I was arguing this with a friend. They seemed to think it’s simply because Daria was always secretly meant to be a closeted lesbian. My friend was never a fan of the show so I told him that’s nonsense. This was never, ever even implied in any way whatsoever. Quite the opposite in fact.
I said it’s because she’s simply a smart, confident, intelligent teen girl but who is also an outcast and not one of the ‘popular’ kids but, most importantly, she couldn’t care less about this. And also because the writers actually made her progress over the show’s run from being totally unpopular to eventually being accepted by everyone else. And not thru any compromises she makes, but simply because she continues to believe in herself. IOW in a not too different alternate universe she could have also liked girls, hence its relevance to Logo.
I liked Daria too although the last season wasnt as good as the previous seasons. I think you answered your own question. While they didnt really explore it afair there would likely have been some issues with Daria and the competition with her hotter younger sister. Daria seemed asexual.
Because no other network carries it, it’s pretty cheap and might get eyeballs. And possibly because it appeals to a demo–liberal gen-x weirdos and their kids–that might also be attracted to LGBT-friendly programming.
OP, IMO your evaluation of the show and the character is how it was presented – Daria is faithful to who she really is even as who she is evolves, and in her story arc she grows to accept both herself and others have weaknesses and foibles. Daria could be gay or not but that would not be the point. Her coming of age involves becoming comfortable with herself and her place in the world and realizing that being the square peg is no shame, and there is no need to try and ram yourself into in the round hole, but the round pegs also are a valid part of life.
Also, does Daria end up in Logo precisely because the show no longer fits in the programming of other animation channels. In the finale there was a bumper in which Daria and Jane acknowledge that by then MTV was likelier to replace them with a reality show featuring “teenagers talking about sex, during sex”.
We live in a world where the “History” Channel runs specials about aliens building pyramids, and you can’t figure out why Logo has a cartoon about a straight girl on it?
They’re showing it because it gets the best return on advertising dollars versus money spent for that time slot. Just like every other commercial television network, ever.
Not Gen-x, unless they’re at the end of the curve, but Millenials (yes, we’re over 30 now). The people I know who watched and missed that show are Millenials (on the older side of the curve) like me, not Gen-Xers like my siblings or cousins. Daria graduated HS in 2001-2002, around the same time the first group of Millenials did. The show while it aired attracted both adults and teenagers, the adults may have been Gen-Xers, but the teenagers watching it (the intended demographic target?) were/are Millenials.
Yeah, I get that not everything Logo airs is going to be RuPaul’s Drag Race, it’s just that I’ve heard the ‘Daria is a man-hating lesbo’ shtick before and it always annoyed me. I’m not a liberal but I was a Gen-Xer at the end of the curve who really liked the show (I was around 30-something when it premiered in '97). Daria never hated guys, as mentioned she had a huge crush on Jane’s brother for the first three seasons, she went on a date with the weird kid whose over-protective, neo-hippie parents grew wheat in their front yard, and she started liking (and then dating) Jane’s ex Tom near the end of season four.
I’m actually glad that somebody is running the show again. And not editing it for content like Noggin’ did ten years ago*!* Except for Jackass it was literally the last good show MTV ever made (and MTV really wasn’t the creative force behind Jackass, they just aired it). Of course, this is all pretty moot considering that I own the freakin’ Daria DVD box set! (but it’s all the way up on the shelf…)
Loved that show as a kid and I remember that scene well*!* I also like how they kept things realistic with the grandmother of Jodie’s accidental love-child. Although she was very sympathetic to Jodie and liked him she was still a good ole’ southern gal and said this upon meeting him for the first time!
Well, I’ll take a stab at overthinking it (as a Gen-X who went out of his way to make sure his kids - age 15 and 11 now, younger then - saw Daria).
LOGO - a network of which I was unaware - focuses on the LGBT audience. A part of that is a cohort of just the ‘L’ part of it.
Daria’s main topic is relationships and how the characters interact with each other. And the three main ones are Daria/Jane, Daria/Helen and Daria/Quinn. Even Daria’s relationship with her boyfriend Tom is largely seen through the lens of how it affects the Daria/Jane relationship.
Is it any real surprise that the show might appeal to women who are interested in how women relate to other women? I don’t think that’s really a leap.
Heck, it doesn’t even have the ‘subtext’ that Xena brought to the table. Daria is straight with a boyfriend and a hetero-crush on Trent and Jane explicitly turns down a lesbian affair while she’s at art camp.
I’m a Gen-Xer who used to watch Daria, and I was about to post a “nuh-unh!” to this post. Because it seems to me that “Daria” was something I watched all the time in high school. But according to Wikipedia, the show aired in 1997 when I was a sophomore in college. No longer a kid.
I know you’ve already basically said this, but I like my shorter version:
Gay audiences tend to like strong women who are outcasts. And the counter culture.
Given the other shows that **kunilou **mentioned, which do in fact all have a large gay following, they are very likely true right. Soap is the only one I’d not heard of having a gay following, but I rarely hear about it at all, and it does have one of the earliest portrayals of an out gay character.
And when you consider those like Golden Girls and Facts of Life, Daria fits right in for being primarily about women but not them interacting with men.
You may be remembering Daria’s original appearances on Beavis & Butthead which aired in the early 90s (the two of them used to call her “Diarrhea-cha-cha-cha!”). Although this technically makes Daria a B&B spin-off, it wasn’t really. Mike Judge had nothing to do with the show (though he has mentioned that he thought it was very good), the tone of Daria was completely different than Beavis & Butthead, and literally the only link to it in Daria is one line Daria’s mother has in the first episode where they’ve moved to Lawndale and it’s Daria’s first day at a new school so Helen says, “You don’t want it to be like Highland do you?” (Highland being the fictional town B&B was set in).
Interestingly, when Beavis & Butthead was revived a couple years ago they *did *mention Daria. Beavis thought that she had killed herself but Butthead corrects him, saying she just moved away.
