While gathering the next fan-works update, I felt compelled to put forward for broader attention a fairly impassioned commentary, by The Angst Guy, that I ran across ... and which was well-buried:

[In the past year] a huge amount of outstanding fanfic has been produced. We've got the Booties going on, I've sent in my nominations, and Kara asked for some critical thinking on what we've done.

I really like literate writing, stuff that shows the person not only knows how people act and react, but can add material from literary works to the story, which is in part what "Daria" is all about. Daria is a book-reader, she's a brain, she makes offhand remarks about people that are rooted in the larger context of the media and classics of the time (e.g., her remark about the novel 1984 in "Psycho Therapy"). Several authors do this extremely well (Gregor Samsa and Scissors MacGillicutty), and it's wonderful to read. [...]

What I also like is the cross-pollination between "Daria" fanfic and other genres of fiction, which I believe keeps the fanfic field fresh and vital: canon comedies, farce, dramas and melodramas, morality tales, science fiction (from time travel to space opera), erotica, fantasy and supernatural, horror, superheroic, alternate histories, detective mysteries, crime stories, political exposes, religious explorations, psychological thrillers, romances (straight and gay), action / adventure epics, and slice-of-life tales, with unusual features such as crossovers, fourth-wall violations, stories-within-a-story, author-style parodies, variable viewpoints, first-person accounts, present-tense format, stream-of- consciousness styles, and reality warping, in the form of novels, short stories, ficlets, scripts, songfics, poetry (including haiku), and serials, with literary influences from Homer to Joyce.

"Daria" fanfic survives because of its infinite flexibility. It has become, through the efforts of its creators, a sea that touches every shore, an ocean with sunless trenches and sunlit wading pools. It is joy and sorrow, brilliance and foolishness, shadows and rainbows. There must be canon so the great cycle of tales remains true to its roots at some level, but it must be admitted that even the original show toyed with style and presentation ("Depth Takes a Holiday," "Tales of the Mall," "The Misery Chick," and "Daria!"), and the alter-egos tugged on the imagination and whispered, "What if ...?"

Damn the straitjackets! Damn the rules! Full speed ahead, by God!

Whew! Gloriosky! I can't say I agree with everything here, especially on how malleable the series may be (more later), but it's intriguing.

It's truly sad, by my lights, that T.A.G. apparently felt that something this passionate (originally in two parts) could only be posted, at least thus far, in a rhetorical sewer. I can't fathom it.