Wearing Only Her Legal Briefs

Legal eagle Helen Morgendorffer celebrates the arrival of the 2010 Godiva Festival in Coventry, which promises to be the best party place on Earth for the whole family. A minimum of 85,000 people are expected. No, seriously. And they won't even have a naked lady on a horse! Everyone's there for the food and music and parade. Well, we believe in traditional values here at the Daria Fandom Blog II, so we do have a naked lady on a horse. No Godiva chocolates, though. We're on a diet.

Eight years ago today, Daria began airing on The N, but in a severely censored form that caused legions of Daria fans to rend their garments and cast ashes on their heads. Is It Fall Yet? was so chopped up the plot made no sense. (Click the link to Outpost Daria to see how the movie was edited.) The butchered episodes ceased to appear in 2006.

The Roswell UFO event is alleged to have occurred 63 years ago today, though accounts have changed over the years and different dates have been offered. Thanks to Roswell, we have soap operas about troubled alien-human-robot love triangles. Or we should have.

Daria said three little important words to her future husband on this day ten years ago. Do you know the fanfic in which she did this?

N0OoZ!!

• Roentgen has produced a clever timeline showing what has been going on in Lawndale High without Daria and Quinn present.
• The Daria Fan Club has grown and changed a good bit. You might wish to check it out.
• Can there be good things in bad episodes? Byron Lomax asks that question, then invites your response. What do you think? (Me, I haven't seen a bad Daria episode yet.)

FF.net

• The InDark, by Mediancat (Part 22): The screams had come from beefy guy and his wife. 'Course, Daria could hardly blame them, with the eyeless robed guy with a long knife walking around waving it at people. He'd been headed for Amy's car, but on seeing Daria and Oz had turned towards them. It was as if his orders were: "Go after Daria, slash tires, and scare people," in that order of importance. It was a good thing no one had tossed in "Go after her friends." (Daria/Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

PPMB

• Anti-Trope, by Minx (continued): "I demand you do something about this!" Ms. Li looked at the irate woman that stood before her and sighed. "Mrs. Rowe, I'm afraid there just isn't enough evidence to support your claims," she said calmly. "What more evidence do you need?" Mrs. Rowe exclaimed as she threw her hands above her head. "My son has e-mails to that boy discussing the paper, he even has handwritten notes! Look!" Mrs. Rowe retrieved a manila folder from her briefcase and dropped it on the desk in front of Ms. Li. "if that isn’t enough evidence I don't know what is." Mrs. Rowe smiled victoriously as she waited for the principal to respond.
• Daria: Hunter 6—Infectious, by Jim North (continued): Burnout moved to follow her, but Jane put her hand out and shook her head. The blonde frowned but stayed at the doorway, slingshot at the ready. Jane turned to the rest of the group and noticed a high keening noise. It took her a few seconds to trace the sound to Brittany, who was staring down at Mack and screaming as quietly as she could. DeMartino and Kevin had picked themselves up off the ground, but Mack sat against the wall, cradling his dead wife's arm. His eyes were wide, his dark skin had gone ashen, and his breathing had turned ragged. Even at a distance and in the poor lighting, Jane could see the perspiration standing out on his forehead. She knelt down next to him, making sure her blade arm was as far back as she could get it.
• Finn Morgendorffer 51: A Matter of Trust, by HolyGrail2007 (Part 4): Daria was still wrestling on what to do with Henry, and she decided the only person she could talk to about it was Jane. She headed over to BFAC unannounced, hoping that Jane was there. Sometimes it could be hard to find her. Jane had been spending a lot of time with Miranda and Mark, and, while Daria knew better than to lash out at them, particularly since Jane was so happy, it bothered her. She was spending more and more time alone. She was disappointed when she knocked on the door and found that the other two wheels, Miranda and Mark, were the only two people in the room.
• Is It Over Yet? by S.C. and Kara Wild (COMPLETE!): "You have ONE last chance to make your WOEFUL study habits moot during the final exam! Which is why I ENCOURAGE you to sign up for the new school TUTORING program. The smart ones to teach, the IDIOTS get to ruin someone ELSE'S life for a change!" "Well, when you make it sound so rewarding..." (PPMB discussion thread)
• Judith Strikes! The Taking of Lawndale High, by Charles RB (COMPLETE!): If you were out in Lawndale after curfew, you were either desperate—for food, for shelter, for an escape—or hard as nails. Either way, you wouldn’t go to the Zon. It was too big a wreck, too condemned, too much a reminder of how Li had massacred organized resistance in her rise to power. So twenty-one people sneaking into it over the space of an hour? Twenty-one people who were clearly armed? If you’d seen that you’d immediately know something was up, just before they slotted you before you blabbed it.
• Politricks Are Not for Kids, by Brian Taylor (Part 3): "She'll be coming 'round the mountain when she comes... she'll be coming 'round the the mountain when she comes..." "Oh, Jesus God, why won't you leave me alone?"
• Unnamed story (Iron Chef: Daria and Jane pregnant at the same time), by Vukodlak (COMPLETE!): Tom was sitting at home watching TV eating some popcorn. In a couple of weeks he'd be off to Bromwell, for now he was enjoying Sick Sad World. Well, "enjoying" wasn't exactly true—there simply wasn't anything else on. It had been over a month since the incident in which a moment of weakness after their breakup Tom went to Jane's and they ended up sleeping together. And the following day Daria, filled with regret over the breakup, went to see him and they made up all night long. Needless to say it had been a very awkward couple of days, but they had managed to talk things out and clear the air... though he hadn't spoken to either of them since. "Millionaire playboy knocks up both his ex-girl friends who used to be best friends, when Sick, Sad World returns." "What an idiot," Tom said to himself. At that moment there was a knock at the door.
  

With Enemies Like These . . .

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it.

—Voltaire, 1767


While in the process of surfing around the other day, looking for odds and ends of Daria stuff to scribble about, I accidentally discovered a message board frequented by neo-Nazis and people who like to argue with them, and the thread to which the search engine led me concerned White Nationalists' opinions about the Daria show. I admit to being vastly astonished that neo-Nazis would spend any time at all away from their book burning and immigrant beating and religious vandalism to watch cartoons, but who am I to judge? At any rate, the one thing that most perturbs neo-Nazis about Daria, it seems, is Mack Mackenzie, because he is black and smart, and Kevin Thompson is white and stupid. Neo-Nazis believe this is not possible, even in a cartoon, and object to it mightily as propaganda put forth by Jews. Now, that's a surprise.

One learns a lot about a person or thing by studying its enemies, and if Daria has enemies like this, that says something. This line of logic cannot be carried too far because of a certain innate fallacy in doing so. Just because Hitler loved his dog doesn't mean that loving your dog is bad, although Hitler did poison his dog, too, so maybe it wasn't a kind of love we're normally familiar with.

By a strange quirk of fate, Daria took shots at Nazism in a manner reminiscent of what was done with Adolf "Elizabeth" Hitler in The Producers. Tad Gupty proclaims that "Hitler ate sugar" to prove how bad it is, and in "Fat Like Me" we are treated to an ad for a Sick, Sad World episode called, "There's Something About Hitler," in which Der Führer is said to have been reincarnated as a "madcap leggy blonde." Daria isn't the only cartoon to bash Hitler (Daffy Duck did it, literally, in 1944, as did Donald Duck two years earlier), but the irony of Daria's situation is pleasing.

I brought this issue up in another forum, but it is better treated here in a comedy-oriented blog, where it belongs. The neo-Nazis vs. Daria thread died long ago, the n-N's doubtless having moved on to protesting some other cartoon's depiction of white people, and we will move on as well.

LATE ADD: It has been noted elsewhere that the reason Mack Mackenzie appears flawless in the show was because the show's creators forgot to give him flaws. In other words, he was likely meant to have "issues" like everyone else, but escaped that fate by sheer accident. Irony on irony. Still, most fans are fond of their Saint Mack and are willing for forgive MTV for making him perfect. Screw what anyone else thinks of it.