Sudden awkward realization that Malcolm’s daemon has been “Asta” all along, I just took the spoken version as “Aster” with a British accent.

Have to go edit some roundup posts now…

(And here I was appreciating the celestial symbolism in how “Aster” means “star”!)

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Spent some time this evening reviewing AO3’s character tags for His Dark Materials, along with The Book of Dust. There’s a handy tag format that only really picked up after I originally canonized most of them, “Petname | Fullname Character’s Pet”, as in “Alpine | Bucky Barnes’s Cat“. So I redid most of the daemon character tags to match that, as in “Asta | Malcolm Polstead’s Daemon“.

Some of them, it feels like overkill — not a lot of fans are likely to forget which Pantalaimon or Hester we’re talking about. But it’s really useful for the daemons whose names only came up briefly. Or maybe were only established outside the actual canon (e.g. author interviews, TV credits). Kyrillion, Jal, Grizal, Sergi…

The review also turned up some minor characters who weren’t canonized before because I couldn’t find info on them, and some characters who got newly-established full names after they were canonized. Also, at least one where the canonical had a typo. Whoops.

I have not audited the relationship tags to make sure they all match up. (Except the one with the typo.) To avoid overloading the servers, there’s a limit on how many tags each wrangler is supposed to rename per day, and doing the rels tonight would blow way past mine.

So that’s a future project.

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I put most of my post-LBS reaction feelings as addendums in the liveblog roundup post, so I didn’t end up making a new microblogging thread about them.