I just want to say that this is fascinating! Thank you, Carol and Beverley, for drawing my attention to very, very early examples of fans being inventive in this way.
I'm pretty sure that
Heartbeat was already on the Archive by the time I started reading it seriously - ie starting at A and working my way through, rather than dabbling (this
was at a time when there were something like 500 stories there, so somewhat easier than now!
), and that would have been around 1996, I think.
Carol, I agree with you entirely in terms of Clark crying - I think he
can, but it takes something pretty devastating to make him do it. Your list of times when he didn't cry was interesting. Now, we didn't see him cry when he thought Lois had been murdered - but we saw him scream and we saw him punch out a TV. We
don't know what he did in the minutes he'd have been alone with the knowledge of her death.
After a horrific rescue? I don't know. Did we see him in the series after a truly terrible human catastrophe? I've read plenty of stories where he's depressed after helping at an earthquake or bombing or landslide etc where lots of people have died. A story I wrote last year did have him - as Superman - crying after a landslide with serious loss of life; the tears, though, came after he'd talked about it and therefore been dwelling on it. We can all carry on and retain composure if we avoid talking about something that upset us! Of course, in the story he'd also come within a hair's-breadth of seeing Lois murdered, right after returning from the landslide. Fanon/FoLClore? (I like that word
) In character - just? Or not? I hope it's in character.
Anyway, keep these examples coming - I'm really enjoying the discussion!
I'm with LabRat, Erica and others: if inventiveness and originality in this respect can be justified given what we know of the characters and their behaviour in the series, I'm all for it.
Wendy
