Daria Morgendorffer

Aka "The Misery Chick"

"I'm not miserable! I'm just not like them."

"This is MY stop; Have to get OFF" ("Excuse Me.")


5'2" tall. Approximate age 16 years old and 65 pounds.

Fighting: 2 Feeble
Agility: 4 Poor
Strength: 5 Typical
Endurance: 4 Poor
Reason: 21 Excellent
Intuition: 20 Excellent
Psyche: 6 Typical

Health 11
Karma 47 but frequently reduced due to failing to complete weekly requirements or Cognitive Dissonance* related events


Powers: None


Equipment:
+Jacket, T-Shirt, Skirt & Boots which provide Feeble armour vs physical attacks and damage from the environment
+Collection of horror themed and disgusting medical oddity reproductions, posters, artworks and books
+Laptop computer
+Corrective Spectacles. When not worn Daria is legally blind (-4CS on all rolls on Fighting, Agility and Intuition)


Talents:

+Novelist
+Literary Expert
+Frighteningly good judge of character
+Debate
+Eating Pizza - Daria can eat significantly more pizza than should be possible, with no ill effect.


Limitations:

Misanthrope:
Daria thinks the worst of people, including herself. She in turn is NEVER given the benefit of the doubt EVER on any roll relating to persuasion, interpersonal interaction or legal argument. In situations of direct persuasion requiring a roll, Daria suffers a -1CS on the roll. Any Karma she can spend to improve her chances is DOUBLED in cost for this character.

*Cognitive Dissonance:
Daria holds herself and everyone else to a naive, adolescent and impossibly strict moral politically liberal code. This prevents her from forming normal attachments and also creates the constant risk she will suffer a mental crisis during which she suffers a -4CS on all rolls until she can discuss the moral conflict with either someone involved in what triggered the crisis or her mother, her father, her best friend Jane Lane or Jane's older brother (and Daria's earliest love interest) Trent Lane. Daria lacks all ability to spontaneously free herself from the mental crisis once it occurs and it will endure permanently unless she finds one of the listed people and discusses it with them. This discussion is not so much the imparting of wisdom by the person with whom she speaks as it is an opportunity for the deeply repressed Daria to externalize her conflict long enough to get desperately needed perspective and in the process give herself permission to confront and deal with the moral issue with which she is wrestling. Once she overcomes a specific mental crisis she will never again suffer Cognitive Dissonance in that situation or any other situation the Judge rules is close to the same situation. Daria earns all roleplaying and other rewards for overcoming her Cognitive Dissonance each time.

NOTE: If it is obvious to those around her that she is suffering then the people listed above will seek her out after one game week has passed to try and help her overcome the mental crisis.


Background:
Daria is a bespectacled, plain, unfashionably dressed, but highly intellectual and seemingly cynical teenage girl who is portrayed as an icon of sanity in an insane household, with her vacuous, fashion-obsessed sister Quinn and career-obsessed parents Helen and Jake. It should be noted that if dressed properly and with effort she is actually a slender and reasonably physically attractive young woman, although her nature is to pay no overt consideration to fashion or physical presentation. She is not a slob or unclean but she definitely dresses down.

She attends Lawndale High School, where on her first day she meets Jane Lane, the artist and classmate who will be her first real friend and her best friend through the rest of her high school life. Their strong friendship and mutual endurance of gloomy adolescence was a motif of the series, which survived despite Jane's boyfriend, Tom Sloane, becoming Daria's.

Unlike most animated characters, Daria and her counterparts aged during the duration of the series. When the series began, Daria was a sophomore in high school and would graduate by the end of the series. (Depending on when she moved to Lawndale, as a Scorpio, she could've been fifteen for the first couple of episodes) When she graduated from high school in the show's final TV movie, she was 18 years old. By the time graduation arrives, Daria's character has undergone noticeable growth. She graduates from Lawndale High, winning the Dian Fossey Award "for dazzling academic achievements in face of near total misanthropy", and crowning her acceptance speech with the assertion that "...[T]here is no aspect, no facet, no moment of life that can't be improved with pizza."


Contacts:
+Helen Morgendorffer, mother, a driven "superwoman" type career woman attorney;
+Jake Morgendorffer, father, an entrepreneur consultant who suffers mania attacks due to childhood emotional trauma;
+Quinn Morgendorffer, bratty "popular girl" younger sister who while highly intelligent acts the part of a bimbo to fit in socially; Quinn is frequently a "villain" to Daria's "hero" and this sometimes goes beyond normal sibling rivalry.
+Aunt Amy, cool wine aunt; in some respects an older version of Daria and a role model to her; if all else fails Daria will call Aunt Amy on the landline phone (or in later years her own mobile phone and eventually cell phone) to try and resolve any mental crisis caused by Daria's Cognitive Dissonance Limitation.
+Jane Lane, Daria's athletic and artistic best friend;
+Trent Lane, Jane Lane's slacker cool musician older brother, and lead singer and guitarist of the band Mystkc Spiral;
+the band members of Mystik Spiral;
+Tom Sloane; at progressive stages of his appearance in her life he is a boy of their own age who Jane and Daria encounter socially, Jane's boyfriend, Daria's first boyfriend and Jane's immediate ex-boyfriend and finally Daria's ex-boyfriend.



Roleplaying Notes:
Daria makes no attempt to dress attractively, never wearing any makeup or styling her long, reddish brown hair in any particular fashion. She typically sports a large dark green jacket, an orange shirt underneath, a black skirt and large lace-up boots, accompanied by her signature thick-rimmed circular glasses. She is relatively small in stature, standing at a mere 5'2" according to her best friend Jane Lane, and most clothes don't fit her as a result, even including her usual outfit to an extent, as her coat and boots are clearly a bit large for her.

Daria is naturally intelligent but also highly apathetic and somewhat lazy, showing no motivation to apply anything above the minimum required effort and never taking part in extracurricular activities by her own volition, entirely content to coast through high school with her inherent academic talents. Because of this lack of engagement with other students, in addition to her often bored or pessimistic expression and status as an outsider, she is commonly perceived as being very unhappy; while she considers herself realistic and in The Misery Chick she clarifies she's not nihilistic, she will occasionally appeal to nihilism and even consideration of suicide for the sake of an offhand joke.

Another one of Daria's key traits is her staunchness, as she is often highly opinionated, sometimes harshly judgmental and even smug at points. Although she is ultimately fair, and will admit to being wrong after proven as such, she is typically opposed to or at least wary of generally accepted social norms and notions, as well as things such as superstition, and can be somewhat quick to anger in a divisive argument. Her sense of morality and unwillingness to conform often frustrates her family and the school faculty, but occasionally makes them proud when conformity would be unjust. She has admitted to having generally low opinions of others, but does occasionally socialize with Jodie Landon and Mack, and acknowledges them as two of the few decently intelligent and respectable students going to Lawndale.

She once confided to Jodie that she knows her unaccepting and uninclusive attitude isn't the perfect way to go about seeing the world, but it's simply her most comfortable form of interaction. As the episode "Boxing Daria" entails, this is rooted in poor childhood experiences of not relating to other kids and being mocked for it. This repeated result, compounded by her belief that she was becoming a burden to her parents, motivated her to stop trying to interact with people altogether and instead shield herself from possible rejection by isolating herself voluntarily.

In her own words, she is highly defensive to the point of actively trying to make people dislike her so that she won't feel bad when they do. Although her stance on most things is unwavering, Daria is also highly self-aware, which is fairly evident given her sense of humor, but this means she is also willing to look at herself in the same critical light in order to learn from her mistakes. While her character is largely the same by the end of the series, she makes multiple strides to come out of her shell and reach out to people throughout its run, often with mixed but ultimately enlightening results.

[daria.fandom.com]