#but... hdm is... not that.

[ssaalexblake]

would it kill the bbc to advertise their shows? just totally by accident found out hdm starts back up tomorrow having seen exactly 0 press for it, jeez

[hashtagloveloses]

the equivalent exchange of your favorite childhood book series (his dark materials and percy jackson) getting the adaptations they finally deserve but the price is that one character must be played by lin-manuel miranda

[his-dark-materials-trilogy]

[kirjavas]

never not thinking about iorek byrnison eating lee scoresby's dead body, so as not to let it rot but instead allow it to sustain an old friend on his journey. and how this act fulfilled lee's dying wish to help lyra by giving iorek the strength to go on and find her. thinking about consumption as a form of love, loving someone in their entirety and wanting to eat them whole but also love and grief being something you carry inside of you that guides you forward

[foldingfittedsheets]

My little book club is reading His Dark Materials and daemons came up while my betrothed and I were cuddling in bed.

They said to me, “Do you think anyone’s daemon is a mosquito?”

“What? No way, that’s way too small!”

“No,” they countered, “We see beetles and butterflies, Pan turned into a little lightning bug, and a moth.”

I digested this information in silence, and then my betrothed started shaking with laughter and pitched in two different voices. “‘Where’s your daemon?’ ‘Oh, it’s a tick.’”

I let out such a guttural sound of amusement and horror that I scared the cats. I couldn’t stop laughing and repeating, “It’S a TiCk!!!”

I escalated in hilarity to choking out, “The only blood it can eat is it’s own persons! They JusT gO aRouNd with a TiCk on their face!”

“I don’t think daemons need to eat, do they?” They asked.

“IT’S A tIcK!!” I responded, tears rolling down my face, hyperventilating at the best and worst concept I’d ever imagined.

[ovenproofowl]

His Dark Materials is a franchise that tackles so many branches of physics and even creates a universe where the main course of study is experimental theology which is all about identifying and explaining dark matter while also adding dimensions to string theory, the multiverse theory, and the very concept of the human soul. At the same time, it aggressively calls out the problem with the state being controlled by the church, how people are condemned for being different and religious fearmongering stops the chance at growth both on an individual and a societal scale. It’s a franchise where the heroes of the story are two children who aren’t allowed to know the prophecy they’re a part of, who save the world unwittingly simply by doing what they believe to be right. Meanwhile, the person who thought he was the hero all along, the person who rallied an army from multiple universes to FIGHT. GOD. HIMSELF. is ultimately consumed by his own ego and forced to take a back seat when he realises he’s just one tiny piece of a much larger story that’s true heart is his own daugher. The child he abandoned, the child he didn’t know or care to know how to look after. It’s a franchise about finding love even when your biological family abandon you, it’s about looking evil in the eye and seeing your own mother, it’s about good and evil not being black and white but instead a complex and cruel mixture of both. It’s about the two worst people you know banding together at the last second to save their daughter with their final breaths. It’s about exploration and learning how to grow through experience, it’s about kindness being shared across the multiverse, exchanging stories with strangers and saving the whole world by doing something perfectly ordinary and receiving no reward.

Oh, and it’s also a franchise rich with fantasy, with giant talking polar bears, witches and ghosts, angels and daemons, and a mammal-like species from another world that travels exclusively on roller skates. 

And it fucking. rocks.

[wizard-legs]

Just revamped this Golden Compass illustration I did about two years ago, and wanted to post since I’m kind of in a winter mood! hand drawn typography by yours truly :P

[nooowestayandgetcaught]

will & lyra | touch (s3 episode 8c)

[transvioletbaudelaire]

And while im on the subject the way jk rowling straight up stole dementors from philip pullman’s specters but removed all the thematic and allegorical weight from them before copy pasting them into her stories is so funny like of course you would do that

[bookishable]

it's always better to have loved.

philip pullman, the amber spyglass / guillermo del toro's pinocchio (2022) / fleabag (2016-2019) / andrew garfield / art by @catadromously / anne carson, euripides / markus zusak, the book thief / shannon barry / little women (2019) / the good place (2016-2020) / fyodor dostoevsky, crime and punishment / his dark materials (2019-2022) / @starpeace

[lonicera-caprifolium]

"... What I thought was that if you-- maybe just once a year-- if we could come here at the same time, just for an hour or something, then we could pretend we were close again-- because we would be close, if you sat here and I sat just here in my world..." "Yes," he said, "as long as I live, I'll come back. Wherever I am in the world, I'll come back here--" "On Midsummer Day," she said. "At midday. As long as I live. As long as I live..."

(from Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass)

[kaizsche]

This story starts in another world. One that is both like, and unlike, your own. Here, a human soul takes the physical form of an animal, known as a daemon. The relationship between human and daemon is sacred. This world has been controlled for centuries by the all-powerful magisterium. Except in the wilderness of the North, where witches whisper of a prophecy. A prophecy of a child with a great destiny. During the great flood, this child was brought to Oxford. HIS DARK MATERIALS, 1.01: LYRA'S JORDAN

[three-atoms]

Art for The Book of Dust Volume 2: The Secret Commonwealth

By Ivan Sergeev

[kirjavas]

i really hate when people dismiss the ending of his dark materials because it leans into the trope "love saves the world". truly, that is what the story is about, but reducing it to a cliché is doing a disservice to the point the story is making. when it says that love says the world, it's rewriting the meaning of sin by saying that giving into desire is not shameful. it's telling us to be brave enough to experience. it's saying that dying for love can have powerful impact, but living for it is much more romantic. it's saying that storytelling saves the world, because telling stories is a language of love. it's saying that the bonds we create with other people will outlast death as long as we share our memories. it's showing how a simple childhood friendship is extraordinary enough to change the course of a war between heaven and earth. is there a better way to end a trilogy that intertwines so many paths of love than with a kiss that shifts the fabric of multiple universes?

[casualavocados]

Little grocery shops and bakeries stood between jewelers and bead-curtained doors opening into private houses, where wrought-iron balconies thick with flowers overhung the narrow pavement, and where the silence, being enclosed, was even more profound. The streets were leading downward, and before very long they opened out onto a broad avenue where more palm trees reached high into the air, the underside of their leaves glowing in the streetlights. On the other side of the avenue was the sea.

HIS DARK MATERIALS • Cittàgazze The Subtle Knife / Chapter 1: The Cat and the Hornbeam Trees

[tragicotps]

Lyra wanting to be with Asriel Asriel wanting to be with Marisa Marisa wanting to be with Lyra

♺