Hmm... what are the finnic equivalents/dysquivalents of the Południca/полуднице[0]?
My poisk-fu will probably be insufficient, but my wild guess at the moment is that due to circumstances mentioned in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkhangelsk#Literature , coincidentally the reference was collected there. (Midnight to me is just a local play on being easier to temporally localise in summer than Noon[1], being just south of the arctic circle[2]. There's another russian folk tale I can't remember specifically in which young folk, on a particular saint's day, go looking for a specific species of flower[3] and if they find a —phenotypically non-existent— colour, it grants invisibility: the rural peasantry's equivalent of ex falso quodlibet?)
[1] I'll note that in my local laws, 12.00-13.00 are still quiet hours; one doesn't rely on any Mittagsgespenst but instead could just threaten to call the cops on errant workers.
[3] at least as long as they're not deflowering each other instead. Another just-so story for a Halfday Witch is related: older members of the village can easily be kept in check by threatened retaliation, but when the younger kids (acting as temporary fieldhands for the harvest) might be in danger of intruding upon Masha and Sasha's privacy[4] over midday, they are threatened with the Midday Witch, and if the small kids ask why Masha and Sasha are not afraid of her, they get told M&S are taking their chances but know enough about agronomy to answer her questions — or would Masha's mother be told she didn't make it home for lunch because she had been caught by the Midday Witch and had to recite flax culture 101?
Unfortunately also a mutually suspicious reference to Don Rumata's universe (what would be the curvature of the M-K-K curve at noon, or more fascinatingly, in each of the first book, points in the engagements of von Seydlitz, considering the battle orders, elders, implicit social rules &c ).
Being fully precognizant of the scene at the Arctic circle (haha) I was going more from vague preintuitions writ Finnic riddles. If you met a Finnic noondemon, you might be more likely to dismiss them than the Sphinx, or (aunt) Dasha, or the catcher in the rye. Slavic demigods/semidemons are more clearly natural phenomena, Finnic demigods seem to be better described as more evolved humans (1 tale of Väinämöinen vs a Christian Alia, 2 compare with the neoEgyptian scifi of the 90s-naughts 3 temporality distortion fields)
As to [1] Switzerland has only 2/3 in SMEs(?!) so I'm more inclined to guess Liechtenstein (or it's brethren) or somewhere close to an Alpine lake. Too small though..(clearly not Luxembourg).. you beat me to the comment than
the Eitgenoze is the most underrated example of an anarchic contract. Consider your (collective) privacy protected by my laziness.
The only aunt Dasha I can think of is Annie's (belle-)aunt Darya Alexandrovna? Or am I barking up the wrong (unhappy) family tree?
Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be Vronsky
'Cause he'll always flee home and he's only alone
Even with someone he loves
(not that I would have done any better than Alexei Kirillovich: while I always claim in writing that Yuri would've done much better to just go to Paris with Tonya, and I bear no resemblance to Mr Sharif myself, somehow my muses have tended to resemble Ms Christie far more than they have Ms Chaplin)
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpV-Ii0TJm8&t=370s (Amy Kane deals death at High Noon, but she has more in common with Han Solo than a noonday demon, as she doesn't ask any questions first)
Indeed, it's ... Critical .. to identify points with, uh, unexpected curvature.
?HN (?Lagniappe of the halfDay):
KidW,o
WitH,d?
[0]https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=762
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40437206