There's plenty to complain about in Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy (and the atrocious film adaptation of the first book), but it gave fandom a truly magnificent gift: the concept of daemons. All your favorite characters with animals that represent an aspect of their souls. Discuss.
*breaks into the house* JADE AND HER DAEMON BEC PLEASE DISCUSS NOW. ROSE AND JASPERS. DAVE AND A CROW THAT LIKES TO PLAY DEAD TO PISS HIM OFF.
How 'bout Roxy with her three-eyed mutant kitten daemon because she lives in a world ravaged by Alien Fish Hitler and has never seen another human in person and didn't know that's not something that can normally happen until after it did?
I was just talking with Tez about Madoka Magica Daemon AU. Here are some things: A Puella Magi's daemon settles when she contracts. Her range also expands greatly - specifically a daemon can go exactly as far from the soul gem as the magical girl can. A smart/risk-taking magical girl could use this to get a range of ~200 meters (in one direction, but still) for spying. Also, the eyes of a Puella Magi's daemon have an odd look to them - like curved glass, or cabochon gems. Akemi Homura rather worried everyone when she walked into class with a massive raven on her shoulder after having settled a few days prior apropos of nothing, after her daemon had preferred small, understated animals (little grey passerines, cats, that sort of thing.)
Madoka's has been different in every timeline Homura has seen it. He was a cat the first time, when Madoka had used her wish to save one. Other times he was a bird, or a mouse, or a butterfly. When Kriemhild Gretchen happened, Homura never even saw what form he took, beyond that it was huge. With Madokami, all she could tell was the faint suggestion of feathers longer than the width of a star.
Though I think my favorite daemon AU I've come up with is the one I did for Darker than Black, because it went awful FAST. But I have no idea if anyone on here has ever seen the show and thus can properly appreciate how terrible it is.
I...went and dug up my list for the various characters I've rped because I used to be in an RP game based on this premise. if a character is missing I just haven't thought about it or couldn't decide. Spoiler: Tales series Tales of the Abyss: Luke fon Fabre | Arcis (f) [unsettled] Tear Grants | Iolanthyca (m) [Turkish Van Cat] Guy Cecil | Delphinea (f) [German Shepherd] Natalia Luzu Kimlasca-Lanvaldear | _ (m) [Asiatic Lion] Asch the Bloody | Renaté (f) [Arctic Wolf] Sync the Tempest | Gevurah (f) [unsettled] Tales of Vesperia: Yuri Lowell | _ (f) [Coywolf] Estellise Sidos Heurassein | Lysander (m) [Angora Rabbit] Raven | _ (f) [Pine Marten] Tales of Rebirth: Veigue Lungberg | _ (f) [Indian Wolf] Tales of Graces f: Haven't sat down and thought about this yet but Sophie wouldn't have one and that would freak people the hell out. Tales of Xillia: Milla Maxwell | Nikephoros (f) [Cassowary] (same gender for reasons. Whether that gender is female or none at all is ???) Jude Mathis | Pei Ja (f) [Raccoon Dog] Alvin | Merina (f) [Marbled Polecat] Elise Lutus | _ (m) [unsettled] Rowen J. Ilbert | _ (f) [Arabian Horse] Leia Rolando | Hector/"Sparky" (m) [King Charles Spaniel] Gaius | Sarangerel (f) [Wolverine] Wingul | Xiulan (f) [Bat Hawk] (they look...exactly like him.) Agria | Vasos (m) [Black Mamba] Presa | Cearuil (m) [Abyssinian] Jiao | _ (f) [Asiatic Black Bear] Ivar | _ (f) [let's face it, probably a chicken] Edit: Ludger has some kind of jackal, named Ziva. I can't recall the type. Victor has a black swan. (Though, this was because he obtained one as an adult in that case, so it reflects his current state and not what she'd be if he'd grown up with her.) Spoiler: other various fandoms Supernatural: most of the ones I have don't make sense for canon because they're from a massive AU but. Charlie has a Corsac Fox named Asimov, because. Kingdom Hearts: Sora | Excalibur (f) [Toucan] Riku | Maris (f) [Coenobita Rugosus (Crying Hermit Crab)] Kairi | Lucian (m) [Asian Small-Clawed Otter] Ventus | Tuuli (f) [Fennec Fox] Vanitas | _ (f) [Bat-Eared Fox] (if he even has one) Ventus/Vanitas | Ekaterine (f) [Northern Luzon Giant Cloud Rat] (au where they only have one between them and she represents who Ven was before the split...) Xehanort | _ (m??) [some kind of octopus] (they're terrifyingly intelligent. if he even has one anymore.) (Do Nobodies have daemons?? Probably not. But can they grow theirs back? ??) Star Wars: Anakin Skywalker | Sol-Karan (f) [Peregrine Falcon] (if I were less lazy I'd find something in universe but)
Re: TotA... Spoiler Did Asch rename his daemon along with himself? Does she reclaim her name the same way he does his?
@LadyNighteyes it was actually my partner rping Asch but I think that's how it went, yeah. (It's been a little while)
Spoiler It's too bad the timeline doesn't work out (a ten-year-old's not likely to have a settled daemon), because it'd be pretty hilarious/awful if "OH NO THE POOR CHILD HAS AMNESIA FROM TRAUMA" was accompanied by "OH NO THE POOR CHILD IS SO TRAUMATIZED HIS DAEMON UN-SETTLED. BECAUSE THAT'S TOTALLY A THING THAT CAN HAPPEN." :::PPP
I was ACTUALLY...just thinking that! :D I love taking the weird plot elements from other canons and seeing what would differ or be the same or what secrets would be more obvious... I also like breaking the scary animals=bad people association, one of my extremely chill OCS has a python.
Oh man, if Kyouko's settles when she makes her contract then how's she gonna feel about it after the big life changing events that turn her into a cynical fuck? Maaan, that must be something. It must seem like such a mockery. A reminder of her naivety and loss. Or maybe not. Pre awful shit Kyouko was still a poor kid who went hungry. She might have gotten a scavenger type that seemed off for a hero-type at the time, but perfectly suited her after.
^That's part of what made the DtB one both so much fun and so horrifying. Because there's a character in canon who's revealed at the end to be deeply in denial about something that would potentially be impossible to ignore in this AU depending on how I handled contractors. And then I thought of a way I could keep them in denial that was totally in character for everyone involved and it was so simple and so awful and I love it. Pythons are not scary. They are fat noodles with permanent :3 faces and boopable snoots. :::PPP
A friendly tumblr-acquaintance is working on Gravity Falls with daemons. I have made a few small contributions. (Thar be spoilers.)
Ahh yeah they are cute as heck, I just mean like in canon the ppl with snakes were bad. Etc. But I imagine maybe the same prejudices we have about certain types of animals might lead people to judge others unfairly by their daemons...
BUSTS INTO THE THREAD HI HELLO I HAVE A LOT OF SALTY OPINIONS ABOUT DAEMONS 1) i get so mad when people make daemon aus and everyone's daemon has a long made up keysmash name. like. people read the original books and did not understand that 'pantalaimon' and 'stellamaria' were real actual names that made a lot of sense in context, and concluded that somehow daemons just have ridiculous magical nonsense names for no reason. and not that like, daemon names are like human names, and make sense considering the culture and educational background of the parents and so on. it really bugs me when like, steve roger's daemon is named phrenobolimar or some shit instead of like, something his mom('s daemon) would have liked. maybe a saint. maybe a virtue! maybe just 'mary' or 'jane'. 2) poetry's animorphs fic 'daemorphing' and the wtnv fic 'he says he is an experimental theologan' are meticulously thought out, but do the second thing i hate, which is giving people daemons that are both obscure, symbolically -nul animals that are also from an entirely different ecosystem than their human counterparts. like... stellamaria was a snow leopard and her human was an englishman, okay, but leopards and other big cats are also in the english symbolic tradition a marker of nobility, and stellamaria's human was a dedicated explorer. ditto ms coulter's daemon: monkeys are exotic but still have a weight and symbolism in british culture, and she too was an ambitious traveler, sort of alienated and set apart from her native people. it works, you can 'read' them. but then like, writers get too hung up on the unmarked actual scientific natures of the animals and so assign characters all kinds of totally obscure and exotic critters like sable antelopes and thompson's gazelles and rock hyrax and stuff. anyway, it seems to me that the native culture would weight a lot of people's settled forms. a lot of dust has to do with consciousness and intent, and a lot of that, in humans, is playing out stories. why else would domestic servants tend towards domestic animals, and scholars tend towards animals like owls and serpents that are only symbolically intelligent, rather than, say, otters, who are clever as fuck but symbolically weighted towards playfulness and frivolity. 3) inconvenient animals. except for the one sailor who's soul was a dolphin and couldn't go back on land, we don't hear of anyone else who has a daemon that would actually be a problem. most daemons seem to fit in to their human counterpart's life and role and culture just fine. soldiers and wolves, gyptians and their cats and hawks and fen creatures, academics and their comfortable ride-along sized owls and ravens and serpents, witches and their sturdy cold-weather geese and albatross and ptarmigan, domestics with their fussy hens and terriers— maybe a goat here and there. you never hear about horses, let alone gnus, hippos, moose, buffalo, like turn up in fanfic. i think it's because whatever 'meaning' a bigger animal would convey, there's probably another animal that would mean the same thing in a way that doesn't generally preclude you from being indoors ever again. maybe instead of a sturdy, take-no-shit, mow-them-down moose, you could be exactly the same thing with a 'will fit on an airplane' wolverine. like that. your daemon is also yourself, you would both have the same desire to fit in or not, and be a sailor or a scholar or an explorer or not. you're not going to say 'i want to be a construction worker!' and have your daemon go 'well too bad! i'm an octopus!'. this turned into a big rant but OK I THINK THAT'S ABOUT IT. i will check back in if i think of more opinions to yell about.
Fullmetal Alchemist daemons! Spoiler: I'd welcome help figuring out some more of these! Ed: Hare (he's hardcore and intimidating, dammit!) Al: Unsettled, but spends a fair amount of time as a cat (some weird shit goes on with the blood seal etc.) Winry: Sea otter- both cute and tool-using; no way would Winry's daemon not be able to hold her tools sometimes Roy Mustang: I want his to be a salamander but that might be a touch on-the-nose? Possibly a dog? Riza Hawkeye: Harris hawk Ling Yao: some kind of jackal? May Chang: Probably Xiao-Mei is her daemon in this version, though probably not settled yet Barry the Chopper: Butcherbird (and, again, weird shit with blood seals) Alex and Olivier Armstrong both have bears, though Olivier doesn't see how Alex got one. I really really want to give Greed a jackdaw, but oh lord the question of homunculi and souls... and Philosopher's Stones... and what about the Immortal Legion... the blood seals aren't the only weird shit that's going on here. If homunculi don't get daemons, Wrath and Pride both have very strictly-trained chimeras posing as theirs. (Pride... is kind of a huge problem in this AU.) Of course, this isn't anywhere near all the characters that need them.
Okay so. The basic premise of Darker than Black is that following a mysterious event ten years earlier, people just started... randomly developing superpowers. But they come with a cost, and your personality changes as well- there's a loss of empathy and some emotions, though the exact manifestation varies from person to person and over time. The perception, while it's pretty clearly wrong, is that they lose their humanity and are emotionless monsters. More often, they're harshly self-interested and have no built-in compunctions against hurting or killing people. They're called contractors. There are also people called dolls who lose all apparent volition and emotion and just kind of stand/sit/lie there unless "programmed" to obey simple orders. However, they also develop the ability to create something like an astral projection in a certain substance, called an observer specter. They're often used for recon. Most of both tend to get scooped up really fast by crime syndicates and intelligence agencies and forced into becoming superpowered soldiers or secret agents, and there was a full-scale superpowered war in South America a few years before. I decided for AU purposes that when somebody becomes a contractor, it severs their bond with their daemon. Contractors don't really care about this on the whole, because they're demonstrably just fine without it, and most of them just kinda shrug when the shady organization hauls their severed daemon off to a lab somewhere, because they've got no reason to care much now. Dolls' daemons just kind of poof out of existence; there are a lot of theories connecting them to observer specters. Aforementioned shady organizations keep whole stockpiles of severed daemons to assign to contractor secret agents as a cover; in most cases, the more innocuous-looking the daemon, the better. Spoiler: GREAT BIG END-OF-SERIES SPOILER The protagonist of DtB, Hei, thinks he's a contractor, but he actually isn't. He's got the powers thanks to a soul-transplant from his contractor little sister, but the little switch in his head never got flipped. He was a child soldier in the above-mentioned war, having gone along as something like a bodyguard to his sister, and had no powers at the time. My awful idea: the reason he hasn't realized in this AU is that in a war zone where pretty much no one has daemons or cares about respecting the taboo against touching them (Why would they? There's no logical reason to), a daemon is a liability. So the first thing they did when this teenager joined up was knock him out and put him on a plane. Without his daemon. Either he'd die or it'd forcibly stretch the bond, and since he was every kind of expendable they wouldn't have cared much if it was the first one. He assumed the bond was broken when he supposedly became a contractor, and convinced himself he was imagining how sick people handling her made him feel. Then they shipped him halfway across the world without her, because now he was an even more useful tool, and it's been five years since he's even seen her. One of the first things his time-traveling ex (it's complicated) did when she went rogue was to raid the lab where they'd taken his daemon, because she wants to keep him alive and there were timelines where the criminal syndicate managed to kill him on accident with their experiments. He has no idea why sometimes his skin crawls and he feels like someone walked over his grave. It's because his ex doesn't always keep her hands off. There's more, but that's the really awful part that I was really proud of. :::)))
I gave a bad guy a viper once, but that was mostly because I wanted an excuse to make someone who ended up with a piece of his soul go from having a harmless spider to a venomous one. And have a freakout over this.
