#lyra belaqua

[eggplant-crusader]

As promised, time for me to go absolutely insane about how good Ruth Wilson and Dafne Keen are at acting, like it's absolutely unbelievable.

First, Marisa Coulter is this weird-ass complex character that has this thing where she is always simultaneously hyper-rational and hyper-emotional. Like whenever she's acting emotional, either that's genuine but she's also very aware of the fact and using it for her advantage, or she's just acting because she's just that good. And whenever she's being cold-blooded and calculating, either she's really that cold about the situation or she's a predator reading to go absolutely feral but acting like she has no feelings one way or another because she knows that's how she gets what she wants.

And Wilson just. Is constantly acting all of that. There's always an undercurrent of boiling emotion to every cold-blooded scene, and there's always a calculating edge to every emotional scene. And everything in between. It's like she's playing multiple characters at the same time, it's incredible. Of course it's not all her, the production of the show is excellent on all sides, and the direction, the costume, the music, it all contributes to crafting the character and what she conveys. But it all hinges on a single person conveying way more than any one human should be able to convey. I never thought anyone would be able to do this walking contradiction justice, yet I am constantly losing my mind about how good Wilson is at it.

Then there's Dafne Keen who is too young to already be the kind of actor who barely needs any lines. Unlike Coulter, Lyra is not the kind of character that is constantly asking the actor to giver everything, few are, but she's still the protagonist so she obviously she has her big moments, and Keen never disappoints. We barely got to see her these two episodes, she mostly did some set up for the land of the dead, and then running away. But the one moment she got, that "let me go, please?", honestly even that line was kind of unnecessary because she had already acted it, but it still was barely a line an yet there was so much to it. Of course it helped that she was acting opposite Wilson who was doing Everything as she always does, and their chemistry is spectacular, but still, Keen earned that reaction from Coulter, she earned it before she even opened her mouth, she told their entire story without saying a word, it was perfect, absolutely perfect. Everything else for her these two episodes was simpler stuff, set up for future episodes and action scenes, and of course she was excellent at it, but not really moments that give an actor a chance to shine. Then there's the quiet moment with Will at the end, which was short and sweet and perfect, and both Keen and Amir Wilson just...they were Lyra and Will. It was like I was being transported to reading the books for the first time and becoming obsessed with them, ugh.

Because surprise bitches, this post is also about Amir Wilson! THAT Will and Coulter scene is one of the most memorable ones from the books, and it's one I've been looking forward to for ages, admittedly mostly because I wanted to see Ruth Wilson doing THAT, playing him like that, but fuck, Amir played off her perfectly, all the inner conflict, him being so full of love and devotion but being torn by it because there's so much he has to protect, it was all perfect on his part, if anything I thought the show didn't do him justice and didn't focus enough on him, but to be fair, the moment when Marisa goes from her pleading manipulation to "you're useless to me" is huge and a joy to watch and show-stopping, but still, let me see Will's heart break for what he's done because his heart was already breaking!

aaaaa sorry I just, I almost never lose it about acting, it's not something I understand that much about, I'm usually all about the writing, but something about them makes me go insane.

[casualavocados]

Dust is beautiful... I never knew. HIS DARK MATERIALS (2019-2022)

[herdarkmaterialsss]

[nonasuch]

three kinds of responses to my fictional characters poll so far:

1. how dare you include 6-8 of my all time faves, i can’t possibly narrow it down

2. these sound fake, am i being goncharov’d

3. how dare you forget lyra belaqua

[dontmesswithnoheroin]

thinking about how lord asriel believed it was his life's purpose to change the world and defeat the authority and his arrogance caused fractures in the fabric of the multiverse, but lyra belaqua saved possibly billions of souls stuck in the purgatory, returning their essence to the multiverse in the form of dust, offsetting the authority's response to asriel's provocation, not because she wanted to be a hero but because she wanted to help out her friend

[curiouslavellan]

Rules: Make a poll of your favourite female characters (no limits - as many or as little as you want) and see which your followers like the most!

I was tagged by @layalu

I'm tagging: @herearedragons, @cactusnymph, @calicostorms, @veilkeeper, @arainayeet, and @general-sleepy, no pressure tho!

[clonerightsagenda]

HDM Season 1 Finale:

I am taking a moment to state that I am so mad I have never seen the aurora. A few times they said it came down this far south and we went looking for it, but we never succeeded.

I'm not sure if Asriel is his first name or his last name and at this point I'm too afraid to ask. In the show they're suggesting Belaqua is his surname too (I guess he was her fake *paternal* uncle?) but it never comes up in the books.

Show!Will is 15???? I mean, the actor is clearly not 12, but I thought they might be asking us to suspend our disbelief. How old is show!Lyra meant to be? She looks younger.

Asriel says "I did not send for you" when he sees Lyra but relaxes when he sees Roger, who he also did not send for, so presumably he sent a request for a completely different child to murder. His child murder Grubhub guy is really late.

Asriel having to slowly push the guillotine down himself for his separation machine just to add to the drama... seems inefficient. Bad engineering. In the book didn't he do it with wires.

No bridge???

So like. Did Asriel even consider for a second asking for volunteers for his experiment. Even the Church gets that one priest who willingly severs himself to blow up the quantum entanglement bomb. Did Asriel ask around before deciding child murder was the way to go? Surely someone is willing to possibly die to strike a blow against god.

Their cutting between storylines remains abrupt and awkward sometimes.

Will is a mood for interrupting his brooding, terror, and confusion to go look at a cat

Overall, pretty good so far! I had quibbles with various episodes, but my biggest complaint remains Mrs. Coulter. She's too clearly unraveling, when a recurring thing in the books is that she's so charming and charismatic she wraps everyone around her finger even when they should know better. I can't buy this Mrs. Coulter conning The Metatron.

[nicollekidman]

🗣️ LYRA 🗣️ BELAQUA 🗣️ SILVERTONGUE 🫂

[fiatluxillustration-portfolio]

Digital Sketchbook Dual Illustrations

LYRA BELAQUA / MRS COULTER

HIS DARK MATERIALS

Created with Procreate [x]

[multimilfs]

Marisa Coulter x Fem!Reader: (Nothing left but) You and only you

Summary: "You're the only one who gets to call me that, you know."

A/N: It's been a bit since I've written for Marisa or watched hdm so apologies if I'm a bit rusty! But I had fun with this so I hope you like it!! Prompt found here!

Tag List: @ghostsunderstoodmysoul @multifandomfix

Warning(s): None

Marisa Coulter fell in love with Asriel Belaqua for his words. He’d open his mouth and it was like floodgates had broken, every sentence spit out in haste so he could speak the next, each word dripping with knowledge. She fell in love with seeing his mind work on paper, the notes scratched out in haste as if time was slipping through his fingers. The flood of his understanding would drown the world and even her at times. It was a flood she’d willingly been overtaken by. 

But you… she fell in love with you for your silence. 

Your brother could ramble out an entire lecture in minutes, but you would sit, tracing a finger around the rim of your glass. In one movement you could say a thousand words. Words were not frivolous to you, not something scribbled down, but something aged. Marisa could see the world examined and pulled apart behind your eyes. When you spoke, the manifestations of your mind ran down her spine like a cool stream. 

When her and Asriel began their affair, she’d worried not for the Magisterium or her husband to catch them, but for you to. 

Asriel had run a hand over her face, coming to hold her by the shoulders as he sought out her eyes. He’d forced her eyes up to look at him on a level of equal standing. His mouth moved, the words so fast that she could barely catch them all, “I swear to you, Marisa, they’ll never know. If your husband can miss it all… they know nothing, they won’t.” 

One glance of your eyes between them undid all of his words. 

You knew. Of course you did. And when you looked in her eyes, she could see the accusations behind them. You had turned away from her that day and left on a mission for the Magisterium. 

But when Lyra was born, you were there, and Asriel wasn’t. 

She clutched your hand and cried, holding it to her chest. Lyra wailed in the next room. You sat at Marisa’s side, combing a hand through the sweat soaked hair along her forehead. You had been the last one she expected. Asriel was only a city away but you… distance hadn’t meant a thing when she needed you. 

And your voice soothed over her body as you pressed your lips to her forehead and whispered, “Well done, darling.” 

Marisa smiled, “You’re the only one who gets to call me that, you know.” 

And you did know. You’ve always known. Asriel loved her and she loved him, but his love wasn’t the kind laced with sweet names. A man of a million words and none of them for her. 

You pressed another kiss to her forehead then. Asriel appeared moments later to whisk Lyra away to Oxford and Marisa said nothing for once, squeezing your hand so hard you worried it’d break. Asriel never returned. 

Life moved on and she built herself back up slowly. And you were there for it all—good and bad—to be her eyes and ears, whispering your findings in her ear, but her favorite was never the secrets you relayed—it was the honeyed darlings, always delivered with intention. With love. Of your few words, that one was reserved only for Marisa Coulter.

[harompe]

"rules: choose 4 of your favorite characters from 4 pieces of media as options and let your tumblr pals decide which one most suits your vibe!"

Tagging anyone who would like to do it!!

[shipcestuous]

You're comment about stories focusing a lot on uncle/nibling (love that word, btw!) relationships until they actually turn out to be parent/child made me think of a non-incestuous example in His Dark Materials. (All canons, it's important to the plot to ever be lost in adaptation.)

At the beginning of the story, main character Lyra Belaqua is (platonically) smitten with her uncle, Lord Asriel. She's been told she's an orphan and her parents were Asriel's brother and sister-in-law, and due to their family connection and his obligation to their deceased relatives, Asriel kindly pulled some strings to have her raised and given a full education in Jordan College, not taking care for her himself but having her be around important scholars and their research since a very young age. Lord Asriel himself isn't around too much, being busy with his own research and his adventures around the world, but besides being Lyra's benefactor, he's intelligent and cunning, charismatic, strong-willed, fierce, and aloof in a bit of a "noble rogue" way, with an air of mystery and danger about him, so whenever he comes visiting, Lyra is immediately drawn to him and trying to get his attention. They're actually rather similar, with her being also very stubbon, resourceful, quick-witted and good at thinking on her feet, with an indipendent and rebellious streak. As the plot of the first book/movie/first season of the HBO show goes on, there's at least two separate occasion when she has reason to believe he's in danger, and her first instinct is to come save him.

However, the truth about their familiar relationship is revealed well before the start of the second installment of the story and, suffice to day, even if she still cares about him, Lyra is not happy at all about Lord Asriel lying to her through her whole life. Them only reuniting after the fact and Asriel being devastated and furious at her sight because he thinks for a moment he'll have to sacrifice her in the experiment that will kick off his grand plan doesn't help... neither does him being relieved to realize she's brought her best friend along and deciding to sacrifice him instead. (For extra context: Lyra's just been through hell and back to save said best friend and a lot of other children along with him. Even later, his death at the hands of her own father, after she herself caused them to meet through her attempts to help them both, as well as the knowledge of what Asriel is willing to do for his ideals, haunts her.)

An extra layer of complication is also added by Lyra finding out the identity of her real mother, Mrs. Coulter, around the same time as all of this goes down. When Mrs. Coulter first shows up in her life as a sort of mentor figure, Lyra is immediately enchanted by her. Mrs. Coulter is an independent woman with important connections in a very religious and patriarchal world, she's beautiful and elegant and refined but also well-educated, passionate and unafraid to speak her mind, witty, and well-respected. It's been ages since I read the book, but I'm pretty sure that, before she learns the truth, Lyra actually fantasizes about her and Asriel meetting, falling in love, getting married, and adopting her or at least taking her on their joint travels around the world. However, under her perfectly put together appearance, Mrs. Coulter hides a dark, unstable side. When she finds out she lied to her, Lyra must confront that and the fact that her mother has been involved in some genuinely horrifying things... things that would have harmed Lyra herself in a very direct manner, if Mrs. Coulter had not intervened at the last second. And even then, Lyra is faced with the devastating fact she only intervened to save her own daughter, and was absolutely willing to let so many other children go through the same process because she counted them as acceptable losses while trying to achieve her goals.

The backstory to Lyra's parentage and its secret is that Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter met when they were younger and fell in love, drawn to each other's passion and intellect, but she was already married at the time. Their affair resulted in baby Lyra, but when Mrs. Coulter's husband realized that "his" daughter actually looked a lot like a Belaqua, Mrs. Coulter faked Lyra's death and entrusted her to Lord Asriel, who in turn hid her away in a country house he owned with a nanny. However, Mrs. Coulter's husband eventually found out and stormed the secret house. Luckily, Asriel engaged him in a duel before he could get to Lyra, and finally killed him. After that, with the scandal brought to light by her husband's death and her reputation and her reputation ruined, Mrs. Coulter refused to have anything more to do with her former lover or their daughter.

After rebuilding her standing as a dignified high society woman and academic, and becoming involved in the thing mentioned above, the one actively targeting and harming children, Mrs. Coulter ended up thinking back to the daughter she herself had given away, worrying about her safety and, perhaps, even wondering if things could have gone differently. So, years later, she tries to keep Lyra close to keep an eye on her and reconnect with her in her own way, still with revealing their true relationship to each other. But while Asriel is distant and close-lipped about anything too personal, Mrs. Coulter deals with the need to hide everything by developing a possessive, even obsessive attitude towards her that gets increasingly uncomfortable (at least once involving violence, another time essentially keeping Lyra prisoner) as the story goes on.

And yet, at the end of the day, both Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter deeply love Lyra, even if not in healthy ways. Their ending, for all their high ideals, selfish actions, and dramatic gestures, is agreeing to sacrifice themselves for Lyra, knowing they're going not just to die but to destroy their souls, but accepting that fate for the chance to save their daughter.

Both relationships are incredibly intense and, while I've never shipped either (the age difference would be a bit much for me, and Mrs Coulter in particular crosses a line at one point that squicks me out beyond repair, I'm afraid) but if it turned out other people shipped one or both, I'd honestly just say "oh, yeah, sure, I get it."

I'm rather familiar with this series. I read the books when they came out, so I'm pretty rusty on those details, but I've seen the movie a few times, and I watched the first season of the series from a few years ago.

This is another great example of a prominent "uncle" that turned out to be the father. Although this might be one situation where I'm OK with it.

I've always shipped Asriel/Mrs. Coulter a lot, so I was kind of stuck on that and never really looked at the relationships with Lyra in that way. But it's really interesting that the dynamics with both parents are Lyra's fascination with a glamorous figure. And then, as you described, slowly learning some horrifying truths about what they are each willing to do.

Particularly with Lord Asriel, when he comes to visit, it's like a celebrity that's coming. She's shy and excited and all that.

[casualavocados]

We gotta make sure they don't win. We gotta go, Roger. All right? Me and Pan...are going to go into the skies and we're going to search for Dust.

Dafne Keen as LYRA BELAQUA/LYRA SILVERTONGUE in HIS DARK MATERIALS, Season 1: eps 5-8

[herdarkmaterialsss]

[sunriseverse]

10 Characters, 10 Fandoms, 10 Tags

tagged by @mispronouncing-michaelangelo (thank you!) tagging @traitorsinsalem @mouldyfox @merevide @misti-step @iinane @missanthropicprinciple @boobliker42069 @psychic-waffles @strawberryswords andddd @large-burly-meat-king!

lin wanyue - fgep

lin buxian/lin yixi - ruzhui

ling wen - tgcf

barsalai shefali and shizuka - the ascendant trilogy (two but do not separate them! so they get one entry)

lyra belaqua/silvertongue - his dark materials

the iron triangle - dmbj (i know this is three characters shhhhhhhh do not separate!!!!)

camakazi - httyd (novels)

harrowhark nonagesimus - the locked tomb series

zhao jue - sci (novel specifically because he's so fucking funny in novel canon)

eragon - the inheritance cycle

[mywingsareonwheels]

The Endeavour/Captain America connection

This is just to check that fellow Endeavour fans are all aware that Leander Deeny who played Louis in "Quartet" (ie one of the two annoying posh secret agents who bother Morse) was Chris Evans body double in Captain America: the First Avenger, and also played a barman, I think in the scene with the epic "you're keeping the outfit, right?" slash scene between Steve and Bucky (though I may be misremembering).

So yes, if you've seen the Steve Rogers transformation scene, the smol "before" bare chest belongs to an Endeavour secret agent actor.

(I have been keeping an informal mental record of major sci-fi fantasy properties of the last thirty years or so (radio, tv, film)[1] which have Endeavour actors in and as far as I can tell it is basically all of them. Possibly not entirely all, but not far off. I might make a full list at some point of everyone I can find, though mostly just to entertain myself with my ridiculous cast list nerdery as I'm not sure who else would be interested! Anton Lesser's habit of playing a villain in pretty much everything helps (and when he isn't it's Roger Allam or Danny Webb), plus of course Anton's in most of the radio Pratchett/Discworld adaptations, but I mean we do also have Lyra Belaqua and Lestat and Jesper and Genya and Alfred Pennyworth and one of the iterations of Miss Hardbroom and a radio Granny Weatherwax and and and. ;-) Leander Deeny handily brings in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, though there are probably other useful overlaps there; I've honestly lost track!)

[1] excluding the one whose profits fund far right transphobia in the uk, obviously. Naturally I do not go there.