r/hisdarkmaterials

Context: first time I read HDM was about 5-6 years ago, about age 30, loved it, very deep, my friend read them as a teen and recommended them.

This past year I decided to do a full re-read in the lead up to paperback TRF release.

I read OUSTITN then The Collectors, then TBS, HDM trilogy then Lyras oxford then Serpentine.

Straight into TSC - incredible book, I felt like it was a true, hurtful, beautiful sequel, that dealt alot with adulthood, the changing world and loved the further depth of the secret commonwealth and Lyra's changed personality as an adult., as well as the further exploration of Lyras world.

Then TRF - absolutely epic, touching, the whole book adds a layer of maturity and depth and understanding, the ending was a perfect mirror to the ending of HDM, even down to the last page, the last conversation Lyra and Pan have in HDM and the conversation Lyra and Olivier have (Olivier, what a character btw!).

I'm sure lots of fans have their understanding of the ending, mine is Lyra is finally who she should be, could be autobiographical in some ways to Pullman, maybe he sees himself as Lyra, like she is in someways his own daemon, but the last line, wow, tied it all together emotionally, not treating the writer to a cringey epilogue of "heres what happened next" but lets you have your own story.

I do in my head canon see Lyra and Malcolm becoming a couple, the world having a power vacuum of the Magisterium that corporations will fill, as with real life the fears of control will be there, but there will be more and more people open to hear Lyras stories that I think she will tell and write, similar to how many young people were impacted by the hyperchrosmians (itself a mirror parallel to HDM), I believe Lyras stories will travel the world, the Authority will finally lose a grasp over the souls of the world. I do think the rose trade may carry on, maybe Mustafa Bey company involved somehow.

Anyway, as with everything on reddit, just had to get my thoughts out.

I am re-reading the original trilogy for the nth time, and I am emotionally wrecked by Marisa and Asriel’s >!sacrifice.!<

>!Maybe this is just my own wounds from my useless piece of shit addict parents, but the way Marisa and Asriel sacrifice themselves for Lyra, after doing pretty much nothing/actively hurting her for her entire life, is really messing with me. Only a few paragraphs before, in the adamant tower, Marisa told Asriel that nothingness was her deepest fear, even worse than being dead. And then she makes the choice to do just that anyway.!<

>!Using her own corrupt nature to fool the Metatron is a “twist” that always impressed me. Ofc this series “for children”’handles a lot of mature themes, but this one - the complexity of human nature, that none of us are simply good or evil, it’s all shades of gray, people do sometimes change - is particularly interesting to me. Marisa has always been cruel and power hungry and selfish, her final sacrifice doesn’t undo her nature, but it’s what makes her sacrifice possible. My anti-hero queen!!<

>!And the fight with the Metatron is so intense, their desperation is palpable, their injuries visceral (shoutout Asriel being able to feel his crushed skull) and Marisa’s final leap into the air - it all has me sobbing lol. Christ it’s epic.!<

Anyone else feel the same way?

I just finished the Rose Field and like most of you I was equally confused and disappointed. I read many of the threads complaining about what went wrong from months ago when it was first published and I don't want to just repeat those critical takes but I do want to vent my spleen!

I should say I really enjoyed La Belle Sauvage and most of the Secret Commonwealth, so this isn't even a criticism of the Book of Dust Trilogy as a whole. It just felt that he lost courage in what he was building during the first two books at some point during the writing of the Rose Field (and the long gap between TSC and TRF would seem to buttress this take) and afterwards kind of muddled his way to a quick and jumbled ending to just have the whole thing off his plate.

The former is my opinion as the sudden deaths of Delamere, the lack of confrontation with Thuringia Potash and the disappearance of the Gryphon and Witch armies seem to show he got cold feet at the last moment. If he did perhaps he felt he didn't want to write another dramatic battle with existential stakes like in the Amber Spyglass? Or perhaps he couldn't get his head around his own concept of the Secret Commonwealth and how it related to the Dust?...why else reintroduce openings to parallel universes which you already established endangered the entire multiverse and could only be opened with the Subtle Knife!!!

But what do you guys think he wanted to achieve with the Rose Field?

&gt;!will and lyra absolutely did not have to leave each other at the end. there’s no solid reasoning for it. the whole “we can only leave ONE window open” is the weakest reasoning i’ve ever heard.

there have been an apparently uncountable amount of windows left open between worlds for 300+ years causing issues with leaky dust and spectres and who knows what else, but they can’t leave a single other window open for the remaining lifespan of two human mortals for MAYBE another 90 years? at most?

like just close it when they both die, and call it a day. they both sacrificed so much to save the known multiverse at the age of what, 13? and xaphania couldn’t give them one little break?

they deserved their happily ever after. just finished my 10000th reread and i’m just mad about it. i think i’ll always be mad about it! if i’m missing something, please tell me because i crave the closure.!<

The TV show is a way better adaptation, but there's something about the set design, props, music and overall visual construction of the film that just captures the imagination better for me. It's the world I imagine when I read the books, and I wish that they'd gotten to adapt the whole trilogy without studio interference.

Hello everybody, I apologise for not having posted in quite some time - I just took some time for a holiday, and now I am back, and my story is back as well. Chapter 9 is now posted on AO3 for your reading pleasure. Thank you! ;)

I read the series when I was 14, and I decided on re-reading the series after realizing how much it impacted me and my worldbuilding style recently. It was my favorite book series, and possibly under all the short term attention span still is.

Before reading this part, I both expected this would be something I'd absorb differently than before, but I didn't expect it to hit me as it did. I was reading "The Lost Boy" and "Fencing" at a café, and when the moment Lyra realizes in horror what happened and what intercision means and what it does to kids, my eyes just started to tear up.

The word kept ringing in my head. "This is an egregious wrong. This is something that should not have happened. This is not right." And I was trying not to sob.

So this post is me reflecting on why that is, because I remember enough that a lot of this book is about growing up and realizing how much you change upon doing so. My reaction when I was a teen wasn't as intense as this, so the difference makes me wonder how much growing up changes us emotionally. I'd like to think this means I'm more sensitive now and I have a clearer moral compass (Edit: a golden compass, you could say). And I think I'm thankful for that.

Has anyone else experienced something similar when rereading the book?

This is the best place I know of to try to have a discussion about this, so please be respectful and just ignore this post if you just disliked TRF or its ending specifically and have nothing to say except "I didn't like it".

I understand a lot of people didn't like it, OK, good for you.

I've gotten quite a few replies on a previous post however from people who did love it, so I know you are out there and I'm hoping to hear from those people.

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To me, the best part of the ending was how many mysteries and questions it left open ended and up to the reader's imagination. It's left me replaying through the ending chapters in my head for weeks since finishing it, in a (good) way no other book I've read ever has. That said, I think it would be fun to hear some other people's speculations on what potential answers to some of those questions might be.

Feel free to share any thoughts or speculations, or responses to mine below.

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Having read a few discussions of this, I haven't seen any mention anywhere of the idea that the alkahest is literally the material of the subtle knife and the alethiometer needle, which is strange to me. To me this connection seems obvious and clearly intended by Pullman. Of course we're also supposed to understand that "nothing is just what it is", but still.

When the voices in the Blue Hotel tell Lyra that the alkahest destroys everything, the immediate following scene is her discovering that the needle can cut through anything. My speculation is that the angels were correct/truthful that cutting openings between worlds creates spectres/mental illnesses, and furthermore that the entities "from between the good numbers" (hinting that they're from a bad place), may in fact be spectres.

The idea that the doorways are "good" is supported by the witches and gryphons saying that the air has been turning bad as they have been being "destroyed", but the witches also say that the winds have been changing for the worse for a much longer time... That makes no sense if the doorways are the source of the good air. It does make sense if doorways are the source of bad air, and they have been being created over thousands of years, and if the explosions are in fact creating hundreds of tiny doorways, letting hundreds of spectres into the world, where before there was only one.

This all fits perfectly with the HDM trilogy; rather than creating a contradiction and undermining the original trilogy, the metaphysics remains consistent. From HDM we have vague explanations that dust and angels can pass between worlds without needing doorways; if this is true, Lyra's hypothesis that the doorways are needed for dust to flow to fuel imaginations etc. falls flat.

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Another unanswered question at the end of TRF regards what is going on with the ailment afflicting Dr. Strauss, with the people with dead or mostly dead daemons, including the lady who took over Mustafa Bey's business, etc.

One thing that seems apparent is that what happened to Strauss has nothing to do with having traveled there specifically. Strauss's daemon is still alive, despite his illness, while people in the rose world seem physically fine even though their daemons are dead. Also, there are people in Lyra's world afflicted with the same "dying daemon" disease without necessarily having spent time in any other worlds.

That tells me two separate things are happening. Strauss may have been trying to warn people about the daemon death disease, he may have believed it was coming from the rose world like a plague, but that wasn't what was wrong with him. What was wrong with him IMHO is that it matches perfectly with being attacked by a spectre directly.

The daemon death disease, on the other hand, to me is not the direct result of spectre attack. It's also not the result of exactly what happened to Lyra and others whose daemons ran away or who ran away from their daemons, those daemons didn't die, so it's something else.

To me the most significant scene to understanding this is when Dilyara shows Pan that dust won't go near the dead daemon. So the question is, for afflicted people whose daemons aren't quite dead yet, does dust also struggle to go near those daemons? Or does dust only have an aversion to fully dead daemons? My theory is that the disease has to with the daemons themselves, not so much the people, though technically they're the same person.

My theory is that dust does avoid afflicted daemons that are only "infected"/partly dead - the disease is defined by dust avoiding daemons. The reason their people are ignoring them is that the connection is already cut off. So where does it come from?

Well imagine the reverse of Lyra's situation. Imagine if the daemon loses its imagination, imagine if the daemon stops believing in itself... I think that's what's going on with this "disease". That's what seems heavily implied when Pan speaks with the daemons at the research facility.

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I think I'll stop there for now, I have other thoughts and ideas but I'm really curious what people might have to say about my interpretation of the story or their own versions of what was meant.

Thanks to anyone who read this far respectfully, hope to get replies from people who actually want to deal with the material and talk about what Pullman may have meant/intended with the story.

I like fantasy worlds with armored bears and witch queens. The second was Oliver twistish and I was really looking forward to reading everything in this universe after the GC. And now I’m discouraged. Should I continue or is this just not for me?

I'm curious, has PP said anything about TRF's ending or made any comments on how the fans reacted to the book or anything like that? I would google it but google is evil and other search engines suck.

Say you live in the world of His Dark Materials. You decide to go out hunting with a few of your friends. You and your friends get into an enclosed spot where it's difficult to immediately see each other. Suddenly, you detect a rustle in the bushes. You prepare yourself for the coup de grace, and deliver a swift blow.

And suddenly, one of your friends just falls over. Dead.

Because the "animal" you killed was their daemon.