What would my daemon be? Well, you can't choose, as Lyra learns in her conversation with the old sailor on the way to the north. You have to make the best of what it turns out to be. So I don't know; but I sometimes say that she might well be a magpie, or a jackdaw, or one of those birds that pick up bright shiny things and take them back to their nests. That's what I do as a storyteller - pick up little shiny ideas or bits of experiences, and steal them.
Rules about toudhing daemons, etc. I didn't think them all out in advance; I discovered them as I wrote. The richness of the daemon idea was such that after 1200 pages I was still finding new things to do with it - for example, when Serafina Pekkala explains to the two daemons that witches do something similar to what Will and Lyra had to do in the land of the dead, and that was why their daemons can range far away, and that Will and Lyra had thus unwittingly gained a new power... I didn't know about that till I got there. But setting up the relationship allowed that sort of revelation to occur.
How could Will see Pan right away, if you need to learn how to see daemons? That is a very good question. That's one of the best questions I've heard for a long time. In fact it's such a good question that any answer I could give would be insufficient to match the profundity and complexity of the issues you raise. I shall have to confess my ignorance and tiptoe away...
Same-sex daemons: it was clear to me from the beginning that occasionally someone might acquire a daemon of the same sex. What might that mean? I don't know everything it might mean; it could mean something about their own sexuality, or it might mean something quite different. It's one of the many things I don't know fully about my world. Similarly with how daemons are born. There wasn't actually any part of the story that depended on studying my daemonic gynecology, so I didn't go into it. |
