The Misanthropic Love Story of Daria Morgendorffer and Jane Lane

Daria never spells out precisely why Jane is so precious to her. Both girls balk at the prospect of sentiment, but the show makes it clear that they are flawlessly suited for each other. Their friendship runs on that elusive, exquisite alchemy: a sameness that enables mutual understanding, and differences that challenge and surprise. Jane’s edges are not as rigid as Daria’s, nor is she as inclined to self-isolation. She wears lipstick and flirts with boys, and her easy way with children rescues Daria from a babysitting gig that might otherwise have ended in double infanticide. And she is willing to admit what Daria cannot: that sometimes, we are vulnerable to others’ perceptions of us.

This dynamic comes to a head in season two’s “See Jane Run.” In this episode, Jane is galvanized by an accusation that she has inherited the Lane Family deadbeat tendency and joins, of all things, the track team. Daria, blindsided by Jane’s sudden lack of antipathy, wallows in the hole of her best friend’s absence. When faced with Jane’s request to attend the first track meet, she wonders whether she can support her pal’s acquiescence to the perverted system of secondary school athletics. It’s an ethical problem, she thinks.

But of course, her discontent comes not from principle but loneliness. Over the course of the episode, Daria begins talking to herself everywhere: in the school halls, in front of her family, and, naturally, in the sanctuary of her bedroom. It’s a desperate impulse to fill the void. When, at the episode’s end, Jane finally stops by to let Daria know that she has decided to quit the track team, her bereft friend cracks the door to her bedroom, self-administering final counsel: “Act natural. You’re not hurt.” But of course, the act is impossible, because there’s no one to whom Daria is more vulnerable than Jane.

If nothing can ever entirely negate the essential emotional solitude of adolescence, Jane’s playful irreverence nudges Daria out from within her Plexiglas armor while her own caustic worldview corroborates Daria’s suspicions regarding humanity’s essential lameness. Maybe it’s hubris that makes Daria so helplessly drawn to another teenage girl who doesn’t shy away from the sick and sad in the world. It’s the same self-involved conviction that survives into adulthood: no one that wasn’t truly special could ever possibly see what we see. In the ecology of intimacy, theirs is a good, loyal, selfish love.

I like to think that, in the midst of my awkward adolescence, my identity was more just than the sum of my external influences—that, however impressionable I may have been, a core of fervent (if naive) principle steadied my gawky frame. If the reality denied me Buffy Summers’s talent for performing acrobatics in heeled boots, and if my high school did not offer me a fleshly manifestation of Trent Lane, then at least, maybe, my nerdiness held some of Daria’s iron-clad resolve. Could I be a person who loved her friends, but whose peace of mind did not rely on comprehensively shared world visions?

Sort of. My high school pals were eclectic. And yet I was intoxicated by sameness. I always experienced—and if I’m being honest, still experience—visceral satisfaction when my best friends and I gorged on identical fetishes and prejudices and neuroses. These moments carried the thrill of world-making. What feels more like a universe unto itself than intimate friendship between sixteen-year-old girls?

Maybe you recall that tangled net of feelings, your swollen heart a little bit in love—with the girl and with the world you begot together, from complaints and mixtapes and tears. However exceptional Daria and Jane may be within Lawndale’s manicured and manic context, the dips and folds of their close friendship unite in a tune so many of us have hummed. At base, every best friend is an only friend, a Jane: co-conspirator and talisman against the loneliness we dread. Love between teenage girls is both life-giving and precarious. Everything depends upon it; everything threatens to destroy it.

This is the first installment of “Fake Friends,” a series about fictional female friendships. And, snowstorm PSA: all of Daria is currently available on Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime.

Rachel Vorona Cote is a writer based in Washington, D.C. She has published essays in The Hairpin and The Rumpus. Hang out with her on Twitter here: @RVoronaCote.

Illustration by Tara Jacoby.