Ooops, I did it again: HDM wackiness
About a year ago I wrote a Buffy the Vampire Slayer/His Dark Materials fic that is, as I said at the time, really less of a crossover and more a “Buffyverse with dæmons” story. It was good fun, but it’s not something I’ve thought about much since.
Then liviapenn created the sga_fusion challenge, and my thoughts immediately turned to my favorite, tragically underutilized fandom: His Dark Materials. I realized that I not only could write an SGA/HDM fusion story, I absolutely had to.
Unlike the Buffyverse story, which was basically a re-writing of the episode “Beneath You” (plus dæmons!), the SGA story grew and grew and grew...and now I have this odd beast: a piece of fanfiction that is, in my opinion, the most romantic McKay/Sheppard story I’ve written...but that’s based around a concept from another fandom altogether. So with that handicap in mind, I’ve prepared a little HDM/dæmons primer which I hope will enable those who are interested to give this story a try.
His Dark Materials is a series of three books by Philip Pullman, the first of which is The Golden Compass (a.k.a. Northern Lights). If you haven’t read them, you really should. Like, now. However, very little HDM canon is actually used in this fic--just the concept of dæmons, which I’ve outlined below:
1. Dæmons (pronounced exactly like “demons”) are an extension of self--not quite a soul, not quite a conscience, but a bit of both, and more besides.
2. Dæmons take the shape of animals. When you’re young, your dæmon can change shape, but when you reach puberty, your dæmon settles in the form it’ll keep for life.
3. With some very rare exceptions, men always have female dæmons and women always have male dæmons.
4. A human and his dæmon cannot communicate telepathically, but there is a shared non-verbal and emotional bond between them. Strong feelings, especially pain, will be felt by both parties.
5. If a human and his dæmon get too far away from each other, it hurts. Really, really hurts. In the HDM-verse, witches are the exception to this rule.
6. If a human is killed, his dæmon dies, and the same thing applies in reverse: if your dæmon gets shot, you’re toast. When a human dies, the dæmon disappears--there is no body.
7. Humans address other humans and dæmons address other dæmons. Only very rarely, like when the human is badly hurt, will his dæmon speak to another human, or vice versa. Similarly, humans will fight humans in battle, and dæmons other dæmons, but a human would never attack another person’s dæmon. Kolya, for example, would never even think of harming another person’s dæmon--but his dæmon might.
8. Touching another person’s dæmon is strictly taboo.
9. Everyone has a dæmon. Everyone. In one of the HDM books, Pullman compares seeing a person walking around without a dæmon to seeing a person walking around without a head.
Hopefully, that should be all you need to follow this story. And hopefully, at least somebody is still hanging around to read it!
On to the actual story!
Dæmonology
Then liviapenn created the sga_fusion challenge, and my thoughts immediately turned to my favorite, tragically underutilized fandom: His Dark Materials. I realized that I not only could write an SGA/HDM fusion story, I absolutely had to.
Unlike the Buffyverse story, which was basically a re-writing of the episode “Beneath You” (plus dæmons!), the SGA story grew and grew and grew...and now I have this odd beast: a piece of fanfiction that is, in my opinion, the most romantic McKay/Sheppard story I’ve written...but that’s based around a concept from another fandom altogether. So with that handicap in mind, I’ve prepared a little HDM/dæmons primer which I hope will enable those who are interested to give this story a try.
His Dark Materials is a series of three books by Philip Pullman, the first of which is The Golden Compass (a.k.a. Northern Lights). If you haven’t read them, you really should. Like, now. However, very little HDM canon is actually used in this fic--just the concept of dæmons, which I’ve outlined below:
1. Dæmons (pronounced exactly like “demons”) are an extension of self--not quite a soul, not quite a conscience, but a bit of both, and more besides.
2. Dæmons take the shape of animals. When you’re young, your dæmon can change shape, but when you reach puberty, your dæmon settles in the form it’ll keep for life.
3. With some very rare exceptions, men always have female dæmons and women always have male dæmons.
4. A human and his dæmon cannot communicate telepathically, but there is a shared non-verbal and emotional bond between them. Strong feelings, especially pain, will be felt by both parties.
5. If a human and his dæmon get too far away from each other, it hurts. Really, really hurts. In the HDM-verse, witches are the exception to this rule.
6. If a human is killed, his dæmon dies, and the same thing applies in reverse: if your dæmon gets shot, you’re toast. When a human dies, the dæmon disappears--there is no body.
7. Humans address other humans and dæmons address other dæmons. Only very rarely, like when the human is badly hurt, will his dæmon speak to another human, or vice versa. Similarly, humans will fight humans in battle, and dæmons other dæmons, but a human would never attack another person’s dæmon. Kolya, for example, would never even think of harming another person’s dæmon--but his dæmon might.
8. Touching another person’s dæmon is strictly taboo.
9. Everyone has a dæmon. Everyone. In one of the HDM books, Pullman compares seeing a person walking around without a dæmon to seeing a person walking around without a head.
Hopefully, that should be all you need to follow this story. And hopefully, at least somebody is still hanging around to read it!
On to the actual story!
Dæmonology