Originally written by Caroline:
Writers write deathfic because it's an obvious venue for exploring some very strong, very basic emotions - anger, grief, etc. And the episode TOGOM gave this fandom the freedom to do that in a "safe" way, with a happy ending; judging by the success of many of those stories, the readers lapped it up. It may be that writers feel that the potential of that episode has been exhausted at this point and are moving on to deathfics where you don't get the happy ending. Also, in TOGOM, Lois is the one who does the grieving; some of these writers may want to shift the focus to Clark and what his life would be like if Lois died.
Is the death of Lois possible in the comic world? Sadly, I suspect it is. Superman has been created and recreated many times through the decades, and a Superman without Lois might be a direction they eventually choose to go.
But why does most deathfic focus on Lois's death? I think for precisely the reason Caroline pointed out above. If you want to explore the reaction of
Lois to the death of
Clark, you quickly recap TOGOM, come up with a reason for Clark to pretend death for an extended period of time, and voilà -- Clark is "dead" and Lois is grieving his loss.
But there's still Superman, you say? A chapter or two laced with Kryptonite will fix that.
Say you want to explore how Lois interacts with his parents after his "death" -- you come up with a Clark scenario where he doesn't/can't contact his parents. He was confined on an island Luthor built with a tiny level of Kryptonite in the soil, just enough to keep him "human." At the end of the story, he will finish gnawing down trees with his teeth and build a raft.
Essentially, TOGOM provides an "accepted" contrivance to explore the impact of Clark's death on anyone and anything you care to examine. No such contrivance exists for Lois. She isn't Kryptonian -- it's a little harder to kill her convincingly without actually killing her. And so, authors who wish to explore this situation
do kill her.
(Nan, though obviously as backstory, did so in the incredible Home series -- Lois has died, Clark has been shattered for a few decades, and now has found something that causes him to wake up. Lois reincarnated. That last is hard to manage pre-death. This is not meant to be insulting, but simply to suggest that the death of Lois or anyone else can be necessary to the situation an author wishes to explore.)
Now, to be fair, there are stories that
end in the death of Lois. Those don't generally fall in this category, though they probably could -- the author wants to explore Lois's thoughts just before _____ finally kills her. Though as demonstrated in 24 Hours, that can be explored with Lois saved at the last second.
All this to say, simply, that there are situations an author could realistically want to explore in this fandom which might call for the death of a character. How can concerned readers avoid them? Authors don't seem to mind that the synopsis sentence is present on the Archive -- would it be that bad to
request that authors post a similar synopsis in the opening of their story, or have a thread for them? "Clark deals with his grief after Mxyzptlk turns Lois into a giant pink bunny in a rabbit's-foot factory in Oklahoma. Meanwhile, the irksome imp has caused Clark's capes to dye any other fabric they touch purple. Can Clark spell Kltpzyxm before it's too late?"
