Yuletide Rec Post the second: C-J

[lunabee34]

Earth's Children by Jean M. Auel

Ones Who Count and Ones Who Care
Jondalar/Ayla, Durc/Ura

When I was reading this series, I believed that Ayla would meet back up with her son in the last novel, but she doesn't. This fic resolves that dropped plot thread beautifully.


Hellspark by Janet Kagan

Reliability
swift-Kalat twis Jalakat/Tinling Alfvaen

Delicious world-building that reads as if Kagan wrote it.


Jane Eyre

lilacs out of the dead land
Jane/Rochester
Post-novel

Given the events of the novel, a true happily-ever-after seems impossible for these two, and this fic explores that impossibility.

Comments

[lunabee34]

Same same. I read the first one in middle school and finished all the available ones in high school. I waited almost ten years! for Plains of Passage and read that one in grad school, and then finally read the last one when it came out in 2011, and it was so disappointing.

She doesn't invent the patriarchy on purpose, but remember how every society is a matriarchy because they all believe that children come from the woman and that spirits from the woman and a man randomly mix to produce children. They don't believe that sex has anything to do with producing children, but Ayla does. In this book, she finally convinces Jondalar of that, and that's the beginning of patriarchy. If sex creates children, then no more indiscriminate sex. If men contribute to the creation of children, that's the end of the matriarchy and female power. It's such a bleak ending.

[kat_lair]

Ughhh matriarchy was one of the best bits about those books, why can't we have good things?

[lunabee34]

*sigh*

It is one of life's defining questions.