Foxy's Got Moxie

Heya! I thought I’d replied to this as a daemian who very much considers herself part of a median system and talk a bit about what that looks like and what my experiences are of that idea within the community.

The thing about daemonism is it’s a really broad range of experiences. I would say that I, personally, have seen a far greater range of what it can mean to have a daemon and what that can look like in the context of plurality than, say, I’ve seen in the tulpa community (nothing wrong with that; just as a comparison point). It’s also an idea that has two major facets; the finding of an animal form or forms that are in some way representative of your personality, and the communication with your daemon themselves.

It’s the latter aspect (lol) that is most relevant to plurality and medianhood. And importantly to note, for some daemians, the former is really the only part of daemonism they participate in; it’s all about form finding, maybe plus a name for their daemon - which is great and valid but worth noting as it’s a way of doing daemonism that really doesn’t, in unto itself, stray into plurality and instead is solely a form of self discovery, personal representation and personality typing.

The vast majority of daemians I know, however, in some way or another participate in actively talking to their daemon.

Now, there are obviously limits to the idea of putting things on spectrums, but for the sake of this conversation, let’s say you have singlet on one end and someone with DID or something similar on the other. There are daemian/daemon relationships to be found basically across that entire spectrum, but I would say them being median systems specifically is….pretty damn common.

There are, of course, also multiple types of median systems, but broadly speaking in the case of daemians we are looking at two different and autonomous individuals, who co-exist and overlap in their sense of self, rather than being entirely compartmentalised the way other plurals are.

For me and Theet, this manifests roughly thus: we have two separate personalities, and two separate consciousnesses (in that, we both obviously perceive the same things at the same time, but we see them from our individual points of view; we can have the same memories of the same situation but remember them differently. If that makes any sense). I have a strong sense of my sense of self, and a strong sense of his existence and how it is separate to mine.

For the most part, we do not have compartmentalised memories; but we do have compartmentalised trauma to a degree - there are things that I can objectively remember but I don’t feel the thing, and he does, and stuff where I feel it and he does not.

We both function autonomously relative to each other - but we are both perpetually co-conscious and our existence and functions is necessitated by the others. Our thought processes are literally just dialogue with each other; and so we are inextricably tied by that.

And our life is ultimately very much ours; we work very well as a team but in a world where we were somehow different people, our lives would not be the same as our joint life is now (Theet just said “both lives would be worse though” which is a valid take). Theet does front, although it’s not our default, but more than that he makes a lot of decisions for us and for what we do (he says to add “but Rachel is very much the majority of how we portray ourselves, personality wise, to the outside world. And the choices I make are based on the things she is capable of doing - which is much more than I would be able to do without her”). And I guess, yes, that’s a point about the personality thing; it’s much more me, although ultimately there is a lot of Theet that is “on display” via fronting or just me repeating things he says or doing stuff cause he wants us to - so the result is a mix.

So that is a rough tldr of how we function as a median system.

But how does this relate to daemonism? Well, I first found the daemon forum when I was 14. To us it never even occurred to us it was “roleplay” or anything remotely along those lines. I pretty much just read the main info on the page and Theet was just there. It felt as natural as breathing. And he was, basically from the beginning, as autonomous as he is now.

Now, everything I’m about to say next is more of a theory. It’s our best understanding of what happened, looking back. But at the time, all I thought of it was a. This is what happens when you find your daemon and b. Cool. But we are pretty sure the reality is more complicated than that. So I was very depressed when I was 14. And not only was I depressed, but I was deeply self hating, and was just in general going through a lot of stuff. And for various reasons there were a lot of things about myself and my personality that I was repressing or squashing down because at the time I thought those things were wrong and bad. And those things became Theet. Very naturally and easily. And then on top of this, I basically became someone else.

I think it would be technically incorrect to call Theet the original, because I think we are much more of a true split; the original was both of us; but I do think that as a child I was in many ways much more like Theta than who I am now. The split, or whatever you want to call it, left a bit of an empty shell up front and we sort of had to…construct who I was? It sounds creepy when you put it like that, and I’ve certainly had identity issues around it but ultimately it’s a plural thing and it’s chill.

There is literally no way to know if this would have happened if I hadn’t found the daemon forum when I did…but I think there is a good chance it would not have. I would have, hopefully, got mentally more healthy and I really think that the “parts of me” that were repressed and became Theet would have otherwise reintegrated. But the forum was there to trigger this other thing happening.

So - that was me, with daemonism. For various reasons, after being active in the daemon community from around 2007 to 2010, life got busy and I drifted out of the community. Theet didn’t go anywhere; but for nine years I didn’t really speak to or interact with other daemians at all. And then last year, I came back to the daemon community.

And there were a few things I discovered. Not every daemon was nearly as autonomous and separate as Theet was; which is what I had previously assumed. Secondly, there were a tonne of daemon experiences and they were all super personal and unique.

There have historically been some discussions of medianhood on the daemon forum, and something that is a tad frustrating is that most of those have petered out, without folks really delving deeper into the broader question of how medianhood relates to daemonism.

But from both what I’ve read and conversations I’ve had with daemians I can say that, I would argue, many daemian and daemon pairs are median systems.

There are also daemian and daemon pairs which absolutely constituent other forms of plurality, although I would say this seems more unusual and generally tied more closely to things like trauma or other events, or with people with much bigger systems.

“But at the same time, those people often end up staying somewhere within the daemonism community because that’s the framework they approached it from and often still relate to, despite some differences from traditional daemonism.” I think there is a lot of truth in this; I can relate a lot more to daemonism, still, than most other mainstream forms of plurality. In our case I think a lot of that, actually, is the specific lack of focus on a headspace; daemonism focuses a lot on projecting your daemon out into the world, rather than the world inside yourself; and as someone who neither has or wants a headspace, I feel much more comfortable with that in the daemon community than tulpa communities and honestly a lot of other plural communities where having an inner world is often…kind of a big thing.

And also, of course, my personal experience of daemonism has involved form finding; with Theta taking forms that represent my personality in some way and finding these forms has been a meaningful thing for us both; both the journey to find these forms and the way I see my personality and myself now reflected back in some of the forms which he takes.

In a lot of ways the things that make me and Theta, I would argue, median and not “more plural” (for want of a way of putting it) are things that are archetypal of the daemon experience; both being present constantly (this isn’t always the case, of course, but for many daemians the constant or as close to constant presence of their daemon as possible is very much a goal), sharing memories, whilst having different perspectives on things, and our inner dialogue being very much the dialogue between us.

Additionally, the fact, as the human, I do occupy more of the general being at the front thing, both literally and in terms of my identity and how we present, and Theet is more behind the scenes; which is pretty typical in a human and daemon context.

You could, at the end of the day, make an argument that being median is something of a logical goal of daemonism. In many ways, of course, daemians have strayed far from His Dark Materials; but that core desire to have a second part of yourself be an autonomous and different personality that interacts with your own…that’s pretty much what being a median is.

However, that isn’t ultimately the goal for every daemian, nor should it be. People want different levels of separation and the flexibility of the whole thing is part of what works well about it.

But I do think daemonism probably does provide a good way to become median, in a way that tulpamancy provides a pathway to maybe a slightly different form of intentional plurality, if people want to use it in that way. And I would say plenty of daemians and daemons are already median systems, or something along those lines or that could be described as such.

(also, I wrote this rather quickly, so I apologise for any typos or generally poor writing!)

Also for reference: http://daemonpage.com/forum/

Imagine a woman sitting on the front steps of her townhouse, watching her malamute dæmon rolling frantically in the frost-stiffened grass, dreaming of the snowfalls to come. She's clutching a thermos of coffee, and even though she hates the biting cold that December mornings bring, she can't help but laugh as her dæmon's paws wave in the air, tail wagging, his doggy grin upside-down and exhuberant. This is their ritual every time the weather turns cold; as her dæmon likes to point out, if he can put up with wearing a fur coat in the summer, she can suffer twenty minutes of 35° weather so he can cool off.

Imagine a college student with a grumpy cornsnake dæmon who grows sluggish with the cold weather. They like to coil around their person's neck while they walk across campus, hiding their small face in the warmth of the collar of their human's sweatshirt. These short, frigid days are hard on reptile dæmons, and they think dreamily about knitted tube-sweaters for snakes, or long handwarmers; anything to stave off the chill.

Imagine a young girl whose dæmon has just settled as a Peary caribou. He's still long-limbed and while he hasn't dropped his antlers just yet, he tells her that they're starting to feel loose. Every morning when they wake up, his coat is fading paler and paler; his shoulders and back still cling to the gray-brown he had started as when they first settled, but his flanks are a shining, soft white. In the foggy mornings when they walk to school, he looks almost fae-like, wandering silvery and beautiful in the weak winter light.

Imagine a boy with a small hedgehog dæmon who watches her grow lazier and rounder as the thermostat dips down. Their doctor assured them it was normal after they first settled. Hedgehogs are hibernators, she had said, so it was normal for hedgehog dæmons to be a little slower in the winter. The boy doesn't mind; he carries her around in his hoodie pocket and makes sure to sit next to air vents blowing warm air during his classes so she'll feel more awake.

Imagine a man and his lion dæmon getting caught in a sudden snow flurry. The lion keeps irritably trying to shake the snow out of his mane, since it's heavy enough on its own without the additional weight of half-melted water, while the man laughs at him. The lion points out that he's a savannah animal, he wasn't built for snow and ice. The man tells him he's quite the complainer for a supposed king of beasts. Dæmon and human end up tumbling and wrestling through the snow when the lion tackles the man, playfully growling.

Imagine a ladybug dæmon who quite likes the contrast her scarlet wing cases make against the duller wash of colors winter brings. Her human laughs and calls her vain, but she doesn't mind. Everyone sees ladybugs and thinks of summer, of slow lazy days and hazy heat, but she prefers sitting on her human's hair like a holly berry— festive, and bright, and entirely unexpected.

Imagine a woman with an orca dæmon. They live right against the coast so he can move uninhibited without ever being too far away. They spend hours together every day. The water's gotten too cold for her to go swimming the way they do in the summers, but she takes her kayak out past the waves so they can explore along the shore-line and chase each other until they're both tired, and she can no longer feel her fingertips. Only then does she head back to land, stroking her dæmon's rubbery head fondly before she leaves him. They may be forced to spend some of their time apart, but their bond has never wavered, no matter how far away he swims.

Give me daemons that bicker with their humans. That drag them out of bed in the morning when they don’t want to face the world and force their humans to face things they don’t think they’re ready for. Give me the fallout from daemons that push their humans too hard. Daemons that don’t follow the usual social protocols, that don’t like interacting with other daemons, that talk directly to other humans even though it makes some people scandalized. 

Give me daemons that are the same sex as their humans. Daemons that are the same sex as their humans and their humans realize they’re trans because of it. Daemons that are the same sex as their humans and their humans are cis. Daemons that are trans. Daemons that transition when their humans do or before their humans do. Daemons that are as fluid as their humans, that can present along the entire spectrum of their species’ sexual dimorphism, that sometimes have manes and sometimes have more colourful plumage and sometimes grow extra horns.

Give me daemons that intentionally settle as something soft because that’s what their human needs to hold. Daemons that settle as something small because they’ll both be happier if they can ride in their human’s pocket and always be in contact or always be out of the way of others or be more easily hidden from the prying eyes of others. Daemons that settle as huge, dangerous things even though their humans don’t feel very scary at all - daemons that settle as huge and dangerous things because their humans don’t feel scary or safe. Give me daemons that are misunderstood. Snake daemons that have similar markings to a much more venomous cousin but are harmless. Daemons that are huge but gentle. Swan daemons that look graceful and pretty and have broken 3 people’s arms already.

Give me daemons that pull back. Daemons that hide in pockets or in shadows. Daemons that aren’t ever going to let their human’s romantic partner touch them, and that’s okay. Daemons that don’t understand or like their humans sometimes, because they are their humans, and honestly how often do we understand and like ourselves, especially when we’re young?

Give me daemons that mirror their human’s health, and daemons that don’t. Daemons whose fur loses its gloss when their humans are stressed or ill. Daemons and humans that are both deaf. Daemons who lose a paw when their human has to have a limb amputated. Daemons who are missing a limb in every shape they take in childhood because their human was born without it. Daemons that share their human’s disability because it’s a part of them just like the way they both hate the smell of citrus or they can both curl up their tongues. 

Daemons who don’t match their humans, or who settle as creatures with abilities that let them make the world more accessible to their humans. Daemons who settle as birds so that they can grab things off of shelves for their wheelchair-using humans. Daemons who settle as something big so their humans can climb on top when they’re tired or in pain. Monkey daemons that can type on their human’s behalf when they’re having a migraine and don’t want to look at a screen. Daemons that can perch on their blind human’s shoulder and whisper directions and sights into their ear, that describe colours and prints so their humans can paint and be fashion designers. 

Give me humans and daemons that fall in love at different speeds. Give me daemons that keep secrets from their humans. Give me daemons with unusually short ranges who can’t be parted from their humans, and daemons with unusually long ones that creep people out. Give me daemons that will check your teeth after you eat a salad to tell you if you have spinach stuck there. Give me humans that will check out a library book in a genre they never read because the main character settled as the same wildly obscure species their daemon is and they’re trying to make them feel better about it. Give me human/daemon pairs who have to re-evaluate the assumptions they’ve made about some species when they meet their college roommate and they’re a scorpion and you’re a frog and you’ve read this story - but you end up being best friends. Give me human/daemon pairs that so far have only dated people with big burly predator daemons, who are absolutely floored when they instantly fall for someone with a ladybug.

like for Christmas, giving kids specialized ornaments for daemons that Settled that year to celebrate their new form

Kids and their daemons staying up as late as they can on Christmas eve to watch for Santa, speculating about what Santa’s daemon could be, and whether or not they were good enough for an extra special present that year

❄ More importantly Dæmons sharing annoyed groans with their humans when that one absolutely terrible Christmas song starts to play for the hundredth time today.

❄ Dæmons and their people wearing matching special religious clothing and jewelry for Yule.  Dæmons with intricately decorated horns and antlers, Dæmons wearing crowns and necklaces weaved from pine, birch, holly, mistletoe, etc.

❄ Families dancing and singing around the Yule log bonfire together with their dæmons and ahhh just imagine all the different shadow shapes that the dæmons and their people would cast!

❄ Dæmons reminding their person that Yule is coming up soon and they still haven’t put together an altar or prayers or any spells.

❄ Children’s dæmons changing into smaller forms in order to have a better chance at being the first to find the Weihnachtsgurke (Christmas Pickle) hidden within the Christmas tree

❄ Gingerbread People with Gingerbread Dæmons!!!

❄ Making a Gingerbread house with your dæmon, who cares if they don’t have opposable thumbs they can still help out.

❄ People with reindeer dæmons probably get teasingly called ‘Rudolph’ a lot more than usual when this time of the year comes around.

- daemons wearing tinsel around necks or paws, or insisting the daemian run some fine festive glitter through their feathers.

- the daemon of a mother scolding the children and their daemons as they not-so-subtly reach to lick the icing of the cake that they just made

- daemons sniffing at the chimney ashes on Christmas Eve/day, trying to detect a strange scent that was never there

- daemons desperately trying to stop their human eating all their Easter eggs in one sitting

- daemons giving puppy eyes at the door so they get more candy 

- daemons turning into something tiny and hiding in their humans’ clothes to complete the soulless monster look 

- a kid watching horror movies and holding their daemon when something scary happens (which is a lot!) 

- daemons sprinkled in gold glitter to emulate Dust and falling apart 

- someone dressed in a beautifully horrific costume, blood, gore, the works…but their daemon is a fluffy sparrow and kinda ruins the effect 

Ugly sweaters for christmas. Daemons don’t need them, and rarely want them, but whoever knits in the family can’t resist. Big daemons might get an ugly scarf to save yarn costs, and the tiniest needles are used to the make the tiniest ugly sweaters for little daemons.

Rainbow everything and anything for pride! Tiny flags cut out of rainbow ribbon, daemons soaring and playing and reveling in the joy of it all with their people!

Daemons decked out with beads at Mardi Gras. Cervid and horned daemons especially get extra decked-out.

Feathered daemons having the time of their lives at Carnivale amidst the many feathered costumes! Kid’s daemons take on the most colorful feathered forms they can think up, and adults without feathered daemons fashion them colorful, feathery, and over-the-top costumes. Daemons and humans sing and make music alike for twice the excitement.

Daemons confessing to their person’s crush for them on Valentine’s day. With or without their person wanting them to.

Single people start a trend of taking your daemon out for a date on Valentines, reducing people’s feeling of being left out, causing for some very cute and funny selfies, and letting a lot of people have more fun!

Kids bringing boxes of valentines to their class, and having their daemon give them out because they’re too shy. Conversely, kids giving out valentines confidently while their daemon cowers behind them, afraid of what their classmates will think.

April Fool’s day. Kids trying to fool their parents into thinking they’ve settled as something completely unlike them, daemons dressing up for pranks and jump scares, daemons playing pranks on their daemians, and vice versa.

Kids trying to hide their daemons entirely and walking around like a zombie on halloween or april fool’s to try to convince others (typically unsuccessfully) that they (*oooOOOoohh*) have… no…. daemon!