oh my god holy fucking shit I looked up 'rwby daemon au' on Tumblr and I found this post it's a post about Weiss and what the person thinks her daemon would be and I love
Now I'm thinking of Frisk with a shrike, because the 'harmless only because they've sworn to be' fits PaciFrisk.
I'm... not really seeing the connection between that and a bird that impales things it kills on thorns to eat later and decorates its turf with the body parts of its victims.
Spoiler: red vs blue I'm pretty sure the process in canon was one-way - despite all the Director's noise about doing terrible things to himself, the Alpha was just a copy of him, and the Director himself was untouched. It might be different in a daemon AU, though. Like, in order to make the AI an actual person they have to make a copy of the daemon out of Dust too, and then somehow integrate the Dust into the computer system where the AI is intended to go? That could be an additional reason why most AI can't travel by radio. That would make Alpha's daemon, and the fragments' daemons, part of them instead of external, I think. Which raises the question of how they faked Church's daemon. Maybe Private Jimmy had a small, non-emotive daemon, like an insect or something, and they just... co-opted it. Got the daemon part of the Alpha program to possess it. Which would mean that Church's daemon would be even less a separate entity than most people's daemons, and he probably wouldn't realize it, so he would make some comments from time to time that the others would find really unsettling.
They've also learned to make poisonous insects edible by adding them to their serial killer body stash and waiting a few days for the toxins to break down.
SO OKAY I was just rewatching madoka magica and idly thinking about daemons and - Spoiler: ALLL THE PMMM SPOILERS ALL OF THEM The daemon is transmuted into a soul-gem upon contract. It can project out in a kind of cursed state - talks less, shifts less - holy shit the Kyubeys are after Dust of fucking course no wonder why there's such an explosion of power when the Witch goes critical these are pre-teen girls they haven't Settled yet and are right on the cusp of locking their Selves in place in the fabric of the universe. -coughs- Annnyway. The daemon is able to project out in a kind of cursed state - don't ask how - but when they put their shoujo gear on the daemon vanishes (the explanation to the girls is that they become their clothing, so that they can fight truly as one heart.) As Sayaka was going critical, her daemon - often a tanuki or an antelope, sometimes a kite or a rat when they were unhappy - flickered and glitched and cried out in fear and pain. None of those girls, not once they were Magical Girls, would ever Settle again. (Maybe that added to Sayaka's despair? Maybe Kyosuke Settled when he was around Hitomi, not her?) Madoka - rabbit, mouse-deer, pigeon/dove (becomes a great circling conglomeration of wings and silky hair great golden hare's eyes at the end of the anime series) Homura - started off mostly little field mice, the occasional squirrel or lizard. After plot happened, they were nearly always a iridecent black rat snake, curled around her throat like a noose. Often they would change to a rail-thin black cat if Madoka was around, and when Madoka confronted them in the Damocles room they were a mouse for the last time, trying to burrow under Madoka's startled mouse-deer. (After the third movie becomes a ragged, eating tear in the fabric of reality that usually is entirely invisible.) Mami - a golden squirrel, or a shiba inu (quick wit, and social animal with overtones of faithfulness and loneliness) Kyouko - A lean-red urban fox, rarely a goose and curled around her throat as a ferret in times of fear and regret.
There's probably been speculation about what the Girl Genius cast's daemons would be, but idk where. I'm wondering about Agatha's, though. (And Gil and Tarvek, and...okay, everyone's, tbh. But Agatha is first.) Do Sparky daemons start settling around when their human starts breaking through? Did Agatha's daemon start settling and that's what tipped Barry off in this world? The locket prevented her from completing her breakthrough until it came off - did it keep her daemon from settling, too? (I imagine Spark daemons trend towards things that are Big or Dangerous or Very Smart, things which are defensive of their territory. Imagine Agatha's daemon shuffling through forms long after everyone her age has settled properly (one more way she's inadequate, one more way she's broken somehow), always going with forms that don't quite seem to fit the young Miss Clay: big Sparky badger-weasels or wolverines, but never the same form two days in a row; very occasionally something small and harmless-looking (and anyone who has a field guide is terrified, because why does she have a bird whose primary defense mechanism is spitting poison at its attackers).) ...oh shit, what happened to Anevka's daemon, here? Anevka was left mostly-alive but severely weakened (and eventually died entirely, "years ago"). Had her daemon settled? Did Tarvek pass off whatever he trotted out along with Clank-Anevka as being unsettled due to the stress and trauma of her illness? (He probably saw her daemon flickering in and out for a while before she died. He made something beautiful and socially appropriate to accompany her, and no one wanted to ask too closely about why Anevka's daemon suddenly looked like a piece of clankwork. No one wanted the answer to that.) (...what would be worse is if he made something to pass off as her daemon, and then came in to find that clank Anevka already had one. It wasn't the original Anevka's daemon. It still looked clanky, and like someone had crafted it out of delicate porcelain, and it was carnivorous and possibly poisonous.) Constructs almost definitely usually have daemons of their own. Often dogs, but not always. ...clanks don't usually have daemons. It's considered a Matter Of Concern if a clank develops one. (Tarvek's horror as he realizes that the Anevka clank isn't Anevka puppeting it any more, but something that thinks it's Anevka.) The Muses are almost always portrayed as having a daemon of some sort, but they look like they're as much clankwork as the Muses themselves, so there's a lot of speculation over whether the Muses actually had daemons or if von Rijin just couldn't bear the weirdness of people-like things that didn't have daemons and crafted artificial daemons to accompany them. Mechanicsburger daemons trend towards stuff that's loyal but also looks harmless and is dangerous as hell if provoked; a lot of venomous critters there. (The jaegerbrau might result in daemons getting unsettled, since the transformation is said to be deeply traumatic; they probably usually resettle as whatever they were before, or at least along the same lines, since it's not implied that personality changes much as a result of the brau.) Bill and Barry's daemons are probably usually portrayed as having been whatever'd go over well as "big, clever, and heroic". Probably often dogs (but big boof type dogs like St Bernards and Bernese mountain dogs), but also stuff that's straight out of myth too. Lucrezia's daemon is usually depicted as something small and dangerous if it's provoked, but with an element of loyalty (people like the love story of Bill and Lucrezia, after all, and they like the thought that he redeemed her - making her daemon something that's just straight-up poisonous or venomous would remove that hope); it is (was?) probably actually a jeweled scorpion or something similar, considering how she seems to be a habitual betrayer. Klaus's daemon is probably actually something big and weird (I like the idea of a dragon, or something chimerical) but gets depicted in the Heterodyne plays as being something harmlessly comedic - a pug, maybe. Hm. This begs the question, now, of how travelling shows portray the Heterodyne Boys and the rest of the cast's daemons, when their own are probably usually settled (and not always the right shape or species). Puppets, maybe? Specially-made clanks that are painted just-so to indicate to the audience that this is just a stand-in for the character's daemon and not something unnatural?
Maybe actors' daemons usually wear clearly-fake-but-well-made masks designed after the actual character's daemon? The point isn't to actually fool the audience, but to effectively invoke the idea of whatever they are.
im...Love...daemon aus... Edit: To make this post less useless, I just wanna say I though very hard about what daemon my character in Arxon's Magical Burst game would have. He's a Japanese Spitz named Yukar, and that has nothing to do with the game proper. I just wanted to think about daemons.
Still watching reboot-seasons of Doctor Who, and thinking - I think Time Lords DO have daemons, but they're normally internal, but can be external through the will of the individual in question. The Doctor consciously projects his in the form of an earth animal, and it's different each time he regenerates. (From the new series I'm familiar with - Nine had a raven or a wolf, Ten had a - dog, I'm thinking, something intent and clever and inclined to a real snarl when they're pissed off but tame enough to look cheerful and tail-waggy the rest of the time, maybe a pointer or a setter - and Eleven DEFINITELY had a jackdaw. I stopped watching after all the new retcon stuff so I'm not familiar enough with Capaldi to say, but yeah) The Master bothered long enough to get himself into office as Harold Saxon - with a snake, I think, because it would have amused him to be hiding in plain sight like that - then dismissed it the moment he didn't have to pretend any more.
...now I'm wondering about what the daemons for people in Recettear would be. I think Recette's might be a pig, maybe? Or a boar. (Or maybe she hadn't settled when Tear first showed up...) Something solid and intelligent, but it looks like it's just interested in food and being comfortable. Louie's would probably be something associated with protectiveness and caring. Fairies and demons might not get daemons. If they do, fairies probably almost always have flying insects for daemons; usually bees, but not always. Demon daemons probably trend towards "big, looks aggressive, and is Good At Fite", but they also almost definitely have their own cultural mythos about what a particular shape means in a daemon and it might not have many cross-references with human lore on that. There's one character who almost definitely does not have a daemon (or at least doesn't start out with one).
