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

[kaydeefalls.livejournal.com]

I am torn between the daemon changing with each regeneration, or being the TARDIS. OR BOTH.

[ladymercury-10.livejournal.com]

Pretty much any of those options would be cool.

[mysticalchild_isis]

I love the TARDIS as daemon option. Fascinating.

[skalja.livejournal.com]

Apparently I'm in the minority, but I just can't get behind the idea of Time Lords having daemons. It makes them a little too human when HDM puts so much thematic emphasis on "has daemon = is human" and vice versa.

And the TARDISes are living beings in their own right (with their own personality and perspective, as we see several times in the Whoniverse), so making them part of their Time Lords feels really squicky to me. (Especially since the only TARDIS we really get to know is generally female-identified, and her pilot is consistently male-identified.)

That said, if they did have daemons I'm going with the "changes with every regeneration" option.

[kaffy_r]

Because I'm not certain every Time-Lord actually had his or her own TARDIS, I'm going to go with "changes w/regeneration." And, since I always read "daemon" as "soul," in my head, and I firmly believe Time-Lords have 'em, the human/non-human thing doesn't bother me.

[mad_maudlin]

Here from who_daily, and I just had to chime in because I wrote a DW daemon!fic and I decided that daemons are an Earth-specific trait, so humans and Silurians have them but Time Lords, space fish, etc. do not. Though I did throw in a TARDIS!daemon joke as well.

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

oh INTERESTING. I've written a couple of different HDM crossovers/fusions so I've thought about this before.

If you go with the idea that most sentient creatures have daemons, than Time Lords certainly would have them as well. I like the idea that the daemon turns to Dust when the Time Lord dies and reforms when he regenerates.

[10littlebullets.livejournal.com]

Completely off topic, but did anyone else get the impression that the handling of parallel worlds in s2 owed a lot to His Dark Materials? I thought it was kind of nifty.

[kaesa.livejournal.com]

1. I understand why people would say "Time Lords aren't human, so their souls wouldn't necessarily take the form of daemons," but on Earth, the Doctor passes for (eccentric) human upon superficial inspection, and if everyone but him had a daemon, it'd be... different. Plus, daemons are fun.

2. Having decided Time Lords get daemons, I also figure a Time Lord's daemon would change with each regeneration and be able to change forms until the new Doctor was settled into his personality. (This doesn't really jive with HDM canon, but I don't really like the part of HDM canon about sex = personality permanence/adulthood, so I am happy to discard that.)

3. Would Time Lord daemons be limited to forms of Gallifreyan wildlife? What does Gallifreyan wildlife even look like?

[katflace.livejournal.com]

I got here through who_daily and am probably doing to ramble for a bit, so sorry in advance for that! :)

My thought is really that they would not have daemons at all, not even invisible ones like the humans of Will's world. I really did read the books as saying daemons were totally unique to human beings and that every other species of sapient beings had its own way of connecting to Dust - the Panserbjorne don't have daemons, the Gallivespians don't, the Mulefa don't. Time Lords may look human, but they're still different from us, and I don't like skimming over the difference like that.

(Of course I also don't think daemons really were peoples' souls, but that that was just the explanation the humans of Lyra's world had come up with for their existance due to not knowing what was really going on...)

If they did have daemons, I think there's a good chance they'd settle as animals we wouldn't recognise at all. Though that poses the question of what even limits the forms someone's daemon can take - can they take a form the person has never even seen? It seems a bit weird, can you imagine some poor medieval villager's daemon becoming a platypus and their peers' reactions to it? If it's only limited by known animals, than presumably the Doctor's daemon at least could take the form of an Earth animal, but would not necessarily, if there was something that fit even better out there. I also do think that yes, it'd change with regeneration (or else it wouldn't even be an issue, they'd settle before they ever left Gallifrey, end up with a Gallifreyan form and that would be that). They'd probably be unsettled for a bit while the new incarnation was stabilising - so Ten's daemon would not have a fixed form during The Christmas Invasion, for instance - before taking a new permanent form.

Finally, I actually have written a ficlet (http://katflace.livejournal.com/556693.html) that plays with this a bit, if you're interested. Probably the reason I've thought about this so much, heh. I've wanted to write more bits from the same world - for instance, surely Three would've needed some way of creating the illusion of having a daemon, if he was going to interact who didn't know he wasn't human during his exile? - but I've never gotten around to it so far...