DE: The Beast Inside

[bjornwilde]

Sorry for the late DE but I guess my body decided I needed to sleep in on my first day of vacation. WIthout further ado, today's topic:

In Andrea's canon, the Lyc-V virus is a magic virus that fuses human DNA with animal, thus allowing the were-folk shapeshifters. If your pup were to be infected, what animal DNA would you chose for them?

Alternately, if your pup had a daemon, ala His Dark Materials, what would it be and what is its personality like?

Also, be sure to read this housekeeping post regarding DEs by my fellow DE Mod.

Comments

[bjornwilde]

Ben Grimm is being stubborn and not wanting his DNA fused with anything. Imagine that. Still, I am leaning towards bull or buffalo.

I've long thought his daemon would be one of the larger breeds of bulldog and not just because of Lockjaw. Not too sure about the personality to be honest, likely it will be much like Ben's.

Andrea's daemon would be a hyena and would be very outgoing and shameless, saying the most embarrassing and blunt things.

Val von Doom is another resisting the DNA virus but I'm leaning towards fox, though her hair color being different is weird to me.

I think her daemon would be a mongoose or mercat and would be very formal and prim.

Hank...well I'll ignore canon and say he gets some big cat DNA, maybe puma. He's neurotic enough. ; p

ETA: Alternately, bear DNA works pretty damn well.

His daemon is a raccoon named Sherezade, who is very motherly to him.

[camwyn]

Despite the fact that I used to play Werewolf: The Apocalypse a great deal, I don't really see any of my current crop of characters as being especially inclined towards shapeshifty foo or animal DNA. I've done some of the daemon thinking, though, so...

Gordon's daemon is a tardigrade named Sati. She is about a millimeter long and lives in a moss-lined marble or flat-sided test tube that Gordon carries around with him. In a daemonverse version of Half-Life, Gordon was asked not to visit his grandfather in the hospital because the skinny kid with no visible daemon creeped them out and a rumor started that he was the Angel of Death. Sati is generally a very practical and quiet creature who is firmly of the opinion that she and Gordon can pull through almost anything.

Shephard's daemon is a small swarm of honeybees named Imre. Not one bee, the whole swarm- they function as a colony lifeform. And they creeped his Marine Corps recruiter the hell out back when he was in senior year of high school. They're capable of being quiet when necessary, of course. The name is actually a man's name; when I assigned it originally I thought it was a woman's. I don't think the bees really care, though. They know who they are, and they have work to do, so why fuss over an external error.

Ellen's daemon is a northern grasshopper mouse named Saoshyant. This came as an enormous relief to her father, who feared that the daemon would settle on a shape unknown to Vault 101 residents, like a yao guai or some other surface creature. Saoshyant is a fierce little thing with a tendency to bide his time and to commit all his resources when he moves into action.

Mordin's daemon, if nonhumans get daemons, is a peacock mantis shrimp (he's made some arrangements involving a portable tank) with roughly the personality of a female Pepe the Prawn from the Muppets.

Varric's is a vixen, with a cheerfully troublemaking personality.

I suspect Medic's is in fact his guinea pig Katyusha, and I can't help but picture her insisting on wearing guinea-pig-sized armor when he runs out onto the field for the day's war.

And I am not yet sure what Santo's or Stacker Pentecost's are. I'll think of something.

[unglitched]

According to the screenwriter, Pentecost's daemon is a tiger.

[camwyn]

I can see that, although I strongly suspect that it means he had to go through the witchy separation process. Not because of anything to do with the Jaegers- there's enough room in the Conn-Pods to fit quite a lot of species in there- but because of his RAF background. Unless he spent his entire RAF career never going anywhere near a cockpit he'd have to be able to handle quite a lot of separation... which makes sense in itself, given that he's capable of keeping his memories and emotions out of the Drift; it's the same kind of fundamental partitioning.

[unglitched]

One wonders how daemons would be handled in a Conn-Pod. I doubt they'd be just running around loose in the chamber--look what happened to Herc.

[neverbelievedintheend]

I'm guessing the larger ones had restraint harnesses resembling the slings that aquariums use to transport cetaceans or pinnipeds, or possibly like whatever the various space programs used for animals that they sent up and bothered to bring back. Since the daemons are intelligent the harnesses have a release button within reach. The Wei triplets have it relatively easy; the snake needs a perch to wrap herself around, the monkey gets a setup like one of the space chimps, and the rooster gets something like the pigeon vests used in World War II to secure homing pigeons for transport behind enemy lines.

[nocarename]

I know someone did a version up with more of a merge between verses, and less of a patch.

Ah, here we go.

[death_gone_mad]

Amascut pre-crazy was very much Sekhmet like in appearance and her temples had names like 'the Lion's Mouth', so were-lioness (though that red mane wtf) or lion daemon. Post-crazy - were-hyena/striped hyena daemon named Yandu, after the Demon-Smith-Black Hyena. I kind of wanted to go with spotted hyena for the infamous gender dynamics of the species, but striped hyena have a range that covers Northern Africa and the Middle East which are analogous to the Kharid, Amascut's usual stomping grounds. My daemonverse AU headcanon says that Yandu spent so much time as a lion in Amascut's childhood that people often mistakenly thought he had settled (and odd implications about Amascut go here) but suddenly he shifted to hyena and stayed there. Of course, Amascut and Yandu went through a witchy separation, possibly early in life too.

I dunno about Fairy Fixit. Perhaps a beaver? Nothing that noms on giant moths like bears or somesuch, please. Though that would be a funny/appropriately horrifying were-form...

Evil Chicken ...
...
...
Out of cooking oil error.

[gavin62truck]

I (and Tommy) enjoyed Tommy's stint as an Irish wolfhound too much to deviate from the idea that he could be any other animal. Also, I'm having a hard time unseeing Lou as a panda.

[bjornwilde]

I am loving the idea of a were-panda. Don't know that it would do much but it is still amusing.

[gavin62truck]

Basically he would just sit around eating and looking adorable.

[genarti]

River transformed in-bar in one of those "turn involuntarily into the animal you're most like" plots into a mongoose. (That one's Lynne's genius idea!) I stand by that, for a daemon or for the most fitting transformation. They're cute, they're social, they're smart, and they're vicious predators who prey on cobras.

Enjolras would have to be something enormously symbolic, of course. Canon compares him to an eagle often enough that I'd probably have to go with that, even though I don't think he personally would; it's too imperial as a symbol for his tastes. (And even though Enjolras is not much like an eagle in terms of actual animal behavior. If I were going with that instead of canon symbolism, I'd probably go with a wolf. More social, more affectionate, just as much martial symbolism and eye-catching prettiness and ability to draw on a visible predatory intimidation factor -- and follow through on that intimidation factor, too.)

Thor got a lioness daemon in a fic that IIRC Ashie wrote, and I really like that. (Lioness specifically not just because of the standard HDMverse thing of person and daemon being different genders, but also because lionesses are the ones who do the hunting and cooperate better. Odin maybe gets a lion. *dry*) That doesn't work as well for the Lyc-V aspect, but I'd probably keep lion anyway unless someone has a better suggestion.

Trowa I have seen written with a snake daemon; I like that, but I'm not wedded to it. Either a snake or a cat of some sort (but a solitary cat, not a lion) is my immediate thought.

Clare... oh gosh, this one's hard. If not for the inherent logistical difficulties with something aquatic, I'd say a shark, maybe a mako. (I might still say that for the Lyc-V part of the question, even though we never really see the Claymores doing much near the seashore.) Are there any terrestrial animals with sonar or ability to sense electrical signals or similar which are also unstoppable predators?

Regan, I have no idea. Sweeping symbolism is harder with her. Maybe a housecat, but that's so overdone... A wren or something? Something that's fierce in a corner but not actively predatory most of the time, and social, and grooms itself a lot. Suggestions welcomed.

[aka_casanova]

Bats are pretty unstoppable predators, on their own small scale. Also, I believe some reptiles have electrical sense.

[genarti]

Bats are! But don't the carnivorous ones mostly take on pretty small insects and such? Ideally I'd go with something that can take on very large or fierce prey. (Claymores in general fight yoma, who are definitely no slouches at fighting, and Clare in particular never met a problem she didn't want to charge at head-on.)

Reptiles are a good idea, though. Hmmm.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Vagrant shrews are predatory land mammals that use echolocation. Given that they routinely eat 1.5 times their own body weight in the course of a day, they're pretty damn predatory- granted, this makes them the opposite of Claymores in terms of amount of food consumed. Also their echolocation is only for scoping out the landscape, not for pinpointing food, so that's nprobably not a great match.

Swiftlets are birds that use echolocation and that prey on insects, but again, the echolocation isn't for finding prey- it's because they live in caves and use the sound to find their nests.

Electrosense doesn't really happen much in land animals. Wiki says once you're out of the water it's confined to echidnas, platypi, and a couple of insect species.

[genarti]

Hmmm. Insects are also an idea! You know, I think they're more visual hunters than anything, but a mantid might actually work okay. They wait in ambush, they're often camouflaged and definitely fast to strike, they're pretty darn predatory, they slice things up rather than liquifying them or whatever...

[ashen_key]

I still need to finish that daemon-fic where Thor gets a lioness, but :DDDDD

[yakalskovich]

Urquhart is canonically described as wolf-like; he is the wolf antagonist to the protagonist's fox, as in Aesop. This very medieval concept of storytelling is what I so love about the canon, actually.

Teja must of course be some feline, and quite dangerous, and a bit of a loner, so I am thinking tiger, ultimately, rather than lion.

Lady Margolotta would be a bat, small and quietly hanging in a corner, watching it all.

Ned Poins is the hyena to Prince Hal's lion, and I don't really want to analyse right now what that says about him, considering what we know about gender roles among hyenas.

Lorenzo is some kind of lemur or gibbon; clingy, affectionate and a bit silly.

Sirona is canonically and historically associated with snakes, so I guess she's a nonpoisonous house-snake that keeps the rats at bay. Especially political rats...

Tamara says she's already a metaphor for the animal nature of humans (especially of those strange creature, woman, which the sailors seldom saw), so no further animal transformations for her, thank you.

Tower is Tower. If anything, he's an elephant, because the tower in chess ('castle') was historically an elephant. That's all I get here.

Hannibal has me stymied. There is no animal I can compare him to in good conscience. Animals do what they do because it's their nature. Hannibal kills in utter disdain for humanity of which he himself theoretically is a part. Your guess is as good as mine.

[swankyfunk]

Teja could be a black panther, being goth and all.

[yakalskovich]

Yes, I guess a black panther would work as well. They are a bit mournful, too, or have that aura, at least since Rilke's poem. Yes, it fits.

[ashen_key]

I could see a housecat for Hannibal, or a stoat. No daemon acts exactly like their animal counterparts, after all. Also, the winter-coat of the stoat, ermine, would appeal to Hannibal's grandiose view of himself.

[yakalskovich]

Stoat it is; definitely rather stoat than housecat. Stoat fits with the description of Hannibal in the original book that calls him 'sleek'. Stoats do kill and destroy at random, too; so that fits as well.

[aka_casanova]

Certain of the great apes (chimpanzees spring to mind) do kill each other over territory or mating rights or sometimes for no apparent reason. I think they're about the only ones that get violent with little provocation, though.

[yakalskovich]

Ashie said stoat, and Saph said (in AIM) that Hannibal is compared to a mink several times in canon. So yes, either creature is it, I think.

[misslucyjane]

Steve is a pit bull. Jaws strong enough to snap a bone, temperament gentle enough that they used to be called "nanny dogs."

The Ice King is a penguin, of course.

Bilbo is a floppy-haired lap dog, like a Llahsa Apso.

Lydia is a sleek shorthaired house cat--ginger, of course.

Merlin is a dragon.

Cecil is an octopus the same animal as Khosheck a big floating eye hard to pin down.

[inlovewithwords]

No comment on Henry until canon tells me more (grrrrrh) and also he's young, so I refuse to consider daemon.

Lois miiiight do okay with shapeshifty, though I don't think so. Either way, I think I'd go with peregrine falcon so she can fly and attack pigeons. Her daemon is feline, though--specifically an ocelot. I have not settled on a name for him and would welcome suggestions. I doubt she went through the witchy separation thing, but possibly. I have this image of Clark's dog--everyone knows he has a dog--and Lois' ocelot curled around the couple snuggling. I await the squees.

Tavi is just not a shapeshifter type and is refusing to discuss it. However, I'm pretty sure the canonical answer is Carna's terrifying super-wolverines called tavar. I think I may have settled on European wildcat for his daemon (apparently my characters like felines?) though I cannot find the conversation. I also have no name for her and would welcome suggestions. (Arguably he is the daemon for Kitai, but that's another discussion.) He definitely went through the witchy separation thing.
EDIT: it occurs to me that a feminine name or word associated with death would probably be most appropriate for Tavi's daemon. Too lazy to find one, though.

And what the hey, tomorrow I submit the app:
Eriond ought to pick an animal to shift into; though one of his brothers and his father didn't, the other five did (six, counting Torak). As for the other, because he is asexual gender of his daemon does not matter to me. His daemon is a male horse named Horse. Just sayin'.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Death_goddesses
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Valkyries
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Greek_death_goddesses

[inlovewithwords]

...okay I just facepalmed in real life because The Odyssey was one of my favorite books as a kid and I soaked up Greek myth like nobody's business.

ETA: Tavi's daemon is named Proserpina, due to it being the Roman name, and because she's royalty and associated with spring as well--the whole 'both produces and destroys everything' business is very Alera and Tavi both, honestly.

...Tavi's not a very nice person sometimes.

[herr_bookman]

Autor is a Chihuahua, for several reasons.

[saphyria]

Sunshine's daemon, a honeybee, alights on Autor's daemon's ear. >_>

[herr_bookman]

Yip!

[redintheledger]

Natasha's daemon is a Siberian Cat (as per icon) - looks fluffy and adorable, and yet unexpectedly athletic, plus all the normal domesticated cat attributes.

[cutting_edgex23]

X's daemon is a Great Grey Shrike, specifically Lanius excubitor invictus, from Northern Canada and Alaska.

[saphyria]

Zelgadiss' daemon would be a badger. Known for its strength and tenacity, reflecting Zels' stubborn nature and how he is unyielding in the face of danger or overwhelming odds. She would likely be more reasonable than he is, though, without his insecurities.

Sunshine's daemon would be a honeybee. Honeybees are very social creatures, as well as fearless and aggressive defenders of their territory. Mellifer would be a help in Sunshine's acceptance of the non-baking-oriented side of her life, seeing the violence not as an attack on who she is but as a necessary evil. Something that must be done, a sacrifice for the greater good.

[chanter1944]

I'm undecided about just what Sariel's daemon would be. She did get turned into a tropical bird during the critterplot, but it was never specified just which bird she was. Bad Chanter! Plus the whole pilot thing... but is that too cliche? Part of me also says cat, though whether that's a domestic breed or a smaller wild variety, I'm not sure. I know in HDM dogs are the stereotypical form for loyal folks, but that doesn't really work for her. I wrote a ficlet about this at one point, and named Sariel's daemon Alexandre in it, but that's not a complete certainty. Darn close to one, though, which I didn't realize until now. Also, even though she's Millicanonically homosexual, her daemon is male.

As for the shapeshifty thing... again, part of me says bird, though not a bird of prey, and part of me says some variety of cat. Could this be where the wildcat aspect comes in? Hmm.

[acts_of_gord]

There's always the margay as far as wildcats go; they're spotted, native to South America, small (5.7 to 8.8 pounds), tree dwellers with ankles flexible enough to let them climb down trees head-first. They've been known to mimic the cries of monkeys in order to lure in their prey, too.