But what if your childhood was shitty and traumatizing and you were meek and quiet as a kid so get a sweet little kitten and eventually as you grow and realize your worth and become more confident that kitten slowly grows into a lion.
Usually, when I bring kids their Companions, it’s a happy day.
Most parents like to throw parties for their children. Make it a big ‘lifetime milestone’ type deal. Sometimes, if there are a lot of birthdays on the same day, they do events at the local schools. I never really have to call ahead – people know I’m coming. The roster at the head offices keeps a running record, and Deliverers like me pack up the Untouched Eggs (wearing gloves, of course), and set out to cover their area for the day. I work six days a week, and sometimes I take emergency runs if I’m nearby and another district is overwhelmed. Overtime is common, but so are short days, when only a small number of kids are hitting ten.
It’s a job that has me travelling a lot. i go wherever there’s the most need for Deliverers. We don’t like to be late; tenth birthdays are an important matter. But I like being on the road. It lets me see a lot of the country.
So you guys took the plot of the golden compass and added a person who delivers the daemons….just wanted to point that out there
Actually, not quite!
The plot of a story is the progression of events throughout it. So the plot of the Golden Compass, for example, is all that stuff about kids getting separated from their daemons and the intrigues with Mrs. Coulter and the mystery of the ‘dust’.
Magical animal companions is, in actuality, a concept. This story has a similar concept to the Golden Compass, but the plot is the part that’s completely different. Funnily enough, though, people are often more adept at spotting similar concepts than similar plots. Probably because concepts are like clothes and plots are more like skeletons – you’re more likely to see one at a glance than the other.
Also, good news – if you like concepts like these, there are way more stories than just His Dark Materials that employ magically bonded animal companions as an element or even central crux of the tale! The concept in fact owes it roots to the mythology of the Familiar, which is probably why Pullman named his magical companions ‘daemons’ in HDM (though I don’t know for certain). If you enjoy such things there’s a goodreads list that’s got some recommendations for other stories with takes on the concept, too (His Dark Materials is also on there – some people don’t realize there are more books than the Golden Compass because they only made the one movie, but there are! They get increasingly theological, though, just as a head’s up).
This particular take is indeed very close to daemons, though, especially with the elements of the animal companion’s shape being determined by something in the child’s nature. But I mean, the prompt presented an interesting twist on it, and I don’t know enough about His Dark Materials to just straight up write fanfiction for it, and wouldn’t want to wrestle with the same theological themes either. So instead I did this.
Sort of like how Phillip J. Pullman wrote His Dark Materials to be ‘Narnia but with the opposite attitude on religion’.
That’s kind of how people come up with stories, in a large number of cases. And I’m mentioning this because there are a lot of people on this post saying some variation of ‘this is just The Golden Compass’, and it makes me worry. Nearly every story out there is some variant of another tale, someone else’s take on this or that concept, this or that archetype. If you shy away from an idea you like just because it’s been done before, you’ll never find yourself exploring any creative inspiration, but the truth is – it’s all been done before.
So just do it anyway. Some people will like it. Happily, a lot of notes on this post can also attest to that! And i don’t think fiction necessarily needs any aspiration greater than the hope that some people will like it.
(GIF from pokemon, another series which has a very similar concept, since kids are given a pokemon at the age of ten to start their life’s adventures!)
funeral-biscuit 