(Wait, TotA largely has Weird domestic animals from what we see in-game. Like, carriages pulled by dinosaurs. And rappigs. Could people have monster daemons? I SUDDENLY HAVE QUESTIONS.)
I did conclude at some point that Sync's would settle as a Mandragora Spoiler if he ever lived that long :(
(...oh my god, Stormlight Archive, EVERYONE would be followed around by a horrible skittery thing with 17 legs and people from places with less insane ecology would be like 8| )
Of course, the greatest question of TotA daemon AUs is: does Peony have a rappig, or does he just WISH he had a rappig?
Peony strikes me as some sort of colorful bird, like a conure. Though I wonder if that's too on the nose?
A parrot of some sort might be pretty appropriate, honestly. Especially if Jade had some sort of corvid (it's the best I can think of for him right now- brilliant and incredibly obnoxious).
I don't actually know this fandom, but I'd like to venture the opinion that grackles are woefully underrepresented in animal symbolism? (They're extremely corvid-like, including the smarts, but without the mythic baggage of gods of death or wisdom. Idk if you want that baggage? It sounds like you just want the behavior. So: grackles.)
Okay, trying to round out the FMA cast... Lan Fan and Fu both get tough faithful guard dogs, I think- some Chinese Xingese breed or breeds. Hereditary bodyguard positions? Yeah. (Oooh, maybe Lan Fan gets a wolfdog, I really want her to @_@) Also I've reconsidered since deciding that homunculi definitely don't get daemons- Ling's the one who has the jackdaw. Pinako gets some kind of probably wild or nearly-wild ram- Resembool is full of sheep, and she's very much at home there, but she's also not the docile type who would have what we typically think of as domestic sheep. Or maybe a goat? One or both of the Doctors Rockbell had a snake, for the medical associations. Trisha Elric... fuck it, some parental character's going to have a Pelican here and it might as well be the posthumous character where we won't need to figure out what to do with such a ridiculous bird. Grumble grumble. Paninya probably has a ferret, or something similarly dexterous and mischievous as befits a lovable pickpocket. The Tucker family, oh god. I don't want to think about them long enough to decide. ;_;
Very important and very terrible FMA question: what happens if you use alchemy to fuse someone with their daemon Chimera-style? 'cause you know somebody did that FOR SCIENCE. It was probably one of the first things people tried when they got into shady human transmutations, honestly.
Scar murders your ass and you go to Hell, that's what happens. ;_; Seriously, though, I actually haven't read the original HDM stuff, so I don't know all the logistics of "dust" and so on. I see a few possibilities- one, you just end up with a person with an internal soul just like non-daemonverse people, which would be widely considered creepy but really is probably the best outcome. Two, you get Tucker's sad monsters and that's what he was doing wrong. Three, not doing that was what Tucker was doing wrong and the successful chimera soldiers are these. ...I kind of like three. The absence of a visible daemon would definitely contribute to the observed dehumanization of the chimera soldiers, and you could get some really interesting viewpoints on the matter between Jerso and Zampano wanting to be separate again, and Darius and Heinkel who find that they're actually pretty okay with it when people aren't treating them like crap.
...Hmmmm. Actually, with such a clear marker of "has soul/doesn't", I think maybe his first "project" would have been met with the creeped-out-ness it deserved even before the truth comes out if it did have one? I dunno. I was thinking "well, his wife had a small one, maybe an insect, and it was no longer able to talk, and Nina's went unnoticed until That Line because of reasons" but it's a lot less complicated to say he did use the daemons. And he still fucked it up. (Though to be fair, the soldier-makers probably did have Philosopher's Stones to work with. Also probably homunculus advice.) And thanks a lot for making me think about this, you horrible monster ;_; (not really I love horrible things)
Another fucked-up thought: What if Tucker failed because he wasn't awful enough? What if for Complicated Soul Reasons a prospective chimera has to be severed first, and then reunited in the transmutation (which would reverse most of the psychological effects, though not the initial trauma)? And vile though Tucker was, it didn't even occur to him to do that?
I'm not sure exactly where, but I do recall once seeing a fic where having your daemon settle as a mythological creature was a sign of mental illness. Different creatures meant different conditions. Like, draconic creatures would be a sign of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder could mean one with multiple heads, and so on. On one hand, I could see that getting kind of gross if not written well, but on the other hand, it could be really interesting to play with a bit. The social/cultural implications would be pretty huge.
I'd only be comfortable with that if it was, like... a vague correlation, but not a 1:1 disorder thing? Because if you Have This Daemon if you Have This Disorder, that implies the disorder is the most central thing about your personality, and... yeeeah. I'd think maybe a less dicey variant is that people with some mental illnesses are more likely to have not-real-animal daemons because they see the world in a very distinctly different way, but you also get mythological animals on a lot of, like, Luna Lovegood types. And maybe the perception is that people with mythical daemons are crazy weirdos, and there was this whole period in the history of mental health care where people tried to characterize specific disorders for specific mythical daemons, but that's viewed by modern mental health professionals with the same sort of "this is a thing which was important to the development of the field but GOD is it embarrassing" as Freud's theories. But diagnostic criteria lists of the "if person has five of these things they may have the disorder" variety for some disorders will have "daemon is not a real-world animal or is an animal largely unfamiliar to the person" in there.
Yeah, that's the kind of implication I'd be worried about. Having it as a correlation instead of a certainty definitely seems better.
*pops into thread* I have very strong feelings about daemon AUs but the main one I want to screech about was an Avengers daemon AU where Natasha's daemon was an actual, incredibly oversized (like, hand-sized) black widow spider. Fuck you six ways from Thursday. Natasha Romanov would have the blandest, most adaptable daemon possible. Her daemon would be a garden variety tabby cat. Maybe a marmalade to make it a ginger too. But not a goddamn spider.
I once saw a fic where the Red Room severed people's daemons so they could still change shape in adulthood, and trained them separately from their people.
