Courtesy link: The Daria

First of all the there's the name, which is a character reference which I think maybe we don't like anymore? That's not really important though.

What is important is the description. It can't seem to make up its mind as to whether it's describing a trope or simply the character Daria. Quite a bit of what it says is oddly specific, and it's unclear which bits, if any, are central to the trope itself and not simply things that Daria happened to be in her show.

The greater problem of course is whether there's actually anything fundamental about this that makes it any different from a generic Deadpan Snarker. I assume there is, but the more I read the description the more confused I get. Is it a subtrope of Deadpan Snarker that applies only to high school girls? Does it have something to do with the nature of the people surrounding her? Is it really Always Female? I have no idea. While you could just enlighten me, keep in mind that the fact that I have no idea implies something's wrong with the description.

Upon comparing the descriptions, The Daria has a high set of principles that she applies to herself as well as others. This is not mentioned in the description of the Deadpan Snarker. Specific to that description is the Deadpan Snarker as potential leader who is often ignored because they are Only Sane Man.

As for the name, I haven't seen Daria televised in years although I am sure it is out there somewhere. While television references will usually resonate with people who were alive when the show was first televised they lose effectiveness with succesive generations. However finding a cultural referent that everyone understands is damn hard because of the multiplicity of sources available.

EDIT fix redlink

edited 23rd Sep '09 8:45:44 AM by blackcat

So it's a Deadpan Snarker with high standards (and isn't a hypocrite) who also has leadership potential that always fails to occur because of idiots? Okay.

Is it always female? Does it have to be a teenager?

Laconic Wiki says "Teenage, snarky, female bookworm." That sounds specific enough. Maybe the description could be revised?

Concerning the character name, it is usable because 1. The character will not be confused with anyone else of the same name, and 2. The character is distinctly known for that trope over any other traits.

Seems like a lot of the examples don't fit those criteria either.

edited 23rd Sep '09 8:51:15 AM by Clarste

If this is just something about changing the description, then I can take a crack at doing a revision...

Nipping all the direct refernces to Daria in the description.

edit: that better?

edited 23rd Sep '09 9:00:01 AM by Wraith_Magus

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, this is another one of those Character Named Tropes that are meaningless to anyone not specifically familiar with the Trope Namer. Is the term used iconically outside the wiki?

Still seems a bit all over the place, honestly. I just can't find the juicy trope core at its center that defines what it is. I suppose it'd be plausible that it's just a really specific character archetype, but the examples don't bear that out. I honestly can't think of anyone who might qualify with that description other than Daria herself.

edited 23rd Sep '09 9:08:09 AM by Clarste

Well, I certainly knew of her, and her role, without ever watching MTV.

@Clarste: I pruned it back a little more. If there's something else you don't understand, you'll have to be specific about it, since I don't really understand what's unclear about it as it is.

There are a good number of examples, and I can easily see what they have to do with the trope, so I don't see the problem.

I'll just go through the list of examples looking at the ones I'm familiar with:

• Mai from Avatar the Last Airbender - Not a bookworm, no high ideals
• Haruhi from Ouran High School Host Club - Not a bookworm, not a Jerkass
• Lisa Simpson - not a teenager, seems to fit overall though
• Susan Sto Helit in the Discworld novel Soul Music - can't think of any problems
• Juno from the movie Juno - Not a bookworm
• Gert Yorkes of the comic book, Runaways - Don't recall too many high ideals, not sure
• Holden Caulfield (from The Catcher in the Rye) - Not female, doesn't hold himself to ideals, can't remember if bookworm
• Kyle from South Park can be another male example - not female, not a teenager, not a bookworm, not really a Jerkass to most of his peers (depending on the context)
• Seven of Nine from Star Trek Voyager - not a teenager, not a bookworm, not in the implied high school setting

So, of all the examples I recognize, 2-3 of them kind of maybe fit the letter of the description. I'm perfectly willing to believe that they have something in common, but the description certainly doesn't seem to point to it. Most of the examples seem to focus on the snarking more than anything else.

Basically I'm asking which parts of necessary and which parts are just commonly seen in conjunction with it.

edited 23rd Sep '09 9:29:18 AM by Clarste

Your tastes are completely different from mine. If those are as you say, then go ahead and remove them, although I don't think "bookworm" is a hard requirement of the trope, so Juno should be fine, too. It really should just be that she is intelligent / learned / culturally minded.

High school setting is not at all required. I was scrubbing that part out of the trope.

How about the female or teenager parts?

I think it depends on how you interpret the use of the word bookworm in the original description.

Then just snip the non-snarky bookworm examples. Simple!

Ignoring the fact that one person's idea was to generalize away from bookworm and another person's was to hone in on it, does anyone agree with me that it's at least slightly confusing or is this just a personal crusade at this point? If it turns out this is just an idiosyncratic response of mine I'll just drop it; we've already fixed it a bit.

I am certain that the requirement for "female" was a hard rule, I see how it came to be but it seems like it is the basis of an arbitary gender split. The "teenager" requirement seems like a stand in for "young but like mature".

I find the trope namer helpful in my understanding of the trope. Well either that or it's so misleading I can't tell but that would mean that the trope namer isn't an example.

What I understand by this trope is something akin to Only Sane Man but it's not so much sanity as intelligence, integrity and morality combined with a self-defense mechanism of snark used to express their frustrations with the world.

Let's look at the first paragraph shall we:

Ignore the clever labelling of jerkass and bookworm. Really the use of bookworm there was pointless because they want to say (indeed they did say) intelligent and worldly. And the point really isn't that they are a Jerkass as in the trope, the point is the dislike for everyone else in the world. We have the actual definition preceeded by an attempt at defining this trope in terms of others (And Thats Terrible) which is then discarded for not really defining the trope.

I feel the rest isn't so bad and uses other tropes as a comparison far better. Especially Knight In Sour Armour. The description is better and more fleshed out and upon reading it I think "How the hell did that Laconic page come to be? They haven't described the trope, they've described some superficial qualities that sometimes, sometimes accompany the use of the trope".

I think the first paragraph needs to be cleaned up, the laconic needs to be cleaned and the examples, well gosh, you can learn so very little from

• Jaye Tyler of Wonderfalls
• Claire Fisher on Six Feet Under
• Georgia Lass of Dead Like Me

there probably isn't an example that actually reinforces the trope definition until Catcher In The Rye.

It probably won't get dropped completely given that is a non-iconic Character Named Trope that fails the One Mario Limit, but it probably is better to get the description, definition and examples sorted out first because no one can propose good name candidates if they don't understand the trope either.

SSOT: It says Intelligent and Worldy because I just put it there after Clarste's post. I just hacked up the description to cleave out the parts that clearly were meant to apply to the original Daria alone.

Is there a better name out there that we can use for this trope? The Daria is a classic example of a bad character-named trope.

Only if you weren't around with Daria was popular - I've only watched a few episodes of it, but long before I did I knew exactly what the character type was because she was so popular. Not really saying that's grounds for a keep, but keep in mind that it isn't really counterintuitive in that way.

The name helps me while the description is scruffy.

I think as ever, the priority should be first to work on the description and make sure that we are all on the same page before starting on the name.

Never seen or heard of it myself, and surely I'm not the only one. "Daria" is not a name that lends itself to instant recognition.

I wonder about that, considering this thread lay dead for a month. "Self-critical Deadpan Snarker" is all I get out of it. If the trope is this hard to nail down, cut it altogether and sell the scrap to Deadpan Snarker.

edited 3rd Nov '09 12:59:01 PM by Citizen

I thought The Daria was the adult version of Little Miss Snarker

EDIT: Boy they chopped out a lot from the Little Miss Snarker Trope

EDIT 2: Note The Daria is listed as a subtrope of the Ice Queen

edited 7th Nov '09 6:45:50 PM by Sackett

No idea what to do here. The Daria, Little Miss Snarker and Deadpan Snarker are all the same trope to me.