Reinvention

A reinvention is a creative recasting of the canon Dariaverse, retaining the same setting (Lawndale) and characters, but with pervasive changes in canon plots, events, and relationships between particular characters. Some changes in the personalities, goals, values, or habits of the characters might also be present, though not enough to make them unrecognizable. A reinvention appears on the surface to be a type of alternate history, but there are no specific points of divergence in the canon timeline that would produce a reinvention. It is possible that a reinvention could be the result of numerous timeline changes, but it would require so many of them that trying to pinpoint them all is essentially meaningless. Notable differences from canon appear throughout the story set-up of a reinvention, as the author retells the saga of Daria’s high-school years in a unique and personal way. In other fandoms a reinvention is usually called an “alternate universe,” but in Daria fanworks the latter term specifically refers to an alternate history, to avoid confusion. The term “reinvention” has less ambiguity about it.

Napalm Kraken did much early on to popularize the notion of reinventions, though without calling it such, in his superb Daria Disenfranchised tales. Here, the main characters again play out their high-school lives but with all-new dialog and plot twists. The characters are still true to their canon selves, but as the world around them has subtly changed, their reactions also change, and the story heads off into lively new directions. An excellent recent example of a straightforward reinvention is NightGoblyn’s work-in-progress on PPMB, “Exchange Students,” which reinvents Daria, Jane, and Quinn (and their families) in startling ways.

Some reinventions result from combining numerous Iron Chef-style fanfic-writing challenges in a single story. For example, a June 2007 Iron Chef was proposed by WacoKid that combined many separate Iron Chef challenges issued by another fanfic writer, Bliss Ticks, resulting in the so-called “Bliss Ticks Challenge.” A third writer, CAP, successfully answered the challenge with a remarkable tale in a divergent Dariaverse in which Daria is an alcoholic, Jane sells drugs, Tiffany goes to prison, and so forth. A similar collection of unrelated Iron Chefs produced “And When Your Heart Begins to Bleed,” by TAG, several years earlier.

A reinvention is not a crossover, though its development might be influenced by an external source, paralleling without crossing over into that specific source. For example, if magic of the sort seen in the Harry Potter stories existed in a Dariaverse, but Hogwarts, Harry Potter, and so forth did not exist there, then the subsequent tale about Daria and company learning magic at Lawndale High could be considered a reinvention.

Roentgen’s Legion of Lawndale Heroes series, currently continued by Brother Grimace, has usually been called a crossover as it describes how things might have gone if the Daria characters had gained the powers of the DC Comics Legion of Superheroes (teenage heroes in the far future). However, as not one of the actual DC heroes or settings appears in the story, only the heroes’ superpowers, the story is more properly called a reinvention. In the same vein, Isauchelli’s work-in-progress “Eldritch Evolution,” which recasts Daria in the style of the TV series Heroes, is also a reinvention. In contrast, Richard Lobinske’s Daria von Doom series and TAG’s “Outcasts from Beyond” are true crossovers, not reinventions.