The title says it true: everybody has a different way to see things. Everyone has a different perspective on everything. Everyone views things in different ways, even if the differences are incredibly subtle (that's a pun based on The Subtle Knife, title of the second book and the name of one of His Dark Materials). Anyway, in His Dark Materials (by Philip Pullman, as mentioned earlier), the main character (Lyra, mentioned earlier) and the other main character (Will, who enters the story a bit later but who is just as important a character to the story as Lyra) are not only viewing different things in different ways, but there are also different worlds (and I mean this literally because there are different worlds all around each other, but like parallel lines, they may be close, but they'll never touch) around them that they are also viewing in different ways. That's a lot of difference! Different children, just coming-of-age, viewing different things and different worlds in different ways. Wow.
Okay, so in my last post, I was talking about the changes in dæmons and what they say about the characters as people, and how Lyra felt like she never wanted to grow up and never wanted her dæmon to settle as one form of an animal. Well, things obviously changed, otherwise I wouldn't be reading this series as my COA book. Lyra didn't exactly suddenly decide to want to grow up (also obvious) of course, but you could tell her mind was being changed by the way she felt and by the things she was doing and saying.
Okay, BIG SPOILER ALERT from here on, until/unless I say otherwise.
So, Will and Lyra have been working together since pages after Will was brought into the story, which was in the beginning of book two. They've pretty much been friends, but really more like two people working with each other, trying to do something and only partially knowing what it was, and knowing that they don't know everything, and accepting and understanding that fact. But in the end, something happened. They saw something about each other, something, as the title clearly states, DIFFERENT. They suddenly saw each other differently, as people who they needed, whom they wanted to be more than friends with. In short, they ended up falling in love.
Anyway, I can right away compare this with the Romeo & Juliet unit. They both have something to do with love. I believe that this one might be more likely to be a truer form of love. It is certainly different. It's not exactly love at first sight, which makes it another kind of love. It's love after thought, realization, and, right before the realization that they were in love, stories, that were the seal on the package. Another way the form of love is different is Will and Lyra are actually (believe it or not) younger than Romeo and Juliet. Will is 13, and Lyra is 12. This surely makes for interesting love, because most people have not fallen into love as deep as Lyra and Will did (for they went very very deep. Interpret that anyway you'd like [but also know you may be interpreting it the wrong way. Think before you interpret. This point of the story was not easy to make a final interpretation on]) at that age. Will and Lyra of course did many other things that none of us will ever do in our lives, such as visit other worlds, and have ways of learning the truth by asking something nonliving. But, love is something probably all of us will encounter at some point, but most of us won't encounter it that truly until we are married, or possibly never, let alone have we encountered it already, possibly even 2 years ago. If you have fallen in that deep, I'd love for you to let me know, and I'd love to hear the stories and the memories you can dig up. If you have fallen in that deep.
Anyways, love is nowhere near the only big issue in the story, it just ends up being pretty much the biggest. Growing up and knowing who you are is about as big an issue in the story, and it's followed more closely and for much longer (love, however big an issue in the story, is only followed for the last 50 pages or so). The real way this is shown should be visible to you at this point: dæmons. Your expressible soul, in the form of an animal, which can change when you are a child and will settle as one animal once you realize who you are. Now, of course, in the matter of the story, and of Will and Lyra (Lyra especially because you know her dæmon throughout the entire story, while you only know Will's for the last 100 pages, maybe), you can guess that at the end of the series, their dæmons take one shape, settle as one animal, and you would be guessing correctly. Both their dæmons settle, but I'm not going to spoil the story as far as saying what animals the dæmons settle as and why (first of all, they don't quite settle in the exact forms you might expect, especially Pantalaimon, Lyra's dæmon). You'll have to read the series yourself if you really want to know. I do highly suggest reading the series, by the way; there's a hell of a lot going on all the time in the story, but in a good way, and it can be quite hard to put the book down at times, and the series is a favorite of mine, certainly for more than that reason. You'd understand, but only if you were me.
So, now to this point. We, as people in the real world, not the fantastical one, obviously go through many things like this. We really see who we are at a certain age, and we see each other differently, as made obvious in His Dark Materials. Anything could happen at any time at all, all at once or slowly with time. I'm a kind of person who has things pretty much happen all at once, which can easily be good, but unfortunately more easily be bad, I feel. Sometimes, though, this goes untrue for me, and that's a part of going through these things. There's a name for going through all these things, and it's not a very special name, but a simple one that, like the title of this post, says it all. It's called Coming Of Age.
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