It’s been more than 12 years since Daria ended and it’s still in public consciousness. The beloved MTV series and its heroine frequently end up on lists of best TV shows , cult shows, favourite female characters and 90s nostalgia.
Music licensing issues that held up home video releases for years ended in 2010, when a DVD set with the series’ entire run of 65 episodes and two TV movies was released. And last year, College Humor produced a fake trailer for a live-action movie starring Aubrey Plaza. In today’s media landscape, where cancellation no longer means the end of a series (as seen in recent resurrections like Arrested Development, 24 and Veronica Mars), internet commentators often beg for more Daria. In the comments section for College Humor’s video, many implored the website to find a way to make the movie for real.
And yet, the memory most people seem to have of Daria as a character isn’t quite right.
On the internet, as in real life, the Daria Morgendorffer people remember is a misanthrope with a monotone voice. An uncaring, almost comatose girl, wandering through the world and hating it indiscriminately.
Plaza plays her this way, never excited, never caring, never attached to anyone or insecure. Several articles about the College Humor video even praised her performance as a perfect Daria impression. But Daria, though often monotone, was much more than that. While she did wander around uncaring through the theme song, in the series proper, she was always running into walls- the people and institutions around her, her world’s expectation of what she should be, and most crucially, her view of herself.
More than anything, Daria wanted to be the girl we remember as unfazed by anything, but instead, kept disappointing herself with her insecurities and the inadvertent connections to people she formed. She was like so many of us as teenagers, deciding what kind of person we were supposed to be while killing ourselves to fit the mold.
But did she cared. Perhaps she cared about things more than anyone else around her. Through five seasons, she fought against fake sincerity, commercialization, and the power and respect given to those with status, money and good looks. She refused to lie about herself for a college scholarship, fake enthusiasm for a part-time job and challenged authorities who threatened the quality of her education, her integrity and her artistic expression. While she scoffed at false values like school spirit, popularity and edginess (a word adults use to sell things to teenagers), she hated them for robbing her generation of meaning and for talking down to youth.
There was a sour taste in her mouth when consuming media directed at youth but written by adults attempting to remain cool. She rejected media directed at teen girls in favor of Conrad, Camus and many political, philosophical and feminist texts, giving 90s teens perhaps their first exposure to classic writers and important ideas. That Daria read these kind of things on her own without a teacher assigning them shows how much she valued learning and encouraged many viewers, myself included, to revisit things we’d been assigned in school and written off as boring.
In her spare time, Daria wrote short stories, acted out No Exit with dolls, made anatomical models, learned about art history from her artist best friend, Jane, and music history from her crush, Trent, and enjoyed watching trash TV–all ways of developing an intelligent mind and broadening her conception of the world outside Lawndale High: her personal idea of hell.
I think you can best understand Daria as a character by seeing her as the type of girl who suffers through high school, assuring herself that in college everyone will magically understand her and speak to her on her level. Sadly, when she visits a local college, she realizes that the people there are the same ones she knew in high school; they’re just older.
Like many of us, Daria looks down on her peers, believing she is more intelligent, sophisticated and mature than them. Though in many cases she’s right, as her classmates, particularly the jocks and cheerleaders are often cartoonishly stupid (even for a cartoon). The popular crowd can’t even spell their own names, and they view being a “brain” like Daria as a fate worse than death. She’s different from her peers, and that difference stands out, as in one episode, she and Jane are the target of a witch hunt.
But Daria is often shown that her assumptions of people’s character and her contempt for them are unwarranted. Her vain sister Quinn is capable of writing a vaguely intelligent poem, ditzy cheerleader Britney has moments of insight and a brilliant tactical mind, and infrequently Daria meets intelligent boys who understand her and her weird sarcastic humor. It’s even painted as a character flaw that Daria clings to first impressions and judges everyone around her. She’s never surprised when someone disappoints her, displaying their true self as self-centered, calculating or dense; she’s only surprised when they go along with her joke or give her an intelligent argument. For example, when she finds out Andrea, a would-be friend from summer camp, idolized her, she can only respect Andrea when she stands up to her.
Even Daria herself doesn’t always measure up to her ideals. Though she is a a teenage girl, Daria wants to be so much more than that. Along with her dismissal of her peers and of the media they enjoy, she views being a teenage girl as a weakness and refuses to allow herself to be human. She has a hopeless crush on an older “bad boy” who rarely notices her, even though she’s smart enough to know he’s irresponsible and totally wrong for her. If she’s being logical, she knows he’s not an option for her and the type of life she wants to live, but still she finds him irresistible and even gets a navel piercing to please him; something she would never do otherwise.
She feels ashamed when she realizes she really wants a romantic celebration for her anniversary (like 30 Rock‘s Liz Lemon and her wedding), as she views sentimentality as pathetic. In several episodes, she struggles with her own sense of vanity, attempting to hide a rash across her face and attempting to wear contacts even though they hurt her eyes because she likes how she looks with them. She disappoints herself with her desire for contacts as she feels there is no reason to want them besides vanity.
Within her school, Daria is known as “the brain” and “the misery chick,” identities she never chose for herself, doesn’t completely like but feels entirely lost without. Within her family she’s the smart one, and Quinn is the pretty one. When that balance is disturbed and Quinn is praised for her intelligence, Daria feels threatened. If she isn’t a brain and smarter than everyone else, she doesn’t know who she is. In another episode, she struggles with her peers’ view of her as someone who is always miserable and thinking about death.
Though when people meet Daria, they frequently gasp (to an exaggerated degree) in disgust at her appearance, it is frequently suggested that she could easily fit in and be popular if she wanted to. Modeling scouts at the school first zero in on Daria over supposedly more attractive classmates, and in one episode, she dresses like Quinn and her appearance threatens her sister. Through she sees herself as far above her peers, she clearly understands them and knows how to appeal to them, once inciting a riot by manipulating them with a short story.
Daria’s friendship with Jane Lane is one of the greatest things about the show as it portrays them as two people with similar interests and a shared sense of humor, while managing to make them distinctive people with different reactions to the same events. Their relationship also humanizes Daria, as Jane challenges her and forces her to confront her flaws and figure out why she feels certain ways. Without Jane, Daria could easily be that silent girl, observing and judging a world she is unattached to, but Jane gives her reasons to care. Jane also worries less about fitting into a certain image; instead she wants to experience every opportunity she can, believing it will make her a better artist and drags Daria along to house parties, school dances and other parts of teen life she would otherwise ignore. Moreover, Jane doesn’t see being intelligent and sarcastic and joining the track team, getting a boyfriend or auditioning for the cheerleading squad as mutually exclusive. Her attempts to get involved force Daria to attempt to reconcile her contempt for their peers as a group with the existence of Jane, one of her peers who she really likes and respects. It is perhaps Jane’s humanizing influence that make Daria feel guilty about making a video that paints Quinn in the worst possible light and so edits it to be more flattering.
Certainly Daria is someone that needs humanizing. In one episode, she confesses to Jane that she often feels superior to other people, sometimes thinking to herself, “You can see things that other people can’t. You can see better than other people.” This reminded me of the first episode of Girls, where Hannah Horvath memorably told her parents she thinks of herself as the voice of her generation. It was an audacious statement, that led many to hate the character, but it was also really unique for a young woman to express grandiose thoughts, to think of herself as great and significant, rather than suppress herself with (often false) modesty as many of us have been taught to. Jane is a great friend for Daria because she takes her confession seriously, values Daria’s opinions, and disarms her, joking (though with a kernel of truth). That this is why she’s proud to be Daria’s friend. It’s great to see characters who are allowed to be audacious.
As she grows up, Daria is able to recognize how difficult she was as a child and how much her parents struggled to raise her. She learns that when she was in elementary school her parents’ marriage was strained as they were frequently called in by the principal to talk about her lack of friends, her refusal to participate and her depressive nature. Toward the end of the series, when she volunteers at a summer camp, she meets a young boy who reminds her of her younger self and is able to see some of her character flaws for herself. She quickly becomes invested in his growth, realizing that she really cares whether she gets through to him. She helps him avoid some of her mistakes, particularly missing out on life by pretending to be uninterested. It’s plain that Daria as she was when the show began would never have been able to see herself so clearly and to connect on this level.
We see a glimpse of the future Daria expects (and most will most likely get) when she writes a short story imagining herself and Quinn as adults visiting their parents. Both are happy and have learned to get along and step out of their comfort zones. The story makes Daria’s mother cry and reveals she is more sentimental than even she realizes.
If you’ve never seen Daria, or you haven’t seen it in years, it’s worth a watch to see one of the most memorable and realistic teenage girls I’ve ever seen on TV.
See also: 29 Reasons Why Daria was TV’s Greatest Cynic, Five Ways Daria Ruined My Life
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Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.
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