96 Tears

Finished reading: AD10

Currently, I'm at work, having prepared for a hard day's labor, only to find that the labor is stalled. I require a database that exists only on my boss's computer -- and he hasn't thought to send it to me. However, this is the time of day he is usually ready to talk to me; I can hopefully await a phonecall or follow-up e-mail. Until then, I'm at wit's end.

I had hoped to work on "Reclamation" with this unexpected bounty of semi-free time: I am on my employer's clock, you know. However, even though all of the beta reads have now been returned, I mailed myself a copy of "Reclamation" without the mark-up comments I needed. The second draft will have to wait until I return home.

(* * *)

Now, back to "Apocalyptic Daria".

When we last left the Culhane family (obscure joke), Daria and Jane were on their way out of the Cord residence and to somewhere closer to home. Their SUV is loaded up for bear and they have a load of supplies and barterables.

However, one thing they don't have is feminine hygiene products, and I'm sure that is one of their highest priorities. They find a store that's open but the manager has no intention of selling. With some gold coinage -- which just happened to be coincidentally at the Cord residence -- they manage to barter for their needs.

While inside, Daria engages in some bartering of her own with the young teenaged son of the store manager. For a gold coin, she obtains some boxes of pizza mix of the kind currently made by the late Chef Boyardee. Daria rewards the young man with a "quick kiss".

(It was interested to see some discussion in the comments thread as to whether Daria would do such a thing. Doggieboy thought about it, then kept it in for the final edit. Very admirable. "You might have a different opinion; I'll take the risk and keep what I have.")

Daria and Jane make it to the refugee center in Frostburg. The town is under martial law (but no one's been drafted yet) and the two stand in line for rations.

At the head of the line, they meet someone unexpected. Linda Griffin, Sandi's mother. It appears that Linda was traveling to Frostburg on work-related matters and when one of the nukes went off, the driver of her van was blinded and the van full of television executives plowed into a post. Linda was the only survivor. Rescued by firemen, Linda was brought to the refugee center where she found employment.

When Linda last heard from her family, her husband Tom was driving Sam and Chris to the Mall of the Millenium. Accompanying them were the entire Fashion Club -- including Quinn. As the Mall of the Millenium was between Baltimore and Washington, it is unknown how far Tom Griffin got, or if Quinn was killed with the others in the firestorm of the Washington bomb, or if they got out...or what happened.

Linda bemoans that her last words to her husband were hardly complementary. Daria remembers that her final comment to Quinn before accompanying Jane on the road trip was an insult, and Daria cries too.

(* * *)

All in all, not a bad section. For the first time since Larry Carter's death, Doggieboy has actually left questions unanswered. Fanfiction authors are obsessed in answering every question; Doggieboy rightfully leaves those questions for the reader.

However, Daria's crying is a bit disturbing. Not that Daria would not be disturbed over the fact that Quinn is dead. Even if these are good-old-fashioned honest tears of regret and shame, this moment allows me to springboard to the whole "Daria cried" subgenre of fanfiction.

My impression of Daria is that she's very uncomfortable with any displays of emotion. Her affect is generally flat. She doesn't like being embraced. She never went on dates until Tom, and found the very concept ludicrous. I don't think that Daria cried at any time during the five-year run. Hell, Daria's embrace of Jane in "Boxing Daria" was a very rare display of emotion from Daria, one so rare that it apparently made Jane uncomfortable.

I just don't see Daria as a crier. Before objections are raised, I am not saying that Daria can't feel great sadness or remorse; rather, I'm saying that she simply isn't very expressive. My personal feeling -- and one I feel is backed by the "canon" -- is that Daria sublimates her emotions or bottles them up. Her flat affect is her chosen way of dealing with the world and I assume that the flatness varies slightly, in the way that techtonic plates shift, depending on the circumstances.

In a lot of fanfiction -- particularly with jak's Daria/911 story -- it seems that the way to "prove" that an event is traumatic enough, that an event is the worst event ever and ever, is to have Daria cry about it. (I suspect that part of that is because of the unexpressed maxim of society that females are "supposed" to cry when they express strong emotion and that crying is an "appropriate" way for a female to behave. My response would be that females have a freedom in expressing emotion that males should take advantage of, rather than males acting as stoic wooden Indians.)

It might be a convenient shorthand, but it's a poor shortcut. It's very hard to draw tears from the printed page. Reading is a second-hand activity -- we are reading about someone else's experiences and experiencing emotion vicariously -- and it isn't just the fact that fanfiction writers are not good at making the reader so sad that they understand why Daria would cry, because *anyone* would cry. Rather, it's the fact that very few writers of any stripe, even the best of them, can move the reader with mere prose. You have to have the sensibility of a poet to write scenes like that. I find such scenes almost impossible to write, and almost impossible to read.

Let's save Daria's tears in the future. Let our little cynic be stoical, because it highlights how much she doesn't fit in with all of those around her. And besides, there's a drought on, and tears are a waste. And sometimes, grief is too deep to be expressed by mere tears.

(* * *)

Up next: A break from Apocalyptic Daria. I'm going to read a story from one of my beta-readers as payback (sorry, Scissors, it's not you) for services rendered. Take care.