Since the Yautja society is predominantly male, it stands to reason that every Predator we have ever seen in a live-action movie has been a man. However, there have been many outstanding female predators who have not only consistently demonstrated their mettle but also advanced to the level of Elite predator and took charge of their own clans.
There have been numerous beautiful yet lethal female predators, from the Valkyrie Predator and Sister Midnight to Machiko Noguchi and Yaquita. One of them, though, has a tragic history and an exciting life narrative. Yes, the Big Mama, the video’s star, is being discussed.
This outstanding female predator initially debuted in the Aliens vs. Predator: Deadliest of the Species comic book, where she had a major impact. She sought assistance from Ash Parnall after suffering a terrible loss, but even decades after Ash’s passing, she never forgot their friendship!
She eventually started an incredible voyage where she battled creatures like a Queen Mother and abominations like the White Hybrids after discovering that Ash Parnall had only perished in body.
She is reported to have murdered legendary figures like Batman, Wolverine, and Cyclops if that were not enough! We will examine the Big Mama story arc from the 12-issue comic book in this video and fill you in on every aspect of this monstrous beast with a maternal side. Shall we get started?
Aliens vs. Predator: Deadliest of the Species
This lengthy yet incredible comic’s first issue opens with panels that resemble chaos that has been painted on paper. A blue-eyed, blonde-haired woman with an unfinished face is depicted in the comic’s first panel. She appears to be in panic because she is most likely being pursued by someone or something. She then goes on to identify herself as Caryn Delacroix, the fictitious trophy wife of Lucien Delacroix, who was the leading partner of Montcalm Delacroix et cie.
By this point, it should be clear that the comic is set in the future, but just to be sure, Caryn says that she and the others are on a huge Skyliner that is being used to celebrate the anniversary of Earth’s liberation from a Xenomorph infestation. Fans of Alien vs. Predator may recognise this as a reference to the 1986 comic book sequel to the film Aliens, Alien: Outbreak. Moving on, Caryn looks for assistance everywhere she can but finds nothing that feels real. She enters a ballroom and locates Lucien there.
When she informs Lucien about her experience, his head snaps off, showing that he was actually a mannequin. She drowns in a crowd but is able to escape, only to be knocked down by her mannequin self. She plummets below, only to land in an unfamiliar room. However, sweet Caryn is yet to experience stranger things. She initially tastes blood, but she is shocked by what happens next. Her skin starts to peel off as if it was a piece of cloth that she had been wearing. And the next thing we know, her entire skin comes out, revealing an entirely new body inside the skin.
Caryn was tired of the strange things that were happening to her and wished she was dead. For a moment, she thought her wish was going to come true when she saw a huge animalistic figure and felt the warmth of three laser beams on her forehead. Interestingly enough, the figure addressed Caryn as Ash Parnall, a name that Caryn had never heard before. Although Caryn is not really aware of who or what the figure was, the reader knows that it was a Predator. And if you have reached this point of the video, you know that this Yautja is none other than Big Mama.
Fortunately for Caryn, these haunting images of bloody death, disfigurement, and violent pursuit come to an end when she wakes up from sleep, proving the fact that the entire sequence of events was a terrible nightmare. But why did Big Mama address Caryn as Ash? Soon enough, Caryn’s stepson, Willem, takes Caryn to the Skyliner’s head doctor, to find out more about Caryn’s latest behavioural change.
Now, one may think that nightmares are something very common to experience, but Caryn was not a human, she was a synthetic whose psychological and physiological designs were supposed to be perfect. Nevertheless, the cause of her nightmare remains a mystery. Meanwhile, Caryn’s filthy rich husband insists the doctors to get her back to how she used to be, happy and carefree. But Caryn was far from carefree, and she goes to the Skyliner’s computer mainframe named Toy, which was more human in nature and manners than humans themselves.
However, nothing really is black and white in the AVP world. While Caryn was fighting her personal demons, there was something else that was haunting two others. Tommy and Maria discuss the strange signals that Maria picked up not long ago. And although the signal was too strong, it was extremely short-lived, and Maria believed that it came from an alien ship of some kind which had camouflage abilities, and what worried her more was the fact that this ship did not just hide from waves, but also optical instruments.
It was not before long that Maria’s fears came to life, and the Skyliner was attacked by an unseen force that ripped the skull of one man and skinned another woman. However, what worries everyone the most is that Caryn is abducted from the location, and Maria and Tommy are called in based on suspicion. But where did Caryn go? Well, Big Mama abducted her and brought her into the midst of dense forests.
And there lay Caryn, bound to a tree, and staring at Big Mama, who once again called her– Ash Par-nall!!! Oh, and by the way, since Caryn was created to please the old hog Lucien, she could change her appearance with the help of Toy, and by now, she was a black-haired woman with Eurasian physiology, albeit she was as hot as she initially was. Caryn’s safe and privileged world had come to a standstill, and she probably thought that this was a fate, far worse than death.
The second issue begins with Caryn still with her alien abductor. She is back on Earth, the Earth which is now bereft of humans. Those who were rich and powerful enough managed to live on the Skyliner, and although Xenomorphs have more or less been eliminated, the threat still exists. However, Big Mama does not care about them. Caryn does all she can to get free from her abductor, but she knows that she is no match for Big Mama’s might.
I mean, the Yautja had slain a corporate bodyguard and ex-colonial marine, Mitchell Lassiter and had taken his skull as a trophy. She makes all the promises that she could imagine, but her captor does not seem to understand a word, and only says the word Ash Parnall as a reply to Caryn’s multiple requests and pleadings. Back on the Skyliner, Tommy and Maria are being interrogated by Willem and Salazar, the corporate chief of security.
It turns out that Maria had filed a sighting report, but since she could not trace the signal’s origin point, she had to call it a ghost sighting. But Miss Salazar was not pleased and threw them in detention, believing that a few days in a dark cell will make them reveal anything else that they had been hiding. While Willem and Salazar were trying their best to find Caryn, Lucien himself came to them.
It was now revealed that Tommy and Maria were ex-defence who specialized in long-range combat missions, but were later deemed as ultimate hazard personnel. Lucien was going to do everything in his capacity to find his dear trophy wife, and as a last-ditch resort, he asked Tommy and Maria to help. While they agreed to help Lucien, Tommy was frank enough to Lucien and said, “But I have to tell you, Seigneur, the odds are, your lady is already dead.”
Back on Earth, Caryn finds herself alone for a moment and watches Big Mama’s combi-stick turned into a flag with the dead lady’s skin and Mitchell’s head at its top. She resolves not to bear witness to such horrifying sights or to wait to meet the same fate. She picks up a military-grade pulse rifle and escapes in the middle of the night. While making camp atop a tree, an epiphany strikes her. She had just field-stripped and cleaned a professional weapon, something that was impossible for a trophy wife designed to please an old man.
She wonders how she was able to do that, but finds no answers, not yet at least. Having said that, Caryn had lived all her years like a stupid girl and told herself that this was all a part of some virtual reality created by Toy at the behest of Lucien to take her mind off the things that she had been feeling lately. It’s not before long that we see her swinging on vines like Tarzan and handling her gun like a professional. While she thought she was playing the little virtual reality game, she fell into the water and got bitten by jellyfish.
Although Caryn was in Big Mama’s sight, the giant Predator seemed to be searching for her. Caryn realises, to everyone’s surprise, that Big Mama could indeed see but not the same way as humans. After realising that Big Mama could only sense thermal radiation, she chose to climb up the waterfall to remain cool and out of sight. However, Big Mama manages to catch up to Caryn, but things go berserk when they get ambushed by a party of Xenomorphs.
It was now that Big Mama showed who she really was and how powerful the female Yautjas could be. She took down the Xenomorphs one by one, and Caryn helped the female Predator. But then Caryn happened to meet a boy who a face hugger had impregnated. Big Mama stuck her spear through this boy’s chest, killing him. Caryn lost her cool and proved how excellent a combatant she could be, knocking off Big Mama and pointing the lasers at Big Mama. Clearly, the second issue ended on a pretty exciting note.
At the beginning of the third issue, Caryn had Big Mama pinned down, but a colonial combat ship approached and started firing at the female Predator. To her utter disbelief, she plunged herself into the jellyfish-infested waters so that she could draw the attention of the ship away from Big Mama. Caryn felt a sense of sympathy and relationship with the Predator.
However, from the ship came Tommy and Maria, who not only rescued Caryn from her virtual reality but also knocked Big Mama down. Caryn is taken to her deluxe home in the space, and she still believes that her ordeals on Earth were a figment of a fictional reality.
However, she continues to get haunted by her dreams about the Predator and Ash Parnall. She fails to figure out a relation between these things and everything seems like another piece of a puzzle that she cannot solve. Having said that, she has come to learn that her dreams are not just dreams and might be, as the comic issue’s title, virtually real. Whatever doubts she had remaining, got alleviated when she discovered Yautja belongings like weapons and a mask.
Desperate to find answers, Caryn decided to ambush the only person she knew for sure would know things. She waited on Salazar, and, just at the right moment, attacked her left, right, and centre. She couldn’t believe herself when she knocked out the corporate head of security herself. But a knocked-out woman is as good as a mute one, right? Caryn now had no idea where Big Mama had been taken, but just then, she saw something in the helmet she was holding– a sort of signal that could lead her straight to Big Mama.
On the other hand, Willem was conspiring with a third party to know everything there was about the Predator and its home world. We have to understand that Willem was in no way his father’s son, and oftentimes, people got the better of him. Unfortunately enough, this was happening even now. On the other hand, Caryn changed her dress to wear appropriate clothes for combat. Lucky for her, she had found just the piece in Salazar’s cupboard.
Slowly and steadily, she found her way to the facility where Big Mama lay on an operating table. The tech guys may not have respected Caryn, but they did respect the gun she was carrying, a weapon that could slash each of them in half in not more than a jiffy. However, Tommy and Maria freed Salazar, and she ordered her men to go after Caryn. They managed to pin her down, but she had already freed Big Mama, who came to Caryn’s rescue.
The two of them fought hordes of security personnel, killing some, and injuring others. Both Salazar and Maria shot several rounds into Big Mama, she was definitely more than wounded, bleeding and in pain. Caryn and the female Predator soon found themselves near a small space shuttle. Caryn was still unsure as to why she was helping Big Mama, but she knew that the female Predator was not a foe, but a friend, probably her only friend.
Caryn could not leave her friend to die in agony, so she helped her into the shuttle, and they both took off. Back at the Skyliner, Lucien was more than angered to learn about what his wife had done. He ordered Tommy and Maria to bring back Caryn at all costs and to leave no stone unturned. And on the flip side, Caryn found herself walking towards Big Mama’s mothership, still unsure about what was going to happen next, but then there was only one way to find out.
Aboard the mother ship, Caryn found herself gasping for breath. She fainted, but Big Mama put on a helmet on her face, and although Caryn came to her senses, Big Mama was rendered unconscious. Caryn had no idea what to do to help the fallen predator, but she found a uniform that belonged to Ash Parnall and started crying out loud for her. Ash did appear, but not in the way Caryn expected her to.
However, Caryn managed to find a way to help Big Mama to heal. She then heads on to explore the huge ship to kill some time, I mean, what else could she possibly do! She was all alone there, and her only alien friend was unconscious, healing. It was not before long that Caryn found herself going through the belongings of the real Ash Parnall, the photographs of her family, her combat weapons, etc. Interestingly enough, in an earlier panel, we saw the various trophies that Big Mama had acquired over the period of time.
Among these were skulls of superheroes from both DC and Marvel, for instance, there was the skull of badass people like Batman, Wolverine, as well as Cyclops. Caryn did not realise when she fell asleep and as it happened, her sleep brought her back into the world of nightmares. This time around, they had exacerbated to another level altogether. She saw her encounter with a Xenomorph and how she had transformed into a hybrid between a Xenomorph and a human. Caryn woke up from her nightmare, shocked and scared.
She told herself that it was just a dream, and had nothing to do with reality, but then again, her dreams in the past about Big Mama and Ash Parnall had come true. Meanwhile, Maria and Tommy, who were on the lookout for Caryn, found themselves face to face with Salazar, who was fresh as a flower. So, Salazar had gone through some serious burns in the previous issue, and the doctors had lost all hope.
However, since she was a synthetic as well, she had an accelerated healing factor, and she is back on the hunt. By now, Caryn has had enough of Ash Parnall and Big Mama, all she wants is out, and out she gets when she notices a space station called Samara with Starship Ellen Ripley, does that ring a bell? You have to agree, there are a lot of cameos in this particular issue. Nevertheless, she docks the Predator ship at the space station and goes inside.
Not very surprisingly, the space station people are not good guys either. Caryn is soon roofy-ed. While they plan to rip her ship down to the last bit, they decide to sell Caryn on the black market. Could you imagine the worth of someone with the same abilities as Caryn? She would sell for a bomb!
Caryn was a trophy, and that too, the trophy of Lucien Delacroix, the most powerful man in known space. Naturally, she was going to have enhancements and features like no other, and her captors knew that. But before she could be sold into the market, her previous memories had to be erased. Her captors were trying to give her another genetic transformation while modifying and enhancing the core conditioning that already existed in her.
But they were unaware of what her core conditioning was, it was not that of a trophy built to please others but something much more ferocious. And there she was, Caryn Delacroix, in all her might and glory. Meanwhile, the salvage team sent to the Predator mother ship found themselves in a bit of a fix when they awakened Big Mama, who had healed by now and was going to do anything to find her Ash Parnall.
Big Mama ripped through the men one by one. The drawings of each of these panels depicting the fight sequence between Big Mama and the humans are truly magnificent. From Big Mama mimicking the things said by the humans to her rage and wrath being unleashed upon them, everything has been drawn gloriously and only complements Big Mama’s power and battle skills.
I mean, one of the men fired an actual missile at Big Mama, but an experienced Predator like her was not going to give up so easily, was she? But unfortunately enough, Big Mama gets captured by a Xenomorph Queen, and the sixth issue of the comic ends on another exciting cliffhanger. But lucky for you, we have read all 12 issues and are here to help. So, as mentioned earlier, Tommy, Maria, and Salazar were hunting Caryn and Big Mama, their search almost came to an end, but not quite in the way they thought it would.
Big Mama doesn’t appear until the end of the 8th issue, where we see that apart from Big Mama and one human, even Maria is abducted by the Xenomorph Queen Mother. Here, she helps us understand that the Queen’s hive has only one Ovomorph, and it is very evident that the egg is nothing but a Royal Ovomorph, supposed to give birth to a Royal Facehugger, and, ultimately, a Queen.
It is not before long that Caryn finds her way into the hive, and learns that the situation at hand is a troubling one; and that there could be no escape without a loss of life. Caryn threatens to destroy the Royal Ovomorph, but the Queen threatens to kill her friends. Caryn understands the gravity of the situation and retracts a bit. Big Mama pleads to Caryn to ‘move away, stay out of reach till the cavalry comes.’ Caryn tells her that that way, everyone would die, and asks Big Mama if her life was worth that much!
Big Mama replies, ‘a fair exchange!’ Clearly, Big Mama held more value to Caryn’s life than Caryn herself, a true friend indeed! Caryn’s argument is that if she was a royal host, the Queen would have less reason to hunt them, and all the reason to be their protector! After saying these last few words, she gracefully picks up the royal facehugger and places it upon her face, letting herself get impregnated. Now, it is important to note that this was one of the very few instances where a human has wilfully and in complete consciousness allowed a facehugger to get attached!
In the next issue, we find Big Mama and the humans fighting for each other’s lives while Caryn is cocooned inside the hive by the Queen. She contemplates several things that have happened to her these past few days, but contemplation is not going to help her condition, is it?
In a last-ditch attempt to change the status quo, she flicks her body and manages to break free of her cocoon. She comes outside the hive only to find Big Mama in trouble and comes between the human gunfire and her Big Mama. She convinces her human friends as well as Big Mama, that the only way they would get to leave the place was by working together. Big Mama was clearly reluctant to the idea of working with Caryn, who had been face-hugged! However, she ultimately agreed. As the events unfolded, it is revealed that Caryn was Ash Parnall in her former life, an extremely smart and able woman who was behind the creation of Toy, the super intelligent computer that served Lucien.
Nevertheless, Salazar, Caryn, Big Mama, The Queen Mother, and a few survivors from the space station Salazar find themselves in Big Mama’s ship. But now, the fight was not against each other, it was for justice. Caryn, in her old life as Ash, was betrayed by her lover and a colleague, the same man who was manhandling Willem.
But then, where does Big Mama fit into all this? Well, several decades ago Big Mama’s children were kidnapped by the bad guys, and Ash Parnall helped Big Mama in the quest of finding the young Predators. However, they could never find the children, and they eventually had to escape. Years later, when Lucien made Caryn in the spitting image of Ash, the woman he once loved, Big Mama came to find her.
Nevertheless, coming back to the present time, it was one of those rare instances when a Xenomorph, a Predator, and humans came together to fight for a common cause, but how were they going to do it? Well, all the humans present inside the ship were excellent combat fighters, but they had to become more than they were– they had to ace the Yautja way of fighting if they had to get any closer to victory against what lay ahead.
Caryn and Big Mama trained the men and women present aboard for an ultimate showdown, but time was running out for Caryn, who still had the Royal embryo inside her, and it could have come out of her, bursting her chest just any moment now. Nevertheless, they complete their training and reach the Skyliner, the place where it all began, the place which housed all kinds of evil.
Upon reaching Toy, everyone was shocked to their cores! Toy had built a new race of Xenomorph hybrids! the White Hybrids were an amalgamation of all three species. Like humans, they were persistent, intelligent, curious, hardworking, and extremely cunning. While the Xenomorph DNA made them savagely fierce, cruel, and violent creatures who spit acidic blood, they reproduce by literally bursting some unfortunate being’s chest.
At the same time, the white hybrids got their animalistic and analytical predatory instinct from the Predators. Naturally, an all-out battle broke out between the three species and the white hybrids, who would have become the dominant species on Earth, had they not been checked at an early stage. But they were a force to reckon with, and it seemed that the battle was lost. Things went against the good side further when Caryn’s chest burster came out, killing her. Having said that, it seemed that Caryn somehow wanted it to happen sooner than later.
Amidst all these things happening, the chest-burster that emerged from Caryn turned into an extremely different kind of hybrid, one that saw Caryn as its mother. Furthermore, there was a larger threat looming by now, in the form of the White Hybrid King, who spoke in the voice of Willem Delacroix because the first white hybrid face hugger was implanted on Willem’s face at Toy’s behest. Toy had realised the potential of his powers and abilities, and till the time humans remained, his programming would have forced him to follow orders.
Therefore, he devised an elaborate scheme using humans to eliminate humans by creating the white hybrids. However, Toy’s plans were far from coming true. As it happens, the Queen mother was abducted by the white hybrid and impregnated with a royal white hybrid chest-burster. However, the Queen managed to escape her confines and reached the battle zone. She realised that the only way her own offspring lived was through the death of the white hybrid king. So, just when the chest burster was about to erupt from her body, she held the white hybrid king close.
As the chest burster did its little thing, it killed both the king and the queen. And, immediately after, this new chest burster was killed off before it could mature. As for Big Mama’s children, they were found in stasis, as if they were kidnapped only yesterday. Interestingly enough, Caryn did die, but from her body, Ash Parnall came to life in body and spirit. This could happen because Toy had created Caryn as an elite specimen, a human clone that could do much more than any other being. In the end, we see Big Mama, Ash Parnall, and the Xenomorph born out of Caryn together. However, Maria, Tommy and Salazar are still on the hunt, referring to Ash Parnall as the Renegade!
So, you see, Big Mama was not your regular Yautja who hunted because it was her way of life, she was a different beast entirely who was more ferocious because she was motivated by a personal cause– a cause that was deep-rooted in her motherly nature! And we know very well how ferocious mothers can get when it comes to protecting their young! She fought several foes in her life and could have been an elite Predator.
Despite her motherly instincts towards Caryn, Big Mama doesn’t have any feminine traits like breasts and looks very much like any other male Yautja. Furthermore, she used several weapons typical to a Yautja, but she also used several human weapons, such as an M41 A pulse rifle. Now that the predator franchise has hit the screens once again, it is my heart’s deep desire to see Big Mama or at least one female Predator on the screen. Speaking of female Predators, you may want to check out our video titled 8 Crazy Brutal But Elegant Female Yautjas – Explained In Detail. We’ll leave a link in the description.