Apathy Sketchpad

Earlier today, myself and two of my housemates were sat around chatting. Most of our chats recently have begun from an awkward silence, which has then been filled by talk of, for some reason, Gay Bar by Electrc Six. Today, by some process understood only by those who have spent years studying student conversations, this led to Lizzy announcing that the perfect girl for me is Daria.

I didn’t think that was probably the best news, since she is after all American, two dimensional, and imaginary, but it did at least remind me the show existed. I haven’t seen it for a long time, but it was always more entertaining than flipping through the music channels that were actually showing music (or at least music based entertainment). But I was bored, so I typed her name into Google to see what I could find. The results were, to say the least, disturbing. The first page I clicked on was a “which Daria character are you?” quiz, which I filled out, despite that fact that I could only name one Daria character, who I promptly turned out to be. This, of course, raised a huge moral dilemma. I was now, apparently, my own perfect girlfriend, and I don’t really see how that would be all that different to what I’m doing now.

There are some things one expects from the internet. One expects Harry Potter or Pokémon fans to be the sort of fans who would write fan fiction about their favourite TV characters. It’s normal. One would expect Daria fans to be the sort of fans who would hang around the fan fiction websites writing snide comments about the Harry Potter and Pokémon stories. It’s human nature. But no. Someone has written Daria fan fiction. Quite a lot of it, actually. One person has even written a Daria-stroke-Doctor-Who crossover story (entitled “Doctor Who Gives A Damn“) in which the Tardis lands in Daria’s town and aparently saves the world with an automatic strawberry literally moments after the reader loses all interest.

The third page was more disturbing. I hit the image search button. And would you believe someone has made Daria porn? Exactly why anybody thinks we want to see inexpertly drawn pictures of Daria and Jane locked in a naked embrace will hopefully remain a mystery, but if there’s going to be anything between us I may have to ask her to take those images down.

Update (20070826):

It is rather depressing just how many hits this page gets from people searching the internet for Daria-based pornography.