing to act quickly rather than smartly.
His year in Nautilus most often reflects a change in pace for Dib. Coupled with his forced need to slow things down for the sake of his decaying body, at the same time Dib has learned how to become more patient, more thoughtful, and more inclined to think things through. He no longer rushes into danger heedless of the threat to himself and while still occasionally a little frantic, is not known to jump down the throats of newly Wakened any longer.
Altogether Dib has become much more zen, realizing his small but significant place in the universe and the importance of slowing down to appreciate the moment instead of haphazardly jumping from one adventure to the next.
On loss and the inevitability of time
In addition to his own immortality, Dib had to learn how to deal with the inevitable losses that come with living a much longer, more involved life. In his own world, where status quo is god and he and his nemesis can bounce back from ridiculous amounts of injury, having to face real, sustained loss was a challenge and a struggle for a long time. Despite the fact that those who die return within days, Dib still not only took death of his Nautilus family extremely heavily, but was proud enough and clingy enough to disregard the consequences of death and try to resurrect the fallen for his own selfish, emotional needs. Learning how to let go and accept that some people will and do die is something that Dib has struggled with, eventually figuring out how to come to peace with the inevitability and inescapability of death.
He learned to cope with loss not only through the deaths of family members but also with the more permanent concept of people he loved falling back to Sleep. Here, there was no immediate cause, nothing he could do to make Nautilus safer, no lesson he could learn in order to prevent others from falling Asleep; such is just the mysterious ways of Nautilus. This too was a struggle to overcome, and Dib briefly battled denial before accepting that there were just some mysteries in the universe that he couldn't solve, and he'd have to learn to be okay with.
So over a course of a year and as a central witness to both character death and other Wakened falling back to Sleep, Dib for the most part has begun to understand the consequences of a long life and the importance of making the most with his family with the finite amount of time he has.
On alienation and empathy
Dib was not an empathetic person when he first arrived in Nautilus. Obsessed with hunting down and exposing his alien nemesis, he made a target of people like Danny early on and cared little of how his points of paranormal interest felt about being stalked. His investigation tendencies terrorized the residents of Holiday House, leading to early instances of alienation between him and Rex, Six, and Danny, all of whom rightfully felt their privacy invaded. He was rude, he was vastly uncaring of the consequences of alienating those around him, and he was very "the ends justify the means."
Over the course of his year in Nautilus, Dib's begun to understand the importance of empathy over scientific detachment, and has striven to make amends to those he's wrongfully hurt in the name of paranormal studies. In the words of the movie Harvey, a person can either be smart, or pleasant. For the entirety of his young life, Dib was smart. Only upon reaching Nautilus did he discover that he was much, much happier being pleasant. He didn't have to try to prove his intelligence at the cost of his friends and he didn't need to be the smartest person in the room any longer; not when being nice and empathetic was so much more rewarding.
Not only is Dib far more empathetic and tolerant to those who he previously hunted down, but he maintains a special place in his heart for the outcasts of Nautilus, partially in order to make up for past transgressions but mainly due to a kinship felt for those who are unprotected and alone. Two of Dib's more interesting friendships have to do with the arguably villainous characters of Megamind and Pitch Black, and the reason Dib attached himself so quickly to these two is that he recognized himself in how alienated they were from other people. Dib was never a recipient of anyone else's empathy in his own world and grew bitter and miserable and stoic as a result, which was never something he wanted to happen to other people. He knows by now that he had a raw deal in his world, and akin to his desire to never let others visit his world is also the desire to protect the Wakened in Nautilus from experiencing the heartache he himself had grown up with all his life.
Showing deliberate kindness in the way he was never treated until Nautilus is Dib's way of both accepting what had happened to him as well as taking his own experiences and making sure it wouldn't happen to others again.
On leadership
If in the earlier half of his stay in Nautilus Dib had sacrificed his individuality to learn to become a member of a team, the later half absolutely saw his rise to learn how to become a leader of said team, culminating in his handling of Pitch's takeover. Often in his pre-Nautilus days, Dib would struggle to unite his fellow humans against a very real threat, only to be disappointed in his inability to rally the troops. There were several reasons why this was - humans are morons is one of the chief ones - but it can also be boiled down to a lack of respect. Dib very rarely respected other people he tried to corral, and gave them no reason in return to respect him. He was loud, he was obnoxious, and he was eleven; these are not the typical traits one looks for in a leader. Despite having a very good plan more often than not, Dib could never quite get others to listen to him and therefore never made a very good leader.
Over time spent in Nautilus, Dib began to unconsciously absorb leadership traits through other changes in his life. He became calmer, more apt to thinking and reasoning things out rather than immediately jump on a soapbox. His encounters with his own mortality made him more thoughtful, more conscious, and forced him to think things through rather than face the ultimate price. His newfound trust in others led him to respect other people more, even the people who disagreed with him who might have had valid points to offer. And despite his age, Dib learned to conduct himself in a more mature and adult manner, pushing past the barrier of his youth and using his words to convince the people around him that his thoughts were worth listening to.
All these attributes came in handy when a crisis actually hit. For the first time, Dib was able to not only organize his thoughts into a cohesive plan, but to deliver that plan and get others to work together to carry it out. Whereas before Dib's determination and intelligence were not enough to help others to bind together into a team, a year in Nautilus helped him to develop the social and emotional tools needed to become an effective, coherent, and respected leader.
On Bending
For his first eight months in Nautilus, Dib could not Bend. While Bending itself is not an actual benchmark for legitimate change, it served as a kind of emotional thermometer for how Dib progressed through his gradual maturation. Bending takes several key factors: concentration, change, and time. While Dib had plenty of time, concentration took considerably longer to master given how much of a frantic spazz he was upon first arriving; activities that took longer than a minute were a struggle to keep his attention in the fast-paced world of Nautilus. But the main reason why Dib took so long to learn how to Bend - and Bend properly - was because he was so slow to personal introspection.
The strange and unusual are Dib's bread and butter; whereas most people experience their first real flips in philosophy upon being forced to confront the reality of what Nautilus is and what sort of people exist inside of it, Dib as a hunter of paranormal creatures was entirely comfortable with the concept of alternate dimensions, ghosts, and aliens. Nothing in or about Nautilus really changed his personal outlook, and his change could not come from outside stimuli because nothing the city conjured up could surprise him.
Dib only learned to Bend when he understood and accepted his own past and the limitations and various failures in it. More than that, instead of pushing down and burying what was hurting him (his father's creation of him), Dib let out the hurt and stopped repressing, becoming better able to express what injured him and becoming a healthier, better person for it.
On self-possession and conquering fear
Dib currently has a nightmare world existing inside his head.
The reason for this is mainly because it was originally his way of coping with all the horrible things that were happening to him in his world. Whenever an adult in his life disappointed him, whenever he was ridiculed, whenever he failed or was placed in one horrible situation after another, Dib took all of that depression and terror and anger and bottled it up inside a small area of space inside his head, to be pushed down and ignored. He never quite learned how to cope with all the bad things in his life other than ignoring them, and had never fully faced his fears head-on.
As he developed and changed in Nautilus, so too did Dib's fears change. He wasn't scared any longer about teachers or parents or the world being taken over by aliens; instead, Dib was faced with more meaningful, worrisome fears of the safety of his family and of Nautilus, and of his failures to protect them. Realizing that there was nothing to be done about fears like these, Dib stopped putting them into his headspace and instead made a monumental effort to push through them: acknowledging they existed, accepting that they scared him, and then working to overcome them through practice and patience.
While the nightmare world in his head still exists, filled with his old childhood fears, Dib is now self-possessed enough to let them out one by one and face them down. His Bending is sporadic and strange because he is no longer repressing parts of his personality and instead learning how to react and control himself and become much more dynamic and expressive, dealing with his feelings in a positive and proactive manner that ultimately paves the way into adulthood.
On family
All of these listed changes are owed to one key component of Dib's life: his family.
Dib had a very limited idea of what family meant to him in his home world. For want of a better word, he "lived" with his father and little sister but the three basically acted as independent spheres with only casual influence in each other's lives. Occasionally one or the other would interact just long enough to have some sort of meaning to the other two, but mainly Dib's family existed in independent realms, much more like roommates than family. More often than not, Dib's family was a hinderance than a help, and there was little respect owed between them; Dib was an embarrassment best ignored, and his father and sister could only occasionally be relied on to assist, and it was never a sure thing.
Compare this to the family Dib has now, and has had ever since his very first day in Nautilus when he was invited into the Holiday house. Having never experienced love and trust on any sort of level as he has had with Dr. Holiday, Caesar, and the rest, Dib over the past year has come to realize that a family is far, far more than people who share a habitat. Far more bound together, the family is a cohesive team, more of a wolf pack with incredibly strong urges to protect and teach those inside of it. To Dib, a family was no longer just someone who shared the same DNA sequence, but a tightly-bound collection of trusted and loved individuals that no matter what they were or where they came from, were worth every sacrifice to protect.
As he began to understand both how his father had emotionally failed him and how a family was supposed to act and operate, Dib began to redefine who he himself was in terms of what he meant to other people. No longer was it acceptable to make irresponsible decisions under the belief that Dib was the only thing he had to lose; now he was part of something much greater, and needed to learn how to adjust accordingly.
Ultimately, Dib's family became to him a safe harbor in a sea of adversity, a place to run to when he needed help and knew he would get it; something he had never before experienced. In this safe spot where he could feel protected, wanted, and loved, Dib discovered the self-confidence and determination he needed to change himself for the better.
In conclusion
Dib's journey through Nautilus hasn't been a smooth one, and his development mainly occurred in jerky leaps and bounds, peppered at times with some significant steps backwards. Ultimately, his motivations have grown more complex over time; no longer is it okay to chase after the mysteries of the universe without first stopping to think about the impact and meaning of the chase. Over time, Dib has progressed from a research-absorbed paranoid hyperactive invasive child with no regard for privacy into a reasoning, logical moral authority tempered with ideas of all-encompassing unconditional acceptance towards others.
Right now he sits on the cusp between childhood and adulthood, ready to take the plunge into the next phase of his life. His characterization has completely tempered out and matured into something that I think Nautilus can be proud of, while at the same time staying true to who he is at heart. To put it succinctly, Dib over the course of his year in Nautilus has learned to change the worst parts of himself while keeping the best, and has evolved from a self-involved child into a true citizen of Nautilus.
And that's basically why I think he should Ascend.
This is a story about change.
It's also a story about friendship, acceptance, understanding, patience, hysteria, aliens, and organ removal.
But mainly it's about one kid who found a family.
A year ago, Dib entered Nautilus a paranoid, hysterical, invasive boy who couldn't Bend for months, who had little to no regard for the privacy of others, who yelled and exaggerated and tried to take on the world by himself, never trusting in the good of other people and never willing to extend a hand out to those who were truly in need of it.
This is his coming of age story.
On pride and teamwork
One of Dib's biggest changes is his evolution from working as an individual and loner to learning how to work as part of a greater team. Key to Dib's characterization prior to entering Nautilus is how absolutely alone in the universe he is: his family ignores him, his classmates hate him, and the one person to pay him any sort of attention is his mortal enemy. When solving problems, Dib has always been very much on his own and has learned to be self-reliant and severely independent. Other people, even his own family, can't be relied on or trusted enough to help when push comes to shove, and while he hadn't yet become jaded over this, there was a resigned, sullen acceptance within Dib that knew that he was on his own.
Speaking to his pride, in Dib's world every adult he's encountered - with the two exceptions being his teacher and his father - is an absolute moron who constantly underestimates his ability and constantly gets in his way of saving the world. This was an early stereotype he struggled with dismissing on his first arriving in Nautilus, where not only were the adults smart and capable, they actually worked together as a group to solve things (a completely alien concept to the stand-alone Dib). When problems struck in Dib's early days of Nautilus, he often felt, as usual, that only he had the capacity to stop it and that the adults (who were rightfully concerned he would get hurt) were only standing in his way because they didn't understand him. He was proud and a little cocky because he'd spent so much time being the only intelligent person in a universe of morons that he didn't often take the time to value the input of other people.
Gradually, Dib began to come around to the idea that problems in Nautilus are far more easily solved as a group. Bending, especially, proved to him that a group working together is stronger than any individual, no matter how strong or smart that individual might be. His pride too took a few massive hits, especially during the days of the Dark Aeon where he was forced to come to grips with the idea that he could no longer be a one-man army and was in fact actually hurting the people around him by thinking he could take it on by himself. Though most of Dib's pre-Nautilus one-man shows were not a result of pride and more the fact that he really is the only person capable of taking down threats in his own world, there was still a small, hard nugget of vanity in him that was gradually dispelled by his growing realization that teamwork was far more valuable a tool than he'd ever realized.
Altogether, Dib has surrendered pride and individual importance and the notion of ever acting alone in a bad situation and has instead embraced the power of the group protectorate.
On paranoia and trust
Dib has always been extremely and absolutely paranoid.
A worst-case-scenario survivalist, Dib has seen bad situations hit catastrophic levels of horror and as such has always been on the lookout for the next big threat, oftentimes blowing a situation wildly out of proportion in his fervor to destroy threats before they have a chance to happen. Every odd creature, every little thing out of place, every story that doesn't quite match up is grounds for suspicion, investigation, stalking, and exposure. And while this behavior was somewhat justified given the context of his own crapsack world, in Nautilus it led only to a series of misunderstandings, hurt feelings, and countless invasions of privacy. From stalking his housemates to leading a presentation against his alien nemesis to believing that every new Wakened needed to be thoroughly screened and vetted, Dib overall had never made a good first impression on people due to his extreme paranoia.
It's taken a year, but Dib eventually had to grow to learn that not every strange, odd creature was going to turn out to be a world-destroying nutjob and through trial and error learn that his behavior was rude, hurtful, and downright nasty and invasive. Allowing people to keep their secrets and ceasing his pre-emptive strikes against perceived or imagined threats significantly cut down his conflicts, most of which were manufactured by his own paranoia. In return, Dib was rewarded by being able to watch those he had trusted manifest not into horrible, harmful monsters, but some of his closest friends.
Jumping back to his new-found appreciation of the idea of teamwork, Dib in learning to be part of a team had to also learn how to trust that team. Being alone and individual for so long and knowing that every adult in his life was a disappointment waiting to happen, it took a considerably longer time for Dib to trust not only in his own family members but also to give the new Wakened - the strangers - the benefit of the doubt. Trusting new people and giving them the chance to make or break it without treating them like criminals first and good citizens only after they'd proved themselves was a monumental shift in philosophy, and helped to turn Dib from a pessimist into a social optimist. With the people he did know, Dib had to give into the idea that sometimes there were people who did know what was better for him than he did himself, and accept a loss of freedom for the price of keeping the household peace.
Trusting others is ultimately a sacrifice of autonomy and preparedness for Dib, but in the end led to stronger, better friendships and a tighter, happier family.
On mortality and immortality
Despite the very real day to day dangers Dib constantly faced down in his world, the threat of actual, real death had never really sunk in. Dib is eleven years old, and often had that perceived idea of invincibility that most children have: no matter what he does, he knows that somehow, in some way, he won't really suffer permanent injury or death. Even when he does actually die in series, it's fixed within the course of a single day and he's none the worse for it. Dib, who's actually had his DNA turned into literal bologna, has never really had to face the serious concept that one day, he will die.
Ultimately that changed in Nautilus when back in the beginning of the year he discovered the unhappy realization that his organs were slowly falling to pieces. For someone who regularly scales up the sides of buildings and puts his body through hell on a day to day basis, facing actual physical limitations and realizing he can no longer push himself as hard as he used to was a very real and terrifying concept. For the first time in his life, Dib felt the conscious realization that his abilities were capped and there was actually a ceiling he could hit in terms of how far he could make himself stretch to reach his goals. Facing the idea that he had limited physical prowess forced Dib to slow down and take appreciation of the brevity of life and the inevitability of one's eventual death, which is a heavy concept to grasp for an eleven-year-old. The illusion of youthful invulnerability was permanently shattered, which ultimately led Dib to greater appreciate life, now that he knew he could not always have enough of it.
But if his organ failure led to his acceptance of his own mortality, the idea of people coming back from the dead in Nautilus gave him a greater appreciation of how he would spend the incredible amount of time spread out before him, even past his own (likely repeating) deaths awaiting him in the future. Since death was no longer a barrier and in all likelihood as a Wakened Dib would live much longer than his organs wanted to dictate, he had to come to terms with the idea that the friends he made in Nautilus were likely going to be people he was planning to spend eternity with. Petty fights and squabbles seem much less important given the enormous amount of time spread out in front of him, and led Dib to learn that some things were just not worth fighting over: what was an argument over who forgot to cook breakfast given the idea that these were the people he would be sharing the universe with?
Through Nautilus and his own limitations Dib grew to have a greater understanding of both mortality and immortality, ultimately making him slow down and appreciate the time given to him; something he had always been too frantic to consider before.
On calmness and peace of mind
Dib is frantic.
Constantly in motion, Dib has always run his life at a breakneck speed, fast-paced and rarely slowing down to enjoy the moment or to stop to consider alternatives. Well-deserving of Caesar's nickname for him - monito, or little monkey - Dib is always moving and always active. Despite his brains, Dib for the longest time was emotionally driven and was often led to commit instant knee-jerk reactions, scared of running out of time in which to act. Jumping to conclusions is something that Dib did extremely often, more often than not due to his habit of needing to act quickly rather than smartly.
His year in Nautilus most often reflects a change in pace for Dib. Coupled with his forced need to slow things down for the sake of his decaying body, at the same time Dib has learned how to become more patient, more thoughtful, and more inclined to think things through. He no longer rushes into danger heedless of the threat to himself and while still occasionally a little frantic, is not known to jump down the throats of newly Wakened any longer.
Altogether Dib has become much more zen, realizing his small but significant place in the universe and the importance of slowing down to appreciate the moment instead of haphazardly jumping from one adventure to the next.
On loss and the inevitability of time
In addition to his own immortality, Dib had to learn how to deal with the inevitable losses that come with living a much longer, more involved life. In his own world, where status quo is god and he and his nemesis can bounce back from ridiculous amounts of injury, having to face real, sustained loss was a challenge and a struggle for a long time. Despite the fact that those who die return within days, Dib still not only took death of his Nautilus family extremely heavily, but was proud enough and clingy enough to disregard the consequences of death and try to resurrect the fallen for his own selfish, emotional needs. Learning how to let go and accept that some people will and do die is something that Dib has struggled with, eventually figuring out how to come to peace with the inevitability and inescapability of death.
He learned to cope with loss not only through the deaths of family members but also with the more permanent concept of people he loved falling back to Sleep. Here, there was no immediate cause, nothing he could do to make Nautilus safer, no lesson he could learn in order to prevent others from falling Asleep; such is just the mysterious ways of Nautilus. This too was a struggle to overcome, and Dib briefly battled denial before accepting that there were just some mysteries in the universe that he couldn't solve, and he'd have to learn to be okay with.
So over a course of a year and as a central witness to both character death and other Wakened falling back to Sleep, Dib for the most part has begun to understand the consequences of a long life and the importance of making the most with his family with the finite amount of time he has.
On alienation and empathy
Dib was not an empathetic person when he first arrived in Nautilus. Obsessed with hunting down and exposing his alien nemesis, he made a target of people like Danny early on and cared little of how his points of paranormal interest felt about being stalked. His investigation tendencies terrorized the residents of Holiday House, leading to early instances of alienation between him and Rex, Six, and Danny, all of whom rightfully felt their privacy invaded. He was rude, he was vastly uncaring of the consequences of alienating those around him, and he was very "the ends justify the means."
Over the course of his year in Nautilus, Dib's begun to understand the importance of empathy over scientific detachment, and has striven to make amends to those he's wrongfully hurt in the name of paranormal studies. In the words of the movie Harvey, a person can either be smart, or pleasant. For the entirety of his young life, Dib was smart. Only upon reaching Nautilus did he discover that he was much, much happier being pleasant. He didn't have to try to prove his intelligence at the cost of his friends and he didn't need to be the smartest person in the room any longer; not when being nice and empathetic was so much more rewarding.
Not only is Dib far more empathetic and tolerant to those who he previously hunted down, but he maintains a special place in his heart for the outcasts of Nautilus, partially in order to make up for past transgressions but mainly due to a kinship felt for those who are unprotected and alone. Two of Dib's more interesting friendships have to do with the arguably villainous characters of Megamind and Pitch Black, and the reason Dib attached himself so quickly to these two is that he recognized himself in how alienated they were from other people. Dib was never a recipient of anyone else's empathy in his own world and grew bitter and miserable and stoic as a result, which was never something he wanted to happen to other people. He knows by now that he had a raw deal in his world, and akin to his desire to never let others visit his world is also the desire to protect the Wakened in Nautilus from experiencing the heartache he himself had grown up with all his life.
Showing deliberate kindness in the way he was never treated until Nautilus is Dib's way of both accepting what had happened to him as well as taking his own experiences and making sure it wouldn't happen to others again.
On leadership
If in the earlier half of his stay in Nautilus Dib had sacrificed his individuality to learn to become a member of a team, the later half absolutely saw his rise to learn how to become a leader of said team, culminating in his handling of Pitch's takeover. Often in his pre-Nautilus days, Dib would struggle to unite his fellow humans against a very real threat, only to be disappointed in his inability to rally the troops. There were several reasons why this was - humans are morons is one of the chief ones - but it can also be boiled down to a lack of respect. Dib very rarely respected other people he tried to corral, and gave them no reason in return to respect him. He was loud, he was obnoxious, and he was eleven; these are not the typical traits one looks for in a leader. Despite having a very good plan more often than not, Dib could never quite get others to listen to him and therefore never made a very good leader.
Over time spent in Nautilus, Dib began to unconsciously absorb leadership traits through other changes in his life. He became calmer, more apt to thinking and reasoning things out rather than immediately jump on a soapbox. His encounters with his own mortality made him more thoughtful, more conscious, and forced him to think things through rather than face the ultimate price. His newfound trust in others led him to respect other people more, even the people who disagreed with him who might have had valid points to offer. And despite his age, Dib learned to conduct himself in a more mature and adult manner, pushing past the barrier of his youth and using his words to convince the people around him that his thoughts were worth listening to.
All these attributes came in handy when a crisis actually hit. For the first time, Dib was able to not only organize his thoughts into a cohesive plan, but to deliver that plan and get others to work together to carry it out. Whereas before Dib's determination and intelligence were not enough to help others to bind together into a team, a year in Nautilus helped him to develop the social and emotional tools needed to become an effective, coherent, and respected leader.
On Bending
For his first eight months in Nautilus, Dib could not Bend. While Bending itself is not an actual benchmark for legitimate change, it served as a kind of emotional thermometer for how Dib progressed through his gradual maturation. Bending takes several key factors: concentration, change, and time. While Dib had plenty of time, concentration took considerably longer to master given how much of a frantic spazz he was upon first arriving; activities that took longer than a minute were a struggle to keep his attention in the fast-paced world of Nautilus. But the main reason why Dib took so long to learn how to Bend - and Bend properly - was because he was so slow to personal introspection.
The strange and unusual are Dib's bread and butter; whereas most people experience their first real flips in philosophy upon being forced to confront the reality of what Nautilus is and what sort of people exist inside of it, Dib as a hunter of paranormal creatures was entirely comfortable with the concept of alternate dimensions, ghosts, and aliens. Nothing in or about Nautilus really changed his personal outlook, and his change could not come from outside stimuli because nothing the city conjured up could surprise him.
Dib only learned to Bend when he understood and accepted his own past and the limitations and various failures in it. More than that, instead of pushing down and burying what was hurting him (his father's creation of him), Dib let out the hurt and stopped repressing, becoming better able to express what injured him and becoming a healthier, better person for it.
On self-possession and conquering fear
Dib currently has a nightmare world existing inside his head.
The reason for this is mainly because it was originally his way of coping with all the horrible things that were happening to him in his world. Whenever an adult in his life disappointed him, whenever he was ridiculed, whenever he failed or was placed in one horrible situation after another, Dib took all of that depression and terror and anger and bottled it up inside a small area of space inside his head, to be pushed down and ignored. He never quite learned how to cope with all the bad things in his life other than ignoring them, and had never fully faced his fears head-on.
As he developed and changed in Nautilus, so too did Dib's fears change. He wasn't scared any longer about teachers or parents or the world being taken over by aliens; instead, Dib was faced with more meaningful, worrisome fears of the safety of his family and of Nautilus, and of his failures to protect them. Realizing that there was nothing to be done about fears like these, Dib stopped putting them into his headspace and instead made a monumental effort to push through them: acknowledging they existed, accepting that they scared him, and then working to overcome them through practice and patience.
While the nightmare world in his head still exists, filled with his old childhood fears, Dib is now self-possessed enough to let them out one by one and face them down. His Bending is sporadic and strange because he is no longer repressing parts of his personality and instead learning how to react and control himself and become much more dynamic and expressive, dealing with his feelings in a positive and proactive manner that ultimately paves the way into adulthood.
On family
All of these listed changes are owed to one key component of Dib's life: his family.
Dib had a very limited idea of what family meant to him in his home world. For want of a better word, he "lived" with his father and little sister but the three basically acted as independent spheres with only casual influence in each other's lives. Occasionally one or the other would interact just long enough to have some sort of meaning to the other two, but mainly Dib's family existed in independent realms, much more like roommates than family. More often than not, Dib's family was a hinderance than a help, and there was little respect owed between them; Dib was an embarrassment best ignored, and his father and sister could only occasionally be relied on to assist, and it was never a sure thing.
Compare this to the family Dib has now, and has had ever since his very first day in Nautilus when he was invited into the Holiday house. Having never experienced love and trust on any sort of level as he has had with Dr. Holiday, Caesar, and the rest, Dib over the past year has come to realize that a family is far, far more than people who share a habitat. Far more bound together, the family is a cohesive team, more of a wolf pack with incredibly strong urges to protect and teach those inside of it. To Dib, a family was no longer just someone who shared the same DNA sequence, but a tightly-bound collection of trusted and loved individuals that no matter what they were or where they came from, were worth every sacrifice to protect.
As he began to understand both how his father had emotionally failed him and how a family was supposed to act and operate, Dib began to redefine who he himself was in terms of what he meant to other people. No longer was it acceptable to make irresponsible decisions under the belief that Dib was the only thing he had to lose; now he was part of something much greater, and needed to learn how to adjust accordingly.
Ultimately, Dib's family became to him a safe harbor in a sea of adversity, a place to run to when he needed help and knew he would get it; something he had never before experienced. In this safe spot where he could feel protected, wanted, and loved, Dib discovered the self-confidence and determination he needed to change himself for the better.
In conclusion
Dib's journey through Nautilus hasn't been a smooth one, and his development mainly occurred in jerky leaps and bounds, peppered at times with some significant steps backwards. Ultimately, his motivations have grown more complex over time; no longer is it okay to chase after the mysteries of the universe without first stopping to think about the impact and meaning of the chase. Over time, Dib has progressed from a research-absorbed paranoid hyperactive invasive child with no regard for privacy into a reasoning, logical moral authority tempered with ideas of all-encompassing unconditional acceptance towards others.
Right now he sits on the cusp between childhood and adulthood, ready to take the plunge into the next phase of his life. His characterization has completely tempered out and matured into something that I think Nautilus can be proud of, while at the same time staying true to who he is at heart. To put it succinctly, Dib over the course of his year in Nautilus has learned to change the worst parts of himself while keeping the best, and has evolved from a self-involved child into a true citizen of Nautilus.
And that's basically why I think he should Ascend.