The October 9, 1998 issue of Entertainment Weekly has an article called "Viva Las Divas"--all about the subject of divas. A sidebar has various diva lists (for example: "Divas Named Joan"--Joan Rivers, Joan Collins, Joan Crawford, Joan of Arc). One of these lists is "'Toon Divas" and lists Tinkerbell, Foghorn Leghorn, Veronica...and Daria. (More of EW's diva stuff can be found at http://cgi.pathfinder.com/ew/features/981009/divas/index.html if anyone's interested or doesn't know what a diva is.)
I think this is another example of a popular magazine misinterpreting Daria, such as People using her as a fashion critic recently. Don't they have editors and fact-checkers and such? Shouldn't someone there point this stuff out?
On Mon, 05 Oct 1998 19:43:56 -0400, Jeg7777 wrote:
This wouldn't happen if MTV really knew who was watcing "Daria", but they're about as tuned in to their own demographics as I am to endless rebroadcasts of Yanni and John Tesch on the never-ending PBS money suck-up fests... er, I mean, pledge drives.
Martin ---- Quinn: You kids know where Grandma's TV is. Go watch something educational. SSW: "Breast implants for chickens???" Quinn & Daria: Not that!!! ---- (To send E-mail, remove the "nospam" from my E-mail address.)
What I think about this is that Daria is picked for these kinds of magazines simply because she is female. And yes, editors and such who choose the cartoon obviously know nothing about it. Or it could just be the way it is on the show: The fashion-obsessed never know when they're being made fun of.
OK, I'm going to flame just a little here. It's not directed at anybody personally, OK?
You guys are completely confusing the folks who make these magazines with the folks who read them. The folks at Entertainment and even People are not fashion-obsessed morons. They may take fashion a bit more seriously than some of us do, but you CAN'T be a moron and put out a weekly national magazine. The people putting Daria in these mags are the people Daria wants to grow up to be.
These people are recommending Daria to their readership because they're serious critical-types who happen to LIKE Daria and WANT their readers to get into her to. (I'm going a little bit out on a limb here, because I haven't read either article yet - where is this week's EW, anyway? - but I bet I'm right).
Furthermore, they like to use her for things like fashion and an article on Divas because she IS an outsider to those things. Using Daria to talk about fashion is a way to point out some of the absurdities of the fashion scene without getting in anybody's face (in the middle ages a jester could make fun of the king without getting his head chopped off, 50 years ago a ventriloquist with a dummy could say things that a regular comedian never could. Today "Daria" can get away with saying things that a fashion reporter never could - and you KNOW the producers and writers aren't just handing her off to some magazine hack ... they're probably producing most of these articles themselves), while putting Daria on a "Divas" list says that being a Diva isn't just about what you wear to the Oscars, it's also about being smart, and funny, and intellectually honest and holding yourself above the daily swamp, and not being afraid to be "too cool for the room."
Daria's a satirical comedy. It's RIGHT that she wise-off about fashion and muscle in among "Divas." Should Daria be taking on politics and foreign cinema? Nah. Daria's about exposing the absurdities of America's adolescent pop culture. Fashion pages are exactly where she needs to be.
So relax a little for god's sake. Don't get so caught up in the fictional continuity of the character that you no longer let her do what she was designed for in the first place -- throwing buckets of cold reality over the goonier manifestations of what we are reluctantly forced to refer to as our "culture."
Oh, Daria's definitely a Diva. (Alliteration roolz, dude!)
Not in any kind of Celine Dion sense, of course. Daria falls squarely somewhere between Dorothy Parker and Janis Ian (with just enough Molly Ivins to keep her from being a basket case.)