As I said in an earlier post (don't remember it? Don't worry -- you didn't miss much), I explained how I immediately related to Daria because I too often come back with the sarcastic remark. But I remember when I did it in high school I annoyed a lot of people and came very close to getting my lights punched out. Do you think this would happen to Daria if she were male instead of female?
Bill.
Bill Harper said:
If Daria were male, Darius' style would be different. Less verbal in dealing with other people. More implicitly than explicitly mocking.
More like Trent, actually.
Sincerely Yours, Jordan
"Man is a god in ruins" (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
dealing
I like Darren better, myself.
You mean Trienna?
On Sun, 29 Aug 1999 00:01:03 -0400, "Bob Ohler" wrote:
Maybe, but Darius is the male form of Daria. Both names are Latin and mean "The Mighty". I don't know what Darren means but I think it's something different.. MSB
[email] (Matthias Benkmann) wrote:
Actually, Darius and Daria come from Dareios, a male Greek name meaning "One who hangs on well to possessions."
rich.
Helen: Bureaucracy is the price we pay for impartiality.
Jake: Jefferson!
Helen: Stalin.
[email] (paperpusher) wrote:
I should've used a disclaimer-- I got this info off of babynamer.com. The amusing bit is that among people who were interested in the name Daria, they also listed Quinn among names they were interested in naming their soon-to-be-arriving progeny. Ah, irony!
rich.
Quinn: I can't be a brain! My friends will hate me!
In article , [email] wrote:
That would be one name that I will never ever consider for any possible offspring. Quinn Quinn, now that would be hell on earth. I don't want to give the little buggers too many reasons to hate me.
Mike Quinn wrote:
How about Daria Quinn? Talk about sending your kid a confusing message... ;-)
rich.
Helen: Bureaucracy is the price we pay for impartiality.
Jake: Jefferson!
Helen: Stalin.
In article , [email] wrote:
By the time that message could be misunderstood, we'll be the only people that understand why (considering it's going to be a while before I even consider having children, then another 15 or so years before said child is old enough to even think of asking, and so on and so forth...). Unless I become a real pain in the ass and make the kid watch every episode of Daria (and agree with every review). I do like the name Daria and would consider giving a child of mine that name.
paperpusher wrote:
Thanks. I just choked on a piece of ice I was chewing on. LOL. Too funny.
Umm...I mean, "*cough* *cough* good one, rich".
Diane *choke* ;)
paperpusher wrote in message news:[email]...
Remember when everyone was naming their daughters "Madonna"? When is "Daria" going to get her turn? Imagine, walking into a first-grade class some day in the not-too-distant future and asking the little girls their names. Of course you ask the little boys their names and what will you get? "Kevin"?
"R. K. Henry" wrote:
Daria is around 1600 in the popularity rankings according to the 1990 US Census. Darius was actually much higher-- around 575. Of course, that may change after the 2000 US Census, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
rich.
Quinn: People are so weird!
Daria: Some are weird. Some are just astonishingly self-centered and deceitful.
(Begin Leather Godesses of Phobos reference)
Tiffany!:)
(End Leather Godesses of Phobos reference)
On 29 Aug 1999 03:49:45 GMT, [email] (Jordan S. Bassior) wrote:
Why? Is that assumption based on the females-talk-males-punch stereotype that we have discussed already in another thread? Well, _I_ don't fit into that stereotype. I am more verbal than most girls I've ever met, and less violent than some of them, too. If I wrote the Daria series based on my life it would be very similar, maybe my Darius would be even _more_ verbal in dealing with people. After all, Daria doesn't talk very much (not in comparison to me). MSB
i can be quite violent. not on a 'going round picking fights' level, but if one of my friends says something nasty, as a joke, i hit them. i don't mean to hurt them or anything.. it's just a habit of mine. perhaps it's due to my dad's theory that the more you hit a child, the more obedient they will be.
On Mon, 30 Aug 1999 01:50:26 +0100, some letters randomly coalesced from individual pixels, claiming to be from "endless, nameless" , and it said:
Hmm...
endless, nameless wrote:
That is weird. One of my online Duranie friends, one Roula Colettas (from Toronto, ON), has a father who is very violent as well. Is there supposed to be some sort of trend or something?
Diane
No, I don't think so, I think it's just the old adage "Spare the rod, spoil the child"... it's still out there, still breathing...
Marie
"What's done to children, they will do to society." -Karl Menninger
MarieRoss wrote:
No, I meant that since Roula and Alli are both of Greek heritage and since both their fathers are especially violent I was wondering if there was some sort of trend as far as *that* is concerned. My parents are both very strict disciplinarians (still) and I still fear them, but Dad isn't anywhere near as violent-sounding as Roula's or Alli's fathers (btw -- I think Roula's father is also from Greece...she keeps on telling me about how he'd "like to return to Greece").
Ya get me?
Diane
Diane, the beautiful yet hallucinating, said:
both
I was once involved with a Greek girl, and her father was very strict and sometimes violent (not to her, but to her mother). I do think there's something violent in Greek culture, something that they maybe got from centuries of Turkish occupation.
There's a difference between "discipline" and "violence" ... a child can be disciplined with a light tap or even disappointed words, you don't need to really HURT a kid to punish him or her.
Sincerely Yours, Jordan
"Man is a god in ruins" (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Oh, ok. Yes, I understand... My step-mother was close friends with a greek family when I was young. The father was very strict with the daughters (but not so much with the only son); the eldest daughter even had to marry a man from Greece (many years her senior) because her father arranged it when she was young. I remember listening to her cry to my stepmother, she was so unhappy. But she went through with her parents wishes, married the man, and went back to Greece with him. Last I heard, she had several children.
Marie
"Let there be spaces in your togetherness." -Kahil Gibran
Matthias Benkmann said:
I'm not assuming that a male Daria would be violent. Trent isn't violent ... and in terms of being a songwriter, is certainly more "verbal" than most WOMEN. And my girlfriend is more violent than me (even though I'll rant more readily).
What I'm saying is that male CULTURE is more violent than female culture, especially in high school where there are few if any real penalties for mere fist-fighting. A male Daria would be more likely to become a target of violence than a female one, and (unlike the female one) would probably have to defend himself physically a few times to prove his courage and his right to be different unmolested.
Incidentally, most of this fighting would be in JHS rather than HS. Upscale high schools aren't all that violent ... even among boys the status conflict has moved more towards insults and one-upmanship than actual physical violence. But JHS students are still basically "kids" in the sense of immaturity, and their status games more elemental.
Sincerely Yours, Jordan
"Man is a god in ruins" (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
On 30 Aug 1999 00:27:55 GMT, [email] (Jordan S. Bassior) wrote:
Huh...my experience was the reverse. Not an everyday occurance mind you, only one fight towards the end of 8th grade, and then it seemed to settle into a pattern as people forgot I wasn't an easy mark that didn't end until the beginning of senior year in highschool and thankfully hasn't returned yet in college ;)
Damon Orca on #Stars!
On Sun, 29 Aug 1999 23:06:53 GMT, some letters randomly coalesced from individual pixels, claiming to be from [email] (Matthias Benkmann), and it said:
Yeah, but if talk shit wit me, I'll put the smack down on yo ass. ;) Like back when I lived in the hood -
Butthead: You never lived in the hood, aswipe!
Bevis: Yeah I did, and when the homies...
Yes, I knew a guy at school who was like Daria and a lot of bullies picked fights with him during his first couple of years at secondary school. But he was pretty good at sticking up for himself and after a while they left him alone.
What if Daria was male? Well in a sense she is, being Glenn Eichler's creation. Perhaps this is where some of her appeal comes from, that it's a view of womanhood from a male perspective.
I think quite a lot of popular female characters have been created by men, which seems to give the lie to the old adage that men don't understand women, since characters such as Daria (Clarissa Darling also springs to mind, she was also created by a man -- Mitchell Kriegman) are equally popular with girls and women, who presumably find them convincing portrayals of their gender. In Clarissa's case, Kriegman has said that many of her lines had previously been performed by himself in his earlier video works, but that she did them better.
There are also series such as Alex Mack which were originally intended to be performed by males ("Alex" was originally Alexander, not Alexandra) but in the end were cast as females. That such transpositions are possibly seems to suggest that there is much less separating the sexes than is popularly supposed. To my mind Daria could be recast as a boy with practically no modification. The lines about borrowing Jane's lipstick might have to be dropped but that's about it.
As to the question of whether a male Daria would encounter more violence, I think the fact is that even a female Daria would encounter much more violence in real life. I was a bit surprised that Tommy Sherman didn't hit Daria, if she'd been a boy he certainly would have done. Maybe it isn't cool to hit a girl but I would have at least expected him to shove her out of the way or knock her books out of her hands. The total lack of violence in Daria's life is perhaps the main weakness in the series - real life just isn't like Lawndale in this respect, where the school food has perhaps been adulterated with valium or something.
After I left school I had a (male) friend who was *exactly* like Daria, right down to the turn of phrase. He too was unpopular with the intellectually challenged but as this was at university, retaliations against his abrasive character took the form of pranks like flooding his room rather than physical violence -- in fact the same happened to me after we made ourselves unpopular at a student meeting by dissing the airheads who ran the show.
-Shez.
On Sun, 29 Aug 1999 17:20:02 +0100, Shez wrote:
I pity you for the environment you must have grown up in to make such a statement. At my school, violence was a rare exception and never really serious. And at my university's maths and computer science faculty, people are even nicer. MSB
I think mine was an average school. I didn't experience much in the way of violence myself but there were bullies and fights going on from time to time. There are always some violent people in society. When you're an adult you can choose where you hang out and stay away from undesirables, but school is a melting pot where you have to rub shoulders with everyone, which inevitably includes society's future criminals and axe murderers (unless they've taken to skiving or been locked up already). Schools should keep things under control, but their record is patchy.
I just checked my news files and according to a survey of 4000 UK teenagers last year, a third had been bullied in the last year. 10% had missed school because of fear of violence. 30% said they had been at least threatened by violence and 15% said they'd been attacked. (Incidentally there's a confidential freephone helpline for young people in the UK who have problems, details can be found on BBC1 Ceefax p516.)
-Shez.
Shez said:
Exactly. It's also the only chance the criminals will ever get to go after "respectable" people without fear of serious consequences, and they make the most of it.
I think the real problem is that actions which would be considered crimes (some of them minor felonies) if committed by adults are taken farily lightly if committed by juveniles. We fail to properly punish or remove from the schools the offenders, to the detriment of everyone else.
Sincerely Yours, Jordan
"Man is a god in ruins" (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Shez said:
If you're brave, intelligence is a tremendous advantage in a fight. Because most people fight instinctively, and most bullies employ "dominance" rather than "efficient" fighting techniques (this isn't alt.martial-arts so I won't go into detail, but people who understand self-defense will know what I mean), the fighter who thinks ahead and strikes hard and fast, instead of trying to "look good" in a fight, will often win, even against long odds.
Plus, you don't have to fight that often once you've demonstrated that you WILL fight. Bullies like easy targets, they are looking to show their dominance, not to get hurt in a hard fought battle.
Absolutely. Her directness and honesty are traits that men not totally seduced by the "cute little sex kitten" image of femininity greatly prize in women.
She'd borrow something else from John.
Maybe. I think that Daria's scarier to those who don't realize her compassionate inner nature than you realize. Plus, she grew up in a rougher environment (Highland) and is now in a fairly soft one (Lawndale).
Remember two things:
1) Tommy Sherman was an adult. An adult hitting a minor can get in a LOT of trouble. Just a few months ago a teenager ... much smaller than me ... tried to provoke me into hitting him by shoving me when I was having an argument with his father. I restrained myself (with effort) because if I'd poked him one I might be sitting in the county jail right now.
2) Tommy Sherman was a hero, and obssessed with "status". A "hero" who beats up on a short little underage girl loses a LOT of status. Tommy wouldn't have to be a genius to realize this. For that matter, a large adult pushing around a MALE high school junior doesn't exactly gain status thereby.
Perhaps. That wouldn't put him in jail, but, if witnessed, he'd lose status. Those bullying tactics only gain you status when the victim is SOMEWHAT close to a peer in age / size, which is why high school kids don't generally hang around elementary school playgrounds picking fights.
There have been fights depicted. Daria's smart enough not to want to get into them, and scary enough that nobody wants to pick them with her. Her complete and obvious lack of fear is in itself intimidating.
Hope you got back at them, but you're missing an important point ... Daria isn't REALLY unpopular. In the example you gave, for example, Tommy Sherman would have made a REAL enemy of Mack (and probably lost the respect of Kevin) if he'd started beating up Daria. Not to mention that Daria has at least one REALLY good friend ... the kind who would jump in to help her without thinking twice about it. Jane's scrawny but muscular, and much more aggressive than Daria, so I wouldn't discount her.
Sincerely Yours, Jordan
"Man is a god in ruins" (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Not true. If Daria had been born a male child, Jake's Son, things would have been different. His(Darren's) relationship with Jake would have would have been completely. Dare we hope that Jake might have become a little less stressed out with a fellow "y-chromosome" in the family. And the hurt feelings over Being outshone by Quinn would never have happened; sister-brother rivalry is very different from sister-sister rivalry. Plus, her relationship with her mother would have been different. Daria (gasp) might have even turned out more like Mack or Kevin! Unless she hung out with Beavis & Butthead then it'd be better to put him out of his _misery_.
The "complete and obvious lack of fear" is a strong weapon in staying out of trouble. I was pretty petite and meek when I started high school and the school's "tough girls" did not like me at all (neither did the cheerleaders but that's another story). It took me two fights to realize that I didn't want anymore. Instead, I created a "fearless" personna for myself. I acted like a "touch chick," I spread rumors about the out-of-town girls who's butts I had kicked, and I never backed down when I was challenged. (and I mean, I _never_ backed down... even when the girl in question could have snapped me like a twig). I ended up earning the respect of a lot of girls whom would otherwise have stomped on me. The other part of my strategy was I made a lot of male friends... you'd be surprised how nice girls will be to you if they think you'll help hook them up with a guy they like who just happens to be your friend. The first part worked on the tougher girls and the second part worked on the cheerleaders and I never got in another physical fight with a girl again. I will add that this strategy of mine had some rather unpleasant side-effects but, to me, at the time, they were well worth it.
I have noticed a lack of real bullies in Lawndale (both male and female), that exist at most real schools. But Lawndale is a small town and maybe that makes a difference.
Marie
"We're men, we're men in tights... Manly men in tights..." -Robin Hood: Men in Tights "Nothing is so simple that it cannot be misunderstood." -Freeman Teague, Jr.
"The little I know, I owe to my ignorance." -Sacha Guitry
Well ok, if the Morgendorffers had had a son then his relationship to them would probably have been different to Daria's and he might have turned out differently. But that doesn't mean there aren't male Darias out there. I don't know the family background to the one I knew, but his demeanour, expressions etc were exactly like Daria's. He even wore glasses, and I suppose his name - Dag (short for Dagobert) - was even quite similar. His family name was Russian rather than German though.
-Shez.
I thought the question was about Daria being a boy... naturally, I assumed this meant that she had been born male, and to my mind, this changed everything... I guess I misunderstood the question... of course there are males who act like Daria, just as their are females who act like Trent (used to know one)...
Marie
"Nothing is so simple that it cannot be misunderstood." -Freeman Teague, Jr.
"The little I know, I owe to my ignorance." -Sacha Guitry
Marie Ross, who has a cute nose, said:
been
Probably. I think that Darren and Jake would have gotten along better than Daria and Jake. A lot of Jake's overprotectiveness and yet fear of overinvolvement is because he really doesn't understand girls very well.
True. But maybe if Darren had a brother Quentin instead of a sister Quinn?
More like Mack, though probably less conformist. He'd be smart and reasonably popular, though not a suck-up. He'd probably share Daria's basic fearlessness, honesty and morality (which makes Darren in many ways a less hypocritical Mack, not that Mack is a really bad hypocrite).
Is Darren small and scrawny or big and athletic? This can matter a lot for guys.
Yes. When I'm in dangerous neighborhoods and people look like they are trying to size me up to attack I meet their gaze briefly. Not stare ... that's a challenge ... but definitely demonstrate that I am not afraid of them. (The advice "never make eye contact" is dead wrong, btw, TOTAL AVOIDANCE of eye contact says "I'm a coward" and makes you *more* likely to be victimized. The rule should be "don't make PROLONGED eye contact").
Sincerely Yours, Jordan
"Man is a god in ruins" (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
On 29 Aug 1999 16:39:07 GMT, [email] (Jordan S. Bassior) wrote:
I can second this one. After the first time you decidedly trounce a larger attacker (or two at once >:-} people generally don't pick on you as much. Physically anyway.
Re the whole dominance theory to most male fighting - yup. I (fortunately or unfortunately - I can't figure out which) have a tendency to respond in kind to that sort of fight (which usually involves a fair bit of wrestling around once you get in close versus exchanging punches - hell it seems more like (unfriendly) competition at that point). Of course if someone actually *does* hit me, I go apeshit on 'em :P Kinda surprising when someone you just hit hard enough to sting comes right back and starts going for the disabling attacks rather than simply attempting to throw you off balance...attempting to tie this back to the issue at hand, you're absolutely right about the intelligence of actually thinking (though that sounds more than slightly repetitive) during a fight because everyone telegraphs their movements, making it much easier to dodge/block and land your own blows, as well as using your environment against them (drive them towards the roots of that tree, throw your book at 'em and attack at the same time, kick that pinecone on the ground towards their face...)
Although if they're cute it's just a bonus :) One of my friends is very much like that - frighteningly intelligent, but with birth defects so a (physical) beauty she is not...
(Thinks for a moment). I'd have to agree with Shez on this one...at the least there'd be a *lot* more teasing than what we see.
<more snippage>
Eh? I haven't seen "Her complete and obvious lack of fear." Then again we haven't seen her threatened with physical violence either.
<snip Shez's stuff>
This I could definetly see (since I have a friend of the same status as Jane - kinda scary when you find yourself walking in step with someone else without meaning to and all but finishing each other's thoughts :) And if she's like the runners I know, her legs are *ripped*. One good boot to the kneecap while he's busy with Daria would knock him out of action in a hurry :)
Likewise...
Damon Orca on #Stars!
Damon Domjan said:
That's sad. I hope people appreciate her anyway.
Highland wasn't exactly hell (we must remember that our impression of it is skewed by the fact that B&B were the viewpoint characters) but it was definitely a more blue-collar environment than Lawndale.
Watch when Daria says something nasty to someone, especially when it is completely intentional on her part. She has no problem making eye contact, regardless of their size and status. In general, Daria act unafraid.
Sincerely Yours, Jordan
"Man is a god in ruins" (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
On Sun, 29 Aug 1999 09:07:00 +1000, Bill Harper wrote:
Not at Lawndale High. The guys there may be freaks but they're basically nice. It's always a matter of the school you go to. The people at my school were nice,too. I do not remember a single incident of serious violence like a fistfight in all those years. MSB
p.s.: Maybe someone thinks it's odd that I regard a fistfight as serious violence but at the school I went to, people didn't even have knives. Like Lawndale (as it appears to me) our community is inhabited mostly by well-off upper middle class families. Such an environment is usually very secure. Even a single woman can can go for a walk at midnight without fear, here.