#daetalk

[acaciapines]

what's up with kirjava? (unless i am an idiot and did not catch when you mentioned them)

nothing is really up with her...from what i remember i just. felt bad for her lol. shes will's daemon! will GETS a daemon!! and kirjava has like. maybe two, three appearances. i get why we cant dive so deep into her--as much as i'd love a book about will and kirjava in out world dealing w having/being a daemon in a world that doesn't understand that, hdm doesnt have time to go there--but i just wished that she got a little bit more, that her importance to will was like, shown better. thats the other half of his soul! let them TALK!!!

[milkyybuns]

Things I look for in a man:

Forearm bigger than my calf

[tenpiecechickenmcscumbag]

damn im graduating from college today

[acaciapines]

so....abt that adventure time daemon au....sits down with folded hands. im SO SO curious as to what your thoughts are and lowkey wondering if theyre anything like what ive been cooking up in my twisted mind...slash joke...YOU GO FIRST I WANNA KNOW!!

jkdfgdjfkg yeah im gonna focus on the fionna + cake aspects since thats what i posted but if you wanna know about someone else send a followup!! i have the strongest ideas for marceline and more scattered thoughts on everyone else but!! i turn this around in my head a lot lol.

under the cut bc i am incapable of being short

so. the reason fionna world is Like It Is despite nominally being a human au is bc i decided that in ooo, humans are the only people with daemons! everyone else has Something Else, but that something else isnt actually a daemon (this bit is still fuzzy lol since it would just be more bg in anything i write).

so that means the only characters in adventure time who have/had a daemon are finn (tossing around the name honey for her?? shes unsettled but mostly dogs bc they grew up with dogs lol), marceline (she lost her daemon upon becoming a vampire, gets her back at the end of stakes. do not ask me what she is settled as idk as of now lol), and simon (lost her upon becoming ice king, he does Not get her back. i think its fun if she is a penguin bc that makes ice king surrounding himself w penguins super tragic. he knows something is gone but cannot articulate what.)

also i guess people like susan strong and the humans on the human island but shhhh i dont have super strong ideas for them lol.

ALL THAT TO SAY. since fionnaworld was created by prismo (gonna be real idk what his deal is but he is obviously His Own Thing and as a deity type deal he probably is granted w 'can see dust' powers and thus has no idea what daemons are all about) and lives in ice kings/later simons head (one who doesnt know about daemons and one who is mourning the permanent loss of his own) when fionna and cake were "created" finn jake and finn's daemon were mashed into two characters, who are! human and daemon.

everyone else either never had a daemon in normal ooo (ex. pb) or didnt have them at the time fionnaworld was created and thus they werent carried over (ex. marceline.) of everyone tho probably marshall WOULD know the most, this is why he has a line in my fic where he's like, do you know what i'd do for a weird cat? as a sort of hint that he SHOULD have a daemon, but. alas.

uhhh. where am i going with this.

OH RIGHT so yeah basically when fionnaworld became de-magicked it took with it a lot of people's points of connection--everyone ends up way more isolated than they were. since simon is mourning his own daemon that translates to daemons just Not Existing, and so fionna and cake are very much isolated from each other. they dont have the words for their relationship. all fionna knows is she needs cake with her, and vice versa.

cake IS still a daemon, but without that framework shes stuck in the 'normal cat' role even though she does a lot of noncatlike things, n her and fionna are very very good still at sorta knowing what the other is thinking and reacting accordingly. the people closest to fionna (so, really just marshall and gary lol) have SOME idea of what is up but if asked its more leftover instinct than like, the ability to actually explain any of this. fionna and cake try to interact w the world as a human-daemon pair but that doesnt work when the world has no fucking idea what that is.

uh. that. probably answers some question!! i think the plot of fionna and cake itself is MOSTLY the same...really fionna and cake just find out there is a word for who they are to each other n get that relationship reestablished which isnt a far cry from canon. i really like the stuff they do with betty/simon so i wouldnt want to change that, though i imagine there is a bit of simon mourning his lost daemon too--idk i feel like you could tie those feelings in if you were to write a full adaptation but i!! dont think enough changes to do that so i wont be lol.

i mostly just wanted to do episode one bc again. daemon in a world that doesnt know wtf a daemon is. truly the funniest and most tragic thing in the world.

[acaciapines]

taking the initative - how does having a daemon work for Hunter? given, you know, everything about grimwalkers. I'm also super interested in how you worked out the Azura series!

he he :333 i'll put this under a cut since hunters Deal is a pretty big thing we unpack over the course of the daemon au so. technically spoilers!! if you wanna wait a year til it comes out or somehow came across this while i was posting the fic.

anyways! so hunter is a freak of nature (affectionate) even by grimwalker standards njgdfg. but before we get into that i gotta do some ~term definition~ cause both daemons and palismen exist in this world and its important you know what i mean when i use em!

daemon: we know them. we love them. what you think of when i say 'daemon au.' creatures made entirely of dust that are the other half of a human, who can change shape up until they settle (around 12 years of age), and have a set range based on their form of how far they can go from said human, with most being between like 10-20 feet. daemons are born when their human is like, 6 months to a year old, slowly forming until they've got enough dust to take their first form.

palismen: the other half of a witch. palismen are born with their witches at palistrom trees--pregnant witches seek out a palistrom tree thats calling to baby and give birth there, and when the witch-baby is born a part of the palistrom tree will break off (usually leaves, twigs, branches, in the past berries + flowers) and become their palisman. palismen can change form up until a witch settles (typically upon joining a coven at 18), and until they settle have no set range--witch and palisman can go as far from each other as they want.

anyways with THAT out of the way, for all intents and purposes golden guards, seeing as they're all grimwalkers of a human, work on the human-side of things. but hunter and fidelity/flapjack (will be using flapjack for clarity's sake going forwards) use witch and palisman respectively since that's the world they grew up in lol.

all living creatures have some sort of connection to dust. for humans this is daemons, for witch palismen, demons have a variety of ways (some have flowers, some are connected to specific places, ex. hooty to the owl house, etc). so, every single living thing is in some way connected to the world around it. this includes hunter!

so, for most of the grimwalkers, they were made of caleb's bones. so, they were pulled out of the ground, and when they were their daemons formed--since grimwalkers Grow underground for a while their dust has the time to build up into their daemon. but see. belos might have made a little mistake in how often he murdered grimwalkers cause come hunter's time and he might. just a little bit. be out of caleb bones. whoopsie! but, you know, he does have some of caleb's daemon's dust, left. that's the same as bone, right?

and thus we get hunter and flapjack. flapjack is the grimwalker--her ortet was the dust of fidelity, caleb's daemon, and so she's dragged out of the ground as a wolfhound, the same form fidelity settled as. flapjack is entirely flesh and blood and has no ability to change. she is, technically, the witch.

but hunter.

needless to say belos was not expecting a weird little witch-baby, that's for certain!

now of course flapjack and hunter do Not know any of this at the start lol, and there's a bit more to it than this (hunter doesnt know he can change form! hmm, i wonder why....), but i need to keep some of my secrets.

as for azura! its not entirely worked out yet (i did just come up with the idea like, a few days ago so ive got some stuff to add in the edits), but the general idea of it is that when luz's dad was dying he very much left her the azura books on purpose. luz and mari have always very obviously stood out from their peers (its the neruodivergency) and as they approached 12 and still weren't settled, and as mari more often than not spoke for luz which is a HUGE no-no (daemons, after all, arent supposed to speak....)

yeah so camila + manny were terrified for her lol. thus azura! in my mind the azura books are very interested in taking the term witch--in my human world sort of the common word for what is medicalized as 'bond disorders,' ie, someone who doesnt settle by 12-13, someone who doesnt WANT to settle, a daemon who speaks when they should have grown out of this--and saying, hey, guys, uh, what the fuck?

so, azura is a witch! i imagine like witches of legend azura (in my eyes being the daemon's name, not that i know what the human would be named lol) wouldn't have a range, and would be various bird-forms. it explores ideas of teenagers not settling, and struggling to figure out who you are when 'who you are' is a thing you do not get to change, and people who do settle do so as daemon-forms that are ALSO medicalized (think, fish. which is the daemon luz's dad had! not sure what fish yet, but he had a fish :D)

basically: I Have A Lot Of Thoughts. Ha. Ha. hope you enjoyed them!

[acaciapines]

I am completely willing to hear a rant on why the ending of amber spyglass fucked over Lyra and pan. I always thought it was off, but I don’t know why to be honest

dfklghgh so the honest answer is. its been years since ive read hdm. im sure if i reread them now i might have Thoughts and Feelings but i cant give a rant about things i read years ago and only half-remember.

but!! in my long daemonfic trends post i talk about my issues with lyra and pan in hdm!!! and that was made after i'd recently read the books, so the information is actually up to date and i still stand by what i said there! i also have the tag 'daetalk' which might have more posts about them in there, but i truly do not remember.

the long and short of it from what i remember is simply that hdm and i have very different thoughts on daemons and how important they are to both society and their respective other half. hdm is more interested in the relationship between lyra and will than lyra and pan and due to that pan ends up sidelined by the end of it. (also kirjava. oh my god kirjava). hdm might be where daemons are from but i have taken them and ran and i will fistfight pullman in a parking lot over this.

[acaciapines]

i'm curious as to what made you choose non-speaking plants as the daemons in your wc au, since a lot of your daemon fic seems to deal more with daemons as sentient beings. is it something you're planning to explore more or just a case by case thing?

of course!

the shortest answer to this is "because it's warrior cats." i also call this a "daemon" au for that exact reason--it was INSPIRED by daemon aus, but yeah, as i write daemon aus its very much a distinct sort of thing.

ive really struggled to make a daemon au work with warriors because at face value (at least to me) it just flat out doesn't--giving cats a second, talking body like...doesnt track? daemon aus give human characters animals. this works. but if your main characters are cats, do the cats...also get animals? if the cats have daemons that means humans have to, as well, and other sort of animal life--which just becomes needlessly complicated and also not warrior cats anymore.

so, i gave the cats plants, because then you can stick with the symbolism aspect of things, but don't have to deal with the logistics of actually having Two Animals Now. plus, in-universe the daemons are given to clan cats by starclan--it is not a normal cat experience and thus it makes much more sense to limit it to just the clans. in my head the plants are also sentient to some extent--they move around the cats' bodies and react to things and do think, its just. they're plants so it's not really in any way a human (or cat in this case) can see 1:1. plus it was actually inspired by some stuff from my owl house daemon au dnkgdfg.

also, technically none of my daemon lore carries over across my various fics. like, mostly it will, or at least bits of it will, but if you look at daemons in like, the nimona daemon au vs the wolf 359 daemon au, i'm clearly exploring different themes with them lol. with the warrior cats au it falls more into the themes im really drawn to with warrior cats, which is starclan as a destructive force and then for this one specifically i really wanted to write about leafpool, bc i adore her but haven't ever written something w her as the main character.

i doubt i'll explore this more in future works, though, unless i happen to write another warrior cat daemon au! you're right in that for most of my daemon aus i treat daemons just as much as people as i do their human counterparts, and that's what i truly have the most fun doing. warrior cats is an outlier and also only a daemon au by the barest definition of the word.

[acaciapines]

plant meanings!!!! ramble about em!!!!!! I wanna hear it!!!!

he he :3

plants! technically spoilers for the fic i just posted the vine that ate the south, so like, yknow. under the cut!

alright so! i spent. do not even want to know how long to come up with all of these. from the start i knew leafpool was gonna be kudzu and since (as probably is obvious from the title) the idea of kudzu growing over and smothering everything is strongly associated with the american south, the clans are vaguely set there! somewhere in the georgia-alabama area idk. so all my plants. should grow there lol.

and now to copy paste my notes! anything added i'll put in (parenthesis) at the end.

Leafpool: Kudzu (Pueraria montana), smothering imagery—she is smothered and left to die by starclan.

Squirrelflight: The wild strawberry (Fragaria virginiana). There is something to this idea of always being this provider, and how that is taken from her, ex. how this is one of the parents of the cultivated strawberry. Also straw is similar to star <3. (i'll add--literally i just liked the vibes of this also, i tried finding something else but just kept coming back squilf being a strawberry <3)

Mothwing: While she doesn’t actually have a daemon, to hide that she weaves long-spurred violets (Viola rostrata) into her fur, because violets are lesbian flowers and also because they tend to grow near eastern hemlock trees…so, connecting her to Leafpool! (ie. to the forest, aka where leaf is from) Before her brother’s death, however, she wore aconite (Aconitum lycoctonum,)the specific species of which is non-native but grown in gardens in the Americas, and less toxic than some other varieties, so she gets the benefits of not being doubted (who would wear actual toxin in their fur) without like. dying lol.

Hollyleaf: Wood Lily (Lilium philadelphicum) as they’re poisonous to cats and thus get that association, but also in looks you could see them as a star—but not an aster species. She’s the odd one out. 

Jayfeather: Georgia aster (Symphyotrichum georgianum). It’s a rather rare species that used to be far more common as it depends on wildfire-made environments and thus occupies a far smaller range than it once did, like how Jay is sort of hemmed in and stuck by the clan system lol.

Lionblaze: Calico aster (Symphyotrichum lateriflorum). It’s a pretty common aster species with a wide range and it grows in tandem with other aster species—I write Lion as a pretty family-oriented guy so it fits.

and though she was cut from the fic dovewing would have both kudzu (to connect her w/ leaf, and very much show how starclan is now forcing dove to the prophecy and basically stuff i wrote in flightless dove) and Aster quitensis, which is a rare and maybe extinct aster species that is only found in ecuador. my notes here just say "she is not getting out of this alive" so take that as you will.

and for the minor characters who i gave plants...

Cinderpelt: Woodland Sunflower (Helianthus divaricatus) just. Because I feel like it fits her okay. cheerful despite her circumstances, happy to be here, taking it one day at a time.

Brambleclaw: Carolina Rose (Rosa carolina) because. C’mon. The thorns. The association with love. He’s toxic as get out. The story isn’t about that but it COULD BE. (brambleclaw was going to play a larger role but the fic turned way deeper into leaf being the mother of hollyjaylion than i thought it would be so he mostly got cut.)

Firestar: Southern Live Oak (Quercus virginiana), because it's a large tree that works with Thunderclan being The Forest, and also they're like, almost evergreen--they keep their leaves year-round mostly and Thunderclan would like that!

annnnnd that's my plants! wahoo!

[acaciapines]

So...what's a daemon EXACTLY? I think I pretty much get it, but I'm still a bit unclear. -Wild Rescuers Anon

well i dunno if i'll be able to clear it up 100% 'cause i dont know that i have a set definition im fully happy with! but if i had to figure one out, it'd be something like...

a daemon is the other half of a human; together they make a person. a daemon tends to be animal-shaped, with the ability to change shape up until some point that defines the person's life, upon which they "settle" into one final form and can no longer change anymore. this final form reflects some fact about the person.

if you compare it to people in our world, most people have various parts of their life they might be conflicted about--think, oh, should i move here and get a better job, or stay where i have a community? in a daemon au this divide is expressed between the human-half and the daemon-half--you get to argue with yourself in a very literal, tangible way.

hopefully that helps some? i tend to muddy the waters and change things around based on the story im telling, haha--truly the best way to figure out how i define a daemon is just. however im writing them in a particular story. that does it better than my own words.

[acaciapines]

Since the fic says we can now ask about Sayaka, what were your criteria for picking her settled form?

...okay so im not going to go into the exact EXACT reasons why i picked horse, bc i think that might still spoil some stuff down the line lol. but i CAN give you a lot of interesting facts about horses that made them fit for sayaka super well.

horses are a prey animal, in contrast to canines and felines commonly found in daemon aus. they're large and make getting around places built for humans rather difficult, in contrast to canines and felines. they are rather hard to hide away, due to their size.

violin bows are strung with horsehair, often taken from dead horses.

horses are a domesticated animal and have been associated with serving/helping humanity throughout history--both in cases like transportation and war, but also for amusement ex. horse racing. thoroughbreds specifically were developed for horse racing. this leads to these horses having lots of health problems.

horses have been used in making glues for centuries. while today they aren't used as much, one place they're still heavily used in is the making of violins.

the whole meme of horses being one bad day away from dying was just too funny to pass up.

[acaciapines]

I just had a thought: do you think that in a world where daemons are out & about as an everyday fact of life, societies would veer more towards largely pedestrian, just because a lot of settled daemons might not be able to fit into vehicles?

okay so i've been thinking about this nonstop since you sent it lol and i am. going to go on a very long answer. so um apologizes in advance??? i'm sure i'll answer the question somewhere. the short answer is do whatever you want forever, and likely in a real-world scenario it would be a sort of case-by-case basis on the local cultural values and historical patterns of settling.

my gut answer is "no," actually, for a few different reasons. i have a few different ways of writing worlds with daemons based on what i want to say with the story, but most of them are sort of based on interrogating the text of his dark materials because it presents a very interesting and incredibly unsatisfying picture of daemons, at least to me. and so because of that, i think a core concept is like, okay, what DO people settle as??

because, like, that's what this question is based on--this idea of, what do people settle as? i think probably early human societies would veer pedestrian, but i also think early human societies wouldnt actually settle young, or maybe even at all. bc of how hard survival is back then, the ability to change form is like, a premium. its sort of a privilege for a daemon to settle as a sparrow, and not, like, need to be a wolf sometimes to defend the town's sheep, or a horse to haul up the materials for building. i think actual animals would still be used for these tasks, but like, if you can turn into a horse, sometimes its easier to just do it yourself, rather than having to build trust with an animal, you know?

but blah blah blah, things keep developing. people want to go further, and keep pushing further. so, we are still going to get ships, because sea travel is still really hard even if half of you can turn into an orca whale. and i think as societies develop so too do like, humans put meanings onto the animals around them, and now settling SAYS something about a person, and i feel like you can come up with all sort of stigmas. like, if you settle as a working animal (think horses, oxen, etc) you're seen as inherently lower class than someone who settles as a lion. and now its a bit easier to keep the predators away, so people dont need to hold out on settling for so long, and now theres MEANING behind settling. and this means you can do it wrong.

so, like, what i'm getting as here is i think most people would end up settling pretty small anyways. like, big dog-sized being the larger end of things. if you look at hdm there's already a mammal bias, if you look at daemonfic as a whole there's a canine and feline bias, and i think this would hold true in a real world situations, too. settled form is (as i write it) influenced very much by what a kid is exposed to growing up--as time goes on the idea is you settle younger, and younger, and you settle as the RIGHT sort of animal, the sorts that are good and noble and say something good. you dont settle as, like, a sea cucumber. and an elephant, well--thats so BIG! you really like to take up space, dont you? how...interesting.

and so as things industrialize i think trains, cars, planes all still come to be. i think the expectation is you settle smaller to make up for it. lowkey i think something like the americans with disabilities act is passed for people with larger daemons, but i think the same sort of stuff happens--like, yeah, this school is accessible for people with bison-daemons! you have to call ahead so somebody can set up the fright elevator for you, and you can't go out in the main halls, and like, maybe it follows the law technically, but. like. its not great.

um. basically i think a world with daemons (if we base it off of HDM, which i do more often than not these days) has a lot of biases and discrimination regarding settled form that would lead to places not really being any better than they are today. because the assumption is you settle small. and if you dont settle small, well thats a you problem, isnt it? its not for the "normal" people to fix.

BUT ALL THAT SAID i think a society that is more pedestrian is also perfectly plausible. i think its just down to what sort of story you want to tell. and right now the most recent daemon au i wrote is my owl house daemon au, wherein the way i built out the human world was entirely based on my issues with hdm, and the entire central conflict on the story is around the idea of settling, so...this.

uh, i hope that answers things! feel free to send in followups lol i have Many Thoughts About Daemons.

[acaciapines]

….I can’t believe it took you less than a day. Anyways, I know so little about this show, but do the citizens of Ooo have daemons, or some other form of dust? Given that they aren’t human and all. (reply by @snarky-wallflower)

a post so i have more space to write. and uh. yeah it is truly so funny. it isnt actually as quick as it seems (ive been turning it over since i finished adventure time like, a week ago?) but still. im a joke and a parody etc etc etc.

anyways! i actually think most people of ooo dont have daemons at all! so lets explain why.

when i write daemon aus, i tend to write dust as a sort of, particle that kind of Exists in the world. it is created by people but it was also there before people and wouldve helped spark the creation of people, in a like, 'oh having a way to interact w this particle is really useful to do x y z, lets evolve to use it!' obvi im not a scientist and the details vary but this is how i sort of tend to see it as a baseline!

so, from there, all species that are. sapient? pretty sure sapient is the word, they all interact and connect to dust in some way. this can be via visual cues (actually perceiving it and its patterns) but mostly its through some other way, like how humans have daemons.

so, in ooo, humans do still have daemons! its just. theyre the only ones.

as for everyone else, they are all, somehow, connected to dust! they all have to be, its just a lot of them dont have daemons because nuclear war, magic bullshit, etc etc. im not 100% on all the lore behind the show but i imagine that The World Fucking Up drastically changed the way sapient species interact with dust. i like the idea that all magic-users are able to use magic bc magic is just interacting directly with dust and getting it to do what you want, so their connection to dust is just, magic. and to get there you lose whatever previous connection you might've had.

most people probably have something else. i think you could get real creative with it. i dont have answers for most people <3 i think you could give species daemon LIKE things, but i'd make em sightly different. not sure. how yet. plants? can't change shape? various things to do with range? specific places? some sort of hivemind? theres a lot of ways you can take it and none of my ideas would focus on that bc thats too close to making a whole au and im like. nah. im focusing on some MINI!! ARCS!! with a limited cast of characters!

as for people i DO have answers for....

marceline had a daemon, being a vampire fucked with that for a while. post-stakes she gets her daemon back.

finn has a daemon and theyre doing totally fine lol.

fern probably had a "daemon" but it was less daemon more another plant construct that was more just him than two people split across two bodies. he finds this out and Doesnt Take It Well.

simon has a daemon. ice king doesnt. simon doesnt get his daemon back upon being de-ice kinged. this is very bad for his mental health.

ditto for betty when she becomes magic betty. golbetty is doing great. they're together in there. no idk what that looks like.

jake has Something. not a daemon. no idea what. but he for sure has a tangible thing. prooooobly same for lady but she also might get magic-user rules and can see dust but this is just chill for her vs most magic users who get there by losing something along the way.

bmo is a computer. i dont think he has a tangible daemon but i think he's got something.

bubblegum has the whole mother gum thing so i imagine thats sort of like, a static place she visits sometimes. or maybe something with neddy??? whatever it is she doesnt have anything that like, follows her around or is on her person.

the candy people since theyre made by pb basically just have a whole mess of things she thought were interesting to experiment with. so there are candy daemons.

i think flame princess has something closer to a daemon than not but they arent a daemon. i'd need to do more research into. fire.

fionna's daemon is cake <3 before the events of the miniseries they Do Not Know This so it manifests as fionna bringing her cat literally everywhere, cake being way too smart for a cat, and neither of them thinking this is weird in any other way. (everyone around them is very freaked out <3)

nobody else in the fionna and cake universe have daemons or anything like it.

fionna: wait are you telling me you dont share dreams with your cat?? don't telepathically communicate with your cat? everyone around her: what the fuck are you talking about--

and thats what ive got whoo! for basic ideas. more detailed plots are for the stakes mini-arc + fionna and cake since i think theres an interesting story there, but thats not for this post.

[acaciapines]

returning to my roots (gravity falls transcendence au blog) to talk about my tau daemon au <3 this will almost certainly never be written at this point but damn it I had good ideas okay!! (long so under read more)

the whole thing was that demonhood severed dipper and his daemon peri, and while for Mabel’s lifetime they generally stuck together, as time passes and they lose more people they split, and Toby’s death is the big sticking point that tears them apart for good. Maddie is essentially raised by divorced parents and when she’s gone they stop having anything to do w each other.

there was this whole idea of how at the start dipper and peri appeared to summons together and were thought up as separate demons (which hurt bc they were trying to be a normal human-daemon pair) but as time goes on they’re just both seem as alcor who tends to take different forms and pronouns for unknowable reasons (which hurts bc they don’t see each other as the same person anymore).

they’d heal bc of two of my favorite tau characters (elizabeth from so you want to be a demonologist and torako from bentley farkas and friends) which tickled me since those two have nothing to do whatsoever with alcor before they meet—they’re not mizar or even reincarnations of anyone alcor’s met before. if I remember right I think Elizabeth gets them talking again (dippers college friends summon alcor and get peri, peri, who hates him and has been having a grand time terrorizing people with the flock, decides to hang around Elizabeth to annoy dipper. elizabeth is not having fun w this). and then tora gets them to actually see themselves as the one person—bc they both love her and want to start a life w her and she loves THEM, and since they’re hanging out around each other more and feeling similar things they start to relate, and tora’s just the right amount of pushy and annoying to get them to confront this, and can you tell the alcor-torako-bentley relationship was my favorite?

i have a whole collection of little drabbles i wrote out for this idea, all like, 100-400 words, but nothing solid for a fic lol (i think I tried starting it but never got far.)

so. idk. tau fandom if you’re out there i had ideas for every major tau arc (up to when I dropped out which was…idk WHEN but the so you want to be a demonologist characters were the last big arc I remember) and would Love to talk about them.

[acaciapines]

it feels like in your fics, daemon settling is presented as a bad thing! can I ask where that is coming from, and what settling means there if it's not about adolescence?

dklfngnkdfgdf i was wondering when someone would ask me this.

the answer is that it depends on the story im trying to tell, and it just so happens that the one im currently writing (toh daemon au) and to a lesser extent the one im posting (pmmm daemon au) have themes in their original shows that just so happen to best support this reading of daemons! like, if you read some of my other stuff, ex the wolf 359 daemon au, its nothing like this lol, my daemon lore does not carry across unrelated fics.

the best way i can describe it is through the unposted owl house daemon au so apologies in advance. also spoiler warning for the fic series. it doesnt exist yet but a lot of this stuff is things we learn throughout the series.

essentially, though, when i am writing a daemon au, there is always some particular aspect of the original media that i think i could explore in depth by adding daemons! in wolf 359 it was this idea of personhood, and so that is what i focused on when adapting my daemon lore in those fics. in toh, its this idea of growing up and being forced to choose things.

if you look at luz, in toh, her story is very much about this idea of like. in a lot of isekai stories the protagonist goes home at the end, yknow? this is what is supposed to happen, they learn something in this new world, and then go home changed, but they GO HOME. but the whole thing with luz is that like--the human world wasnt ever her home, not really. the only person she had there was her mom. but in the boiling isles, now, THAT is a home for her!

but...shes supposed to go back to the human realm. shes not supposed to stay. and so a lot of her arc, to me (and what i choose to focus on in my au) is this idea of what you are 'supposed' to do (ie what society says is acceptable) and what actually makes you happy, and is the life you want to live. in the show, this accumulates in luz's palisman (daemon equivalent, basically) not just being one animal, but being a snake that can shift into a whole lot of other animals--it is this way of showing that like. luz never had to choose. to force her to choose is something about society that is sorta fucked up. its this idea that we act like kids are able to figure out their entire future, that you make a choice and that determines your life forever. but like...no? you can change! thats AMAZING, that people are able to change!

and so to tell that story daemon settling has to be about something you are forced into too young. that to act like a 14 year old can figure out their entire future and never have the possibility to change later down the line and make another choice and figure out something new is...bad, actually? life doesnt end when youre young!

or something like that lol i always always believe i will say what im trying to say better in the actual text of the story itself vs trying to write it all out like that.

and to be fair a lot of this also comes from the fact that all of my daemon aus are in conversation with typical daemon aus that pop up in fandoms, and also to an extent daemons as they are seen in his dark materials, because i have A Lot Of Feelings about it, and a lot of daemon aus are just...not about daemons. and i like telling stories ABOUT daemons, not just stories where the characters happen to have an animal companion sometimes. and this is especially true of the owl house daemon au bc the entire way im building up the human world and how it works is um. um its just stuff i think sucks in most daemon aus/hdm and why i think that.

anyways. tl;dr: daemons are about whatever the core of the story i want to tell is and it just so happens in the stuff im writing right now daemon settling being a negative fits that core.

you (general) can always send me more specific followups about this too! i am literally always down to talk about daemons and daemon aus bc This Is My Thing i have decided and i love love love talking about it.

[acaciapines]

i know you have your own conlang pronouns but have you considered using "thou" in daemon aus? cause thinking about it, people would probably still use "you" most of the time cause youre talking to a pair, but with "thou" to specify. like "where are you going?" vs "what are thou eating?". fun way for human-daemons to refer to daemonless people too

ooooh ive never considered this but i do really like it! much as i love conlang i think theres something really powerful in using like...the same words we use in english today but twisting their definitions so you gotta really sit n think w/ them for a sec (ex. in pseudalopex i have 'you' specifically meaning the half on their own, while the conlang 'eue' is for human-daemon pair). it adds another layer that is very fun to think on and this touches on that!!

dkdfgdfg YEAH fun fact the daemon pronouns originally were for my wolf 359 daemon au....they got cut for readability (this thing is 280k+ words long. its for a relatively small fandom. i already knew i wasnt getting much of an audience and figured not to make it any worse) and i think the fic honestly works fine w/out them because then later on when i used them in other fics those were more like....directly about that language but i do think sometimes. i think keeping them wouldve added A Lot.

like i was also gonna have pairs be called by last name and then first names are when you're talking to a specific half, but that was also cut bc most of the wolf 359 characters you know more by last name anyways, so. its an idea! i turn it around in my head sometimes but overall i still really like the final product.

where was i going with this. oh right poor daemonless (or humanless) people in daemon aus...there is so MUCH that you can do there!! and your language idea fits perfectly with the stuff i like to explore that i dont really see explored ever elsewhere.

[acaciapines]

honestly the daemonless people line was a throwaway but thinking on it, theres so many angles to swing it, like a daemoned pair calling someone by "thou" as a logical choice since they're singular but the daemonless person rolling their eyes as usually they're called "thou" in a "half a person" way. and that's only one way to twist it! it's a shame that my current daemon aus that use 'thou' use it as an archaic form of speaking to show certain characters are from the past

(ask 2) and yes I did notice you could've used last names for the pair amd first names for the individual, fun to know you actively chose not to use it to keep from mixing up people (I have forgotten Kepler's first name lol). one of my… what's the opposite of pet peeve? little like? is when the pov character uses their first name for themself but last name for other people. I see it p much only in anime fandoms w how Japanese is more formal with last vs first names. if only I were active in any rn

it is SO fun there is so much to think of it! bc yeah...like. um. unironically lowkey this is touched on in the wolf daemon au so yknow not gonna say much but you are so RIGHT the way a human-daemon pair might use 'thou' but it DOES imply half-a-person! and how there might be a lone human or lone daemon that want to be called that (reclaiming a word that is used to hurt them) but i can also see the other way, the lone person going no, fuck that, im a YOU because im an entire person without anything else.

hey! thats where the conlang comes in! just make up the words you need <3

kjdgfdg dont worry i dont think kepler uses his first name much in the show anyways. like do people call him warren. does this happen anywhere save for the final arc. i actually dont remember. like in my fic i think poppy will call him warren and [redacted final arc spoilers] but other than that....

oooh that is so very fun! yeah i love using names like that. ive actually seen stuff like that a BIT in wolf 359 fics but i think you mentioned you havent finished the show and most of that is in people's post-canon fics, so. one day...