In today's news, an anon sent me an ask about a Mistborn daemon AU and I decided to just ignore the "what animals do they even HAVE on a planet constantly buried in volcanic ash?" question and answer it at length anyway. Sazed was hard.
I'm reviving this thread because daemon AUs came up on FFA and I had a thought which I am very proud of: Everyone thinks Cloud (FF7)'s daemon is a wolf, but she's actually a husky mix.
Some other Final Fantasy protags: DarkKnight!Cecil has no visible daemon. Turns out this is because she's a caterpillar and she's hidden in a protective pocket inside his armor. When he switches to Paladin, she turns into an adult luna moth. Terra's daemon is weird. I've seen people propose that it's unsettled, but I wouldn't say that- I think it can change, but not fully at will, and the forms are always strange- griffins and chimeras and monsters. I never finished FF8 but I know enough to know both that it forces lion symbolism down your throat for Squall and that this is Wrong.
Squall always struck me as either having some small, secretive daemon - a rhinoceros beetle, maybe? - or something huge and awkward, like an okapi XDD Also Zack Fair absolutely has a great galumphing shepherd mix, with a tail that goes a mile a minute and paws too big for her body XDD
I've only seen Zack for like five minutes in the original game and I am 1000% ready to accept this. Not going to opine on Zidane and the accuracy level of his monkey symbolism until I'm done with FF9, though FF9 in general has the additional complication that probably 70% of the population of the world is something other than vanilla human and there's all sorts of special cases to address. Quina has absolutely eaten daemons before. Tidus probably has an otter and they choreograph her into his blitzball moves.
I read an Undertale short story where the humans had learnt how to keep their souls internal, so daemons stopped being a thing entirely. Until Frisk fell down, anyways, and somehow Chara wound up as their daemon. It was weird. Anyway: Toriel with a wolf daemon. Frisk sees them and thinks that they're a dog and runs up and tries to pet them. It is very awkward. Also-what if Chara accidentally revealing themself because their daemon comes back? So there's like...whatever Chara's daemon is, hanging around and having conversations with, apparently, the empty air. Because that's where Chara is.
I worked out some of the ToTA daemons once with a friend! Spoiler: Hiding this for those who haven't played the game, because SPOILERS Luke: Salvatoria, female. Tori for short. Unsettled...till Akzeriuth. Before that she had favoured dog and guinea pig forms (dog in public/while mucking around with other daemons, guinea pig while she was alone with Luke). After the massive trauma of Akzeriuth she settled in the form of a wild southern mountain cavy. This is not considered a good thing by anyone. Tear: Acathistus, male. Trumpeter swan. The name is that of a sort of hymn. Natalia: Pantokrator, male. White Chesedonian (that is, African) lion. The name means 'all-powerful'. Guy: Heliotrope, female. Golden jackal. If you know him solely as 'Guy Cecil the Kimlascan servant' you'll have heard that her name is Helen. Hel for short, either ways. Anise: Flare, male. Coral snake. Jade: Atropos, female. And here comes the freakout, because she's a Hodgkinson's or greater ground wyvern; in other words, she looks very like a heraldic wyvern. These are extinct, so everyone wtfs a lot, and also is scared because she is one of those rare HUGE FUCKER daemons. The name is that of one of the three Fates; Atropos is the one who cuts the thread, determining when human lives will end. Van: Hodegetria, female. Harpy eagle. The name is Greek, and a title of the Virgin Mary; literally it's 'She Who Shows The Way'. Asch: Female; the name of the daemon of the prophesised boy was naturally part of the prophesy too. But she can't be Salvatoria anymore, just as he can't be Luke fon Fabre. So she's Smoke, and she settled sometime between the kidnap and the start of the game as a bobcat. Sync: Female, unsettled and unnamed. Sync despises her, because he despises himself. Messed up murderbabies. :( Dist: Gaudior, male. Peacock. The name means 'more joyful' and I may have stolen it from Madeleine l'Engle's unicorn. Peony: Anemone, female. And yep, she's a rappig! But not the roly-poly sort he keeps as pets. She's an ancestral, undomesticated rappig; basically a wild boar with hare ears. A quote from Ursula Vernon seems apropos here: "All that you need to know about boars can be summed up in the fact that if you wish to hunt them, you must have a specially made boar spear. This spear has a crosspiece on it to prevent the boar from charging the length of the spear, driving it all the way through his own body, to savage the human holding the other end." Peony's a goof, but he is in no wise harmless.
TELL ME WHEN YOU'VE FINISHED THE GAME BECAUSE FF9 IS ONE OF MY FAVS AND I HAVE SO MANY HEADCANONS but spoilers :P
Here's a question to tide you over until that happens: black mage daemons. Do they have daemons from creation, as identical and standardized as the mages themselves are? Do they gain daemons as they gain sentience? Do they never have daemons, and Vivi never noticed this was odd because he's seen other people who didn't have them? If they do have daemons, do they settle? Do they have time to settle?
OOOOH THAT'S A GOOD ONE Hmmm... as much as I want to say that they'd gain daemons as they do sentience, maybe they're only nebulous things and not like, a solid recognisable animal like 'human' daemons (because who am I kidding I'm not sure their are ANY store-brand humans in FF9 especially considering they're all like chibi-sized in the Final Fantasy mashup games) - like Vivi could just have like a soft little black tribble thing sort of thing. Are the Black Waltzes sentient? I can't remember? But bonus terrifying because the flying angry mage creature is followed and surrounded by a crackling, glitching darkness of eyes and fangs XD
Steiner and Beatrix and some of the NPCs look like they could be vanilla human. But yeah, that's what I mean about FF9 getting complicated. :::PPP They can hold a coherent conversation, at least until BW3 goes nuts, which is more than you can say for the normal mages. So yes, I'm totally behind soot sprites for sentient mages and terrifying eldritch clouds of death for the Waltzes.
The thought occurs that since we only see their outsides, we can't tell if this is true. Internal differences-or differences concealed by clothing-could still be a thing. I think the genetic hodgepodge in FF9 may be something to do with the Mist being around for generations. Steiner said it 'spawned abnormalities in mind and body'. The party spent quite a bit of time under the Mist, and that never happened to them-at least any more than was already the case-but maybe what you really want to worry about with the Mist is living under it for extended amounts of time, like years. Possibly also having kids under it. Nobody seems surprised or boggled, too, that someone like Brahne could give birth to someone like Garnet/Dagger, and that suggests that...well I'mma quote a bit from Ursula le Guin's 'Changing Planes'. The situation on Gaia's not quite so dire, but the parallel is there, at least with regards to people. Burmecia is under the Mist, too, and they seem more stable than most-sure they're all rat-people, but they're a homogenous race. That made me think of something from D&D, the 3.5E Oriental Adventures setting that's based on Rokugan from the Legend of the Five Rings. In that canon, rat-people called Nezumi live in the Shadowlands, which is magically tainted. Humans can't go there without protection, else they get warped in mind and body, but the Nezumi are somehow immune to the taint. It just doesn't touch them. I dunno where the creators of that setting got the idea, but maybe they didn't entirely make it up out of whole cloth, and both the Nezumi and the Burmecians are referencing the same source?
Considering Nezumi in japanese literally just means 'rat or mouse' and Final Fantasy is also of japanese origin, it's fully possible. No myths or legends from that country immediately come to mind on the subject - besides the Iron Rat story - but maybe it's that rats and mice tend to thrive in places other animals might suffer? Like nuclear fallout zones, for example?
If we've got bizarre and unpredictable genetics due to Mist, that raises an additional hurdle re: the thread subject and FF9: animal genetics have to be just as intensely weird as people genetics. So now we're at the "everyone in the Stormlight Archive has a crab thing with seventeen legs" wildlife problem. :::PPP
i don't even know what Tracer's daemon would be (from Overwatch) but how the hell would her chronal dissociation affect their bond? That would be interesting.
Maybe a squirrel or squirrel relative? or some kind of lemur? Or a peregrine falcon, which unless Animorphs taught me wrong is the fastest bird alive. Whatever it is, I bet they're like witches and can go as far from each other as they want. Maybe the daemon glitches and fuzzes in and out of reality when she's doing weird time shit? Or maybe it always exists even when she currently doesn't, and so it was hanging around by itself for months after the initial teleporter accident. That would be pretty chilling, in-universe.
!!! Overwatch daemons is good shit cause do Omnics get daemons? Winston prolly doesn't have one, nor AIs, and that'd be pretty interesting to explore.
Seconding the idea for squirrel! Maybe a red squirrel? (Or if something non-british, something like a spider monkey XD)
