#Iofur Raknison

[unchangingwindoww]

1.04 // 1.07

[beasanfi1997]

Iofur Raknison Is the main antagonist in the Golden Compass, Lord Boreal Is the main antagonist in the Subtle Knife and Metatron Is the main antagonist in the Amber Spyglass but the Magisterium are the real villain in his dark materials franchise from la belle Savage to the Third book of dust

[iviarellereads]

The Golden Compass, Chapter 20 - Mortal Combat

(THIS PROJECT IS SPOILER FREE! No spoilers past the chapter you click on. Curious what I'm doing here? Read this post! For the link index for His Dark Materials, read this one! Like what you see? Send me a Ko-Fi.)

In which someone gets a new name.

Bears have rituals with regard to combat between themselves, so there's much to-do while they wait for Iorek. Iofur looks so clean and rested and powerful, and his claws are un-gilded and sharpened to razor points. At one point, Lyra has to excuse herself to weep with the fear that she's set Iorek up for his death. His steel armour also gets polished and placed ever so carefully upon him.

When she asks, the Alethiometer simply says she must trust Iorek, and as she keeps asking, it almost seems to rebuke her for asking the same thing so much when it's given her an answer.(1)

However, Lyra is able to observe that much of the court's behaviour is driven simply by what Iofur finds fashionable. Some of the bears carry dolls like Iofur's, and are confused to realize that he's discarded his. The bears who follow Iofur are no more sure of what they are than he is, and that uncertainty is a weakness.

Eventually, Iorek finally arrives, and Lyra says she should go pretend to still be faithful to him as his daemon. Iofur says yes, she should encourage Iorek before his death. When she walks across the battle ground to him, Lyra weeps and weeps to tell him what she's done, but Iorek only asks if she really tricked Iofur. She did, and he names her Lyra Silvertongue, and says that a fair fight is all Iorek has ever wanted from Iofur.

So, after more ritual calls to each other, the bears fight: Iorek in his rusted meteorite armour, Iofur in his steel abomination. And despite Lyra's fear, it was always clear who would win. Iorek calls out to the bears asking who their king is, and they call out his name, and throw all their human decorations to the ground, finally bound to a king who knows what he is, what they all are.

In fact, the bears get so caught up in the excitement that they start tearing down the palace, but Iorek hears Lyra calling for them to stop, and when she tells him about the prisoners, he has some bears sent inside to free them first. Then, having nothing better to do and needing to rest, Lyra curls up with Pan in a corner of the arena, pulls snow over herself as a blanket, and takes a nap.

She is, of course, awakened some time later to see Iorek. But when she's brought to the place where he's gathered with some other bears, the first person she sees is Roger, and they rush to hug. The human prisoners are building a driftwood shelter, and seem glad of having something to do after the cells. A bear even slices open a seal and tells Lyra and Roger which bits they should eat, and with a decent meal in her, Lyra finally starts to warm up.

Now, she's brought before Iorek, to hear the situation as he's being told it. Generally, it's that Mrs. Coulter had great influence over Iofur, and gave him the drug that he used on the bear Iorek ended up having to kill, among other things.

Iorek asks Lyra to ask the alethiometer a few things. While they wait for a torch so she can see it, she asks what happened to Lee Scoresby and the witches. Iorek tells her, but adds that the alethiometer will be more accurate about where they are now. Indeed, she confirms that another clan of witches attacked, and Lee soared away with his balloon after Iorek and Roger fell out, unharmed.

As to Mrs. Coulter, the alethiometer does something odd and Lyra has to puzzle it out, but decides it means she's flying this way, with machine guns. Some witches are about to tell her about Iofur, and they learned it from the cliff ghasts, so there are spies all about. She's coming to kill Asriel, so she can take over his plan, because she fears what he'll do with the power of another world but believes she can control it instead, and she's coming for Lyra because she wants something Lyra has, something they need for the experiment. Lyra supposes again that it must be the alethiometer, but something about the conclusion troubles her.(2)

Either way, if Mrs. Coulter gets her way, they'll all die, a conclusion that makes Lyra so tired she almost thinks dying would be a relief, but Iorek being so brave beside her makes her at least act brave, too.(3) So, they have to take the alethiometer to Lord Asriel at once. Lyra takes another nap while Iorek prepares to go with her and Roger.

=====

(1) There must be some kind of consciousness behind it, right? To be doing that? But what sort of cosmic ray could be conscious? (2) What else does Lyra have that they could possibly need? (3) Fake it til you make it, little one.

[69thatstheweednumber]

a thing that is currently making me a lil insane about miss huang going to svalbard is that svalbard is the place in the his dark materials books where the experimental station is set up thanks to mrs coulter’s manipulation of iofur raknison. in hdm, the station is the place where children get their daemons, their souls, cut away before they reach puberty, so they are forever inert as people. more importantly to the church (the greater scope villain/antagonist of book 1 and much of the series as a whole), children who’ve had their demons cut away are also freed from sin.

and, most importantly, in the reveal scene where lyra our protagonist and we the audience finally learn that this process is the “intercision” other characters have been talking about, the narrator specifically refers to tony makarios, the boy who has been cut from his daemon, as “a severed child.” and iirc those are the last words of the chapter where we learn this.

and uhhhh lemme tell you. miss huang going to a place that shares this name, coming in the same ep as “she’s one of jame’s” coupled with what we know about harmony and hampton’s child labor in the ether mill and how kier met imogen when he was a stewMAN and she was a swabGIRL. well i don’t feel great about all these implications i’m finding i tell ya the fuck what

[herxus]

Iofur Raknison: Mrs Coulter decieved me! Lyra Belacua: She deceived all of us. Thats it. Thats the show.

[blackfeatherdragon]

Oh I think His Dark Materials (The original book) pulled this too!

Like. It spells out exactly what was being done to the kids and their daemons in the north long before the reveal hits. We get the conversation in the Retiring Room over 'whole children', we get Lyra speculating that the Gobblers were sawing kids in half up north, but we just brush that off as Lyra being an imaginative kid herself. We're shown exactly how important daemons are in the setting of HDM, how it's taboo to touch someone else's daemon, how daemons are the literal physical manifestation of a person's soul, we're told how Iofur Raknison, the king of the panserbjorne, desperately wanted a daemon to emulate the humans.

But then we get to the scene where Lyra and Pan find little Tony Makarios in the fish shack and it all becomes clear. They really were cutting children in half in the north, via severing their connections with their daemons. In the world of HDM, a child who went through intercision really is half a child, a child who acts lobotomized because they're no longer whole.

oh i never know how to explain this properly but i looooooooooooooooove when a story just absolutely TELLS you something and it’s so obvious it goes right by you. like the equivalent of hiding in plain sight. i’m thinking in the original cut(?) of alien where they showed the full xenomorph, crouched and ready to pounce, but because we’ve never seen it before, we can’t tell what it is and interpret it as part of the spaceship. or it’s a detail that seems so out of place or wildly insane that you automatically ignore it and assume you misinterpreted until that exact detail comes back in a big way? (like when noah the raven boy flat out tells everyone he’s a ghost and they take it as a joke, so the reader does too) is there a tvtropes name for this i’m obsessed with it

[his-dark-materials-trilogy]

The Golden Compass by Marco Giorgianni

Part 5

[daydreaming-scribe]

It sucks that The Golden Compass was made so poorly that it needed to be rebooted as His Dark Materials because the original casting popped off by having Sam Elliot, Ian McShane, and Sir Ian McKellen as Lee, Iofur, and Iorek and they weren’t gonna get any better.

[future-crab]

The 2007 Golden Compass movie is so fascinating to me. Cause, like, it’s so sanitized, it’s so mangled, it’s scrubbed completely clean of anything children or parents might find challenging. They cut out a huge chunk of the final act so that it could have a weirdly abrupt happy ending.

And yet. That bear still did get its jaw ripped off. In this totally bland family-friendly movie, a talking bear gets the entire lower half of his face torn off. THAT’s the place they chose to remain book-accurate. Someone in the studio chose a very strange hill to die on.

[hatters-workshop]

I thought you guys might like to see my little HDM shrine in my book case. I finally got some plastic book covers (though they are a little too large but it's better than nothing, right?) Which allowed me to slip my own cover designs in and it makes me so happy. They both look like they could be legit, though Northern Lights is still my favourite.

I'm still trying to work up the energy for tackling the illustrations for the Subtle Knife. I still need to re-read it, as I just haven't found the spoons so far this year.

[biwonderland98]

I... I really feel that this little image of a panserbjørn in my copy of Northern Lights doesn't quite do the armoured bears justice... just me?

[iviarellereads]

The Golden Compass, Chapter 19 - Captivity

(THIS PROJECT IS SPOILER FREE! No spoilers past the chapter you click on. Curious what I'm doing here? Read this post! For the link index for His Dark Materials, read this one! Like what you see? Send me a Ko-Fi.)

In which someone has to do some quick thinking.

The bears escort Lyra to a great palace. The outside is all carved with images glorifying Iofur, supposedly, but Lyra only knows this from the bear sergeant tells her because the birds have coated it thickly with excrement. Inside, there are checkpoints with bears with gleaming armour with feathers in their helmets and all. They all look like toys compared to Iorek. There's also a reeking smell of rotting carcasses and dung, besides the blubber lamps every few yards for light ineffective enough that she can hardly see what she might be stepping on.(1)

Lyra is put in a small, damp cell, and Pan becomes a firefly to give them some light. She asks the alethiometer where Iorek is (a day's journey away, but rushing to Svalbard for her, with Roger). But, there's someone else in the dark with her, who startles her out of her reading-state.

Jotham Santelia was a professor at Gloucester. When he learns Lyra's from Oxford, he starts slagging on one of the professors there. He's quite mad, probably from the torture and deprivation, but Lyra still finds him useful for information about the current state of the bear kingdom.

He tells her Iofur invited him here, intended to set up a college to gain prestige in the human world. But, something went awry, and now Santelia is locked up. She wrangles him around to the subject of Iorek, and he tells her Iorek is an outcast, he has no rights as a bear, not even to challenge Iofur. And finally, she gets out of him that Asriel is a forbidden topic, because Iofur is playing both Asriel and Mrs. Coulter against each other, but Santelia believes it's going to fall apart soon.(2)

Lyra sits back on the stone bench in the cell, and finally remembers what the professor Santelia hates, the one back in Oxford, once said about Iofur Raknison back in the Retiring Room: he wants a daemon more than anything else in the world, to be a human king. So, she forms a plan, a framework for her next set of lies.

Just as she's nearly asleep, some bear guards come to bring them some seal meat. Pan hides as a mouse in her pocket, while Lyra convinces them that Iofur will want to hear what she has to say. Finally, after a long wait, she's presented to Iofur, who looks somehow a little more human than other bears, and who wears a great gaudy necklace and has his claws gilded. Lyra is terrified, her plan seeming so small in comparison to him… but then she sees a doll on his knee, where a daemon might rest, a doll that resembles Mrs. Coulter, and she knows this will work after all.

Lyra tells Iofur she's Iorek's daemon, given to him by Mrs. Coulter at Bolvangar, and she looks human because she's an animal's daemon, the way humans' daemons look like animals. She says Iorek is racing to get her back, but she had to come to Iofur because she wants to be his daemon, because he's so big and strong and clever, and the only way to do that is in single combat.

Iofur demands proof. Lyra uses the alethiometer (which she passes off as a daemon mirror for scrying) to tell some truths to the questions he asks her. He asks what the first creature he killed was, and despite her disgust, with Pan's encouragement she flatters him at killing his own father. He asks what Mrs. Coulter promised him, and Lyra confirms that there was a promise to have Iofur baptised as a Christian, despite having no daemon.(3) Lyra also adds that Mrs. Coulter hasn't done this, and that the Magisterium would never agree anyway, at least not until Lyra becomes Iofur's daemon and then they couldn't say no.

Having also asked how far away Iorek is, Lyra tells Iofur that if he wants to challenge Iorek for his daemon, the guards will have to not attack him as he approaches. She even helps him with a story to justify it to the guards, and almost loses perspective when she realizes what power she holds over him, except that Pan bites her finger.

Then, she steps back modestly, and watches the bears prepare the combat ground, and hopes that Iorek isn't too tired for the fight when he catches up.

=====

(1) And here we get the real story after all, not precisely this line but these first few pages of the chapter. Iofur is trying to be something he's not, and it's a farce on every level to everyone but him. On the one hand, I think it is important to learn that trying to be something other than what you feel you are is foolish. On the other, it's all too easy to twist that into believing that you should never try to become something different. Like, the truth is somewhere between those things. It's silly to pretend to be a temporarily embarrassed billionaire when you're working under the poverty line, but it can be literally life-saving to trans your gender and find your truth, and I don't want to let this chapter pass without a bit of that nuance. (2) Very likely, seeing how close we are to the end of the book. (3) What a fascinating distinction to make.

[inthefaceofadaffodil]

I can’t believe that His Dark Materials is really going to give us Lyra playing Iofur’s dumbass like a cheap kazoo, Iorek slapping him stupid a n d Will potentially yeeting Thomas’s rat ass down the stairs all in one episode. To make all of this even better the episode is airing at 9 p.m instead of 8 p.m aka after the watershed which means shits gonna. get. GORY.

[bonezmcgee]

Ok I know this is way late to the party and im literally the only one that cares but where'd the bear Armour in hdm go?? Like, , it was meant to be akin to a bear's soul. That's why its such an important characteristic of Iofur that he wants modern human armor, not the sky iron that's so sacred to the bears, that Iorek has, and it plays a huge role in his eventual downfall. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk

[meyerlansky]

his dark materials, episode seven: “the fight to the death” ↳ i'm frightened by everything. being frightened of you is just one more thing.

[life-on-morse]

“You are no longer Lyra Belacqua... you are Lyra Silvertongue.”

HDM Fans: