It looks like opening this topic was like throwing a live grenade into a crowded room.
Ann wrote:
I'm talking about stories like It Might have Been by Ray Reynolds, where the author even posted an nfic honeymoon vignette to underscore how sexually happy and in tune Clark was with his wife-who-was-not-Lois. There is also The Butterfly Legacy by Lynn M, where Clark's true love seems to be the woman he met in the jungle, and the memories of this woman are always with him afterwards in his marriage to Lois. There is Classicalla's A New Hero, where Lois is dead but Clark has remarried and is very happy with his new wife. And in her new story, Laura S made Clark very, very happy with Lana, and then he became a very, very grieving widower.
It's interesting that you'd point out "It Might Have Been" to support your position, Ann, because Ray is a self-proclaimed first-season Lois hater. Part of the reason he wrote the story was to rub Lois's nose in Clark's happiness with someone else (and it was NOT just about sex, as you imply).
In "The Butterfly Legacy," Lynn didn't make Gillian his "one and only soulmate" at all. Clark and Gillian were together because Clark thought Lois was married to someone else and was therefore lost to him. Another valid viewpoint is that Clark believed that Lois had rejected him and was open to receiving comfort from another woman, which would have made Gillian the "sloppy seconds." In any case, he'd already chosen to leave Gillian and return to Lois before he found out she'd been killed.
In "A New Hero," Lois had been gone for quite some time before Clark allowed himself to get close to another woman. To classify Clark in this story as being a "serial womanizer" is totally unwarranted. Classicalla didn't portray Clark in that way at all.
If we want to view these stories as fairy tales, we can. It certainly isn't realistic to write about a flying man who can't be hurt by anything man can conceive or construct. And if we want to write about a perfect relationship between two people, we can do that too. There's no law or rule which prohibits it. I only ask that we all allow others to express our opinions without being clobbered for it.
Interestingly, I just found Irene Dutch's excellent "Redemption," where an AIDS-ravaged Claude comes back into Lois's life to try to correct his past wrongs. This was a bit that I found pertinent to this discussion. ("...that man..." refers to Claude in this excerpt and "...she..." refers to Lois.)
She felt a gentle sadness over the loss of her friend. No matter how much she loved Clark – and she loved Clark with her whole heart and soul – she had once loved that man. She had given herself to him. Oh, she hadn’t loved him in the same way that she loved Clark – she could never love any man in the same way that she loved Clark – but, she had loved him. And he was dead.
Like I said, interesting. Lois had loved Claude - or, at least, she had loved the man she thought Claude was. If we don't accept this, we have to say that Lois went to bed with Claude just for the sex, and that's not what I got either from the pilot episode or from the fanfic I've read since then. She really loved Claude, but she loves Clark far more, and it's so much better for both of them because Clark loves her, too, unlike Claude, who only used her to further his own career.
All this is to say that if Clark loved and married someone before he met Lois, it does not destroy their chances of having "that one great love" together. Nor does it make Clark a serial womanizer. Nor does it devalue Lois and make her just "the next one in line." Yes, our fanfic is fantasy, but if someone's story doesn't line up with our fantasy, it isn't a direct attack on our cherished beliefs. It just means that Laura's fantasy world is a little different. It's neither better nor worse because of that, and it certainly isn't wrong for the same reason.
Can't we all just get along?
