Tired Daria Fandom Tropes

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The Tired Daria Fandom Tropes are those identifiable and worn plots, character types, argumentative moves, and figures of speech in Daria fan work and fandom itself.

Origin of the term

A trope is a term from literary criticism derived from the Greek noun τρο´πος meaning variously turn, way, direction, manner, so "trope" in writing on literature designates the category of identifiable turns or types of plot, character, argument (figure of thought), or figure of speech. As Jesus said of the poor, they will always be with us; hence this guide.

General considerations

Just because a trope has become tired over time doesn't mean that it was always tired; for example, there may have been striking examples of stories where Daria is all powerful, but that sort of story became tired through repetition. Vice versa, some tropes may have seemed ill-conceived from their first appearance, but after a while one shining example emerged; however, the ubiquity of the inferior samples made the trope tired before its time.

Tired plots in Daria fan fic

The Daria & Trent Shipper

With Season One of Daria, it was clear that Daria had a crush on Trent that was more or less fully realized by "Road Worrier." Since late Season One, Daria fans have tried to match Daria and Trent romantically, even after it was made clear by Glenn Eichler in "Jane's Addition" that Daria and Trent would have been incompatible.

From Invisigoth Gypsy to Diane Long to Michelle Klein-Hass, many of the earlier Daria writers could be considered "'shippers", or "relationshippers"—writers interested in seeing this "obvious" relationship reach its conclusion. Even after Jane's Addition, fanfiction writers like Ruthless Bunny wrote of Daria/Trent relationships, basically as "what might have been" exercises, taking incompatibility issues into account. The "'shipper" contingent remained active until the earlier writers dropped out of the fandom and newer writers who entered the fandom later and had foreknowledge that Daria and Trent were doomed as a couple decided to explore Daria in other relationships.

As with anything taken to extremes, early relationship writing ranged from the lachrymose to the melodramatic to the inept to the (occasionally) thoughtful. Most of the early Daria/Trent writing was quite poor and is frankly best forgotten, or was written in the middle of the series when the full scope of the mutual incompatibility of Daria and Trent was neither recognized nor made explicit. Today, there are very few writers who write with an eye to pairing Daria and Trent as a couple.

The Daria / Jane Slash fic

One of the long-debated questions in Daria fandom is "Are Daria and Jane homosexual?" Any strong friendship between two same-sex members in the media will lead to speculation that the friendship is more than just a friendship. Even though writer Glenn Eichler and longtime fans like Martin Pollard have given well-reasoned arguments as to the contrary, those fans who either disagree with those conclusions, or simply want to see a same-sex romantic relationship explored in the Daria setting have taken this friendship to what they see as the "ultimate" conclusion. (See: Gabrielle/Xena, whose every-third-story-a-slash has made Gabrielle/Xena fan fiction a bad joke.)

This potential pairing has been explored in a number of ways, and viewed from multiple chronological vantage points, from the coming out of one of the characters to the other to a look at both characters several years into a committed relationship. It has been written both as romance and as one-hand-typing pornography. It it also considered an "easy" pairing by writers such as CINCGREEN, who has wondered if a Daria/Jane pairing does not take into account several facts:

• 1. One can rarely sustain a relationship with one's first love, and
• 2. Daria does not make much of a romantic partner.
• 3. Daria and Jane might be incompatible.

Still, the Daria/Jane slashing persists, instead of less obvious slashing like Helen/Amanda, or perhaps male slashing like Kevin/Upchuck, each of which sadly goes unwritten while we read the 367th variation of a Daria/Jane relationship.

Daria triumphs over all odds

Much of "Daria Triumphant" fan fiction comes from the influence of Season One and Two episodes, in which clever Daria easily undoes the evil of a handful of dim-witted enemies like Ms. Li, Quinn, the Amazon Modeling Agency, and whomever Glenn Eichler and company decided to write about. It might have further been influenced by The Look-Alike Series, a fanfiction series written by Canadibrit whose protagonist, Lynn Cullen, took triumphalism to unheard-of heights.

Most of this fanfiction was written while Season One and Two were still on the air. Very little fanfiction is now written in which Daria makes defeating an annoying presence as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.

Quinn gets raped

According to CINCGREEN, there are four components to what is called "melodrama" (and what in some quarters might be called "angst"):

• a sensational, "movie of the week" topic
• the building of suspense
• the use of coincidence to move the plot
• a moral which more or less reaffirms the "forbidden maxims" of society. These maxims may be opposed to the beliefs to which society gives lip service.

Any story written which is centered around Quinn's rape certainly satisfies the first of those criteria: such a story would be the very definition of sensationalism. Two authors have written stories where Quinn is raped and attempt to explore the consequences: a fanfic by Michelle Klein-Hass and the more well known Sins of the Past by Martin Pollard.

In general, the stories of both Klein-Hass and Pollard were so well received that, in effect, the topic could no longer be explored: any further attempt to write a portrayal of a Daria character being raped would be compared to much-more well-known and well-received stories, and the concept was effectively dead as fan fiction material.

Quinn deserved to be raped

In general 'rapefic' is not well received, for obvious reasons, particularly if such rapes are explicit and occur as part of the story narrative. However, for a long time, Pollard's Sins of the Past had the reputation for being a well-told story.

In summer of 1999, Kara Wild wrote an essay, "On the Subject of Quinn and Rape." Although relatively mild compared to the criticism that would follow, her essay took Pollard, Klein-Hass, and Peter Guerin to task for seeming to validate the notion that rape could redeem Quinn. She argued that the reverse was just as likely, and pointed to John Berry's My Quinn's Delayed Reaction as an example of a way Quinn could redeem herself without experiencing violence. In response, Klein-Hass was horrified that her work might be interpreted as a justification for rape, while Pollard admitted to Wild that he could see her point of view. Klein-Hass would later amend So Turns the Wheel to eliminate the "rape redemption" element.

Around 2000-2001, Blue Balls (later revealed to be Crazy Nutso) wrote an essay that also addressed Sins of the Past and So Turns the Wheel. His essay was more in-depth and damning in its language.

In 2002, CINCGREEN wrote an essay called "Controversy More Than Ever" in which he accused Pollard of making the implicit argument in Sins of the Past that Quinn deserved to be raped. In the essay, CINCGREEN makes the argument that in Pollard's point of view, Quinn's sin was leading boys on. The essay sparked furious discussion at the PPMB, where the argument between Ruthless Bunny and Pollard became so acrimonious that Ruthless Bunny pulled her fiction from Outpost Daria simply to deny Martin Pollard as website owner the right to post it. This was one of the factors in Ruthless Bunny leaving Daria fandom.

Pollard's position was that he certainly did not intend to make such an argument, and any interpretation contrary to his intention is an incorrect interpretation. He has declined further comment about the story, but still hosts it at Outpost Daria. Pollard, however, has written no fan fiction since completing Sins of the Past.

Tired characterization in Daria fan fic

Tom is evil

Since the arrival of Tom Sloane, there have been fans that did not care for the new character designated to be Jane's boyfriend. After The Kiss, the dislike of some Daria fans for Tom Sloane boiled over to outright hatred. Perhaps part of the hatred was in the way that Tom cheated on Jane and perhaps part of the hatred arose from the fact that a Daria/Tom relationship put a big dent in the hopes of Daria/Trent relationshippers to match Daria with her earlier crush.

As Tom Sloane's character was poorly defined, serving no other purpose than to be Jane's (and later Daria's) boyfriend, some fan fiction writers created a Tom Sloane who either through malign indifference or through design allowed the events of The Kiss to happen. As such a malignly indifferent (or maliciously devious) person would not be a nice person per se, the fanfiction stereotype of "Evil Tom" was created.

In such fanfiction, Daria and/or Jane must contend against the machinations of Evil Tom. Perhaps they are unaware of such machinations, perhaps they learn the truth, but Evil Tom is the master manipulator. After a while, hatred in some quarters of Tom Sloane had become so great that Evil Tom Sloane was called "Evil T(h)om", suggesting that this Tom Sloane incarnation could almost be considered a different person from the canon character.

Recent interpretations of Tom Sloane's actions suggest that Tom acts the way he does because either a) he's totally clueless as to the real world consequences of his actions, or b) he manages to justify what he does in the service of some intrinsic or extrinsic "greater good". He's still evil, though.

Daria is omnicompetent and damn near omnipotent

Stories of this typed borrowed heavily from the portrayal of Daria in Seasons One and Two, where Daria defeated the machinations of foes who were no match for her wit or her brainpower.

As Daria writers explored further variations on this theme, Daria's opponents in early Daria fanfiction were not so easy to defeat as Kevin or Ms. Li. As little was known about Daria, many early writers fell into the tempation of granting Daria whatever competence it took to defeat her opponent. Daria sometimes had knowledge of firearms, obscure forms of martial arts, homemade explosives making, Internet hacking, or whatever esoteric skills that would not only ensure her victory, but make her look damn cool in the process.

However, as further was learned about Daria as the series went on, the temptation to portray Daria as an action movie heroine diminished proportionally. Daria is no longer given competencies beyond that expected of an intelligent high school student, and if she has greater competencies, they are explored appropriately.

Jane is always trying to set Daria up with Trent

Since "Road Worrier," when it was obvious—at least to Jane—that Daria liked her older brother Trent, the first three seasons often had Jane teasing Daria about her affection for the lead singer of Mystik Spiral.

Earlier Daria fans—most often "'shippers"—carried Jane's teasing one step further, and in those stories, Jane actively conspires to bring her older brother and her best friend together. (Jane is usually paired with Jesse, making two happy couples.) In bad fiction of this type, Jane's machinations become quite involved and every comment Jane makes to Daria seems to refer to Daria's romantic discomfort. This interpretation and these stories were so common that this version of Jane is now called "Yenta Jane", after the name of the matchmaker in Fiddler On The Roof.

When "Jane's Addition" diminished the prospects for a Daria/Trent relationship, this type of fiction quickly fell out of fashion, even though relationshippers continued to fanwork a Daria/Trent coupling, but one without Jane's heavy-handed involvement.

Daria and Jane will be freakin' friends forever and ever

Some Daria stories have Daria and Jane remaining friends even in adulthood, sometimes going so far as to live together or at least in the same town. However, as Daria and Jane grow older, it is unlikely that their personalities will change in similar ways, and the prospect that they might fall into acquaintanceship, or even lose touch with each other as adults is not an insignificant one. Still, the rule with fan fiction writers seems to be "As Daria goeth, so goeth Jane," even though both are in their nineties.

Helen is a vicious bitch

Helen Morgendorffer in Seasons One and Two was treated by the Daria writers as a more inflexible character than in later seasons, one opposed to many of Daria's goals, particularly the goal of being let alone. Helen was invariably trying to push Daria into being more social and taking more of a part in school activities, but Helen became more relaxed in later seasons, sometimes giving Daria good advice and trying to help her daughter, if not always successfully.

As writing stories about a character who wishes to be left alone is difficult, many stories have Daria forced into doing something she doesn't want, and in the early history of Daria fan fiction, the opposing force was her mother, Helen Morgendorffer. Sometimes, this characterization of Helen as antagonist was carried to extremes, with Helen the Queen Hell Bitch on Wheels.

Sometimes, Helen's goal was to have Daria be more like Quinn. (This goal is often not stated explicitly.) More that one story was written about Helen believing that Daria needed psychiatric help to change her sullen and cynical personality. These stories involved Helen committing Daria to the type of institution that was closed in the 1750s. In these stories, Helen is at her preachy and domineering worst, not willing to consider anyone else's opinion but her own, implicitly trusting in authority and giving that authority power to turn all of its force against her daughter. Helen's interpretation as the Ultimate Evil Mother has diminished since the airing of episodes such as "I Don't" and "Psycho Therapy," which made Helen a more sympathetic character.

Daria is a supermodel beneath the glasses

In the episode "Quinn the Brain," Daria dresses like Quinn and pretends to seek popularity and beauty (for approximately 15 seconds) to keep Quinn from infringing on her intellectual turf. However, the sight of Daria sans glasses and wearing less gloomy clothes sparked the conceit that Daria was secretly a knockout.

Works of fiction like Nemo Blank's "Retrograde Girl" actually had an amnesiac Daria become a successful model once away from the "man-stopper" glasses (term by Brother Grimace), orange T-shirt and boots. Other characters had Daria win a beauty contest or forced Daria to wear sexy clothes to compel her to realize how attractive she really was. The belief that Daria could be very good looking if she'd just try is still so strong that an Iron Chef challenge was issued in 2006 which required Iron Chef writers to work with the limitation that Daria makes herself over, but doesn't become more beautiful.

Daria is already a great writer

Everyone from Diane Long to Scissors MacGillicutty have written tales of an alternate future where Daria is well known as a writer. She can be a novelist, a magazine writer, a newspaper columnist, anything that has the potential for earning fame and fortune.

Of course, we have no idea as to the true scope of Daria's writing talent. Daria's story for Musings was rejected in "The Story of D," but the rejection letter was not a form letter—indicating that the editors saw some point in reading it through. She can reduce Mr. O'Neill or her mother to tears with her writing, but that requires no great talent. And the Melody Powers stories are undoubtedly for a limited audience.

One suspects that stories which hypothesize that Daria will grow up to be a writer have no idea how little money a writer makes.

Jane is already a great painter

There are much fewer stories where Jane Lane has reached the top of the artist world, or at least a comfortable position in it.

Oddly enough, there is more evidence that Jane is a talented artist than evidence that Daria is a talented writer. Whereas one can't convey writing talent by reading prose on a screen, the animators of Daria could let their imaginations shine, giving Jane noteworthy ability as a painter, sculptor, graphic artist, or whatever the situation required. Jane is already talented enough as an artist that by her senior year of high school she is able to sell "knockoff" paintings of artists like Van Gogh, so close to the originals that it would take someone with above-average art knowledge to notice the difference.

Most likely, fan fiction writers shy away from an in-depth exploration of Jane's successful art career for the same reason the cartoon shied away from examining Daria's writing talent -- given the choice of medium, those intricacies are difficult to convey.

The source of both Daria The Great Writer and Jane The Great Painter undoubtedly come from assuming that some talent of a protagonist will lead to a successful career. Jodie and Quinn seem to be used in this manner, with Jodie some successful businesswoman and Quinn involved in fashion. Even Future Mack has ended up a pro football player in some stories.

At least one member of the Fashion Club has anorxia or bulemia

Usually, the member is Tiffany Blum-Deckler, Tiffany, because it's a quick jump from a character continually seeking validation that they are not fat to a full-blown eating disorder, at least in the eyes of some writers. Sometimes it's another member of the Fashion Club on a weight loss kick to boost popularity.

Most of these stories are so bad they cause diarrhea. Make sure you hydrate well before reading them.

Tired arguments about Daria the character, Daria the show, and Daria fandom Itself

"Any perceivable flaw in the show is really a sign of how well made it is"

Some Daria fans over the years have held the opinion that perceived weaknesses in the show, such as the lack of evidence that Daria suppressed strong feelings for Tom from "I Loathe a Parade" until "Dye! Dye! My Darling," were done that way by design and as such are extremely effective. For instance, this sort of fan might argue that the lack of insight into Daria's thoughts post-"I Loathe a Parade" made everything more exciting and suspenseful, and that Glenn Eichler was trusting that the fans would be able to fill in the blanks. Similarly, many of these fans dismiss arguments that there has been a break in quality or tone between the early seasons and the late ones, arguing that any changes only made the show better.

These sentiments were strongest prior to Kara Wild's interviews with Glenn Eichler, who spoke at length about the decision making involved in producing the show.

"Unless a fic satisfies the set of criteria {α, β, γ, . . . } it isn't a real piece of Daria fan fiction"

It has been argued that Daria fan fiction must contain a persistent undercurrent of satire, and fan fiction that doesn't isn't any good.

"Scriptfic Vs. Prose Fic"

Almost from the beginning of the fandom, advocates of the two basic writing formats have debated the relative pros and cons of prose and script. At times, these debates have become heated and personal.

Many of the early and mid-period Daria fan fiction writers wrote in the form of a script. The Lost Seasons, The Look Alike Series, and the Driven Wild Universe are written as long form scripts, with lines prefaced by the name of a character (usually in capital letters) and followed by a line of dialogue.

Some writers have made the argument that they prefer this style to prose writing for several reasons:

• Daria is a dialogue-heavy show. Daria was animated, but did not take full advantage of the power animation had to offer. Essentially grounded in realism, Daria was conversation-driven and scripted dialogue gets to the heart of the characters' relationships with one another. By contrast, prose fics often rely on external events as a crutch to propel the story along.

• The Daria characters are most "in character" in scripted format. When writing a script, one has to keep Daria's lines sarcastic and sharp, and Daria and Jane's back-and-forth dialogue true to the show. Otherwise, readers would not accept the story as believable. By contrast, prose writers have frequently made Daria serious and sarcasm-free, and other characters have personality traits that differ sharply from their personalities in the series.

• Prosefic does not allow readers to use their imaginations well enough. Prosefic, in essence tells the reader what he or she should be seeing...or thinking. The script form gives the reader maximum freedom.

• Prose fan fiction writing is lazy writing. Anyone who can write could have written prose stories back in elementary school. It takes genuine skill to master the rapid back-and-forth of scripted dialogue.

• For younger fan fiction writers with dreams of working in TV or movies, what better practice than writing fiction in script form? It might not be exactly like a real teleplay (which relies on strict rules of its own), but it will help you make your dialogue skills stronger, which would transfer well to a real teleplay.

• If you don't like scripts, then you should forget TV altogether. Go read a book.

During the early fandom wars over prose fiction versus script-form fiction, the prose writers had some rejoinders. Their arguments were:

• Daria script fiction has absolutely no relation to how a screenplay or movie script would be written. Music is not added in real scripts, nor are stage-blocking directions. Supplementary paragraphs are also not present. In effect, the script style that scriptfic writers praise is an artificial construct that should be discarded.

• Script writing is lazy writing. With script writing, writers can discard inner monologue and can discard descriptions of setting, as well as the most basic descriptions of what the characters look like. (Save, or course, for clumsy additions.) Furthermore, in order to introduce new characters, the script fic writer must either add some sort of brief narrative or develop new characters through conversations with much contrived exposition. Since the visual element provided by a cinematographer is missing, these visual cues are added in ways which further break up the natural flow of the action.

• Fanfiction is already an inherently lazy form of writing, as there is no need to develop new characters -- in fanfiction, all of the characters are borrowed from other sources. Scriptfic appeals to the lazy among the lazy.

• All natural conversational pacing is destroyed as without the prose structure, characters swap line for line of dialogue at unknown tempo.

In the end, the prose fic writers seem to have won the battle. Over half of all fan fiction written now is prose fic, a reversal from the earlier days of fanfiction. Though given that the current output is smaller, it is unclear how great a shift has really occurred.

One could argue that the reason was, with the lack of new episodes, there was no reason to keep writing stories in episodic form, whereas when the show was still airing, an episodic script could be somewhat accepted as part of the show's canon. However, the biggest reason might simply be that Fanfiction.net, one of the largest fan fiction depositories on the Internet, started prohibiting scripted stories from being posted, its owners threatening to delete any that slipped through its doors. With only a few active Daria fan fiction sites besides Fanfiction.net, fans who wanted to try scripted format might have decided it wasn't worth the reduced exposure.

All in all, the argument is largely moot, as fine stories have been written in both script and prose; neither format needs to be excluded.

"Angst Bad, Canon Good"

One argument is that the downside of the growth of prose fan fiction is that a lot of the show's trademark humor and low-key realism has become superseded by story lines that deal heavily with angst.

"The fandom went downhill after this person left"

A varient of this claim is: "All the good people are leaving, so fandom must be going downhill!"

Since Daria fandom's early days, well-known fans have come and gone, often to be mourned by the remaining fans. Rowena Stubbs's decision to discontinue Planet Daria caused a panic amongst fans in fall of 1998, as her website was then the premiere Daria fan site. All wondered what would happen to the community, until Martin J. Pollard more firmly established his own website, Outpost Daria.

Another panic broke out in winter of 1999/early 2000 when Michelle Klein-Hass pulled down Lawndale Commons, right around the time C.E. Forman, fandom's (then) most celebrated fanfic author, announced that he would not finish Lost Season Two of The Lost Seasons series. Fans were truly convinced then that Daria fandom would never recover, until Pollard and the Paperpusher established their own message boards.

The conventional wisdom that everyone was "jumping ship" really took hold after Daria finished its run on MTV in 2001-2002. Some fans announced that they had nothing to stick around for, while several noted fanfic authors, like Nemo Blank, announced that they were writing their last fanfics ever. Many remaining fans were convinced that, with no fresh episodes, there would be nothing new to discuss, which meant Daria fandom would inevitably die out. While it is likely that the number of active members is fewer than when Daria was in its first run, fans have managed to find new topics or rally around new causes (like DVDaria).

"The fandom went downhill after this person arrived"

[That would be me.—TAG]