More quiz results

[truepenny]

Found via jess79.

I think the conceit of this one is exceptionally clever, because it was something I thought about while I was reading His Dark Materials, and I know if I'd read HDM when I was ten or eleven, I would have spent a lot of time "playing daemon." And I like my answer. I'm not convinced it would turn out to be the right answer, were I to find myself in Lyra's Oxford, but it's certainly an answer I can live with.



Your WOLF DAEMON shows that you are solitary,
ferocious, and often intimidating, but not
without your sufficient loyalty and poise.
People tend to misunderstand you, but you
prefer your own company, anyway.


What Animal Would Your Daemon Settle As?
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Comments

[skalja.livejournal.com]

Of course, the irony is that a) wolves are usually not solitary, b) in Lyra's world, wolves are usually the daemons of what-are-those-warriors-in-the-Golden-Compass-called.

[libskrat]

Tartars, I believe, are the chaps with the wolf daemons.

I don't think this is the world's best idea for a quiz, because daemons are theoretically unbounded.

I came out having a monkey daemon. I think mine is really a pika, though.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Pika?
*googles*
Okay. There are options other than Pikachu when confronted with that word. That's good.

Actual pikas are quite cute.

I suspect, really, that my daemon would be a ferret or weasel or one of the other Mustelidae. Something too smart for its own good and with a tendency to hoard things.

[libskrat]

Pika as in Pikachu? Gag! Ka-barf! Never!

Actual pikas are shy little brown creatures who frugally take care of themselves by cutting extra fodder when the cutting is good, and hoarding it for lean times.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Now, see, I knew you didn't mean Pikachu (for whom, I confess, I have an unwholesome weakness--not the rest of Pokemon, which is an incredibly cynical marketing enterprise, just for Pikachu). But I don't think I'd ever heard of pikas before. So I've learned something today. That's always good.

[skalja.livejournal.com]

Early on, before the Quizilla boom, a friend and I wanted to do a daemon quiz which would have over twenty questions and something like forty results at least. Obviously, it fell through. But it would have been interesting to try...

I got snake, but I think mine is really a fox or some other small, furry predator.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Sadly, it is a quiz made without any particular attention given to the books themselves. cavlec's monkey daemon, for instance. But I still think the idea is cool.

[libskrat]

Yes, they did rather miss the "manipulative and evil" part of monkey-nature as expressed in Mrs. Coulter's daemon.

However, the nature of person-daemon congruence is still an open question to me. At least some people (witches, servants, Tartars) seem to subjugate individual personality to group membership when settling their daemons' forms.

I suspect, in fact, that it is *not* only love that settles a daemon's form -- it is any meaningful act (including ritual) conferring adulthood.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

It seems to be very deeply bound up with identity--that is, how you conceive of yourself. So people who conceive of themselves first and foremost as part of a group have daemons that reflect that. It's a whatchamacallit, a self-fulfilling prophecy? vicious circle? something like that. So witches have bird daemons because all witches have bird daemons; if you're a witch, you know that's what your daemon's going to be. And since daemons are all Jungian and shit, it doesn't have to be something you know up in the concsious part of the brain.

Am I making any sense with that?

[libskrat]

Yeah, you are.

I do get a faint impression, though, that Pullman wrote in the all-servants-have-dog-daemons thing off the cuff, without fully thinking it through. It's a wretchedly classist assumption, the kind of thing Pullman is generally above, and I think by the third book he realized that and kinda regretted it, but couldn't take it back.

I should go grab Amber Spyglass and find the bit that makes me think this. Heck, maybe I'll just go reread the whole thing...