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@owl-dae
"Iorek Byrnison" Watercolor on paper, 11x14", 2026.
For "Bibliophilia," opening April 8 at Quirky Fox Gallery
like realistically i feel like your daemon should settle in your mid 20s. like maybe after puberty there are a few forms it goes between, but settling at age 15 is insane
I disagree. I feel like 15-18ish is around the age when people really start thinking about what type of person they want to be. They start worrying more about what their peers think of them. At that age, teenagers often want to be SEEN as mature & grown up. They start looking for their own way through the world without relying on what their parents think & say.
I think that drive to discover oneself & become independent is what drives a dæmon to settle. It’s not so much that you know who you are, it’s that you start to consider who you want to be.
Children are also a lot more open & malleable in the way they see the world. Once they get to be a teenager, they have more or less formed an idea of how the world works. It slowly becomes harder to change that idea.
Dæmons are shaped by the way you think: especially the way you think about yourself. Sure, that certainly can change later in life, but your perspective is always going to be colored by your experiences when you were forming your ideas of the world.
Follow up:
Facts are facts. @ladycloud @esmesqualor-not-esmecullen
Perfect, no notes
Phillip Pullman is a talented writer and usually a pretty good worldbuilder but sometimes there’s shit that makes me wonder if he understands people at all. Like the taboo against touching someone else’s daemon—his explanation is that it’s taboo, and therefore it doesn’t really happen, and it’s remarkable and shocking when it does.
Which is completely absurd. Children would be touching each other’s daemons all the time, as play or bullying or experimentation. Parents would be grabbing or even hurting daemons on a regular basis and criticizing this practice would be seen as radical and crazy the same way that criticizing spanking is. And of course there’s other kinds of assault. I actually do not believe there would be a meaningful taboo about it.
(Also—the ‘daemons can be fixed by the touch of a lover’ is stupid because if that were true then kids would have figured that out and be talking about it with each other constantly.)
@venus-ceros ok no that actually makes a lot of sense both in the narrative and on an analysis level. i support ur reading of this
also to take up op's criticism--lyra grew up somewhat sheltered, she didnt have contact to a broad range of people from different backgrounds. maybe eg. hurting your childs daemon (analogous to physical abuse) is more common among less intellectual people or people that arent super close to or important for the church, its just not relevant to teh story
I’m not asking “why is it a taboo” like that’s pretty clear. I am challenging the implication made in the book that Because it’s taboo, people don’t do it. People do taboos constantly, all the time, in public, casually, for laffs, on impulse, etc. Lyra grew up surrounded by dozens of other children running wild and ignoring adults in every other respect—they’d all be experimentally touching daemons all the time.
She also grew up in a world with both the church and law enforcement who would 100% be touching your daemon as a form of control and calmly explaining why it’s ok and necessary when they do it. Maybe Lyra hadn’t personally witnessed any police arrests but surely many of her playmates had and would eagerly describe it in lurid detail and then the bolder ones would try it on each other to see how it felt. That’s just how kids work.
I agree, and I spend too much of my own free time patching up Pullman, and it’s a low value-activity. But here is a patch I’ve used:
- a human touching their own daemon feels good to both.
- humans touching humans can mean anything.
- daemons touching daemons can mean anything
- humans touching another person’s daemon feels DISORIENTING for both the human and the daemon. It’s taboo because it makes the human feel something like - revolting, scary, nauseating, disturbing.
- a parent (human) might grab a child’s daemon, but it makes a lot more sense for THEIR daemon to manage the child’s daemon as much as possible. Same with kids playing, grabbing each other - their daemons should touch each other.
- lovers touching across this boundary without discomfort is possibly an indicator that the theme is actually: if you are sympathetic enough to someone else’s (internal) soul, then you can manage the discomfort of touching/Knowing their (external) soul.
- rather than getting hung up on the mechanics of the animal, the storytelling mechanic of the daemon is to reveal character, so “touching the daemon causes physically disorienting dissociation of your own self as you temporarily mesh with someone else’s Soul. People generally don’t like it (it feels like bloodloss, like madness, like losing your sense of self, like falling into a well; or whatever!) but lovers might find it intimate” could be practical/believable and not clog the gears. “Taboo” is a clumsy, lazy articulation of something Pullman might have wanted to use later and didn’t want to bother with. Behind “taboo” he gestured at something more interesting, but again - clumsiness, laziness, he was paid for a book, not for a full theology.
Pullman’s ultimate stance is “don’t worry too much about it” and I understand that, as well as the heart’s cry about The Implications. (The Implications have powered a series of fics with over 150k words and full academic lore.) But in doing this, we are definitely putting in more time and thought than the creator did!
It’s been a hot minute since I last re-read the series, as my copy got destroyed, so please forgive any inaccuracies, or names I’ve forgotten lol.
My understanding was that when a person touches someone else’s dæmon, the way the recipient feels about it is heavily dependent on the intention of the person touching their demon. When the person grabs Pan to throw him in the cutting machine, Lyra describes it as very painful and disorienting. There’s a deep feeling of wrongness. When Will touches Pan, consensually, it’s described as pleasant, and exciting, if a little disorienting.
It’s no secret that a person touching another person’s dæmon is used as a metaphor for sex. Specifically the way that having sex is very intimate, and taboo in the church. You’re allowing someone access to a very sensitive and vulnerable part of yourself.
Dæmon to dæmon interaction is used as a metaphor for communication, rather than sex. We can do a bit of hand waving and explain this with in-world lore. Dæmons are beings made of dust, rather than normal, physical matter. Dust is the medium of ideas. It’s less disorienting for ideas to interact directly.
As for the taboo itself: people definitely break it all the time. Kids irl will sometimes take off their underwear to look at each other’s genitalia, out of innocent curiosity. I’ve made a post about parents grabbing their children’s dæmons before. And there are DEFINITELY situations where a human is forced to restrain someone else’s dæmon. Perhaps someone is acting crazy/violent and the person(s) trying to restrain them have dæmons that are significantly smaller than the dangerous person’s. There’s no way a rat or a bird could hope to restrain a dog. (Not to mention police violence. That’s another can of worms. Probably an extremely controversial subject in Lyra’s world.)
But our perspective is limited by Lyra’s experience, and she was very sheltered. So we don’t see the ugly underbelly of when people disregard the taboo. I haven’t read through the Book of Dust yet, but I heard that in the 2nd (the Secret Commonwealth iirc) Lyra goes to another country and experiences a culture that treats their dæmons very differently.
Live theater in the His Dark Materials universe must be wild. Surely an actor's daemon also has lines to recite, so their daemon's form probably also factors into casting decisions. Maybe some plays have vague character descriptions for daemons, but I bet other plays have really specific or central daemon characters. And sure, big-budget theaters can afford to hire a separate actor with a particular daemon to stand backstage while their daemon plays its part onstage, but community theaters don't have those kinds of resources.
Like if you're casting for Julius Caesar, surely the real historical Caesar had a pretty iconic daemon, right? Are you going to cast an actor with a pigeon daemon as Caesar and just have everyone suspend their disbelief that it's Caesar's lioness, ἁμαρτία?
#overthinking how casting works in real life#internal pieces of an essay about directors' choices and interpretation and whatnot#But imagine casting your actors and daemons as a set--what it says about the characters they're playing#It says something if you cast Julius Caesar with a pigeon daemon#Imagine what it would do to the Eulogy speech! How could Caesar have been ambitious! His daemon was a common pigeon!#(or do you argue that historians were embarrassed by the betrayal and “lionized” his daemon after the fact to make him seem more regal?)#It would make typecasting and casting against type absolutely fascinating when you thrown in daemons.
absolutely fire tags from @afamiliarroomba
#i bet in some cases of really iconic daemons they keep the actor's daemon offstage #and use puppets or something #also opens up a world of new possibilities for child actors (via @pigeonhawk)
#I had to preserve these. the bit about child actors made me go ''oh fuuuuck'' out loud #there must be some majorly significant coming-of-age plays that have to do with daemons settling #and like. at least one instance of a daemon /actually/ settling during a performance #the reviews! the doctoral dissertations! #also love the idea of daemons-as-puppetry #something something the facsimile of theater while daemons skitter along under the stage like matched magnets #distinct schools of theatrical production and history based on live-action or puppetry daemons and mixed-form shows trying to make a point (@impossibletruths)
I'm SO GLAD other people have had these thoughts other than me lol. I'll wonder who a character's daemon would be, and usually that's not going to match the actor's daemon. It's fun to think about!
His Dark Material universe will forever be my favorite type of world-building because is so well made to the fact that we can have open conversations about this because the base is so well created.
I think Marisa Coulter would've THRIVED in the Bene Gesserit.
i really hate when people dismiss the ending of his dark materials because it leans into the trope "love saves the world". truly, that is what the story is about, but reducing it to a cliché is doing a disservice to the point the story is making. when it says that love says the world, it's rewriting the meaning of sin by saying that giving into desire is not shameful. it's telling us to be brave enough to experience. it's saying that dying for love can have powerful impact, but living for it is much more romantic. it's saying that storytelling saves the world, because telling stories is a language of love. it's saying that the bonds we create with other people will outlast death as long as we share our memories. it's showing how a simple childhood friendship is extraordinary enough to change the course of a war between heaven and earth. is there a better way to end a trilogy that intertwines so many paths of love than with a kiss that shifts the fabric of multiple universes?
Thinking about. The fact that people in Lyra's world in HDM see daemonless people as incredibly uncanny and Wrong due to the implications of them being literally souless. Thinking about the fun horror tropes that would result in that world.
In the HDM version of The Thing, the titular Thing tries to imitate the both the humans and the accompanying daemons at the camp, but there's something Off about the daemons in the same way there's something Off about Thing!Jed the dog. They don't act right, they don't feel right when next to a real daemon.
In HDM! Dracula, Dracula, being a souless vampire, has to use his wolf control ability to manipulate a wild wolf to act as his 'daemon' when Jonathan is at the castle. Of course, since Dracula has not interacted with a daemon in hundreds of years, the wolf does not act right. Jonathan can tell there's something off about this 'daemon' but brushes it off at first, his daemon (a dog, to contrast Dracula's fake wolf 'daemon') can tell there's something off about the wolf...it's all very off.
When Lucy is revealed to be a vampire, there is clear horror at the uncanniness of her missing daemon in addition to her feeding off the children and being unable to rest in peace, when she was never able to travel away from her daemon in life.
God is dead, and we didn’t kill him. We beat down the doors of heaven and just found him like this. Not above taking credit for it and using it as the basis for a legitimizing mythology for our incipient space-faring empire though
god is dead and, well, you’ve always wondered what that would taste like
God is dead and honestly we should have noticed the smell earlier
His Dark Materials (2000)
i think abt the part in the golden compass where it was noted that if your daemon chose to assume the form of a fish or some kind of ocean dwelling creature you could never leave the water again. at best you could dock, maybe walk a bit away from the shore, but that's it. chained to the water because your physical soul form commands it.
is love devotion? is love attachment? is love being bonded so firmly to something that it consumes you? when your daemon chooses it's final form do you weep with joy or fear?
can i kiss you? with tongue.
Live theater in the His Dark Materials universe must be wild. Surely an actor's daemon also has lines to recite, so their daemon's form probably also factors into casting decisions. Maybe some plays have vague character descriptions for daemons, but I bet other plays have really specific or central daemon characters. And sure, big-budget theaters can afford to hire a separate actor with a particular daemon to stand backstage while their daemon plays its part onstage, but community theaters don't have those kinds of resources.
Like if you're casting for Julius Caesar, surely the real historical Caesar had a pretty iconic daemon, right? Are you going to cast an actor with a pigeon daemon as Caesar and just have everyone suspend their disbelief that it's Caesar's lioness, ἁμαρτία?
thinking about daemons as a manifestation of the soul. and also about being a teenager and having a cringey, weird, flexible and unsettled little soul. how many teenagers in a daemons!verse are out there persuading their souls to take a similar shape to their friends' souls? or accidentally mirroring a crush and being teased relentlessly for it? there's got to be kids going no, this is right, this does feel right, with their daemons trying their damnedest to look comfortable in the shape of a little bird, say, because their hero on tv, or in a book, or in a band, has a little dainty bird daemon. and then, years later, a sibling is going to say hey, remember when you decided he was a bird because you had a crush on that singer? about the colossal st bernard flopped over the entire sofa and a terrible pillow fight will ensue because oh my god, shut up, that never happened it's so embarrassing.
sure visible souls are cute and important and say something about you, but it's also the mortifying ordeal of being known when you're a kid and that's the last thing you need
Finally done with Wolf 359 characters’ daemons! P.S.: I know that humming-birbs are tiny, but so is Hera, my smol child
hmmm this his dark materials fanmade animated trailer is the most beautiful thing I’ve seen this year… wow
Directed by Louis HOLMES, Agathe LEROUX and Léa REY—MAUZAIZE
Daemon HeadCanon - Music
I've seen a few different posts about Daemons in theatre and movies (I've got thoughts on this too, maybe one day I'll write them down here) but surprisingly I haven't come across any about music. I thought I'd write down some thoughts I had.
So firstly I don't think there would be much change with instruments. Most forms wouldn't be able to play any existing instruments well or even at all. Fingers are pretty important for that. That said, different instruments could have been invented for Daemons to play. I have no idea what those would look like or how they would work, but it would be fun to see different interpretations of what those could be.
I also don't think that genres would change too much. Because it's a way we categorize music I can't see it being affected. There might me new genres, but I think country would still be country, rap would be wrap, and etc. I DO think that lyrics would be different, or would at least be expanded upon. There would be a ton of different metaphors and says in a world with Daes that would undoubtedly get worked into songs. Romanticizing certain forms would common place in songs and might even popularize those forms.
On another note, I bet it would be super fun to sing with your Daemon. I already sing in the shower and if I'm home alone, but I very rarely sing in front of other people. I imagine belting out a song with your daemon would be a very special and personal experience.
Building on that, I imagine certain singers and song writers would preform with their Daemon. I don't think everyone would. Factors like genre, style, comfort, song, and of course personal preference would go into how often someone would do this, or even if they would at all. But just imagine. A singer sits dow with a guitar, their Daemon siting on their shoulder and preforming a song about a past love. Once they reach the chorus their Daemon joins them in a duet. Another part of them, their soul, joining in and expanding the song. Goose bumps.
Anyway, that's what I've got this time. I'd love to hear other thoughts and opinions on this!
Daemon Things Not Talked About
- singing duets - Snapchat - sports - songs in general??? - religion - theatre/film monologues w daemons - science on daemons - 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?) - spies - the language barrier not being as big a deal - faking ones’ death (how can you act dead on screen/in real life when your daemon is right there?) - supernatural creatures - what are their ideas of common plot/character tropes? - separation - dancing - Just Dance??????? - video games in general - …torture?.?.?……!!! Jesus christ - big cities!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! - Okay back to monologues because imagine Romeo going “okay gotta kill myself” and his daemon goes “oh my god no just chill for one second here, jesus christ dude” and he’s like “oh ur right homie” and bam they’re fine - also wouldn’t juliet’s daemon still be hanging out? Like “quit telling everyone we’re dead” - BIG daemons. I’m talkin LAAARGGEE - Steven Universe??? Would gems have daemons? Would they be animals or gems? Gem animals? Weird creatures? WHAT IF THEIR DAEMON IS THEIR LITERAL GEM??? AHHHHH - school. - wait??? Would personified animals like Micky Mouse have daemons??? They have souls like people right? Soooo?????? Um?? -okay okay BUT MONOLOGUES “so I dunno what to do should I sacrifice myself to join the popular girls” “nah girl just be yourself” “yeah that’s a good idea thx”
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.
Carrying on with some of the things Whumpster-Fire didn’t address:
— I think LARGE Dæmons and separation would probably go hand in hand, primarily for practicality.
For example, I wrote a character who’s dæ settles as a 40-foot long dragon (alt world where dragons are real) and they’re forced to Separate because he wouldn’t fit in most buildings. I imagine that there would be places built to accommodate larger dæmons (specialized housing, and certain public spaces) but if your dæ settles as something larger than, say, an average horse, you’re generally expected to separate.
It’s also common for people with large dæmons to prefer working from home whenever possible, so they don’t have to be apart all day. Imagine using your large dæmon for transport, or even physical labor. My aforementioned character with the dragon dæmon actually rides on his back! He finds it very entertaining to return the favor of carrying them!
It would be really cool if there were certain cities/settlements built with LARGE dæmons in mind though.
— Science on dæmons
This would undoubtedly be treated like human experimentation is irl: heavily regulated. It would be very interesting to imagine how behavioral sciences might be changed by the presence of dæmons though! Specialized experiments designed to measure how much a person’s dæmon affects their behavior/reactions/decision making etc.
What about medications designed for one’s dæmon? The possibilities are immense!
— singing and the arts in a world with dæmons would be very interesting indeed. Imagine “Monologues” including a call-and-response between the actor and their dæmon.
Songs where the dæmon sings one part and the human sings the other. Happier songs are typically sung in harmony, where songs about sadness and turmoil may be sung with parts sung in counterpoint. Example (TW: discussion of suicide) in this song there’s technically only one singer, but some parts are sung in minor key, while others are sung in major, creating the effect of two voices. I imagine the person singing the negative parts, while the dæmon sings the more positive ones.
Alternatively, a funny, lighthearted song where the person is falling in love while their dæmon is trying to talk them out of it, singing over them.
— as far as emergency services, I don’t think the taboo really applies to unconscious people’s dæmons. The responder is going to be wearing gloves the whole time anyways. It’s obviously preferable for the responder’s dæmon to be the one handling the victim’s dæ, but when that’s not possible, then I don’t think it really violates the taboo. (The Taboo is a thinly veiled metaphor for sex. You wouldn’t say it’s Assault to deal with an injury to someone’s genitals, right?)
I also had the image pop in my head of someone’s moose Dæ having to be tied to the roof of the ambulance… terrible, I know. But hilarious!
Silly His Dark Materials headcanon: daemons’ fur/feathers/skin does actually go through periodic changes. Any part of their body that comes off - fur, claws, antlers, teeth, molted feathers, molted skin for reptile daemons, exoskeletons for some invertebrates - disappears after like a day, but many species with fur do blow their coats in the spring. Fortunately daemons can’t trigger people’s allergies but sometimes there’s just fur everywhere.
Hester’s real winter coat didn’t start coming in until after she’d been in the north for a couple years. She sort of wishes it didn’t because Lee does the “make a second rabbit out of all the fur that comes off when brushing” joke Every. God. Damn. Year. and still thinks he’s absolutely hilarious.
Unsettled daemons don’t do this, and can give themselves seasonal coats at any time of year. If Hester thought she was a jackrabbit for years, there is someone out there, probably numerous people, whose “ermine” daemon settled in winter and they were very surprised to discover that an ermine and a stoat are the exact same animal.