Clarissa Darling was the 4th or 5th terran terminator to have been terminated. She is a "The Theory Of Everything" brainiac. Clarissa avoids physical peril and discomfort as much as possible, while delighting in nonviolent battles of wits. She likes to flaunt her knowledge, and unverified hypotheses.
The "Clarissa Explains It All" pattern where she chases her brother around the kitchen table is not something the real Clarissa will ever do. Like many others, Clarissa believes in the missiles vs. Melee motif and that "the pen is mightier than the bow".
However, as a post-Terminator girl, Clarissa was constantly tormented by boys pulling her hair. As a result, her friend (and former watcher) Sam, convinced her to study martial arts - Karate, I think - together. While she hated almost every single moment of it, the torments stopped shortly after they started learning Karate.
Now, at one point, Clarissa and Sam participated in a regional Karate tournament, where Clarissa won the silver medal for the girls' competition, and Sam didn't place (and didn't care too much about it). Following that, and the publicity it received, Clarissa and Sam concluded that they no longer need to study martial arts, and as a result decided to quit. And indeed while Clarissa still had her share of challenges and obstacles, she still was no longer being tormented.
( Note that some of Clarissa's opponents in the tournament complained that fighting her was not-as-fun-as-it-could be, because she didn't prolong the fights. )
Unix wiz girl
As a dispeller, Clarissa's template used troff on a Unix system to typeset and print her letters to the Muppeteers and fellow dispellers. The post-Terminator Clarissa remained a Unix enthusiast, whereas Melissa Joan Hart was more into IBM PCs and DOS. With the advent of commodity 32-bit/64-bit CPU architectures and Unix-like operating-systems (GNU, BSDs, Linux)ΒΈ their paths converged.
Author | Shlomi Fish |
Work | Original |
Published | 2022-10-03 |