AYLA*
Please note! Everything I write on this blog will contain spoilers!!!
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I confess, I love a monster.
A monster in her being and a monster in her mind. She grew into this monster across hundreds of years, committing atrocities and refining her ingenuity and creativity for cruelty. But I look into her soul and see not a monster but a scared, insecure, devastatingly traumatized person who was manipulated down a horrible path by the cruelest of demons, her cruel personality forged in the circumstances of that path. At every opportunity for her to live a normal life and develop into the person she should have been she was thrust into choices and circumstance increasingly horrible.
Now Ayla is an immortal undead ‘not-quite a vampire’ who lives for spite, while being a lonely, lost, broken person who needs saving. Does she deserve that chance, that love and caring and sacrifice from someone? Based on her deeds, not at all—she deserves the worst fate she could suffer, and she receives most of that through the first five books of the series (one more is left to be written). As someone who started life as an innocent, gentle, beaten down child, in spite of everything she has done, I do feel she deserves that chance, that love, that caring, that sacrifice. And she gets that, at the cost of everything to the person who gives her all. A young witch, Flowridia, destroys herself and the people close to her, all far more deserving of her love and loyalty than Ayla, to be with Ayla and to save her.
This blog is going to be a lot of ill-informed and poorly-written ramblings about Ayla and Fallen Gods. I leave the descriptions and the reviews to others who have done far better at those than I can begin to; see the Amazon pages and GoodReads for all that. I am really just a terribly smitten fan girl of Ayla and can talk about her forever. I do cringe at almost everything she does, and so much of what she says and does and feels just breaks my heart, but I am there for her. By any standard she is horrible, and often cruel even to the one person she cares about and who cares about her. However, she is developing some empathy and self-reflection, and she usually comes back and apologizes and quite often hates herself for how she behaved, even doing intense self-harm. A complex person who does not deserve my affection and loyalty but I cannot be otherwise with her.
That’s it for now. More even more obscure stuff to come lol!
*Ayla Darkleaf is an MC (IMO *the* MC lol) in the Fallen Gods series by SD Simper (link below, replace ‘_DOT_’ with a period). All quotes in this blog come from one of the books or from stories in the same world posted on SD’s Patreon (link also below, same DOT thing).
https://smile.amazon_DOT_com/Sting-Victory-Fantasy-Lesbian-Romance-ebook/dp/B07H63V28W/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1M7IUV8KIIZ34&keywords=sd+simper+fallen+gods&qid=1669263829&sprefix=Sd+simper%2Caps%2C117&sr=8-1
https://www.patreon_DOT_com/sdsimper/about
