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Herbal Daemons

6 years ago2,084 words

Here are a few ideas I've been exploring for what kind of story I could tell using the thing I described in the previous post.

In that post, I talked about the technical aspects of what I want to do, the mechanics of the medium, but of course it's the story that I'll be telling with it that's more important and interesting.

I knew that I wanted to tell a story that was in some way about mental health issues... but beyond that, I wasn't certain of any specifics. I didn't know whether to draw on old projects I started and got nowhere on, or whether to start something fresh.

I'm still not sure about what to do, but I've been doing some brainstorming and doodling and here's an idea I've been playing around with.



Essentially, the story would be set in some fantasy world where people who demonstrate emotional instability or inappropriate behaviour are "looked after" by "daemons" sent by God. These daemons appear suddenly in front of the person the first time they present such aberrant behaviour, and stick with them all the time from then on, acting as guardians, ostensibly to take care of them since they "need help". Once a person has daemons, though, they become an outcast, because those daemons go everywhere with them, getting in the way, and people tend not to like interacting with daemons because it gets them down (plus they look down on people who clearly 'need help' because vulnerability and inability aren't respectable).

The story would follow a girl beset with two daemons - one for her anxiety, one for her depression - who lives alone as a pariah because they prevent her from being accepted into society. Unable to bear this for any longer than she already has, she might go on a journey to literally find God to ask Him why she's been cursed with these inescapable daemons, during which she meets other people with their own daemons and they all have adventures and so on.





Daemons would come in 'species' or 'types', similar to (and to some degree inspired by) the ∞ gems ∞ in Steven Universe, for those of you who are familiar with that. So for example every person with depression would have a Hypericum daemon accompanying them, everyone with anxiety would have a Lavandula. Each Hypericum or Lavandula would look identical and would have the same general personality, but would be an individual.

(I admire and envy the design behind Steven Univere's gems, and it's something particularly interesting to me because it's the kind of bright, fantastical worldbuilding and species creation that I often saw people coming up with on deviantART, only this has ended up in a popular series and achieved wide exposure. So it's not that I'm aiming to copy Steven Universe exactly, but rather I'm walking the same general path that Rebecca Sugar and a ton of deviantART people have also walked, enjoying the process of creating a world and species with their particular rules and natures and so on.)

I originally made the daemons male, then androgynously sexless, but these ones ended up female-looking at the end of the brainstorming process. In Steven Universe, all gems are sexless but female gendered, but I don't know what I'll do myself. I don't mind the idea of them all being female because they're a bit like dryads, which are female nature spirits, but I'll see how things go. Some designs might work better as males. That's if I even stick with this idea, of course.

Daemon types/species are based on herbs which supposedly act as herbal remedies for the associated condition... which I think is an interesting idea because making them all plant-based gives some thematic coherence and interest, and because it fits with them supposedly being sent to help with those conditions. But, like with herbal remedies in general, they aren't exactly effective.

Instead, each daemon has a personality which is its associated condition incarnate. Doing it this way rather than just having monsters represent moods or thoughts, as in previous ideas, allows me to build speaking characters out of mental illnesses, which would probably be more interesting than just having mindless things to 'fight', as it allows them to comment throughout the story in the same way as the 'inner demons' of someone in the real world with these conditions might. (Also, there are parallels between this and Inside Out, though I suppose that title is actually more applicable to what I'm doing than it was to that film!)

It was a pain coming up with names for the anxiety and depression daemons, because I had to find herbal remedies that specifically treated those two conditions... and given the vague nature of herbal remedies, I found a list of things which are supposedly cures for both but nothing clear and obviously recognisable as the definitive cure for either.

I decided on ∞ Lavender ∞ for the anxiety one because I like the colour and the shape of the plant, and this is still one of my favourite things that I've ever made:



Lavendeer! From Taming Dreams.

I wanted this daemon to look like some kind of timid rabbit or something with the lavender 'ears', though maybe they look like weird antennae or something instead. I would have preferred to just use the name Lavender, but used the Latin ∞ Lavandula ∞ to fit with the other daemon.

I would have wanted the depression one to be blue for obvious reasons, but I couldn't find any blue-flowered herbs that were reliably supposedly able to help with that condition. The closest I found were blue 'scarlet' pimpernels, but they had a whole list of associated conditions they supposedly treat so it didn't seem like the best choice. Instead, I chose a herb called ∞ St John's Wort ∞, which seems to be the most definitive herbal remedy for depression that I could find. It's annoying though because St John's Wort is a terrible name for a character, and the Latin name, Hypericum, isn't exactly ideal ("Hyper, I cum" sounds like some weird sexual boast). Making the character based on depression sunny yellow with a name like that might be a source of comedy though because of the contrast, but I'm unsure whether or not it'd work. I'll continue brainstorming. She's supposed to be in pyjamas/underpants because she can't be bothered getting dressed; I know I sit around in my sleeping clothes all day due to depression! Maybe a girl in her underpants with a sunny flower in her hair representing depression is at least a relatively original depiction of depression anthropomorphised, at least!

Maybe I could go with the names Lavender and Wort, as I feel that the sounds of those might be more fitting and they're easier to remember. But we'll see! ("I'm a social outcast because I have a Wort!")

Calling them "daemons" feels irritatingly cliche, since tons of other stories are about demons in various forms, and the spelling "daemon" feels like an overly pretentious version of that. But "daemon" and "demon" are different terms, apparently. ∞ The term daemon in mythology refers to a kind of positive spirit guide ∞, and it was used in Philip Pullman's ∞ His Dark Materials ∞ in that sense. I read those books when I was a young teenager, and they stuck with me because I found the idea of people having their soul manifest as an animal 'daemon' beside them intriguing. I suppose what I'm doing here isn't entirely dissimilar. Also, daemon of course brings to mind demons, which links with concepts like 'guardian angels' and 'inner demons', all of which fit with what these are supposed to be. Phrases like "he's struggling with his demons" exist in our reality to refer to essentially the same thing as they would in this reality.

I haven't even talked about the human protagonist! I don't know much about her yet. Her appearance there is something I feel I've used multiple times because it's essentially just a collection of features that appeal to me. I like giving characters a defining colour, and my favourite colour is teal, so I'd like to use that for the protagonist. I've always liked red hair because it's regarded as unusual, something worthy of being ridiculed for in some cases ("ginger" is a disparaging term in the UK, at least), so I can empathise with that as someone who's always been an outsider. She doesn't even have a name yet, but she probably won't be called Oneira despite looking a lot like that character. I'll come up with something I like - and probably change the design - once I devote some time to her; so far I've been focusing on the daemons.

I feel that a big part of what makes some long-running stories intriguing is the world that they create and its associated lore and rules that differ from our own. Originally I intended to set this story in the modern world, with modern fashion, smartphones, etc, so then I could have the characters explore facets of the afterlife with the implication that that's how it works in this reality too. Setting everything in some fantasy world 'cheapens' it in that it might not inspire people to apply it to this world, I thought, but I suppose the worldbuilding is more important than whatever 'lesson' I might want the thing to teach.

Since flowers are a theme, I wonder whether to set it in a variant of the Alora Fane world. I feel that I've outgrown the 'meaningless' fantasy idea of six animal-people races though, so I don't particularly want to use the species I came up with for that... I definitely want to use basic humans, as they're more directly relatable, and the daemons already play the role of an alternate race to add some alien aspects to the world and interactions. Having a bunch of species would dilute things, reducing the amount I could focus on any individual one, so I'm still thinking about what to do here.

Perhaps some Alora Fane lore still applies though, like the world being a 'pocket dimension' created by a species called the Aolmna to teach 'barbaric' races a spiritual philosophy of oneness that they called 'Unisis' so as to reduce conflict in the universe, but this particular Fane (they made many) was separated from its creator 'gods' by some catastrophe and now eons have passed without them, leading some to question whether such gods exist at all, and others to practise a distorted version of Unisis in the same way that people here might practise Buddhism. This would also give a clear location for the protagonist to venture towards in the form of the Nexus, where the gods are said to reside. And it allows me to explore ideas like how different the world might be with gods that actually did actively and clearly participate in its running, which was the original thought behind developing Alora Fane as a world. Also it'd mean the whole Alora Fane thing wasn't for nothing; it's a shame that I poured a lot into that but ultimately never used it in anything finished.



So yes! Those are some ideas I've been playing around with. They're not a definite direction or anything; I just find it interesting to see others' creative processes, so I thought I'd share mine. This blog is about sharing my thoughts, after all. And of course just writing this out has been part of the process as well.

I don't know if anyone's actually interested in any of this (yet) because I know there's no reason to have any sentimental attachment to it (unlike if I was, say, talking about MARDEK), and it's probably not entirely clear what I'm aiming to achieve yet. But maybe if I stick with this, it'll be interesting to look back on this post to see how it began. And of course it keeps me occupied until the brain surgery... which I'll be finding out a date for on Wednesday. Oh how I'm looking forward to that.