Daria has two cousins, one on her mother's side and as best as we can tell one on her father's. Erin Danielson (née Chambers) is the former, and though we see her only in "I Don't," tales of her marital woes crop up in several fifth-season episodes.You would think a cousin of Daria would merit much weighty fanfic, but this is not the case for this poor thing. To be sure, Kara Wild, Crusading Saint, and Richard Lobinske have written excellent stories about her and her new (dork) husband Brian, but Erin is a difficult subject and not many other authors want to tangle with a shallow, two-dimensional character that Kara once christened "Erin the Head."
The trick, as KW, CS, and RL have shown us, is to make Erin interesting, and that is a real challenge. A divorce from Brian is an often explored theme in stories about her, but what else could be done? Could it be that she, not Brian, was the intelligence agent? Could she have an interesting hobby that is somewhat dangerous? Does she have a dark secret in her past? Could she be more than she seems? What would Daria think of that?
LATE ADD: Brother Grimace has reminded me that Erin appears in "It's All About Respect," and there she has a very interesting post-Brian life as a children's book author, with a very interesting post-Brian squeeze whom I dare not name. (And she doesn't have herpes.)
2 comments:
Speaking of intelligence -- IC Erin, speaking frankly, seems to have none; I cannot see her as a Russian agent who married Brian in order to accesss some secrets. As for Brian, I see him as someone along the lines of a bumbling junior analyst fired for placing Burma in Africa.
Well, you never know, the KGB might have been kinda desperate for agents. Heck, she could have been a spy for the FBI or Canada or Guam or all sorts of places, thinking Brian had access to files he never really had access to, and then he gave her herpes and she was stuck with him.
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