Yeah! And thinking about it a little more, it also serves in-universe to make Lauren a softer and kinder person in Butler's "what might a person who started a religion as a teenager be like" experiment.

As a person, Lauren is so stubborn and ambitious. She has a huge sense of "destiny" and self-importance even at a young age that leads her to view others kind of as pawns or tools in her grand vision.

If she didn't have experiences (hyper-empathic ones) which forced her to constantly directly confront the pain and humanity of others, it might be easy for her single-minded grand vision and self-righteousness to eclipse her empathy and altruism and lead her to trample others underfoot in pursuit of her own goals and affirmation of her own beliefs.

In that regard you could examine Christian America/President Jarrett and maybe Marcus maybe as sort of parallels to Lauren, or more examinations of how belief, vision, and empathy interact with each other in people and in society.

I didn't think Butler was trying to make a judgement about the relationship as much as she was illustrating something about Lauren.

I see Lauren's relationship with Bankole as further illustration that she has a kind of...I don't wanna outsized or inflated...but she has a large perception of her own capability and self-importance. She sees herself as special and so, while she is a sharer, she kind of holds herself above and apart from most people, especially those her own age. It's easier for her to feel that Bankole is her equal because he's so much older and more experienced. The wisdom and experience conferred by his age allows her to see him as more "equal" to her than people in her own cohort.

Now that I think about it, I kind of think Lauren being a sharer could be a way Butler tried to humanize her in the first book. Again Lauren holds herself above and apart from other people. Lauren is an adept reader and manipulator of others and is always thinking about how she and hers can best benefit from a situation. If we weren't constantly being beat over the heat with her empathic capability she could have felt kind of sociopathic.

I just finished Parable of the Talents last week!

I actually thought that Talents humanized Lauren a little by showing us >!some of her daughter's and her brother's perspective, as incomplete as it was.!<

In the first book she felt a lot more like a Mary Sue because others' wariness of and frustration with her attitude didn't come up as much. She just magically seemed to know more about everything and be luckier and be more successful than everyone else in her endeavors. And she was never really punished for any of her character flaws. Which I guess it would be hard to portray in the first book anyway because it's all from her perspective.

In the second book though she could be said to be punished for her hubris. >!We get snatches of perspectives that validate this from other characters like Bankole, Marcus, and her daughter Asha/Larkin. They all express at various points that she should do or should have done things differently. From their perspectives it can be said that Lauren's dogged pursuit of her goals and refusal to listen to others resulted in Bankole's death, the loss of the community, and the estrangement of her only child.!<

But Lauren would never see things this way. She can’t see it that way because to doubt her judgement would be to doubt Earthseed. And to doubt Earthseed would be to doubt her whole life's purpose. Also from a narrative perspective, the death of Lauren's ideals would unpin the central idea of the books and the story would have to shift drastically to find a new center.

The fact that at the end of Talents we see >!the hurt and emptiness Lauren has created within her own biological family!< makes me think that Lauren is not a Mary-Sue and Butler was just trying to examine what a person who created a new religion might be like.