User:JimFrank/sandbox/Ayla

Ayla is the main protagonist of the Earth's Children novels written by Jean M. Auel between 1980 and 2011 and set in a prehistorical setting. The author had just completed a university degree in prehistorical studies and wanted to use her knowledge to write a book. Let's say it had mixed results.

Why She Sucks

 * 1) Ayla qualifies as a Mary-Sue, and a bad one at that. Let's see...she's unrealistically beautiful for a cavewoman (her hair is always well taken care of and she shaves with silex stones), she's abnormally tall for her time and place (almost as tall as a modern woman), she's one of the only two people in the world to have the Cave Lion as their totem, nearly everyone she meets likes her or wants to adopt her, it turns out she's gifted with prescience and can foresee the future up until our 20th century, and her boyfriend, Jondalar, is a Gary-Stu himself.
 * 2) Her name means "moonlight" in Turkish, which is not merely unusual for her time and place, but also characteristic of a Mary-Sue, as cosmic names and short names with an "a" and a "y" somewhere are pretty common with Mary-Sue characters.
 * 3) She invented almost everything vital to humanity, including but not limited to surgery, animal taming, slings, firestarters and silex cutting, which is unrealistic.
 * 4) While the books could have been considered feminist as Ayla is a free woman and invented so many things, she also discovered men's role in the conception of children and created monogamy. Which means she invented patriarchy.
 * 5) She gets many things she didn't deserve in any way. For example, Jondalar fell in love with her even though her pet had killed his brother.