I think that both parties have a point. Your past record of intolerance to deathfics stand against you, Ann, so of course you must expect that people will feel frustrated when you bring what seems to be a similar issue again. Also, I don't agree that a deathfic that focuses more on Clark's loss as opposed to Lois' loss is inferior or hurtful at all. It's simply a part of the author's views on death, as is explained in this thread.
However, you do have a point. Some of the posters may think you're carrying feminism too far when you see misogyny in children's moral fables in this way. However, I don't believe that. The content of folk tales carry the subconcious nuances and thinking patterns of generations of social traditions and cultural sub-texts. If you do see a trend where the matyrdom of girls are seen as more exhalted and positively spun than that of boys, such statistics cannot be brushed off as mere co-incidence.
In Hinduism, there is a certain wedding tradition where the young bride and bridegroom are linked together with a sash and made to walk seven times around the fire. The first six times the bridegroom walks in front of the bride, demostrating his dominance and precedence over his wife. On the seventh round, which represents death, the bride is required to walk in front of her husband, signifying her duty to stand between her husband and death. In other words, to die before her husband. This is a part of the mythos that gave rise to the infamous Sathi Pooja, where it is a matter of honour for a woman to cast herself onto the funeral pyre of her husband and a matter of disgrace to outlive him. Such instances where the woman's life is considered of secondary importance to the man's is fraught in the traditions of ancient civilizations all over the world. Society has promoted women as primarily being vessels and symbols of honour, chastity and outright decoration for men since time out of mind. Today, we pride ourselves in our modernity in thinking and the abolition of anachronistic fallacies from our cultures. However is it quite so impossible that the lingering instincts and subconcious ideas that gave rise to these tradions in the first place are still inherent in us, uninvestigated and undiscovered? And does it really do us credit to dismiss the issue out of hand in such a way?
I for one, am going to do some thinking about this. Although in the others defence, Ann, it honestly wasn't readily apparent what you were trying to tell us until you clarified it to alycone in two sentences.
At first, I thought you were just upset about Lois deathfics again. Then I thought it was about how you perceive death. It's only now I understand that you are drawing inferences to apparent misogyny through statistical data.
I'm quite willing and game to give this due consideration and ruminate upon it, but I don't think we should discuss it in terms of writing talent anymore. That simply makes an interesting anthropological disscussion into a personal vendetta that is also a dead horse into the bargain. And I think that if this is to be a profitable discussion, this topic belongs in the OT folder.
On a side note, I don't wish to demean your beliefs at all Ann, but believing that NOTHING happens after death feels like a rather uncomfortable thing to believe.
No wonder you don't like deathfics! But in literature Ann, Lois does definitely go on to a better place after death, if the author has anything to say about it.
So you can divorce death in fiction and reality with that in mind.
Also, I feel a deathfic plotbunny coming on. Oh, dear.
