A RECENT headline on the blog of the Paris Review, the sort of print publication for which I have always felt a retroactive affection despite not having been present for its glory days nor frequently having read it even in its recent years, asked a provocative question on a highly unexpected topic: “Where Are the Darias?”

Daria Morgendorffer (1996-2002), MTV’s combat-booted Fran Lebowitz who my generation and I watched without knowing what, precisely, high school would be like, is now one of so many touchstones of writers seeking to recreate a 1990s idyll. The post was so popular, or engendered so many responses, that a follow-up post arrived, sorting through – and rejecting as inferior to the real thing – many television characters who might be described as Dariavian.

Marisa Meltzer, author of the Paris Review posts as well as the book Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music, singled out characters from, among other cancelled series, Arrested Development, Freaks and Geeks, Gilmore Girls, and Veronica Mars, as well as from current shows ranging in popularity from Parks and Recreation to Modern Family. None measured up to the memory of Daria. Indeed, the headline of the second post, a post with a wealth of un-elaborated-upon examples of a particular archetype, contradicts the text below: “Are We Afraid of Daria?”

Well, no! Most people just moved on from that specific example.

To seek more witty, smart female representation on television is a worthy goal; Meltzer’s fine 2010 book Girl Power looks to the past–in particular, the riot grrl culture of the 1990s–to identify touchstones for a possible future for female-fronted music.

Synthesis of the past into the present (so Hegelian!) is very different, though, from wallowing. That the posts address questions of media representation and feminism seem incidental to the thesis: “Here is something that I liked, and that meant a lot to me.” The differences between Daria and the current TV landscape cannot be proven, because the author is comparing a variety of individual characters to a totemic memory.

As seen in the recent online hubbub over Liz Phair’s new record Funstyle – for instance, a disappointingly devotional interview by the talented and refreshing memoirist Emily Gould – cherished cultural moments from the past are impervious to argument from the fond fan. The argument, in this case: “Wow, this is awful music!”

Or at least, it’s only about itself, the very opposite of the music at the heart of Girl Power, which may yet have the ability to mobilize musicians just beginning to strum guitars in middle-school band.

(And Funstyle is truly bad. Incidentally, that a particular, and particularly appealing, brand of nostalgia tends towards the feminine – Daria, Liz Phair, the “Real 90s” Tumblr, the long-dead teen magazine Sassy, the bar downtown that plays Heathers on loop – can be credited either to the quadrennial re-emergence of Courtney Love or, more seriously, described as apocryphal. Perhaps, as a participant in a Tumblr debate on nostalgia stated recently, gay men and women are more wired to register nostalgia. Perhaps, too, straight-male nostalgia registers as mass culture rather than subculture. The implied blissful, honorable past of Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally and the mythos around the annual Super Bowl/World Series/etc. would support this thesis, events to which Phair and Daria and gay/lady nostalgia exist in opposition and in like-minded idleness. Further, this writer has no affinity with straight-male culture – just saying!)

THIS PHENOMENON-–as all phenomena do today, you know?–-begins with the Internet. While the untutored might expect the Internet to entirely support development of new ideas and new culture, it’s also a repository for memory. Blogging platforms like Tumblr and Twitter encourage posting widely remembered detritus to earn likes or reblogs/retweets. Who hasn’t seen a few–or a thousand–audio posts on Tumblr with a Dave Matthews, or whatever, song with memories attached? Or a reference to some cancelled show, a reference whose parameters go no farther than the notion of quoting something, on Twitter? Because of the time-wasting nature of these sites, which are used when one is idle, reveries sprout easily.

Or they ensue or are fueled, having begun long before. Gawker and Jezebel and the countless less–mentioned-in-trend-pieces blogs miming them strike a tone that the current culture is stupid and broken. Which, right, sure! And the same was true not so very long ago when Daria was on the air, but Daria was a bright spot. (Was it ever: I loved watching it, setting my very first email account on Comcast.net to alert me when episodes would air. That seems long ago, but it wasn’t, looking at a time span beyond the foreshortened Internet one!) It’s up to viewers to find.

“She was an outsider because she didn’t fit in at school, in her family, or in the world at large,” writes Meltzer, of Daria. Well, sure, but neither did Maeby Fünke or Claire Fisher or April Ludgate! But their shows (which, respectively, concluded in 2006 and 2005, and continue to this day) are not freighted with memory. To argue, too, that no other shows have characters like Daria at their very center, as protagonists, is like arguing that no prominent shows since Six Feet Under have been set in mortuaries. It’s missing the forest for the memory of a particularly coniferous tree. Has Meltzer seen Parks and Recreation? April is a character exhilarating in all her particular traits – so like Daria in how compelling she makes cynicism, and yet… different. That difference, and not supporting vs. lead distinctions or a false dichotomy of “real” or “false” outsiderness, is why there are no Darias. It’s because a Daria has to evoke the same feelings Daria did on first watching, more than a decade ago.

Fond memory is obviously, but in particular senses, a good thing! Life would be boring if we lacked all cultural memory, and to reach out beyond the lightning speed of the current backlash/counter-backlash/back-and-forth-forever cycle certainly has appeal. But to make the personal an issue of record–to ask why nothing measures up to those things one fondly remembers–is to become a curmudgeon.

ANDY ROONEY RECENTLY ASKED why music these days is so different from that which he used to enjoy, stating that he’d never even heard of Lady Gaga or Usher. Meltzer glancingly acknowledges other Darias when commenters make her aware, but seems happier to live in the past.

A refusal to engage culture as it stands, and to live in the realm of memory forever, is a Rooney hallmark. To see it in really reflective members of the generation above ours, though, one whose members are young enough to have never made watching 60 Minutes a weekend ritual, is beyond disheartening. It’s a call to action for those interested in creating and engaging.

To partially misuse a reference to a pretty recent movie I hadn’t thought about in a while, the culture millennials have inherited and are beginning to influence, in 2010, seems like the waiting room at Lacuna, Inc. Half the people are leaving, ready to start vacuous lives unweighted with any of the ballast of memory. These are the people who can’t remember how they got through the day before Facebook apps and think “Love the Way You Lie” is Eminem’s best work. Then there are those so freighted with memory that their view of the present is obscured.

Creative people making memes and polishing idols and wondering where to find things as great as other, older things have a chance (youth! energy! the endlessly reproducible, easily disseminated Internet!) to use the influences of the past to make something new and worth remembering – or, better yet, something that may yet inspire some future person to make something for their own time. I can’t wait for Meltzer’s next book. I hope it’s fiction, and has a sarcastic and relatable teen narrator – like Daria, maybe, if one squints at the page, but also, in some way I wouldn’t presume to predict, an original.