Work Text:
In writing the Reaction Posts of Dust, one idea I pondered for “how would I fix the Book of Dust trilogy?” is “instead of putting Lyra through a weird character arc that doesn’t flow naturally from her HDM experiences…give that arc to a new character Lyra can be narrative foils with.”
Here’s my rewrite of The Secret Commonwealth, with Lyra’s foil included.
I’m calling the new girl Bonita, so Lyra’s two new close connections can be Bon and Mal. She’s from High Brazil, because the place comes up a couple times in passing, and this would be a good setup to give some actual worldbuilding about what it’s like.
We need more non-mammal daemon rep, so Bonita’s is a caiman lizard: semi-aquatic, and native to South America. His name is Potameides. Like Pantalaimon, it’s Greek (it’s a kind of river nymph)…and it means their nicknames can be Pot(s) and Pan.
Contrasts. Book Lyra has short blonde hair, so Bonita’s is long and dark. Red-brown mammal daemon vs. green reptile daemon. Lyra goes by Silvertongue, so Bonita’s family name is Eldorado, “the golden one.”
All the random things Pan accuses Lyra of in TBoD, that we never see on-page? Bonita actually does them. Dismisses and ignores her daemon. Sneers at art and beauty, saying they’re irrational. Finds out about Lyra’s field of study, and scoffs that the alethiometer symbols are so open-ended, you can read anything you want into them.
On the other hand…Bonita is very into this book about a daemonless hero who kills God. Lyra’s first great love was a daemonless hero who killed God! She’s gone for so many years without a single person in her life who isn’t dismissive and/or scared to discuss that subject.
Turns out, Bonita is the only student besides Lyra who isn’t intimidated by the Magisterium in general. And Lyra is the only student who isn’t intimidated by Bonita. So they end up forming a weird-but-genuine bond.
Then one night, Pots and Pan cross paths while they’re both out wandering, and get a massive mutual shock: neither of their humans are in sight…
Lyra+Pan have noticed that Bonita+Pots are strained and fighting a lot. The story Pots gives now is, he goes on walkabouts alone because he and Bonita can’t stand to be around each other. He’s expecting that Pan can relate, but no — Pan goes for night walks because it helps with how cooped-up he and Lyra feel, being unable to travel for a whole semester at a time.
He just saw Roderick Hassall get murdered, though, so that’s more than enough adventure for one night! It doesn’t seem safe to let Pots stay out here alone, so Pan brings him back to Lyra’s dorm room.
For a while after that, any time Pots leaves Bonita for the night, he just comes to see Lyra. She and Pan share the backstory of how they separated, explaining how they don’t regret it, no matter how much it hurt, because it was part of an important quest to keep a promise. They also share a few details of their fantastical multiverse-crossing adventures.
(Pots won’t go into the details of his own separation experience…but he sure does hate these books Bonita has been reading.)
Lyra+Pan also let Pots observe the investigation they do into Hassall’s research + travel notes + address book. The legend of the Blue Hotel comes up along the way.
Then, one dark and stormy night, it isn’t Pots who shows up. It’s Bonita. She’s missed a couple of classes, and now Lyra finds out why: “I haven’t seen Pots in days. Is he with you?”
Lyra is known for giving good advice to friends in a crisis, like she did with Miriam a chapter or two ago. But also, a human without a daemon is a freakish sight, like a body walking around without a head. Because Lyra+Pan can separate, they’re the only person Bonita knows who won’t freak out just at the sight of her.
Lyra: So, uh, this is a bit awkward, we miiiiight have inspired him to go looking for a legendary secret city where lost daemons go?
Bonita: Wait you what now
Lyra: Also, a bunch of other canon plot has happened to us by now, the upshot of which is that we need to flee town. Our plan is to visit the addresses in this guy’s notebook. Which will, conveniently enough, take us in exactly the direction the Blue Hotel is supposed to be. Are you up for a road trip?
Bonita: I’ll go pack a bag
Lyra+Pan immediately come up with the plan that their friend needs to pass herself off as a traveling witch. Bonita’s never met any witches, so they have to coach her on how to do it.
(Another fix-it thing I’m putting in here: in this version, Serafina and her clan gave Lyra+Pan their standard support/counseling for separation ordeals. Because every young witch has gone through one, for hundreds (if not thousands) of years, they have extremely well-developed protocols for handling the trauma. Lyra tries to relay some of that for Bonita too — with mixed results, since she’s not exactly a therapist, but she does her best.)
They can still take Lyra’s canon side quest to visit the Gyptians first. Maybe the alethiometer advises her to go there, so Farder Coram can set her up with money and weapons. Considering that he’s supposed to be a super-cool secret agent, let’s have him arrange fake documents for Bonita’s new witch alias. With photos of a bird daemon, even.
Bonita brought the Talbot and Brande books Pots hates, so we get more of her POV on why she likes them. She argues “logical explanations” for weird or fantastical things, and tries to mock or minimize any emotional response.
Pan is aggravated about it, the way he is when Lyra (supposedly) does these things (offscreen) in canon…but he can also see that it’s a coping mechanism, where Bonita is trying to avoid trauma/guilt/pain by rationalizing her way out of it.
Instead of trying to make rational debate-club comebacks, Lyra engages her friend with her imagination and story-crafting skills. (The ones she regularly uses in canon, even though the narrative keeps claiming she’s lost them.)
It’s a handy excuse to include exposition about Lyra’s own past adventures! From “just found out that, when I was an infant, my surrogate mom and my high school econ teacher took me on a boat ride through Fairyland” to “my first boyfriend killed God IRL, actually.”
Speaking of other characters: Most of their quests can be pretty much the same as in canon, I think.
Marcel Delamare is still sabotaging the global rose industry, to prevent more people from learning that the oil can be used to make Amber Spyglasses. And scheming to make himself Pope. And overseeing a general wave of faith-based oppression.
Malcolm still does the same trip to investigate the Magisterium’s schemes. Just, imagine him (and all the other Oakley Street characters) having 1000% more operational security about it. (And let’s completely drop all the the Malcolm/Lyra subtext. I don’t think it’s impossible to make it work, but the details of how I’d fix it would be a whole other post, which I’m not invested enough to actually write.)
This Lyra is on-purpose tracing a list of Addresses Of Separated People. She and Bonita can still meet any/all the ones Lyra met in canon, but now it’s a deliberate research effort, instead of Lyra constantly, randomly bumping into people who just hand her plot-relevant exposition with no caveats or catches.
Alison Wetherfield isn’t one of the separated people, but she was cool. So let’s give her a different non-random reason to cross paths with Lyra: make her an Oakley Street agent. Have them trade official code phrases and everything.
Olivier Bonnevile is still doing alethiometry for the Magisterium, when it doesn’t get in the way of his own personal revenge quest. If his Force-visions work the same way they do in canon, maybe he chases Lyra+Pan+Bonita down in person, and they have to do something clever to shake him off? Or we just give the Force-visions different rules, so they send him down a more book-accurate path.
Olivier’s alethiometry is a foil to the way this Lyra actually does by-the-book readings: the kind that was foreshadowed in HDM, the kind she’s been studying this whole time. She can’t exactly haul the full set of Books of Reading across Europe, so we get to see her leaning on her own memory/understanding as she picks symbols and interprets the results.
This also means Lyra gets things wrong, in ways that affect the plot.
She asks the alethiometer where Bonita’s daemon went, and interprets the results as a confirmation that he’s looking for the Blue Hotel. But in fact, Pots is doing the thing Pan did: sneaking off to Germany to confront Gottfried Brande, with the idea of “he must be the kind of magical imagination-stealing wizard Lyra would meet on those adventures she vaguely told me about.”
Their meeting leads to an explicit revelation that Cosima isn’t Brande’s daemon. He forced a separation ordeal on his actual daemon, years ago, to prove a point about how useless and unnecessary she was. She fled and never came back.
Dramatic Reveal that Bonita did the same thing to Pots! Forcing a separation, because her reading of Talbot/Brande convinced her it wasn’t Logical or Rational to depend on your daemon’s presence in the first place.
Even after all these years, Brande still insists none of this was a problem. He got a substitute daemon to keep up appearances with the irrational public, but he’s fine, totally fine, he doesn’t even want his daemon back. Cosima tells Pots to give up, some people are just too horribly broken to ever get better, and clearly that includes both of them.
After being thoroughly demoralized by all this, Pots finally thinks about taking refuge in the Blue Hotel after all.
Misc notes on other scenes that get changed:
The Fire Elemental Guy and his Water Sprite Daemon: Lyra reacts to their sorcerer-abuser like the terrifying self-serving villain he is, instead of a source of helpful trustworthy exposition. Afterward, she and Pan open up to Bonita about the similar abuses from their parents: Marisa’s experiments with severing children, Asriel’s murder of Roger to use as a power source.
Bonita also seems deeply/personally affected, but won’t admit why.
The ferry boat crash: I already wanted this to have more tension from “the refugees react to a daemonless person with horror, as if she’s cursed or diseased.” To give the story an overall escalation of tension: show that Bonita has finally gotten good at her traveling-witch role, but it’s no longer enough to reassure people. To tie it into the broader themes: their tolerance/acceptance is suffering because of the fear and instability Delamare has been spreading.
Maybe a passionate speech from Lyra turns the situation around — the first test of her ability to counteract Delamare’s narratives with her own stories? Or maybe there’s no fixing it, but she gives Bonita some important comfort: “Something scary and upsetting happened to you, it just means they’re scared, it doesn’t mean you’re cursed.”
The assault scene on the train: Let’s actually do the Relevant Thematic Point of, Lyra successfully defends herself and Bonita by grabbing the attackers’ daemons, while Pan takes off somewhere out-of-range so nobody can grab him back.
Afterward, a shaken Bonita tries to convince Lyra (and herself), “see, this proves how having a daemon makes you vulnerable and you’re better off without one!” Escalate to “having emotions makes you vulnerable, you’re better off numb!” Then “being alive makes you vulnerable, you’re better off dead!”
And then, a tipping point…
One more Dramatic Reveal: It finally comes out why the Talbot/Brande books got Bonita’s attention at all. Some severe trauma, with parallels to Lyra+Pan’s separation and the whole Fire Elemental Guy saga: it’s related to daemons, and it’s related to magic. She never had any good way to cope with it. Unlike Lyra+Pan (or Malcolm+Asta), who found meaning and comfort in how their trauma led them to help people they cared about, Bonita+Pots found the whole thing horribly, desperately meaningless.
So Bonita found a promise of hope in Talbot’s philosophy of “nothing has meaning anyway,” and Brande’s dramatic adventure about “if something seems illogical, the heroic thing to do is destroy it.”
It wasn’t until this journey with Lyra+Pan that she ever had a real demonstration of “a person with this level of epic trauma can live with meaning/purpose/feeling anyway.”
One more parallel: just as young Pan once cuddled up against the daemonless Will to comfort him, adult Pan cuddles up to Bonita now, so she has a daemon to hug as she finally has a long-deferred breakdown.
(Possibly this culminates in “Lyra/Bonita tender comforting makeout session.” Even if it doesn’t go canon, though, this is the scene that cements Lyra/Bonita as the breakout ship of the book.)
The last two chapters: Lyra still learns about the underground trade in separated daemons, but this time it’s while she and Bonita are actively asking around for info about the Blue Hotel. Turns out, the whole story was either created or propagated by the daemon-selling trade, as a way to lure pre-separated daemons to a convenient central location.
I really want a Bolvangar-style sequence of “finding the place where a bunch of daemons are caged, and setting them free.” But with a heartbreaking twist of “the separated adult daemons don’t even bother trying to run, because they can’t imagine any better future for themselves than whatever the daemon-sellers come up with.”
Fortunately, Pots isn’t in the cages (yet). Lyra and Bonita still have to find the actual Blue Hotel setting. And they still end up with Ionedes as a guide, because I would never deprive Lyra of this A+ addition to her Dad Collection.
Turns out Pots did make it to the Blue Hotel, and he is not going to keep avoiding his human for the length of a whole second book! Heartwarming reunion scene where Bonita says she knows she’s been wrong, and of course she wants Pots back!
…And then there’s one final conflict scene, during all the chaos Pan and the alethiometer get yoinked by a griffin, and that’s the cliffhanger for The Rose Field.
(A full-length outline of an update for that whole book, with all the new narrative problems it introduces, is another long post I probably won’t write. Except to say, I think it’s still workable to have Pan and Lyra split across two separate adventuring parties for most of TRF. It just has to be for “the plot is meaningfully keeping them apart” reasons, instead of “Pan is gratuitously avoiding Lyra” reasons.)