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Daria is an American adult animated sitcom television series [6] created by Glenn Eichler and Susie Lewis Lynn.The series ran from March 3, 1997, to January 21, 2002, on MTV.It focuses on the title character, Daria Morgendorffer, an intelligent, cynical high school student, voiced by Tracy Grandstaff, reprising her role from Mike Judge's earlier animated series, Beavis and Butt-Head.
Daria: Created by Glenn Eichler, Susie Lewis. With Tracy Grandstaff, Wendy Hoopes, Julian Rebolledo, John Lynn. A smart and cynical girl goes through teenage life as a proud outsider in a world of mainly idiotic adolescents and condescending adults.
- (28K)
- 1997-03-03
- Animation, Comedy, Drama
- 30
- Overview
- Personality
- Physical Appearance
- Character Overview
- Beavis and Butt-Head
- Daria
- Daria's Growth
- Daria and Her Parents
- Relationship with Quinn
Daria Morgendorffer is the series' eponymous protagonist. Originally a supporting character in Beavis and Butt-Head before getting her own series, she is the eldest child in the Morgendorffer family and a disaffected, misanthropic student of Lawndale High.
She is voiced by Tracy Grandstaff.
primarily revolves around Daria's cynical outlook, and how her views evolve throughout the series as the events of the sitcom unfold. Apathetic, intellectual, and witty, Daria is naturally an anti-social person. Daria's best-known characteristic is her deadpan sarcasm; her usual reaction to almost anything and everyone being a dry, witty remark at their expense. She rarely shows any emotion, and usually appears stand-offish and uncaring most of the time to her peers - which is something that she admittedly welcomes.
Thus, Daria is initially presented as someone quite bored by the mundane and shallow world of high school life, and prefers to engage in intellectual and philosophical quandaries, and dedicate herself to her own interests - humorously finding more in common with fictional characters in novels rather than people in the real world. This cynical and distasted nature united her with her best friend, Jane Lane, and the two often enjoy a sort of innate pride in seeing high school life more objectively than their brain-dead classmates and condescending, selfish teachers.
One of Daria's primarily personality traits is her natural intelligence. Even in her youth, Daria was perceived to be an intelligent individual. Seemingly a respectful and shy young girl before, Daria's personality has been shaped around the way she has been treated by her peers. Her social isolation, specifically, has demotivated her to such a point that she is highly apathetic and somewhat lazy towards others, showing no motivation to apply anything above the minimum required effort. While this has isolated her from her peers, her conscious denial of them did allow her to, in her opinion, refine her own intelligence. However, it is also her rejection by her peers also led her to be greatly skeptical, arrogant and snide towards others.
This extends towards her academics, as while she is academically brilliant, she often avoids taking part in any extracurricular, and often social, activities by her own volition, entirely content to coast through high school with her inherent academic talents alone. Due to this lack of engagement with other students, in addition to her often bored or pessimistic expression and status as an outsider, she is commonly perceived as being an unhappy person. Although considering herself more realistic—even clarifying in The Misery Chick to be she's not nihilistic—she will occasionally appeal to nihilism and even consideration of suicide for the sake of an offhand joke.
Another one of Daria's key traits is her staunchness, as she is often highly opinionated, sometimes harshly judgmental, and even smug at points. Although she is ultimately fair and will admit to being wrong after proven as such, she is typically opposed to, or at least wary of, generally accepted social norms and notions, as well as things such as superstition, and can be somewhat quick to anger in a divisive argument. Her sense of morality and unwillingness to conform often frustrates her family and the school faculty, but occasionally makes them proud when conformity would be unjust.
Her calm and unfazed nature also weirds her peers out, and it is noted that in most situations that would shock, or even frighten, most others, Daria is often noted to maintain a very neutral, or occasionally even snide, demeanor. She has admitted to having generally low opinions of others, but this is not necessarily true. Rather she tends to act as if she does as overcompensation for the effect being rejected from her peers has had with her. Her ability to socialize with Jodie Landon and Mack, and acknowledge them as two of the few decently intelligent and respectable students going to Lawndale, does imply that she may actually be deep down socially inclined. Not that she is extroverted, but the extent of which she is unwilling to cooperate or communicate with her peers seems to be a result of her experiences in her earlier years, and not a reflection of her actual personality.
Daria Morgendorffer has upper-back length reddish-brown hair that has bangs going across her forehead on the right side, which she doesn't style in any particular fashion.
In stark contrast with most other female characters, Daria makes no attempt to dress attractively as she typically sports a large dark green zipped up jacket, an orange shirt underneath, a black knee-length pleated skirt and large black lace-up boots, accompanied by her signature black thick-rimmed circular glasses. She is relatively small in stature, standing at a mere 5'2" according to Jane Lane, and most clothes don't fit her as a result, even including her usual outfit to an extent, as her coat and boots are clearly a bit large for her. Quinn the Brain is the only episode where her body type is actively showcased, and it seems to be fairly similar to Quinn Morgendorffer.
Daria Morgendorffer is an intelligent, insightful, snarky, and sensitive teenage girl in an otherwise "normal" environment. This is to say that she doesn't fit in all that well, and was often subject to ridicule—and would ridicule back, poking at the idiocies of her peers, her elders, and herself.
Though an outcast at her school, she has earned a degree of grudging, nearly surprising respect from her fellow students. (Surprising because there's little evidence that they are capable of appreciating her.) She attempts to fly under the radar and blend into the background but keeps getting drawn into situations against her will, where she either restores sanity or causes things to descend into further chaos.
A career aptitude test in It Happened One Nut said she'd do well as a mortician: "Your lack of interest in personal interaction makes you an ideal candidate for working with the dead." She was not happy with this result.
She has described Jane Lane as basically the only real friend she's ever had. The Daria Diaries states she was "always invited to slumber parties" as a pre-teen, but only because she had an adult library card and could bring along sex-filled romance books.
Daria has a high intelligence for her age group, knowing about a wide variety of subjects and noted to be both at the top of many classes and getting straight A's. However, Daria is shown to be quite lazy and apathetic: she manages to get her high grades despite not working that hard.
Her experience with romance appears to have been limited for most of her teenage life until Tom Sloane consisting largely of a few dates and odd flirtations (see Robert, Ted DeWitt-Clinton, and Trent Lane).
In Daria's first incarnation as a recurring character on Beavis and Butt-Head, she formed a female, intelligent foil to the two male dunderheads. (She was, a producer/writer for the show stated, "the smart girl who hung around with Beavis and Butt-Head because it annoyed her parents.") Often, the two would openly mock her and refer to her as "Diarrhea." Daria was named by Mike Judge after a girl at his school who'd had that name... and also been nicknamed "Diarrhea." He cites David Felton as coming up with her look ("like Lynda Barry") and with the character, with producer John Andrews creating the original design.
took place in a small town called Highland in Texas, where Daria, Beavis, and Butt-Head were in the ninth grade at Highland High.
Tracy Grandstaff's voice for Daria starts off sounding normal and gradually become deeper and flatter, though the full monotone version from her own series would not be completed until Esteemsters.
Though she is not amused by their antics, she does not have the passionate hatred for them that Principal McVicker and Coach Buzzcut have nor does she really believe there is any hope for them either as Mr. Van Driessen had. At times, she would also make fun of the two for their stupidity. In the episode U. S. History, she turned around to talk to the duos and said they'll never graduate, and she told them that "to graduate" means to be all done with the final year of school.
In It's a Miserable Life, it is stated that Butt-Head had been responsible for giving her a negative outlook on boys. In the final episode of the series when the boys "died," Daria expressed the sentiments that Beavis and Butt-Head did not have very bright futures to look forward to. She was one of the few characters that the duo never managed to drive crazy as they had with many other students and teachers. In the Marvel comic books, however, the duo did manage to push her closer to the edge than they did in the TV show.
This early version of Daria was not as sarcastic or cutting (at least not to the lads) as she would be in Daria, and in a number of episodes would be shown trying to explain simple concepts or solutions to them, sometimes without any jokes at their expense at all. This side of Daria would be played down in her own show. (In the Beavis and Butt-Head comic book, Daria was more prone to sarcastic remarks.) Butt-Head was more willing to listen to her (and usually called her by her real name to her face), while Beavis appeared to irritate her more than Butt-Head.
In her eponymous series, Daria is a bespectacled, plain, unfashionably dressed, but highly intellectual and seemingly cynical teenage girl who is portrayed as an icon of sanity in an insane household, with her vacuous, fashion-obsessed sister Quinn Morgendorffer and career-obsessed parents Helen Morgendorffer and Jake Morgendorffer.
The new show moves her to the middle-class suburb of Lawndale and she attends Lawndale High School where on her first day she meets Jane Lane, the artist and classmate who will be her first real friend and her best friend through the rest of her high school life. Their strong friendship and mutual endurance of gloomy adolescence was a motif of the series, which survived despite Jane's boyfriend, Tom Sloane, becoming Daria's.
While much of the show is a vehicle for Daria's droll deadpan monotone one-liners, a recurring plot element in early seasons is Daria standing up to misused authority, leading some fans to conclude that her apparent cynicism is only skin deep or at least that she is only cynical in the classical sense. The jump to main character also makes Daria become more angsty: she is now shown to have problems connecting to people or dealing with people she cares about.
Daria's personal views on politics and religion are subject to intense debate. Because she so often speaks with a sarcastic or cynical twist, one cannot always be sure she means what she says. In early episodes, she often said that she didn't have a conscience, but it was repeatedly shown that she did have one. Although she could say cruel things to other people (especially Quinn), there were also cases where she acted out of kindness (e.g. The Old and the Beautiful, I Loathe a Parade, Is It Fall Yet?).
According to the episode Lane Miserables, her height is 5'2". Her eyes are brown, per an interview with Glenn Eichler and general implications made in Through a Lens Darkly.
Unlike most animated characters, Daria and her counterparts aged during the duration of the series. When the series began, Daria was a sophomore in high school and would graduate by the end of the series. (Depending on when she moved to Lawndale, as a Scorpio, she could've been fifteen for the first couple of episodes) When she graduated from high school in the show's final TV movie, she was eighteen-years-old. By the time graduation arrives, Daria's character has undergone noticeable growth. She graduates from Lawndale High, winning the Dian Fossey Award "for dazzling academic achievements in face of near total misanthropy," and crowning her acceptance speech with the assertion that "...[T]here is no aspect, no facet, no moment of life that can't be improved with pizza."
Though the series was a rich one, replete with interesting characters and multiple points-of-view, it was mostly the story of one character, Daria herself, and her evolution.
At the beginning, she can be fairly characterized as smart, cynical, and a little ruthless.
She is not afraid to physically rough up her little sister when the latter clearly deserves it (note the ending of The New Kid). She is not afraid to take a series of very risky, manipulative actions to call attention to her school's principal's unethical behavior (This Year's Model) She has, by her own admission, never had a real friend until Jane Lane; She has, however, alluded to her own consideration of Beavis and Butt-Head with some slight affection. During her freshman year at Highland High School, Daria was seen as spending time with the two boys for the purposes of her own amusement, to manipulate them as subjects for a science class project and a school newspaper photo-essay, and because her association with the two boys bothered her parents.
As time went on, Daria would have to face the flip-side of her high standards and cynicism: an ugly judgmental streak (Partner's Complaint), problems with living up to her own standards (Through a Lens Darkly), fear of trying (The Story of D), and excessive unpleasantness at people who didn't deserve it (Camp Fear). She also became vicious and unpleasant when Jane had boyfriends, fearing that Jane was going to be taken away from her; Tom Sloane would tell her how stupid this was, citing that Jane was constantly talking about Daria. By the time of Psycho Therapy, Daria was quite calmly stating "I'm so defensive that I actually work to make people dislike me so I won't feel bad when they do," showing she was aware of this flaw within herself.
Flashbacks to Daria's earlier childhood would also show that she'd been a loner since a very young age, preferring to read rather than play with the other kids because she couldn't get them to understand her and was getting picked on over it; she decided to stop trying, claiming the other kids didn't interest her. She was a voracious reader (Boxing Daria) and mainly only liked people who were in books, irritated by a world she found to be idiotic (Is It Fall Yet?).
She would openly state she'd prefer to read than try to meet people. (Camp Fear) She also had a questioning nature, responding (at age 6) to an explanation of Rorschach blot tests with the question "then why don't I just draw my own picture?", and would avoid taking part in activities she didn't enjoy unless she was forced into it. She has ended up with a reputation as a gloomy "brain" as a result—however, in Quinn the Brain she admitted she was stuck with this reputation because others had put it on her, and she didn't actually like it. As per The Misery Chick, she is irritated that people keep assuming she's upset or wrong somehow because she's not like them.
Daria's parents had been trying to get her to be more sociable and conventional since a very young age, both out of concern and out of frustration. While their intentions are noble in Boxing Daria made it clear they did this because they were upset that their daughter was unhappy, and Is It Fall Yet? had Helen admit she was afraid of Daria becoming permanently antisocial—their methods have mostly failed, only causing Daria to become irritated and clam up. Early attempts were shown to be asking Daria to just keep trying to play with the other kids and simply taking a book away from her at Camp Grizzly so she couldn't hide behind it, both options being crude and having the opposite effect.
Most of their modern-day attempts had the same effectiveness, and usually showed them to be somewhat clueless about how to deal with their daughter. Despite that, she's sometimes recognized they're trying to help and she does love them: she's attempted several times to help her parents, usually sounding uncomfortable at the prospect of talking frankly to them, such as when she encouraged her father in Jake of Hearts and consoled her mother in Psycho Therapy. In the latter, she admits she deliberately clams up around them because she knows they'd be attentive and she'd rather they weren't; in Of Human Bonding, she tries to convince her father not to try bonding with her for the same reasons. In the latter, she also showed problems with opening up to him.
In one of her darkest hours, Dye! Dye! My Darling, Daria turned to Helen for help and comfort. In Write Where It Hurts Helen also showed some sharp insight into parts of her daughter's psyche. IIFY? shows that Helen believes her daughter isn't naturally antisocial but uses it as a mask, and wants to stop this; in Boxing Daria, she says she and Jake know Daria withdraws from the world as a way of dealing with things.
Jake has a pet name, "kiddo," for Daria and will sometimes turn to her if he needs help or advice, like in Aunt Nauseam. As he rarely pushes her to do things, she seems to get on more amiably with him than with her mother. In Of Human Bonding, Daria thought: "he's afraid to be afraid. That's what's so heartbreaking. He's my father; shouldn't I let down the barricades for once and tell him I think he's a hero?" (Daria wound up not telling Jake he was her hero).
This can be summed up with two words: total war. The two sisters are very resentful of the other and that their differences regarding social standing and personalities drive a large amount of the conflict in the series; Quinn won't even admit for most of the series that Daria is her sister (which irritates Daria). This goes back to Quinn's infancy: flashbacks to toddler Daria who her angrily wanted to "punish" baby Quinn for being loud, angrily yelling "Why can't I be an only child?!," and trying to stop footage of Quinn being filmed. Photos in The Daria Diaries even show Daria opening a door so Quinn, taking her baby steps, may wander outside!
Both sides love to antagonize the other. Daria goes out of her way to go to places where she knows Quinn doesn't want her to go and embarrass her sister by existing in front of Quinn's friends. In "The Invitation", Daria sounded mildly impressed when Quinn got in a really vicious dig at her. Daria has also tried to deliberately ruin things for Quinn: in The F Word, she tried to 'fail' at preventing Quinn from being allowed to go to a fashion sale.
When they're not insulting or irritating each other, their dealings often resemble a business transaction such as laying out terms of requirements, expenses, exceptions, and final payment. On some rare occasions the two sisters have worked together to achieve some goal, usually to get out of trouble or to avoid it; these earlier team-ups were also done in a business-like fashion, such as when Daria incites Quinn (That Was Then, This Is Dumb), with an offer of some form of payment or benefit, to gather scandalous blackmail information about their parents.
In spite of these differences, there does exist a level of sibling love between the two, even if they refuse to openly admit it. Daria has, to her discomfort, sometimes found herself helping Quinn: she backed her up against the Fashion Club in Just Add Water, guilted herself out of embarrassing her sister in "Monster", and openly told Quinn "there's nothing wrong with you physically" in Too Cute when her sister was obsessed with (imaginary) imperfections. When Quinn has come to Daria for serious advice, Daria has given it to the best of her ability.
Daria has shown some sharp insight into her sister. In Psycho Therapy, she stated Quinn "wears superficiality like a suit of armor, because she's afraid to looking inside and finding absolutely nothing"; in Lucky Strike, she snaps at Quinn that she knows she's not stupid.
In a Daria-penned essay "Please Pass the Peace Pact", Daria talked about "the Morgendorffer Accords (also known as the "Kitchen Counter Talks")" being "signed" after fifteen years. Both girls agreed to respect bedrooms as sacrosanct and to have equal access to "essential resources" in the bathroom and kitchen ("the refrigerator and the bathroom. No one wants a replay of the bitter Cold Cream War of 1998").
Daria is an animated TV series about a young, intelligent, and cynical high school girl named Daria Morgendorffer, initially a supporting character on the MTV animated series Beavis and Butt-Head. It was produced by Tom Snyder Productions and MTV with Glenn Eichler who served as its executive producer and principal writer for the entire run of the series. Peggy Nicoll and Anne D. Bernstein ...
Daria Morgendorffer relies on her wit and her best friend Jane to brave her superficial peers at Lawndale High, her popular sister Quinn, her frazzled parents, and the bleakness of suburbia. Watch Now. Season 1. Pluto TV. Movies and Shows in United States. Daria. Stream Daria free and on-demand with Pluto TV. Free Movies & TV Shows.
Daria Morgendorffer is a fictional character and the main protagonist of the MTV animated series Daria, which aired from 1997 to 2002. She was originally created as a smart foil to Beavis and Butt-Head, and later became the star of her own show.
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Daria. Brainy, sardonic Daria Morgendorffer tries to fly under the radar at Lawndale High School, and she's doing a pretty good job of it: Her self-esteem teacher can't even remember her name. Not that low self-esteem is a problem for Daria, who explains that "I have low esteem for everyone else." Frankly, she couldn't care less about the ...
