New series of posts where I ramble about miscellaneous fan material.
This first post comes from a brainstorm partly brought to life by a well-written His Dark Materials and Ultimate Spider-Man crossover one-shot written by a friend of mine. If you’re reading this, you know who you are! :)
I thought of doing the same thing with characters from The Henry Stickmin Collection because the concept of daemons representing personalities is a fascinating one. I subscribe to the theory that they also represent the consciousness of someone, which is a headcanon that also comes from my friend. But that’s about all I find interesting with His Dark Materials, besides a few characters. Everything else is not my cup of tea. I think the story started out simple-ish enough, but as the series went on, everything started getting more wonky, with the inclusion of a multi-universe (not quite as expansive as Marvel's and DC’s but it’s still overwhelming) and the main characters saving every universe through equally…different means. Not to mention some of the characters are not totally open to character development because they’re not looking to redeem themselves. Mrs. Coulter for instance; I saw the 2005 film version and I have read The Golden Compass but I did not like her in either adaptation because her actions are really confusing that I can’t really find myself liking her.
And it’s not just me, either. I took a look at some crossovers and it appears most of them use the daemon concept, but the characters from their properties barely meet up. I don’t exactly see someone like Captain Kirk wanting to shake hands with Lord Asriel anytime soon. I also don’t see any other HDM concepts used in the crossovers. I believe it’s partly because for one thing, having your own personality/subconscious take animal form that you can talk to has a lot of potential for exploring a character’s mindset and talking animals are a common story element people enjoy in stories of old and new. And from what I can tell, that’s the top reason why people want to write within the HDM realm at all. Everything else is up to the beholder.
But trying it with Henry Stickmin is a fun idea, so I made a list matching characters with their daemons. This is not the definite, end-all list, as there are a few more characters to pair off with their daemons, but I’m going with these ten for now.
Henry Stickmin - Phoenix
Ellie Rose - Swan
Charles Calvin - Albatross
Rupert Price - Hawk
Dave Panpa - Dove
Hubert Galeforce - Eagle
Wilson Stone - Owl
Dmitri Johannes Petrov - Vulture
Reginald Copperbottom - Magpie/Raven (Undecided)
Right Hand Man - Falcon
You might have noticed that there is a pattern with these daemons: they’re all birds. And that’s because besides the fact I can’t seem to resist taking on challenges for my good, in which case the challenge is to use one type of animal only, I found it surprisingly easy and fitting to match everyone with birds. Birds have so much symbolism to them, and although birds are not regularly used in the games, the motif of flight is present throughout: we can see this in the vehicles used like the Toppats’ airship and its escape pods, Charles and his helicopter, the Toppats’ space station, the Center for Chaos Containments’ mobile units and the flying armor known as Prototype, I could go on.
And this is not limited to aircraft; this motif extends to characters too, like the Right Hand Man and his ability to soar thanks to his cybernetics, the many tools and gags Henry uses to help him take flight including a real bird that helps him escape danger at one point and his own cyborg form in ‘Revenged', Ellie’s talent for lifting someone into the air using the Force, Charles’ aforementioned helicopter and his own endearing but sometimes-flighty tendency (no pun intended), and other motif instances I can’t think of.
So why not use birds to emphasize this motif and build upon characters’ personalities and abilities based on what we see in the series?
I don’t know what I’ll do with this idea - perhaps write one-shots or something. But in the meantime, I’m going to keep on playing with it and choosing the specific bird types for each character. There are so many birds in the world, yes, but one owl will differ from another and I want to match each daemon with their character correctly. This will take time as I don’t want to pick a bird for the ’this bird is so cool and awesome!!’ factor and we only have so much information about the HS characters. The games aren’t too explicit with the backgrounds behind the cast, so in order to garner what birds will naturally work for them, researching these birds and trying to mirror them with their assigned persons is a must.
In a future post, I’ll not only explain why I chose each bird for their human counterpart, but I’ll also give their names and other bits of trivia.
Wanderer out!
