The show Daria is well-known and fondly remembered for being a humorous and perceptive portrayal of its eponymous heroine, a sarcastic and bespectacled teenage girl in 1990s America, and her best friend Jane.
What this fan work presupposes is, what if her best friend was Tom?
Yeah, that Tom.
Daria Featuring Tom is what's known in the Daria fan community as a Round Robin Iron Chef. This is where the entire show is re-imagined as an AU. Instead of stories, however, the Round Robin Iron Chef consists of opinionated after-the-fact episode synopses, followed by notes explaining how the episode was received by fans and critics, and what its legacy has been. Meta humor is welcome and expected. Best of all, anyone is welcome to pitch in so long as they keep the story going and stay true(ish) to the arc of the series.
Daria Featuring Tom puts Tom, the controversial boyfriend character of the later seasons, in Jane's role as Daria's best and only friend from the first episode. Together, Daria and Tom navigate the tribulations of high school life at the turn of the millennium, idly mocking the stupidity around them. But things get complicated when a girl named Jane starts vying for Tom's attentions. Things get... complicated from there.
This work is complete, and can be found on the Lawndale-high Message Board
. It is primarily the work of authors Charles_RB and Shiva, with some help from Well Tempered Clavier.
This series provides examples of:
- Academic Athlete: Tom becomes this when he joins the football team.
- A Day In The Lime Light: Jane gets one in S3:E11, "The Lawndale Zone". It's credited with improving her image in the fandom.
- Bourgeois Bohemian: Tom, much like in the show. The pic goes into more detail about this aspect of his character, however.
- Chick Magnet: Tom in Season 5.
- Coming-Out Story: Eventually ecomes this for Daria and Jane.
- Girl of the Week: A feature in Tom's life during Season 5. Not all fans thought this was a believable direction for his character, while others interpreted it as him acting out from the trauma he suffered over the summer.
- Meta Fiction: It's fans re-imagining the series with an element changed, and presenting it as an after-the-fact series synopsis or review. Goes a step further with the notes, which sometimes discuss fanfictions that might have been written based on this concept.
- Romantic False Lead: Jane for Tom.
- Will They or Won't They?: Daria and Tom. They seem to be interested in each other at certain points. They don't. Instead, Daria cheats on Tom with Jane.
