01. Both Lyra and Viola have poignant moments of remembering and crying over each other. When Lyra visits the Costas on their barge, she imagines how Ma Costa would cook Viola eggs and onion soup for Viola to enjoy. When Lyra goes back to Svalbard to see Iorek, she thinks about how Iorek would rough up Viola’s hair and how both of them would roll around in the snow and ride on Iorek’s back together. Viola has very similar moments when she watches movies or reads books that remind her of Lyra.
02. Sometimes, Lyra even dreams of Viola stroking her scalp and braiding her hair, while Viola frequently imagines that she can hear Lyra laughing at some of her jokes and she almost always falls asleep imagining that Lyra is singing to her.
03. Whenever Viola feels like she’s breaking down (whether due to school or work or her mother’s mental illness or her own dysphoria), Kirjava cuddles up next to her and purrs in order to remind Viola that she is still good and beautiful and a woman.
04. Both Lyra and Viola cobbled their names together from various different sources. Lyra was christened Roland Gabriel Coulter when she was born and later Doctor Carne renamed her Roland Gabriel Polstead when she came to Jordan College. Lyra hated the name “Roland Gabriel Polstead” from very early on and knew herself to be a girl from the age of four or five. So she took the name “Lyra” from when she saw a lyre performance at a harvest festival when she was five, “Isabella” (her middle name) from a spooky story about Queen Isabeau of Brytain (whose daemon was a wolf in this universe) she heard on All Hallows’ Eve at the age of eight, and “Belacqua” from her admiration for Lord Asriel. Meanwhile, Viola knew she was a girl from the age of six. She took the name “Viola” from the main character of Shakespeare’s play “Twelfth Night”. Meanwhile, her middle name, “Elaine”, came about because Viola observed that many boys had their fathers’ names for middle names and decided to take her mother’s name as her own middle name.
05. Lyra’s wife Eleanor Baudelaire and Viola’s wife Madeleine Whitman are also trans. Lyra married Eleanor because Nell reminded her a lot of Viola and Viola took Madeleine as her wife because Maddie shares Lyra’s mischievous grin.
06. Neither Lyra nor Viola have any biological children, but they adopt children instead (Lyra has two daughters named Sophia and Miranda while Viola has five children named Samuel, Roger, Laura, Michael, and Sarah). Both Lyra and Viola raise their children to be good and kind and patient and just, and both of them are also fiercely protective of their kids, especially against bullies.
07. Viola always felt a bit more ‘Male’ when she held the Subtle Knife, so her choice to break it represents her accepting her womanhood and a kind of triumph over her dysphoria.
08. Pantalaimon is still male because Lyra is pansexual (i.e. attracted to men, non-binary people, genderfluid people, agender people, etc) and Kirjava is still female because Viola is 100% a lesbian.
09. Viola’s favourite part of Lyra is her voice (particularly when she’s singing or laughing) and Lyra’s favourite aspect of Viola is stroking her scalp and braiding her hair.
10. Before he dissolves into atoms, John Parry goes back to his home and hugs both Elaine and Viola. His last words are “Viola, the best thing I ever did in my life…was having you for a daughter”.
11. Viola shows Lyra a large collection of her favourite movies when they’re first getting to know each other (including “Casablanca”, “West Side Story”, “Dirty Dancing”, “Titanic”, and “Lilo and Stitch”).
12. When Lyra is first telling Viola what a daemon is, the usually quiet and reserved and sad Viola makes a joke about fursonas.
13. A major cause of Viola’s dysphoria is that she doesn’t look like what Society says a trans woman is “supposed to look like” (i.e. she’s poor, she’s black, she’s butch instead of super-feminine, she doesn’t pass for a Cis girl very well as a child...). She also deliberately suppressed her gender identity for years in order to avoid making things harder for her mother.
14. Lyra undergoes gender transition with the help of the Witches and Viola transitions with the help of her world’s medical science. They complete their transition in late 2010 and when they feel each other’s presence in the Botanic Gardens, both Lyra and Viola gasp in shock at the sight of each other fully transitioned.
15. Whenever Viola’s dysphoria gets too intense for her to handle, Lyra sings to her and strokes her hair as a way of comforting her. Lyra’s covers of pop and rock songs aren’t the most amazing things ever, but Viola always smiles because it's the first time another girl her own age has given her positive attention and affection.
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