Man, I love the idea of expressing a character’s personality through association with an animal, and I love the things you can do with an associated animal that’s also that character’s soul, but I definitely feel some sort of way about daemons settling, and it’s occurring to me just now that I also feel some sort of way about the idea that settled adults can safely be severed from their daemons with no ill effects save for docility and compliance, while it literally kills children. You are not nearly so subtle as I thought you at age twelve, Mr. Pullman. (Then again, at age twelve, I completely failed to recognise any sort of religious allegory in the Chronicles of Narnia, so maybe I was just a particularly obtuse little kid.)
Rosa’s daemon is a satinette pigeon named Queenie. Sun-mi’s is a magpie that she calls Hildegard, mostly because she can. She has another name, but Sun-mi doesn’t like to share it. (When she was born, they thought she was one of those rare people whose daemon was the same sex as they were. They were right, but not in the way they expected.)
Mira’s daemon, to her endless amusement and frustration, is a rabbit – but not just any rabbit, one of those enormous rabbits that weighs as much as a person. She calls him Flopsy.
Bob’s real name is Metallah. Ian used to not use it because it was a mouthful and he likes to tease her (as she likes to tease him right back). Now, he doesn’t use it because of Connotations. And because it’s a mouthful. Besides, Bob is just such a Bob.
Alcor doesn’t have one.
It occurs to me that I had three out of four of these people rename their own daemons (and Rosa’s is debatable).
I stand by that, I think, especially for RB. If anyone is going to name your literal soul, it should be you.
Tag: rb
What are the nooses in Ian’s show that I keep hearing about? Are they like the secret codes in Gravity Falls?
It was a joke early in Reincarnation Blues about Ian trying to write jokes the censors wouldn’t cut, referencing a cut scene from Scary-oke where Dipper finds a ‘zombie survival kit’ that contains a noose. Mod M hadn’t intended for it to be a recurring thing, but TAU peeps picked it up and ran with it. People seem to have been equating a noose motif to the ‘hidden Bills’ in Gravity Falls.
Headcanon that much like Alex Hirsch, Ian does many of the voices for Mizar the Magnificent. Alcor then hears the voice for Bael (AKA, Bill Cipher in the series)- whether visiting Ian at work at the studio or watching the season 1 finale himself- and finds his impression a bit too on the nose. Especially that eerie laughter.
“I knew this was a mistake.”
Mira stepped carefully over Ian where he lay flat on his back in the middle of the living room floor. “What career-ending, life-ruining, this-time-I-really-mean-it-Mira-we’re-going-to-have-to-go-live-in-a-subway-station-and-eat-pigeon-poop-to-survive mistake have you made this time?”
Ian didn’t even raise his head from the floor to glare at her. “I made him pretty. They’ve only seen his face for a couple of seconds and they’re already losing their minds! I can’t turn him into a speaking character like this! Let alone the main antagonist! What horror have I wrought? What have I done to my poor, poor show?”
“Back up,” Mira said, settling herself on the couch. “You haven’t told me which tragic creature you’ve cursed with beauty yet.”
Ian threw an arm up to cover his eyes. “Bael.”
Mira winced in sympathy. “Ooh. Yeah. I did try to warn you.”
“And I didn’t listen,” Ian groaned, from the floor, like a ghost from some pre-Transcendence drama, heavy with regret and the full weight of responsibility. “I – didn’t – listen.” Each word was punctuated by a smack of the flat of his hand against the floor. “And now it’s too late.”
Mira prodded the sole of his foot with her toe, but Ian didn’t move.
“Is it, though?”
Ian still didn’t move, but he went still in a way that made Mira think he was listening. “I mean, you said you’ve only shown a couple seconds of his face.”
Ian sat bolt upright. “You’re right.” Mira was pretty sure she could feel her heart swell in her chest at the pure, evil delight in her boyfriend’s words. “He still needs a voice.”
“It’s gonna have to be bad, if he’s as pretty as you say.”
Ian nodded, a smile crooking across one cheek as he said, “Something annoying.”
“Nasal.”
“High-pitched.”
“And loud. Can’t forget loud.”
“Definitely not.” Ian laughed. “And insistently grating. Never letting up. Like…a pushy salesman on an edutisement. HEY KID, CHECK OUT THIS COOL SHINY THING! IT CAN BE YOURS TODAY FOR THE LOW, LOW PRICE OF YOUR SOUL!”
After a moment, Mira managed to eke out a hollow, edgy chuckle. “Yeeeaaaahhhh. That’s. That’s bad, all right.”
Ian’s crooked grin had twisted into a grimace, his upper lip curled into something halfway between horror and disgust, like a spider had just crawled out of his mouth midsentence.
When he looked up at Mira, the light caught the gold of his artificial eye, making it wink.
“Maybe not that one,” Mira said, with more cheer than she felt. “Okay. How about…annoying Texas twang?”
She could see the tension easing out of Ian’s shoulders. “Are you kidding? Rosa’d kill me. Or worse, write a revenge song.” He made a face, and flopped back onto the floor. “I’ll just have to think about it a little more.”
Headcanon that much like Alex Hirsch, Ian does many of the voices for Mizar the Magnificent. Alcor then hears the voice for Bael (AKA, Bill Cipher in the series)- whether visiting Ian at work at the studio or watching the season 1 finale himself- and finds his impression a bit too on the nose. Especially that eerie laughter.
I’m practicing with nibs and I loved marypsue’s newest fic. Expect more (and also less smudgey) art later!
Seiya drabble inspired question- what’s the approximate age difference between the Beale sisters?
About a year between Lydia and Violet, two between Violet and Joy.
“You’re being an idiot.”
Alcor’s ears flicked back and his hair puffed up a bit like an angry cat, so Mira knew that she had scored a point.
“It’s a legitimate concern,” he pointed out, sounding like he had a stick in his butt.
“No, a legitimate concern is her having my nose. That’s what I’m worried about.”
He looked at her face. “There’s nothing wrong with your nose.”
Mira frowned. “It’s massive. It’s so massive that other big noses see it and go “Stars that’s a big nose.’”
“I just want to do right by her. I don’t want to make the same mistake with her-”
“-that you did, I know, I know, you’ve said that like once a week for the last six months.” He still looked dejected and mopey so she pulled him down from where he had been hovering in the air and onto the couch.“
"I trust you. And I trust that an old fart like you can learn from their mistakes. When you meet her you’ll be meeting someone wonderful and new, just like me and Ian.” She shoved the brush into a gloved hand.
“And if you’re going to stick around and nope and pout, the least you can do is get my toe nails for me, since I can’t reach.”
–
The triplets (his Stars, his anchors, his kids) had been, when he thought back on it, almost ridiculously perfect as babies. They rarely cried longer than a few minutes and were easy to calm down. They were sleeping through the night at eight weeks and almost always kept their food down.
It was to make up, Mabel always said, for having to pop the out all in one go.
Lydia Victoria Beale was different.
Lydia had colic, “worse case I’ve seen in my career!” the pediatrician had enthused to an unamused and sleepless Mira and Ian. It was a running contest between him and Ian as to who could get her to go to sleep first, but they both really knew it was nothing they did and everything to do with Lydia exhausting herself from sobbing.
Lydia threw up almost everything she ate, and if it wasn’t for Dipper’s intervention neither Ian or Mira would have had an unstained shirt left in their closet. She changed her sleep schedule on a whim, one week sleeping through the night the next only sleeping from 10-2 in the middle of the day. She wiggled out of her onesies, peed on one of them weekly and refused to let anyone but them hold her (much to the dismay of Ian and Mira’s parents.)
She was her own little person with a stubborn personality from day one and Dipper loved her. It felt like a victory to get her to sleep or to get food down and Dipper loved her. She gave Ian his first grey hairs and he noticed they had stopped talking about having more than one kid. She had the sweetest smile, laughed far easier than any baby he had known and he loved her.
She was so… so her, so Lydia, someone new and wonderful, and it was impossible to compare her to anyone else.
(He was worried, when Mira gave him a shirt that read “World’s Okayest Uncle,” that it would bring up too many memories, far too many for a little girl to be weighed down by.
The shirt was a little too baggy and got puked on eight or nine times and it was perfect.)
Ian, how in earth did you Pavlov your health class when you were 13?
Well, it’s pretty simple! The first thing you have to consider is that a classroom full of preteens – wait, apologies to any thirteen-year-olds reading this, technically teenagers – is basically already Pavlov-trained to the bell signaling the end of each class period. It’s like half the work’s already done for you! All I did was
Mira says that if I say any more, I can be held legally liable for any damages that result. Boo. Lawyers are no fun, guys.
But! I can warn you not to do something totally innocuous, like tapping your pen against your desk, just before that bell sounds for a month or two, so that the class comes to associate it with the sound of the bell and when you tap your pen against your desk in the middle of a major exam, everyone panics and runs up to hand in their papers half an hour in and you get the highest grade in the class.
Definitely don’t do that.
I drew Mira from TAU again. I am still trying to figure out how I want to draw her..
Hey, Ian any other creative projects in the works?
Not at the moment! I’ve been really lucky to have the kind of creative control Gisnep’s given me over Mizar the Magnificent, but having this much control also means I spend about 95% of my time doing things related to the show. The other 5% is spent eating, drinking coffee, watching TLLLC (The Live, Laugh, Love Channel), convincing Mira that we don’t need twelve puppies and a hamster, training puppies not to pee on the apartment carpet, feeding the hamster, and occasionally, if I have time, sleeping. As you can see, not a lot of time for developing new projects!
Also, until Mizar the Magnificent is completed or cancelled, the mouse owns me.
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