the equivalent exchange of your favorite childhood book series (his dark materials and percy jackson) getting the adaptations they finally deserve but the price is that one character must be played by lin-manuel miranda
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My little book club is reading His Dark Materials and daemons came up while my betrothed and I were cuddling in bed.
They said to me, “Do you think anyone’s daemon is a mosquito?”
“What? No way, that’s way too small!”
“No,” they countered, “We see beetles and butterflies, Pan turned into a little lightning bug, and a moth.”
I digested this information in silence, and then my betrothed started shaking with laughter and pitched in two different voices. “‘Where’s your daemon?’ ‘Oh, it’s a tick.’”
I let out such a guttural sound of amusement and horror that I scared the cats. I couldn’t stop laughing and repeating, “It’S a TiCk!!!”
I escalated in hilarity to choking out, “The only blood it can eat is it’s own persons! They JusT gO aRouNd with a TiCk on their face!”
“I don’t think daemons need to eat, do they?” They asked.
“IT’S A tIcK!!” I responded, tears rolling down my face, hyperventilating at the best and worst concept I’d ever imagined.
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"... What I thought was that if you-- maybe just once a year-- if we could come here at the same time, just for an hour or something, then we could pretend we were close again-- because we would be close, if you sat here and I sat just here in my world..."
"Yes," he said, "as long as I live, I'll come back. Wherever I am in the world, I'll come back here--"
"On Midsummer Day," she said. "At midday. As long as I live. As long as I live..."
(from Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass)
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His Dark Materials is a franchise that tackles so many branches of physics and even creates a universe where the main course of study is experimental theology which is all about identifying and explaining dark matter while also adding dimensions to string theory, the multiverse theory, and the very concept of the human soul. At the same time, it aggressively calls out the problem with the state being controlled by the church, how people are condemned for being different and religious fearmongering stops the chance at growth both on an individual and a societal scale. It’s a franchise where the heroes of the story are two children who aren’t allowed to know the prophecy they’re a part of, who save the world unwittingly simply by doing what they believe to be right. Meanwhile, the person who thought he was the hero all along, the person who rallied an army from multiple universes to FIGHT. GOD. HIMSELF. is ultimately consumed by his own ego and forced to take a back seat when he realises he’s just one tiny piece of a much larger story that’s true heart is his own daugher. The child he abandoned, the child he didn’t know or care to know how to look after. It’s a franchise about finding love even when your biological family abandon you, it’s about looking evil in the eye and seeing your own mother, it’s about good and evil not being black and white but instead a complex and cruel mixture of both. It’s about the two worst people you know banding together at the last second to save their daughter with their final breaths. It’s about exploration and learning how to grow through experience, it’s about kindness being shared across the multiverse, exchanging stories with strangers and saving the whole world by doing something perfectly ordinary and receiving no reward.
Oh, and it’s also a franchise rich with fantasy, with giant talking polar bears, witches and ghosts, angels and daemons, and a mammal-like species from another world that travels exclusively on roller skates.
And it fucking. rocks.
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his dark materials really said heaven is not real and you will return to dust upon your death so you need to make your own heaven on earth by being a good person instead of wasting your time practicing a hateful religion headed by a corrupt church
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Just revamped this Golden Compass illustration I did about two years ago, and wanted to post since I’m kind of in a winter mood! hand drawn typography by yours truly :P
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His Dark Materials where everything is the same except Mrs Coulter’s daemon is the stylish but illegal monkey
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I'm thinking about His Dark Materials again. Specifically the societal quirks that Lyra's world has as a result of everyone having their soul manifested outside their body in the form of dæmons. It's one of the most fascinating examples of worldbuilding I've come across tbh
Some of my most favourite tidbits:
Dæmons are named by the dæmons of the child's parents
It's taboo to touch another person's dæmon, but this is learnt, not instinctual
Children often settle arguments through their dæmons, with one accepting the dominance of the other (eg. Pan hissing at Annie's fox daemon in the first book to get her to back down)
The fact that people can tell when someone lacks a daemon even though they can be hidden out of sight (like a mouse in your pocket)
To the inhabitants of Lyra's world, looking at someone without a dæmon is like looking at someone without a head
These extra pieces of lore just make the world seem so magical but believable at the same time
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his dark materials daemons cause i'm nostalgic
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never not thinking about iorek byrnison eating lee scoresby's dead body, so as not to let it rot but instead allow it to sustain an old friend on his journey. and how this act fulfilled lee's dying wish to help lyra by giving iorek the strength to go on and find her. thinking about consumption as a form of love, loving someone in their entirety and wanting to eat them whole but also love and grief being something you carry inside of you that guides you forward
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There she was, as powerful in her way as Lord Asriel was in his.
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