The Golden Compass [Kintsugi Bookclub]

Welcome, book lovers! Let's talk about The Golden Compass/Northern Lights, shall we? (If you want to talk about The Amulet of Samarkand or Monstrous Regiment, click the name to go to the appropriate thread.)

Before we begin, though, a few guidelines, if you don't mind? Well, even if you do, guidelines it is!

1. All posts after this one are fair game for untagged spoilers. The assumption is that you'll acquire the book, read it, and come back to talk about it once you've read it. That might not be for a few weeks, and that is totally fine.
2. If you're have a hard time finding the book, or want to talk about the rules or selection or problems or anything else not related to the content itself, bring that over to the main Bookclub Thread. We'll help as best we can. Same with if you think these guidelines aren't useful, they can be changed!
3. You can totally post in here without being done, though. Just scroll all the way down and write out your thoughts if'n you want to liveblog them. (Please let us know where you are so we don't reply/tag you and spoil things unintentionally if you care about not being spoiled.)
4. Ignoring this thread until you're caught up might mean missing alerts. That's totally okay. You can find it in the forum browser or in your list of Watched Threads (if you're watching it).
5. You can participate in as many of the Bookclub threads as you want, in whatever order you like. The idea here is to provide discussion and encouragement in a way that lets everyone have the best reading experience we can manage.

I hope those aren't too stringent, we can edit them as we need to, but since we're doing three books at once we can't really parcel them out section-by-section, not everyone will be reading them all at once, it may take people time to find some of the books, and some people read at very different paces.

 

I just finished rereading it, and I have so many thoughts!

One, which had never occurred to me when reading the book as a teen, was: it's stated that a person's deamon being the same gender as the person is rare, but happens. The one person who's mentioned specifically as being like that is a man, and he is also described as very "gentle". In my teens, this always seemed like it hinted at sexual orientation (as in, the man with a male deamon was a gay guy), but now I wonder, does it maybe hint at gender, as in, the guy in question was a trans person (a trans woman who wasn't out as female? a trans man who was stealth?) and their deamon reflected that?

Another is that I love the pacing of this book. It lets us settle in nicely and then gets faster and faster, and even though we spend 2/3rds of it thinking Bolvangar will be the climax, it's after it's destroyed that shit starts to really hit the fan at breakneck speed. I do have some trouble with the narration, though. One of my narrative pet peeves is when 3rd person narrative switches PoV inconsistently in order to convey information. The book is mostly narrated from Lyra's understanding of matters, but it will sometimes shift (like at the end of the 1st chapter, for a short conversation between the Master of Jordan College and the Librarian) and it feels so... unnecessary and awkward.

I'll also add that WOW I love Mrs. Coulter, such a compelling woman who manages to only have more wickedness under her wickedness and still remain complex <3

 

Was anyone else INCREDIBLY PISSED after watching the movie for the first time? (only a month or two after reading the book, mind you)
(oh lord it was sad. twelve year old me left the theater ranting.)

 

Oh my god I need to reread these books right now <3 <3 <3

And also: the movie! I watched it a billion years ago and the thought of it still fills me with rage :) I really liked Nicole Kidman as Mrs Coulter and I had such great hopes for it, but then the entire movie was sort of eh, and then, THE ENDING. What the fuck.

Spoiler: spoiler for the ending???

I watched it in a theatre and it was actually pretty cool to experience the collective WTF moment when we all braced for the emotional climax of the story, and then BAM, credits rolling.

 

I just listen to the audiobook with the actors reading their character's lines and pretend it's the movie

 

That sounds like a much better idea.

@smyxolotl all of your comment=exactly

 

I seem to have repressed almost all memories of the film. Can't say I'm that sad about having forgotten.

 

IIRC the movie was ended that way because they thought the ending of the book would be a downer ending and make it unpopular so they wouldn't get greenlit for the next two. That...backfired spectacularly. (they also downplayed Pullman's anti-organized religion thing a lot to try to not piss off fundies and that didn't work either)

I played in an RP game based on HDM for a bit and the people running it did some research and had people use their own discretion about daemon gender relation to person gender. I seem to recall someone saying that a fan had asked Pullman if he meant it to include trans people, and he said he hadn't considered it, but he liked the explanation.

(as in, if a person is AMAB but their daemon is male, it means their gender is probably female. I imagine there are also exceptions because gender can be wibbly-wobbly as well.)

EDIT: also Nicole Kidman as Mrs. Coulter was SO GOOD. Ahhh.

 

I'm pretty certain it would make the most sense as a trans thing.
UGGH MOVIE NO

 

WRT to the movie, while they DID considerably fuck up my favorite background characters (the bears, obviously) I was SO UNBELIEVABLY STOKED that the Kings' fight was spot-on accurate. I did not expect them to go full-on facial mutilation for the movie. That is, to this day, one of my favorite descriptions of a duel and killing blow--AND IT WAS IN A "TEEN" BOOK

 

I loved that whole fight, and the bit before it with Lyra pretending to be a demon. That was awesome.