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]

Certainly he'd have a harder time passing among humans if they had daemons and he didn't. He'd have to devise some workaround like claiming his daemon was a small nocturnal animal concealed in his pocket that didn't like to come out when it was light. Then it would get dark and he'd need a new excuse. Yeah, it would be tricky.

I like the idea that the daemons changing form with regeneration might include a brief period of being able to shift at will while the Time Lord figures out who s/he has become. The Doctor often seems a little unsure of his personality after regeneration, and that wouldn't work if he could look over at what his daemon became and say "oh, I'm a ferret daemon sort of person now."

I was assuming that Time Lord daemons would originally have been Gallifreyan wildlife, but I wonder if they can now have off-world daemons. I would suspect a daemon could take any form the Time Lord (or future space-faring human?) knew about and identified with. As for Gallifrey wildlife, new Who doesn't tell us, and if classic Who gives any clues I don't know about it. Presumably the Time Lords evolved from some group of animals roughly analogous to mammals (vertebrates, four limbs, hair, possibly suckling their young as evidenced by Time Ladies having breasts), but what other wildlife might be present we don't know.

[kaesa.livejournal.com]

Aaand I just failed by jumping between any old Time Lord and the Doctor in my explanation. YOU KNOW WHAT I MEANT.

I feel like the strong visceral reaction to seeing someone without an immediately visible daemon in HDM would make it difficult to explain to passers-by, "No, don't worry, I have a bat daemon. She's allergic to ...quarries. Yes, that's it!" But the Doctor could come up with something, surely. I stand by my assertion that daemons are fun.

I think in Invasion of Time the Gallifreyans living outside the Citadel are shown wearing furs, which presumably they hunted themselves, so they at least have large furry animals. ...Or possibly large furry vegetation.

[tardis-stowaway.livejournal.com]

If the Doctor was trying to pass as human without a daemon, I suspect many people would generate their own explanations for why there wasn't a daemon immediately visible. The expectation that people have daemons is so strong I think they'd be unwilling to believe the lack of daemon before their eyes, since the Doctor is clearly not damaged like people who have undergone intercision and he's too male to be a witch.

Gallifreyans living outside the Citadel are shown wearing furs, which presumably they hunted themselves, so they at least have large furry animals. ...Or possibly large furry vegetation.

LOL! Way to think outside the box. I also support your assertion that daemons are fun.