Poll: Time Lord daemons?

[tardis_stowaway]

I have a Doctor Who thought question for you! Over in Sherlock fandom I've read a number of excellent fics fusing the world of Sherlock with the His Dark Materials book trilogy, giving all the characters daemons*. I started wondering how such a fusion would work in the Doctor Who universe. Specifically, would Time Lord daemons be like human daemons? Please note that this is purely a speculative exercise; I have no plans for writing DW/HDM crossover fic (though I'd happily read any that's already out there...)[Poll #1752951]Feel free to use the comments to speculate further on this topic and/or suggest daemons for Doctor Who or Torchwood characters.

*A very quick primer for those who haven't read Phillip Pullman's excellent His Dark Materials Trilogy:  in this alternate universe fantasy, each person has a daemon, which is essentially an external manifestation of his/her soul.  Daemons take the shapes of animals.  During childhood they may shapeshift freely, then at adolescence they settle on a form that remains for the rest of the person's life.  Daemons have real physical form and may touch their own humans, inanimate objects, or other daemons, but touching another person's daemon is a deep cross-cultural taboo.

Comments

[tardis-stowaway.livejournal.com]

Hey, it's good to get a variety of opinions! Thanks for the comment.

It's been a while since I read the books, but I thought the witches are referred to as not human (though they do have children with humans), and witches certainly have daemons.

When I included the TARDIS-daemon option, I was thinking about armored bears, whose armor is their soul. Personally, I agree that TARDISes are too independent to be Time Lord daemons. However, arguing for that option, people and their daemons aren't always going to react identically to a given situation if they're in internal conflict about it. Since this is a hypothetical AU anyway, I think it's a reasonable stretch. Also, recall that in the HDM books, the large majority of people have a daemon of the opposite gender, so the fact that the Doctor is (so far) male and his TARDIS is female actually supports this scenario.

[skalja.livejournal.com]

I don't remember the witches being explicitly referred to (by people with accurate knowledge of their cultures an abilities) as non-human so much as not like the other humans ... and a big part of that, though certainly not all, is their ability to separate themselves physically from their daemons. By the end of the series they treat Lyra pretty much like a peer, because she too has learned how to move independently from Pan.

I know that daemons can have different reactions to events than their humans, and that they're usually the opposite gender -- my point is more that I find it generally kind of squicky to turn one character who is an independent being in their own right into a literal part of another character, and doubly so when it's a female character being subsumed into a male character. Particularly after The Doctor's Wife, which makes it so clear that the Doctor+TARDIS is a pairing of equals.

[tardis-stowaway.livejournal.com]

I thought I remembered witches referring to themselves as other than humans, but then I realized I was only certain of that memory from fanfic. Some quick googling did turn up some reference-type websites that specifically refer to witches as not human (

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I thought I remembered witches referring to themselves as other than humans, but then I realized I was only certain of that memory from fanfic. Some quick googling did turn up some reference-type websites that specifically refer to witches as not human (<a href="http://hdm.wikia.com/wiki/Witches"here they're called 'human-like creatures'</a>, and <a href="http://www.bridgetothestars.net/wiki/index.php?title=Witches">here it refers to witches living longer than humans</a>). However, it has been quite a few years since I read the books, so I can't verify that this isn't just a case of general cluelessness that includes me.

OK, I think I see what you're trying to say a bit better. As I now understand it, your point about the TARDIS we know being female is part of why it squicks you, not a reason the concept couldn't happen. Fair enough. If something were to happen within canon (or within a fic) that erased a character's individual personhood and made them part of another character, then I would totally share the squick. Something semi-analogous happened in the Dollhouse finale and it creeped me out in a major way, even with the genders reversed. It doesn't bother me personally to ask the question "but what would it be like if there was a world where she'd always been part of him and he was part of her?", but I see why it squicks you.