Daniel Suni

Daniel Suni was a fanfic author and essayist from 1999 to 2000, noted for his strong prescriptivist beliefs.

Biographical Information

Suni was Finnish by nationality, and frequently consulted English-language dictionaries while writing his fanfics.

Fandom History

Suni's first foray into fanfiction was "End, Weekend, End," written in September 1999, a comedic script that he kept as close to canon as possible. In the forward, he stated "My ambition when I started to write this was that, if this script would have been turned into an episode, nobody would know that it hadn't been written by someone of MTV's people." He quickly won praise for his efforts, and followed up in November 1999 with a similar scripted fanfic, "Hotter Than Hades." C.E. Forman was credited as being a strong influence on his tone and structure.

Suni's next fanfic, "How Deep It Goes," would be dramatically different from his first two. Written in prose, in six parts, it involved Daria pondering the meaning of life after the suicide of a classmate. This would be the first of two prosefics that Suni wrote.

Suni followed up with "A Lousy Deal" in December 1999, which resembled his earlier works. However, not long after Season Four premiered, Suni wrote his second prosefic, "A Sick, Sad Goodbye," in which Daria and Jane lamented the downward spiral of their favorite show, which represented Suni's growing dissatisfaction with the direction of Daria.

Controversies

Suni was a fanfiction prescriptivist from the beginning, but as the months passed, he became more vocal in his opinions. He considered only scripted fanfics that maintained all of the elements of the show to be the only acceptable fanfics, and that anything that deviated from the series should be dismissed. He held C.E. Forman's writing up as the gold standard of fanfiction writing, irritating authors whose work was not completely canon. In February 2000, Kara Wild wrote a rebuttal essay, "The Off-Canon Approach," pointing out amongst other things that even C.E. Forman did not stay perfectly on canon.

However, after Episode 4.01, "Partner's Complaint," aired on MTV, Suni became aggrieved by the show's direction, which he felt was pulling away from its roots as a sharp satire. Soon after writing "A Sick, Sad Goodbye," he followed up with a lengthy essay, "Cynic's Complaint."

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