on daemon AUs
Jan. 30th, 2025 09:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thinktoomuchI’ve been meaning to post something on my dreamwidth for a while, and these last couple of days I talked to a couple of oomfs about some daemon headcanons and realized that this was the perfect subject to approach here, especially considering the fact that the very first fic I posted on ao3 was a daemon AU.
This is not meant to be, like, a handbook on daemon AUs or anything, because I’m far from an expert and I don’t consider characterization one of my strongest suits. Rather, it’s just a place for me to ramble about my headcanons and what my process looks like.
For anyone who doesn’t know what exactly daemon AUs are: the concept comes from Phillip Pullman’s book trilogy His Dark Materials, wherein the main character Lyra lives in a world where everyone’s souls live outside of their bodies in the form of animals, called dæmons (or daemons, as is easier lol). When you’re a child, your daemon can switch between animal forms, but typically around puberty they will “settle” into a form that is considered to be a reflection of who you are as a person.
In the books, your daemon is typically the “opposite” sex as you: Lyra, for example, has a male daemon called Pantalaimon. Sadly, afaik the books don’t really address other gender identities aside from cisgender, and how those might reflect on your daemon.
Since your daemon is your soul, you can’t be physically separated without experiencing extreme pain. There are different processes by which you can achieve a greater distance from your daemon, but I think those are far too niche for me to get into in this post. And perhaps most important of all: touching another person's daemon is a huge taboo, and it’s either an act of great violence or great intimacy.
It must be said that it’s been a while since I last read the books. I think a decade, even, but before that I can’t count how many times I reread them, especially the first one, The Golden Compass. I got the book in 2009, when I was eleven years old, and became instantly fascinated.
See, I’ve always been obsessed with animals. As a child, my favorite TV programs were animal documentaries. I’m so obsessed with them, in fact, that I made them my profession: I went to vet school and spent a lot of my time there in internships involving wildlife rehab and field research, with a small side of companion animal medicine. I also volunteered in science outreach and communication programs, which I kept working in after graduating, and will begin a masters program in One Health soon!
So I have to admit that my love of daemons and daemon AUs doesn’t really come from their story or characterization potential, but from the fact that to me, having an animal companion be constantly by your side would be a dream come true. And given that I already spend most of my time reading science papers and learning about animals so that I can teach other people about them, the process of trying to assign them to different characters became an almost natural one.
Because of that, I’ll sometimes have a daemon in mind for a person right away, before any further research takes place. For my Twice AU, Tzuyu was the first person I assigned an animal to, simply because I immediately pictured her with a small falconid on her shoulder (although I ended up giving her a sparrowhawk instead).
A few other times, I have a vague idea of the type of animal I want them to be. I’m definitely biased towards vertebrates, but I love bug daemons and try to always include them. For Jihyo, I knew right away I wanted her to be some kind of ungulate, strong and resilient. She was going to be a bovid, initially, until I settled on Siberian roe deer.
For most characters, the process looks a little like this:
- First of all, I mostly gravitate towards small to mid-sized daemons for headcanon reasons. I imagine that large daemons must’ve been more common in times past, and then became more and more unusual as humans began to move into cities. For example, if a character has a big daemon and lives in a city like Seoul, how does this affect their daily life? What does their daily commute look like? Were they always forced to sit in the front rows of classrooms, or all the way in the back? For Jihyo, the image of her being so young with a daemon that was bigger than her was a crucial part of determining which animal to give her*.
- Next, I like giving characters animals that I think they could realistically be aware of. For me, that means giving preference to species that have a range in SK, if we’re talking about Korean characters. (Full disclosure, I feel like I don’t do this most times, especially in modern AUs, but I try to keep it in mind! At the very least I try not give them relatively unknown animals like silky anteaters or something, yk)
- Prey or predator? And obviously, sometimes an animal can be both. Do they suit a social or solitary animal? And exactly how social or how solitary? I’d say an introvert can have a social animal, or an extrovert can have a solitary animal if it fits their other characteristics, but someone who prefers to be alone would probably never have a honeybee daemon, for example.
- Does this person have a male or female daemon? If it’s someone with a male daemon, who is caring and loves to have people around them, I’ll typically look for an animal where the male helps tend to their young, or isn’t highly territorial (which can be surprisingly hard sometimes! sobs). Of course, like with people, sex in animals isn’t black and white, so I think there is a lot of fun to be had there as well! And like I said before, the concept of same-sex daemons has so much potential to explore gender and/or sexuality.
And sometimes, the process will look completely different:
I’m going to include this as accountability, to see if this time I can go ahead and actually finish it: I’m in the process of writing a (G)I-dle daemon AU, and the first character I assigned a daemon to was Miyeon, and it began with the following thought: what animals have passed the infamous “mirror test”**? Because aside from the obvious princess persona, Miyeon has stated time and time again how she’s a go with the flow type of person, not easily shaken, and I wanted her to have a daemon that represents how confident and sure she is of herself. (Spoiler alert, I gave her an Eurasian magpie. The rest of the girls will be coming to you on ao3, hopefully soon!)
I don’t always feel confident in my choices, and sometimes I’ll end up giving someone a species for the sake of the story, but the fun is definitely in the process!
Now that I’m here I’m unsure of how to finish this, and if I should go back and rewrite the entire thing to be less verbose, and maybe a little less personal as well. But in the end, I don’t think I regret it: loving animals is such an integral part of myself that sometimes it feels weird to be in this fandom space, separate from my real life, and not talk about them. It’s like breathing, in a way. I talk about animals all the time, as a living and because the majority of my social circle also works with them.
In the end, I think that’s the main thing that pulls me towards daemon AUs: they allow me to make any fandom be about animals, even if it’s not. I can't think of anything better :)
*i actually had a mimo sequel/companion piece in the works where in one of the scenes momo (whose daemon hadn't settled yet) observed jihyo in an amusement park and how she was so often excluded from rides because they weren't made for ppl with big daemons. ended up scraping the whole thing bc it was going nowhere though
**regardless of any scientific validity!! i haven’t researched the test and honestly i don’t really care to lol
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Date: 2025-02-01 08:48 pm (UTC)thank u for sharing your thoughts with us they are very good!!!
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Date: 2025-02-04 05:36 pm (UTC)