On Sunday night, the first episode of the much anticipated His Dark Materials arrived on the BBC. Obviously it’s everything you could ever want, the perfect telly to watch on a cold Sunday evening, curled up on the sofa with a bucket of red wine to enjoy some mild peril. But, predictably, while the story is partially intended to encourage readers and viewers to question the nature of organised religion, what it actually made lots of us question is how our sex lives would be affected if daemons were real.
For the uninitiated, a daemon is a sort of inseperable animal companion who is a window into your soul. Throughout your childhood the daemon changes as you change, but when you reach adulthood it finally settles into a permanent form. Viewers were quick to ask all sorts of questions when the show went out on Sunday, like ‘what if your daemon was a fish?’. Technically the answer to that question is that if you have an aquatic daemon you have to stay near or in the water for your entire life, as people aren’t able to be physically separated from their daemons (apart from Mrs Coulter but that’s a whole different story).
Another hot topic was (of course) what happens to your daemons when you have sex. Do your animals just kind of sit there awkwardly watching each other and waiting for it to be over? Or do they stare at you in an off-putting manner which anyone who has a pet cat will be familiar with? Presumably the idea that your daemons would have sex with each other is ruled out by the fact that you could be a couple whose dameons are respetively a butterfly and a bear.
According to people who’ve read the books, later in the series it’s made clear that while two people are having sex, their daemons frolic. The inference seems to be that they interact in a similar way to their humans, so if you’re having nice gentle friendly sex they’ll curl up together.
Everyone being able to see a physical manifestation of your soul would also come with downsides. There would probably be quite a lot of daemon stigma. Imagine getting ready to take your new boyfriend to dinner with your friends and in the Uber on the way there fretting about how your mates will react when you arrive with your new boo and his daemon, which happens to be a worm.
You’d find yourself sitting around drinking wine with your girlfriends and asking whether they would consider going out with someone who was sweet, kind, loving and charming, but just so happened to have a slug daemon. ‘He’s so great to me, but there are slime trails over literally ALL of his clothes.’
Carrie Bradshaw would have met a guy who was perfect, but for the fact that his horse daemon just wouldn’t fit in her Manhattan apartment. ‘I couldn’t help but wonder – if his daemon didn’t fit in my apartment, could he fit into my world?’
Dating apps would be filled with people who ask you not to judge them by their daemon because actually mosquitos are really misunderstood. Think-pieces would be written about the lost generation of men who can’t get a shag because the physical manifestation of their soul is a pigeon.
If you can get your head around the idea that you’d have to have sex in a room while your otter is play fighting with someone else’s mallard, the daemon thing would come with benefits. Imagine all of the time and stress that you’d be able to save yourself if instead of dating someone before realising that they’re a cockroach, you could just look at the actual cockroach which was sitting on their shoulder as a literal manifestation of their soul.
Though, if we’re totally honest, we’d probably convince ourselves that the cockroach was a symbol of hardiness and resilience and date him for six months anyway.