daria and hell being other people (and also a teenage girl)
i might be cornplating but on this doodle, i got a nice comment on someone’s reblog that stuck with me, where they said it’s easy to forget that the characters are teenagers, and they liked my drawing because it showed daria looking like a teenage girl and that was 100% what i was trying to portray in my first drawing. —it was meant to be a reference to the episode ‘Lane Miserables’ where trent and jane come to stay over daria’s place for a while, where she thought she finally gotten over her crush on trent, but by the end of the episode realises she still has it.
even through daria’s cynical perspective, what makes her such a relateable character is that she actually makes mistakes and does things that may misalign with her idea of what herself actually is. a great example of this are in the episodes ‘Pierce Me’ and ‘Through a Lens Darkly’. in both episodes, daria does things she doesn’t think ‘Daria Morgendorffer’ (the booksmart, sarcastic, highly intelligent teenager) would do. she feels like she’s going against her own values and being a hypocrite but really she is just being human. a teenage girl.
and what i love about it is what jane says in ‘Pierce Me’
Don't you get it, Daria? You did something stupid for a guy. Gee, you may join the human race after all.
and in ‘Through a Lens Darkly’ brittany says
I think it's really brave of you to […] admit that you care about the way you look, even just a little, because knowing that a brain can be worried about her looks makes me feel, um, I dunno, not so shallow or something. Like we're not that different, just human or whatever.
on the surface daria is this very aloof, witty, sarcastic person but all she really is is just a normal teenage girl like myself: embarrassing, inconsistent, even being intelligent, she can be myopic. she is one of those rare characters that actually manage to portray what being a teenager is like for me, and that i actually get to relate to. she uses her sarcasm as a tool to try to understand and meander through the strange river of life. she is not ‘the misery chick’. the show would be super boring if it was just about daria being right every time about every stupid thing she encounters, or knowing exactly the most intelligent thing to do in every experience.
i’m probably stating the obvious but what i love about daria is that she is a teenage girl, and they actually write her like one.
