I just handed in my last ever high school assignment, and god damn did that ever feel good. I’m not going to school today but will have perfect attendance for the last week. One day of it’s a half day for the valedictory dinner, one day of it is taken up by an excursion, and one day of it lasts for less than an hour before our official graduation thing, this means I have exactly thirteen hours left at that hellhole. Makoma and I are celebrating by taking a nice, relaxing day off—a bit of a sleep in, a long bath, wandering around the house eating junk in my pyjamas—this is also helping to cure the mild hangover induced by celebrating the last ever assessment undertaken at SPS by the class of 2007.

Having realised earlier, with a sense of impending doom, that I would need something to force me into writing and socialising and generally making myself feel vaguely useful, Makoma (darling daemon that he is) conned me into starting up The Daemian Chronicles. I can’t guarantee they’ll be even vaguely interesting or insightful, but what the hell. Here we go, starting off with a bit of angsting about form crisising.

Form crisising is when someone has settled as a form, has been that form for a long time, and then… the form goes kaput. Something feels wrong, or doesn’t fit as well as it did, or your daemon just starts spastically changing. Or, if you’re like us, all three at once. Funfun.

Makoma settled on September 10th, 2006. We know this (or, at least, we know it was around that time—we’re so incredibly bad at remembering dates that we tend to pick them loooong after the fact.) This was The Time our personality stopped changing. Now, for a very long time we thought we were settled as an orca—it fitted us well, and it was such a big, comforting form that I honestly didn’t mind the perpetual fat joke supplied. Since about August of this year, though, we’ve been having some serious doubts about the validity of the orca as a form. Le sigh.

As stated in my profile, Mak’s been taking a crapload of other forms lately, but there are two that he’s been sticking with a lot—harpy eagle, and Korean kirin (also known as a girin.)

Now, the harpy eagle doesn’t fit us at all. I’m simply not an avian-soul. It doesn’t fit, but it’s a gorgeous form and we love it and we use it as a surrogate form in order to avoid stressing over everything else. Now, kirin, on the other hand…

Mak took the form once or twice before August, then he started taking it a lot of the time. It was a pretty stylised, silly-looking Guild Wars kirin at the time, but it gradually evolved into a more traditional, albeit really ugly, Chinese kirin.

I love mythology, so I did a bit of research, and found an analysis on the forum’s done by the lovely Li. “Huh,” says I, “This fits pretty well.” Mak gives me a look surprisingly disdainful for someone I can put my hand straight through. Anyway, I did a bit of research and eventually wrote my own analysis. The general kirin traits fitted pretty well, and I wrote a bit about the different nationalities of kirin and the bearing that would have on the form… then three days later I read over it again and went, “Ho damn, the Korean kirin is us.” And it really is. I could analyse it here and now and do a point-by-point, but that would be amazingly long and boring.

The main problem I have is that I really don’t feel like a mythic, I guess. I’m a very dominant person (kirin are top of the heirachy among mythical and/or real animals in most every mythology) and while I’m pretty calm and passive most of the time, I can get very angry very quickly if it’s something serious enough (Korean kirin called typhoons on people who wronged them.) I even fit most of the traits of lion and generic sociable ungulate, the two animals that make up the kirin form. But… mythic just isn’t something I associated more than fleetingly with myself. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a mindset thing? But the form fits, and it’s comfortable…
Now that the stress of school is over, we’re going to wait a bit—til Christmas or New Year’s, maybe—before we consider kirin as a potential settled form. But I have a feeling it’ll stick around for a while.