And any other part of the Nasuverse you'd like to talk about, of course. This series definitely goes some places I'm not sure about, but I have a lot of feelings about Waver Velvet from his adorably floppy hair to his terribly unfortunate name, so we have a thread now.
Oh, good, it's not just me. Nice thing about the Internet, really, you don't have to be an awkward fan alone. Yeah on one hand it's like "why am I still watching the show that just fridged Irisviel?", but then there's "I am his follower" and you are crying forever.
The story does not treat it's characters well but you just can't put it down. because you're busy clutching it and sobbing....
Yeeeaaaah. That's pretty likely, judging from how he treats them. *puts a Fandom bandaid on it* *looks at some of the non-fate/zero fate designs* *makes a face* But I do like the characters.
Oh, absolutely. Trouble is, the fandom's been around long enough that I'd feel weird and shy trying to make myself part of one of the more established circles. I started this thread at least partially so I wouldn't be tempted to just randomly show up in somebody's tumblr inbox and go "so I have ideas about a daemon AU".
hahah NGL, most of the Fate fans on Tumblr that I know would probably be okay with that. well except for the fact Tumblr's not a great platform for conversation. It is scary nosing into an established fandom tho.
I am curiously interested in where you're going with it, is that close enough? For one thing are you talking 'his dark materials' daemons or are you talking demons but not calling them demons...
I would read a daemon AU but I need to finish the series first.... I was watching and then school got hard right around the time crap got awful in the show and I dropped it for, like, a year? I have free time right now so I should really pick it back up again. Between this and Gundam Tekketsu it's not like I needed my feelings anyway.
I mean His Dark Materials style daemons. I just like trying to figure out what animal could potentially match a given character, and I think it's fun to brainstorm with people about it.
Okay, but I think the real question would be WOULD SERVANTS HAVE DAEMONS. this is very vitaly important. @Aya-non. I know what you mean; I think you should watch it though it rips you up but it's a good watch. (the same thing happened to me with Attack on Titan)
Yeah, I was going back and forth on that, too. On one hand, they're magical copies of dead people. On the other hand, if the Grail can bring them back, it seems like their daemons should come too. I'm thinking maybe the daemon of the mage who summoned them sustains the Servant's daemon the same way the Master sustains the Servant themselves. It could be a neat little parallel, and you could do some interesting stuff with the connection if you wanted.
I have to admit that is the most logical and elegant way to handle it. At the same time, consider the following: The heroic servant takes the place of the daemon for the duration of the grailwar.
Okay that... would be super fucking creepy from an in-universe perspective, considering how intimate and personal daemons are, what with them being the living manifestation of your soul and all. Which totally makes me want to see someone do that, the potential is fascinating. On the other hand, you lose all the potential inherent in seeing the actual daemons of the various Masters and Servants, and finding out what might represent this or that character is half the fun. Plus, we wouldn't get to see what they'd think of each others' daemons, or how those daemons might interact with each other. Being connected daemon to daemon could still work in interesting ways- maybe in that state they can touch each others' daemons without the feeling of wrongness that normally happens, because they feel almost like the same person?
Throwing in a third option: having a Servant is really really creepy because they almost feel like a daemon, like, another person (a person, mind, not another Servant) touching them is icky and wrong and the person's daemon itself feels sorta...crowded, when they show up? Like some of the space it's occupying is being taken up? But they aren't actually a daemon. (They take energy from a person's soul, and they do, to some extent, represent an aspect of that person's soul--but not their whole soul. So the Servant is a daemon-like thing but the daemon still exists and so they and the daemon end up sort of occupying the same space and probably arguing/fighting some.)
It's just really a question of how much personhood the servants have, as magical constructs. Are they resurrected people using magic to make a body, projections of magic entirely; how much does the legend effect the summon as well as the person who created the legend effect it. my problem with the reaction-to-people's-deamons was always cultural difference; an indian person is going to have a diffrent emotional reaction to someone with a snake deamon than someone from Britain or america.
I prefer the former, personally: Servants are certainly magical creatures as opposed to humans, the supernatural is part of their nature now, but they're still sapient beings in their own right. See, those cultural differences are part of why I'd find this interesting- explore what the daemon means to the person in question, and how that agrees or conflicts with the perceptions of the people around them. A decent chunk of what I have is actually my attempts to work out how mage culture thinks of daemons, specifically. It's focused largely on the Clock Tower, different magical traditions wouldn't see things the exact same way, but the Mages Association putting themselves in charge of anything in reach and just assuming that their way is how things work is pretty canonically (and historically, what with the whole 'based in/on the British aristocracy' bit) accurate for them. So their traditions are sort of assumed to be the standard for all mage culture and it's what most mages know, even though some still have other traditions. So what I've come up with is that for mages, the traditional ideal is for men to have bird daemons and women to have cats. I went with birds because of the thing about witches always having avian daemons in the HDM novels- I'm not actually using anything else from the setting, I'm just thinking in terms of 'Nasuverse, but with daemons', but I liked the parallel. I split it partially because I didn't want to have to stick with birds for basically every traditional mage character, partially because I thought it would work well with the Association's strict approach to gender roles (see most of Sola-Ui's problems), and partially to evoke the classic 'witch's cat' image. Now, obviously, there are major problems with that whole belief, starting with the fact that people can't choose what their daemon becomes. Of course, socially punishing people for failing to live up to arbitrary standards in ways that were completely out of their control to begin with also fits pretty well with that kind of culture, so. Since mages are frequently raised with the belief that it's how things should be and there's something wrong with them if they don't fit, it winds up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy in a lot of cases: daemons are based on your personality and perceptions, both of which are at least partially products of your environment, and that tradition is part of the environment they grow up in. So there are quite a few mages who don't have proper, appropriate daemons, but a fairly large amount do. It's considered a minor scandal not to, a bit like having an uncle who gets shamefully drunk at official parties. Furthermore, the older families prefer to distance themselves from lower-generation magi by avoiding common breeds of bird or cat as their daemons. Again, you can't actually control this, but cultural expectations do lead to a disproportionate amount of, say, raptors, peacocks, swans, owls, etc. Not a lot of crows, sparrows, or other 'common' birds.
