This is in answer to Greybird's post "Three-D (or Remade) Misery Chick."

I actually think we're talking about two different things here.

Levitz's Law is a law of plotting -- "Anything can be explained away." How is Superboy fighting crime in the 30th century when they've now decided in the 20th century that Superman was never Superboy? Well ... it wasn't really Superboy, that's why. Everyone just thought it was Superboy. Oh, and we'll kill him now, just so that you don't get confused, even though we've been telling these Superboy stories for over 25 years.

There. That oughta clear things up!

Science fiction does this a lot, particularly in TV shows and comics. It becomes a big problem when you have multiple people writing the same series, or making episodes, or worst of all, when an actor comes back. The worst problem is with soap operas. Patrick Duffy wanted to come back to "Dallas" after a year, even though the producers had killed him a year earlier so that he could leave the series.

No problem! Have one of the secondary characters wake up and reveal that Season Two of "Dallas" -- the one without Duffy -- was just a bad dream!

Literally.

Plot contradictions and "retcons" are such a joke that TV shows like "The Simpsons" now mock the concept. Witness Lucy Lawless's explanation for any "Xena" plot contradiction at the BiMonSciFiCon as "A wizard did it." Or when the Simpsons own a horse (again), and Comic Book Guy points out that "The Simpsons" devoted an entire episode to this several seasons ago, Homer asks the assembled crowd, "Does anyone really care what this guy thinks?"

We're fortunate as "Daria" fans that there aren't any blaringly obvious contradictions in the show that need to be explained away. What helped was having Glenn Eichler running herd over the process for five straight years. It helps when you have a guiding force to keep Kevin at the appropriate level of stupidity, or Daria at the appropriate level of sarcasm.

I think what you're asking is not "Do fans act in contradiction to established events?" but rather "Do fans act in contradiction to established characterization?" Do they just remake a character in their own eyes, and slap the character's name on whatever comes out?

This brings us back to Ye Olde Dispute about "canon." Generally, "canon" is invoked when someone takes the "Daria" characters out of their natural setting (high school), situation (dealing with parents and dumb classmates), genre (light comedy with just a dash of drama), and timeframe (Daria from sophomore to senior year of high school).

Thomas Mikkelsen, a great "Daria" writer no matter what else you might say about him, railed often against writers deciding to shuffle "Daria" characters out of one (or all) of these realms. And God help you if you decided to write an alternate-universe "Daria," where the timeframe of events was irreversibly altered from events as they happened on TV (for example, Daria shoots someone).

So what is "canon characterization"? The problem is that there is no really good definition of it. We have seen all of the "Daria" characters -- to varying amounts of screen time -- behave in ways that make them generally predictable. Daria is sarcastic, cynical, hostile to her parents' attempts to change her. Jane is Daria's buddy, and she likes art. Kevin and Brittany are dumb. Sandi is a jealous bitch. Trent is a vacant stoner.

Bad canon characterization is when characters behave in non-predictable ways with no explanation. Brittany being smart with no explanation as to why. Sandi crossing the line from bitchy to interfering to committing acts that are downright evil in its purest sense. Daria crossing the line from passive-aggressive rebellion against her parents ("The Big House") to overt rebellion. Helen being moronically stupid and inflexible as a parent. Stories that, when you read them, make you think that the author had some fatal misunderstanding as to what the character was about. (Probably because they didn't see all the episodes.)

Another definition of bad canon characterization -- although I suspect that fans would disagree with me -- is when characters become too stiff and unvarying from their "core" characterizations. Bad canon characterization is "Daria would never do that!", because, by the sacred tablets handed down by Glenn Eichler, Daria must be sarcastic, cynical, only like Jane, etc., etc., etc.

Harlan Ellison had righteous contempt for people who would say "Kirk would never do that" or "Buffy would never do that." In Ellison's eyes, a lot of the things human beings did they found explanations for later -- no action was out of the range of human possibility, and to put such restrictions on characters limited their humanity. "Never" is a mighty long time.

I belong to Ellison's camp here, to a degree. Every "Daria" character can wander off the reservation, but too many wanderings might lead one to believe that we're not looking at the same character. Sooner or later, we must see something that reminds us, and reminds us the majority of the time, that this is Daria, or Jane, or whomever.

So what is good canon characterization?

The answer is that from all we've seen in the 67 episodes of "Daria," of all the acts we've seen Daria and Jane and Quinn and Trent and the Fashion Club commit, there is something in the background that we can only rarely peek at -- character motivations.

For an example, let's take Sandi Griffin. You can like her, or you can hate her. However, what we don't know is "why." Why is Sandi Griffin the way she is? Why is she so snotty, why so hostile to her supposed "best friend" Quinn, why is she so controlling, why is she such a fussbudget?

Glenn Eichler knew that a good writer doesn't stop the story to give a five-part series called "The Life of Sandi Griffin, Complete With Vignettes That Illustrate the Reasons for Sandi's Bitchiness." What he can do is hint, give us peeks into what he thought made Sandi Griffin Sandi Griffin. Since Sandi doesn't get much screen time, we get very few hints.

We know something about Sandi's family. Her mother is a take-charge, take-no-prisoners kind of woman who likes to brag about both her own (real) and her daughter's (supposed) accomplishments. Her father is a cypher. Her brothers run out of control, but Sandi's mother keeps her on a short leash, or tries to.

Furthermore, we had a flashback into Sandi's youth, where Sandi was trying to help with a party ...

Young Sandi - I'll never work on another dance again! They expect you to do stuff, and now everything's messed up and the whole school's going to blame me. Plus, I haven't even had time to find sandals to go with my new halter dress!

Young Linda - Sandi, I warned you. To volunteer is to say, "Use me."

Sandi still shivers to the core whenever anyone says the unholy words "dance committee." Clearly, this episode, and the "lessons" she learned from it, might be a key to explaining Sandi's behavior. Certainly, not all of it, and definitely, not as an excuse for it. But Sandi's emotional reactions to this flashback mean that this episode, whatever its interpretation, is an important part of her background that shouldn't be overlooked.

Good core characterization makes sure that characters have good motivations for doing what they do. If the motivations for an act are based in facts that exist only in the writer's head (a traumatic pre-school experience for Jane, for example), then those truths must come out sooner or later in the story.

Any interpretation of the character must be plausibly based in what we've seen on the screen. If Brittany secretly has an IQ of 160, then we must know why she acts dumb, and we must keep her acting dumb, at least for the first part of the story. The series's interpretation of Brittany is the Dumb Cheerleader, and this isn't a persona that should be discarded with a glib explanation, or no explanation at all.

Finally, if characters stray from their core personas -- and I believe that all characters have the right to do that -- one should explain either the magnetic force that pulls them away, or at least give an Ellisonian explanation that their reptilian hindbrain took over their good judgment, at least for a few minutes.

I like Robert Pirsig's explanation that the part of the brain we share with reptiles is millions of years old, and the part of our brains that we associate with logic and reasoning is only a few thousands of years old, and it works over the reptile brain like a rodeo cowboy hanging on to a bucking bull. Every now and then, the rider gets thrown, and the party reptile takes over.

Note that I avoided the word "reason," as in "Characters must have good reasons for what they do." Reason is a word that implies "clearly thought out," as if the characters, before doing anything, went to an Excel spreadsheet and calculated pluses and minuses like a robot.

I am now tired of writing this reply. So I'll stop. Comments?