One thing that’s fascinating about Daisy as a character is that she’s so powerfully slow. Not in wit or intellect, but physically, as a hunter. She knows her power and she has no need to rush or flail, it’s easy to be calm when you have no difficulty asserting yourself.
This makes it all the more clear when the power slips from her grasp. She rushes, fumbles, makes mistakes. There’s very few times that she slips up, early on at least. Aside from a few select moments she maintains the gravitas and power of a wolf or a bear all the way from her introduction to the coffin, but after the coffin things change.
Basira has every reason to be upset at her change, because after that trauma Daisy becomes a different thing entirely. Her demeanour changes, she speeds up, she’s skittish, she loses her strength. She’s no longer slow and certain but weak and clingy.
It might feel wrong to want that slow and steady person back but relationships are like music and if the tempo changes the balance shifts and that can lead to terrible things, things that cause you to lose eachother.
Am I saying that perhaps if Daisy had somehow managed to avoid traumatisation, keep her tempo stable, that she wouldn’t have had to sacrifice herself?
Maybe.
Even in her early moments of irrationality there is a swift calculation to it, an understanding. If Daisy had been able to keep a grasp on her fierce intellect perhaps the violence of the hunt could have been suppressed!
But no, what use is there in thinking like that? After all, animals can never live as long as humans.
I can never decide in my mind what Daisy looks like when she succumbs to the hunt, and i rather like it that way. Becoming animalistic, losing that grasp of humanity that even monsters get to hold into us a terrifying concept.
Everyone knows about werewolves- whether or not you pretended to be one as a child everyone knows that to be a werewolf is to be cursed. To be such a beast that you lose control over yourself; and in turn you curse your loved ones by allowing them to watch you turn into something beastial and other.
Those of you who grew up engaged in spirituality will also be aware of the bone aching horror of seeing the wrong spirit in a body. Watching that canine thing look at you with human eyes, say things to you that a creature of that calibre should never be able to articulate, yet it says these things to you nonetheless.
Equally, many know the fear of seeing a thing that may once have been a human and for all intents and purposes appears to be, but again is simply wrong. The soul is misshapen and all that you can see in the eyes of the one you once loved is an undying, uncontrollable hunger. Even the positive actions it takes are to feed the hunger, you can’t trust a person if you do not see a person when you look at them.
Whatever variation of these things daisy became after laying down her life to serve the hunt, it placed Jon, Martin, and most of all Basira in a place of nauseating terror.
To see something that’s wrong, beastly, warped, is enough to hold you where you stand, but to see someone you love devoid of all that really makes them themself? Agonising.