"Howdy, pardner! You from Texas?"

Okay, here's a weird one. Since I obviously have no life, it seemed like a good idea to track down some of the Daria westerns that have been written and put them on a page in the DariaWiki, simply because no one has done that before. All right, stop laughing. I'm serious. It's a genre, right? It's been done before in fanfic, right? Yeah, whatever. Anyway, here we go.

Canon Daria has only a few references to the western lifestyle, none very deep. Quinn has a clear attraction to cowboys, per her daydream in "College Bored" and her thing with Travis in "Speedtrapped." Daria has no such attraction, but she did develop a slight taste for country & western music in "Speedtrapped," unless that was only to irritate Quinn. The Morgendorffers went to the Grand Canyon when the girls were young (per The Daria Diaries), so they've been to Arizona. Heck, they lived in TEXAS for years, so the siblings would have to know something about the Old West. Oh, and we can't forget Daria dressed up as McCloud in her dream in "Murder, She Snored," riding a horse through downtown Manhattan.

As for fanfic . . . huh, how could you do it? Well, there's movie/novel crossovers, dream worlds, reinventions & uberfics, alternate universes, and post-canon tales, all sorts of possibilities. For examples, we've got to start off with "The Cynic, the Fashionista, and the Jackass," by Doggieboy, which is a brilliant and hilarious western crossover. That's got to be the archetype for this subgenre right there. Decelaraptor did some marvelous western tales, two coming to mind in particular: "Tales of the Missouri Cheyenne" and "Daria: 1830" (scroll down), both hugely comic and true to character. "Daria 2007: The Girl from Hope" flirted with a western scene at the end, when Daria was living in Montana and rode horses (and shot rifles). And Daria lived in Montana in "Darkness," but there wasn't much of a western-theme story in that, so skip that one.

Anyone else remember any Daria westerns? It's an offbeat theme, but it does work. Sort of.