Yvonne, on some level I agree with you. Not when it comes to killing either Lois or Clark. Honestly, I would never, ever kill either of them, so the question of which of them I would kill is really not an issue, but... okay, if somebody forced me to write a deathfic because if I didn't they'd hurt my family or something, then I'd kill Clark. I'd do pretty much anything to avoid killing Lois!

Still, I understand what you say about wanting to keep your hero alive. For many years - ten, fifteen years or something, I'm not really sure - I'd tell myself a "Spock story" as I waited to fall asleep every night. Yes, Spock of Star Trek was my big hero, and I made him incomparably more heroic than he had ever been in the TV show. Well, people, keep that Spock-storytelling up for ten or fifteen years, and you can imagine how my hero eventually turned out. He became so insufferably good and super-mega-giga-altruistic that there was nothing I could do to prevent him, honestly, from sacrificing his own life for the greater good of all the sentient (and for that matter non-sentient) life forms of the universe. So he died, and let me tell you, I felt so bereaved. What could I do now, to help myself fall asleep at night?

I can understand what you mean when you say that Clark is your hero, not Lois, and in any case you'd rather rest your eyes on Clark than on Lois. I understand all of that. And believe me, too, that I'm not trying to deliberately misunderstand you. When you say you'd rather kill Lois than Clark you're talking about these honest-to-God fictional characters who you're having a romp with in a bit of fan fiction.

But, even so, Yvonne, I shudder. And not because of you, really, but because of all these women out there, all of us women, who just stand by and shrug and close our eyes while a holocaust of women are being killed every two to four years.... And then we sit down by our word processors and write a story where we'd rather kill a woman than a man. People, I shudder.

Ann