Tagging @dxmonions since the blog’s archived, yeah I know this post is like 4 years old but it’s really cool
- singing duets YES Oh my god yes
- sports God this one strikes me as a thing that’d be totally different in Lyra’s world. If the distance limit before it hurt was like, a hundred meters or even 50 it’d be different, but the canonical limit is so short that most of the team sports we know just… wouldn’t be possible. Contact sports like rugby, hockey, and American football would inherently have such a high risk of violating the no-touching taboo, and something like baseball would just be too dangerous except for people with larger daemons like wolves, because an MLB pitch is dangerous enough for humans, but if you’ve ever seen video of birds being in the wrong place at the wrong time, it would just be so unsafe because for most daemon species getting hit by a pitch would be instant death. I think that world would be dominated by various individual sports like racing, javelin/discus throwing, and individual combat sports such as wrestling and boxing where the playing area is small enough that the daemons can sit on the sidelines.
- emergency services (how do they get the daemon out of a bad situation if they’re passed out? Are all units required to have at least one person with a daemon capable of manipulating and carrying things?)
I’m curious what qualifies as “touching” for the purposes of the taboo. Like, carrying an unconscious daemon in a cage or on a stretcher ought to be fine because you’re not touching them. Does nudging / pushing onto a stretcher with tweezers and popsicle sticks count? Do really thick gloves?
- faking ones’ death (how can you act dead on screen/in real life when your daemon is right there?)
I guess IRL it’d kind of be limited to making sure your body is never found, or at the very least your actual body. On-screen? I think movies would by necessity evolve to have the same level of willing suspension of disbelief as stage plays. Y’know how the idea of ninjas dressing in black may have originally come from Japanese plays where stage hands wear all-black to signify that they don’t exist in-universe and their presence should be ignored? I’ll bet the simplest method is literally just “drop a black or background/colored cloth over the actor’s daemon when a character dies,” followed by: “Set off a colored smoke effect to represent them dissolving and drop them through a trapdoor in the stage/set.” As the medium evolved effects could improve, including innovations such as: “Make sure only the dying character is in the shot, and cut away the couple seconds it takes for their daemon to hide out of the camera range / behind part of the set.” Some productions might use other tricks such as having the daemons be played by puppets, and later CGI, which would also help with situations where they wanted to cast someone whose daemon is a different species than the character ought to have.
Animation might also be a big deal in that world. Imagine the first serious animated feature film appearing in theaters - like, a Disney level production - and having a heart-wrenching death scene that shows a daemon dissolving with a level of realism that’s impossible in live action with the technology of the time.
- wait??? Would personified animals like Micky Mouse have daemons??? They have souls like people right? Soooo?????? Um??
Ooooh, this is a cool one… Anthromomorphized animals in folklore might or might not have daemons - Panserbjorne don’t, after all - and might just be way less common because the symbolism of Beast Fables might just be replaced with human characters with daemons of that species.
“Toons” as in the world of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? My headcanon is that while you could sort of create a pair that represented a human and daemon - e.g. an Elmer Fudd type character with a hunting hound daemon - that Toons don’t actually have daemons - or it would be more accurate to say they don’t have humans. Creatures like Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny are actually closer to daemons than humans: they’re basically a soul with a body formed around it, and their flesh is substantial in the way that a daemon’s is and an angel’s isn’t. In terms of the setting’s physics, Toons aren’t matter that attracts Dust to it, they’re Dust that attracts matter. However there are some very important differences: breaking a daemon’s body is no harder than breaking an animal’s, and instantly kills them and their human; breaking a toon’s body mildly and briefly inconveniences them. The worst that can be done using conventional methods is to reduce them to a less-substantial, ghost-like form, and even then they seem to just reform after a while.
ellievsbear
pixelskylines
dailybridgerton
theartofmadeline
dededos
2087
snowghoul
