yw/hdm

"reading one book is like eating one potato chip." and apparently having one thought about young wizards and his dark materials is like eating one potato chip! i'm using this blog as a collection ground for my "#yw x hdm" posts, so i can stop flooding people's dashes. main blog at littleskywatcher.tumblr.com. (:

[ofwizardsanddaemons]

Errakis rolled over and regarded Nita upside-down. "Do you want the easy answer, or the true one?"

Nita let out a long breath. "Sometimes I think this would be easier if my subconscious didn't actually talk back to me."

"It doesn't--well, not any more than an average person's. Think about it: if I weren't here, you'd still be having this conversation. Dairine would just look at you funny for talking to thin air."

Nita snorted. "Dairine looks at me funny regardless," she pointed out.

Errakis sighed, and Nita sighed at the sound. She knew both of them were avoiding the question. She reached out and shucked him absently under the chin. "I think--" she started, then stopped. "I stand by my decision," she said finally. "I took an Oath to guard growth and ease pain. This system is threatened--our system is threatened, 'Rakis--and dammit, I'm not gonna just give up on her. I will do everything in my power to save her. Everything in my power," she repeated in the Speech. Somehow, the phrase sounded a lot more final in the universe's tongue, and she shivered.

Errakis crawled into her lap and she cuddled him, both of them taking comfort in the touch. Neither of them voiced the niggling thought: But what if our power isn't enough?

[ofwizardsanddaemons]

guess who has the sywtbaw nme again!

and who may or may not have spent the last 20 minutes hunting for manual text references aw yeah

[ofwizardsanddaemons]

ronan calls kit's daemon "madreen rua" sometimes and it makes kit blush right out to his ears

[ofwizardsanddaemons]

*Pretend this is in Italics* Cooooooool. :D *Optional!Hugs* Thank you for answering, Cousin!

thank you for asking, cousin! :D

[ofwizardsanddaemons]

Hi! o/ *Has only just found & fallen in love with this blog* What would be your Bobo-specific headcanons (that don't have to wait on spoilers, that is!)? *Optional!Hugs*

hi! welcome! :D (and thanks!) <3

if you're talking about spoilers for stuff i've written, since i've yet to formally set anything besides brainstorming down, let's not worry about that.

oh good, i've been needing to think on bobo. (here's the tag, but all that's there so far are vague mentions, usually in connection to sharing a soulspace with a Power.)

SO

first and foremost i am treating bobo similarly to how i'm treating Power 'passengers'. (if we find out that bobo isn't a Power that might change, but since we're not going to find out until april of 2016 we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.) which means: no separate daemon.

ahhhh, i should go back and re-read some of the scenes with bobo--doesn't the peridexis sound different than nita's inner voice? like even if it sounds like her, it's like her with something extra. in the yw books, the winged defender uses ronan's voice to communicate with the human wizards, generally, and it's described as sounding like ronan but with something deeper (as in underlying power, not necessarily deeper in pitch), something older. similarly, bobo communicates through errakis, but in the private form of communication humans have with their daemons. no one else can hear the peridexis. ((do we have pronouns for the peridexic effect? does it need pronouns? assigning pronouns to wizardry itself, now that's an adventure.))

which leads us to ronan and other wizards with 'passengers', if you'll excuse me for a brief tangent--the Powers would have no problem using either the wizard or the daemon for communication. however, since it's much more common for humans to do the speaking, a passenger will probably defer to custom and use the wizard's voice rather than the daemon's. in WaW, since ronan knows the excursus group well, the winged defender might be more inclined to switch off depending on the situation. in front of acquaintances, however, They would almost exclusively use ronan's voice. (ahhh and this can tie into the idea of Powers existing outside gender, esp for wizards who have daemons of genders other than their own.)

anyway, back to bobo. bobo manifests a little differently than for example the michael power (scarlet feathers mixed in with mairéad's normal brown), esp since it can be a sort of power surge that comes and goes. you know the blue-white-fire color of the speech in a lot of yw fanart? ((tbh a lot of harry potter patronus fanart is that color, too.)) errakis gets a glow around his eyes first, then the rest of his form. (it's a different glow from the life-fire-reality glow in Timeheart, less warm. think computer-screen cool but not chilly.) the spell diagram will glow with that same light. errakis' voice is mechanical when bobo borrows it, but not in the same way that spot's voice is mechanical. it's got a different flavor, and nita feels like dairine has rubbed off on her if she's able to tell that. errakis says sometime his mouth tastes like starfire and old paper afterwards.

does that help?

[ofwizardsanddaemons]

this is kit's daemon. he's a kit fox because of course. not sure of his actual name as yet, but i'm p sure once he settles kit (and later nita and 'mela) affectionately calls him variants of zorro, spanish for fox.

[ofwizardsanddaemons]

ahhhh i want to start writing a thing but midterms

[ofwizardsanddaemons]

I had another Thought about Kit's daemon - what about his adventure on Mars? Do Martians have daemons? What happens to his damon then? Does it go back to being internal? Or does it change appearance? Would it become the scorpion-dog-pet thing? (I haven't read AWOM in a while so I don't remember the details very well, but I'm pretty sure there was something like that)

sO initially mars is trying to make itself as amenable to kit’s version of mars as possible, which means a) it would look like Helium (if i’m remembering the city name right) and b) his daemon would be there. i think his daemon would initially be a scorpion-dog-pet thing—i don’t remember the naming, either—and probably a little indignant about it. (kit would be delighted, and amused at how annoyed he is.)

bear in mind that this semblance is mainly intended to draw kit in. i don’t think martians have daemons, and as kit gets drawn further into the world and khretef starts to take over, kit’s daemon starts to have a harder time following physically. (keep in mind, this starts to be khretef more than kit, so kit’s daemon would eventually be stuck with kit under khretef’s will, and mostly silent. occasionally kit will hear his daemon’s voice, and some part of him knows it should be a familiar voice, but he can’t place it. just like khretef’s scorpion-dog-pet thing reminds him both of another pet and another, different kind of bond, if he could just remember…)

which means when nita shows up and kicks aurilelde around, she finds what looks like kit without kit’s daemon and is terrified for him. and when kit finally gets out from under khretef’s influence, both he and his daemon appear trembling on the floor of the throne room.

also, when kit goes “how did i fail to notice that neets is hot???” his daemon definitely snickers at him. he’s known for awhile. ;)

[ofwizardsanddaemons]

nimblermortal reblogged your post:

No but the implication that Kit is an abdal

and how glorious that would be, because they run into another abdal that they’re super careful of talking around and the Powers must be laughing their heads off about Kit.

the further i get into this au the more interested i am in where kit's going to be going in canon, because choosing a daemon for him and looking more at ponch raises more questions than answers :D

[ofwizardsanddaemons]

((since i’m eating and can’t also grade papers))

THOUGHT 3: darryl + daemons that don’t settle

i’m torn between his daemon either settling really early (super-long Ordeal by the books, but the hardest part was just taking the Oath and that took way less than three months) OR (and this OR is…

[fireandwonder]

I was also thinking that Darryl’s daemon doesn’t settle! Hadn’t quite thought it through, though. You’re right, it wouldn’t really make sense for it to be an abdal thing, since it would make it too obvious. I think I was sort of connecting it to the bi-location thing; like, he can be in multiple places at once, so his soul can have multiple forms at once(ish). And in canon there are other ways to bilocate besides being an abdal.

[wanderingskywatcher]

:D

[ofwizardsanddaemons]

((since i'm eating and can't also grade papers))

THOUGHT 3: darryl + daemons that don't settle

i'm torn between his daemon either settling really early (super-long Ordeal by the books, but the hardest part was just taking the Oath and that took way less than three months) OR (and this OR is where i'm leaning)

i'm not sure if his daemon ever settles, really. (i'm also not sure if that's a darryl thing or an abdal thing or a thing that may be viewed by some in-universe researchers as an autie thing.) like, they have a preferred form, but it's not permanent, just comfortable. as an abdal, it might be related to being such a direct conduit to the One--daemons settle as power levels start to settle. (they probably already have a form in mind coming out of the Ordeal, but can change for a little while after that, it's just harder.) and we don't know a whole lot about abdals outside of darryl. (as tom said, "they don't grow on trees" meaning they're uncommon rather than suggesting their habitats.) an unsettled daemon is probably not a trait of all abdals.

aha, we're far enough into this universe that tom is telling me about it. YES. tom says it might be a combination of the abdal thing and the autism thing. it's dangerous to make sweeping generalizations like that, because no two cases are the same (in either category). it's easiest to just say it's a darryl thing (and to let darryl assume that it's a darryl thing, and somehow loosely connected to the bi-location but definitely not a cause for concern). he says there are other wizards whose daemons never settle, and there aren't too many common factors among them beyond that they tend to be fairly rare. the lone power seems to be particularly interested in them, too, but whether that's because of the unsettled daemons or the unsettled daemons are because of the interest... well, that's anybody's guess. the Powers tend to play those sorts of things close to Their chests.

[ofwizardsanddaemons]

THOUGHT 2: kit (this was originally part of the same post as nita, but then it spiraled and i thought it should get its own post)

but now that we work further into this idea, i’m not quite sure about ponch as kit’s daemon. on one hand, it completely makes sense, like tatterpig was saying—they’re both unflinchingly loyal and especially during the events in AWAl, ponch basically acts like a daemon in canon, anyway.

on the other hand, ponch has been in the family for years. (or has he?) in the ‘verse i’m building, we’ve mentioned that daemons aren’t exactly physical beings to the uninitiated, so it wouldn’t be self-consistent to just keep up the premise of ponch as the family dog, unless there was some reason for him being visible to everyone (potentially even before kit took the Oath). and then if he’s the family pet, there’s a lot of work needed to keep up that appearance—if, like i’ve suggested, kit starts undergoing separation training with his daemon during TWD, then what was ponch doing while kit was at school? kit can’t just leave him at home, and his parents would be suspicious if their dog mysteriously wasn’t home during the middle of the day when kit is supposed to be in class sans his loyal dog.

so i mean, one thing we could do is take ponch as the family dog out of the narrative, or give the rodriguezes a different dog in addition to kit’s daemon. some options:

-ponch is a separate entity from kit’s daemon, but still gets the ‘strangeness’ in the books and basically functions the same way i imagine peach functions: not anyone’s daemon, but a Power in Its own right. Powers aren’t necessarily obvious as such right away, so this could work.

-the rodriguez family dog is different from kit’s daemon, but at some point something happens to said dog (probably after kit and daemon undergo separation), so (physicalized) daemon seamlessly fills the hole left by mysteriously incapacitated dog. which could lead to interesting commentary on kit if his daemon essentially becomes a Power. (i mean, dairine is kind of like this, too, and it could be argued that nita and bobo are in a similar situation.) in this case, i think the choice to be uniformly visible would be a suggestion made by the daemon, who isn’t really sure why the suggestion occurred to him but it’s one of those hunches you can’t ignore. (but does this invalidate kit’s very real relationship with his dog? hm.)

-the family dog is not kit’s daemon and the two continue existing independently, but kit’s daemon still fulfills the same narrative purpose as ponch in the books. (the dog is as normal as wizards’ pets ever are.)

-the rodriguezes don’t have a dog. ponch is kit’s daemon, but the rest of the family doesn’t know about him. (well, carmela does once she learns the Speech, but the rest of them don’t.) this is bad news for questions like the meaning of life, and doesn’t make a lot of sense if we try to keep the ‘wizardly leakage’ storyline from AWAl onwards, where ponch starts affecting normal dogs.

-ponch is the rodriguez family dog and has largely the same narrative as in the books. kit’s daemon is separate, but the two are close (which becomes a topic of interest to the Seniors later on, i’m betting). in this option, kit’s daemon settles as a fox. (it’s hilarious later that raoul’s nickname for kit is ‘kit fox’.) that means the wizardly leakage involves ponch as a nonwizard being able to see kit’s daemon at all, for a start. part of the strangeness is their communication.

i think i’m favoring that last one. (which, re-reading this, is an extension of the first one.)

[ofwizardsanddaemons]

how concrete does my reasoning on daemon pronouns have to be? like in hdm philip pullman himself said he wasn't quite sure why he had one or two characters (in short stories but still) with daemons of their own gender. (he hinted at homosexuality which i'm sure is his reasoning for it being so rare, but he also effectively said WHO KNOWS.) i know pullman's default was daemons of "opposite" gender as their humans but that seems unnecessarily binaristic to me. (also fuck philip pullman. god.)

fuck it i'm the writer, right? right. p sure kit's daemon uses he/him/his pronouns. also p sure carmela's uses they/them/theirs. probably darryl's, too.

[ofwizardsanddaemons]

AFTERTHOUGHT: our favorite seniors

not ready to tackle their daemons yet (though annie and monty are temptingly convenient) BUT

tom is still interested in the Speech. (he's the closest thing we have to a canon Speech guru, lbr here--whatever he says about not knowing much is modesty and a nod to the sheer volume of the language of Life.) by logical extension in this 'verse, he knows more about daemons than your average wizard. he probably helped roshaun work up to getting his daemon visible (they may have been in unsuspecting contact prior to his arrival on earth, just as a matter of intellectual curiosity), and he's v interested later in kit and ponch and [kit's daemon's name].

carl is still the claudications expert--and has long discussions with the cats about the way daemons interact with spacetime. if tom is the daemon theory guy, carl is the daemon practice guy. he could tell you why daemons can bump furniture and stuff, and why nonwizards don't have clumsy invisible followers. (mostly a privacy thing--daemons are much more interactive when their humans can see them to interact, and try not to draw too much attention to themselves otherwise. just like wizards can usually only overhear other wizards' thoughts, wizardly and nonwizardly daemons are largely uncommunicative to daemons of the other persuasion. although there are a percentage of reported hauntings that are just daemons taking exception to their humans and trying to get their point across invisibly.)

[ofwizardsanddaemons]

THOUGHT 2: kit (this was originally part of the same post as nita, but then it spiraled and i thought it should get its own post)

but now that we work further into this idea, i'm not quite sure about ponch as kit's daemon. on one hand, it completely makes sense, like tatterpig was saying--they're both unflinchingly loyal and especially during the events in AWAl, ponch basically acts like a daemon in canon, anyway.

on the other hand, ponch has been in the family for years. (or has he?) in the 'verse i'm building, we've mentioned that daemons aren't exactly physical beings to the uninitiated, so it wouldn't be self-consistent to just keep up the premise of ponch as the family dog, unless there was some reason for him being visible to everyone (potentially even before kit took the Oath). and then if he's the family pet, there's a lot of work needed to keep up that appearance--if, like i've suggested, kit starts undergoing separation training with his daemon during TWD, then what was ponch doing while kit was at school? kit can't just leave him at home, and his parents would be suspicious if their dog mysteriously wasn't home during the middle of the day when kit is supposed to be in class sans his loyal dog.

so i mean, one thing we could do is take ponch as the family dog out of the narrative, or give the rodriguezes a different dog in addition to kit's daemon. some options:

-ponch is a separate entity from kit's daemon, but still gets the 'strangeness' in the books and basically functions the same way i imagine peach functions: not anyone's daemon, but a Power in Its own right. Powers aren't necessarily obvious as such right away, so this could work.

-the rodriguez family dog is different from kit's daemon, but at some point something happens to said dog (probably after kit and daemon undergo separation), so (physicalized) daemon seamlessly fills the hole left by mysteriously incapacitated dog. which could lead to interesting commentary on kit if his daemon essentially becomes a Power. (i mean, dairine is kind of like this, too, and it could be argued that nita and bobo are in a similar situation.) in this case, i think the choice to be uniformly visible would be a suggestion made by the daemon, who isn't really sure why the suggestion occurred to him but it's one of those hunches you can't ignore. (but does this invalidate kit's very real relationship with his dog? hm.)

-the family dog is not kit's daemon and the two continue existing independently, but kit's daemon still fulfills the same narrative purpose as ponch in the books. (the dog is as normal as wizards' pets ever are.)

-the rodriguezes don't have a dog. ponch is kit's daemon, but the rest of the family doesn't know about him. (well, carmela does once she learns the Speech, but the rest of them don't.) this is bad news for questions like the meaning of life, and doesn't make a lot of sense if we try to keep the 'wizardly leakage' storyline from AWAl onwards, where ponch starts affecting normal dogs.

-ponch is the rodriguez family dog and has largely the same narrative as in the books. kit's daemon is separate, but the two are close (which becomes a topic of interest to the Seniors later on, i'm betting). in this option, kit's daemon settles as a fox. (it's hilarious later that raoul's nickname for kit is 'kit fox'.) that means the wizardly leakage involves ponch as a nonwizard being able to see kit's daemon at all, for a start. part of the strangeness is their communication.

i think i'm favoring that last one. (which, re-reading this, is an extension of the first one.)

[ofwizardsanddaemons]

today's dilemma: fitting daemons into canon.

THOUGHT 1: nita

when nita gets the manual (like before she reads the Oath), does it mention daemons?

i think it does. because then she won't have to flip the heck out when errakis suddenly appears (WAIT THIS IS PART OF THE POST-OATH PRECOG DREAM aha yes perfect). also it makes more sense/is a less awkward narrative technique than having errakis explain himself.

then of course, once she takes the Oath, the section on daemons is a lot bigger, as per usual with the manual.

[wanderingskywatcher]

pathless-wood replied to your post: applied for CUWiP! lunch and then GR. …

One of things about your new pet au making my brain hurt is this: if other animal species are just as much “people” as humans in YW, do they get daemons too? Or is it only for humans? How would a wizard’s daemon…

[fireandwonder]

Ooo, I just had a thought! What about plural species like Pont? How might humans with daemons interact with them in this au? 

[wanderingskywatcher]

oh man, nita would be just completely dumbfounded when she meets Pont. they’d ask all sorts of questions, and errakis and she would just kind of look at each other like i have no idea how to answer this and we just kind of…are? and eventually she figures she’ll have to talk to tom at some point about the Speech again because if she’s hearing correctly the plural pronouns Pont use to refer to themselves are completely different from the plural pronouns she and errakis use to refer to themselves as a unit. (it’s hard to make that distinction in english, eesh.)

pont would be delighted! more plural beings! and also terribly confused because while humans and their daemons are basically one being in two bodies, they don’t refer to themselves as a single entity. generally. why do these creatures refer to themselves separately? why do you look so dissimilar? (do they look dissimilar? how much of Pont’s worldview is human-visual and how much is something different than what we’d perceive as physical? the first time they look with Pont, nita and errakis would probably spend a moment going huh and laughing about the idea that humans and their daemons start to resemble each other, because whoever came up with that had no idea how right they were!)

[wanderingskywatcher]

i started reading mcu fanfiction instead of finishing my reading logs (who’s surprised?) but i bring for your consideration:

young wizards daemon au

[walkingoutintherain]

TELL ME MORE TELL ME MORE~

What other species in the universe have daemons? Is it exclusively a human thing, so when they make mochteroofs for the excursus crowd they have to simulate daemons too? (Insert image of everyone sitting around and the aliens picking daemons. “Can mine be a flytrap?” “No, it had to be an animal. Like, something animate.” “A flytrap is just as animate as I am!”)

Then there’s the terrific brightness Ronan’s daemon acquires when the Champion manifests — the way the Lone One’s lack of daemon ought to make It grotesque but somehow adds to Its beauty.

And what happens to your daemon when you shapechange? Do h’Niit and K!t internalize their daemons, or do they become whales too? If they’re internalized maybe when you start to lose control of the shapechange they reappear.

And does your daemon settle when you take the Oath?

[fireandwonder]

Also consider: Could a human wizard possibly have a non-earth species daemon?

And it would make sense that a daemon would settle when the wizard takes the Oath, but I also kind of imagine that for some wizards it would settle when you pass the Ordeal. And for others the daemon settles at a completely different time. 

I’ve also always headcanoned that a traumatic event can cause an adult’s daemon to change; so if a wizard gave up wizardry, their daemon would change into something else

[wanderingskywatcher]

i said i was finishing my reading logs haha SURPRISE FRIENDS i’m not yet

-so starting with WD when kit + ponch started with “adjunct talent in training” i’m p sure he and ponch were working on the same sort of separation as the witches do with their daemons in HDM. (also that’s foreshadowing for when ponch really leaves and ouch.)

-i’m p sure terran wizards can internalize their daemons for things like the underwater thing. daemons are v tied up in the Speech, i think (and it’s the thing that all Life understands so everyone /has/ daemons they just can’t all /see/ them, or they’re expressed in different ways than mere physicality). also being tied up in the Speech means that they could be incorporated into the fabric of a spell rather than directly physicalized during things like shapechanges? so like trailofdesire was saying, once you start to lose control of the spell your daemon flickers back into physicality.

-now i’m curious about nonwizardly daemons—can wizards see them? is it like the address list in the manual, if they’re not “out” to a wizard maybe their daemon won’t be clear? and then in AWAb when kit and ronan meet they can easily see each other’s daemons. and annie’s daemon peeks shyly out from under her hair when nita follows her sideways. maybe daemons can see each other without necessarily their humans being able to see all of them. that’d make sense, with it being tied up in the Speech and also human fallibility and all that.

- fireandwonder, i think a human wizard could definitely have a non-earth-species daemon! it might be a marker of people who’ve “taken a wrong turn” hmmmm.

-ohhhh good golly please consider nita’s premonition of irina holding the world’s kernel and a normally cheerful canary suddenly looking downright /deadly/ and shadows spreading like huge wings cast by the light of the kernel