Originally posted By Lynn S. M.:
By killing Lois, or any other character, in fanfic, we are dealing with fiction. No actual people are dying.
I agree up to a point. Or rather, I agree, of course, that Lois is a totally fictional person and if an author kills her in a fic, that doesn't mean that a real person dies in any way. And just as you pointed out, any other person who writes LnC fanfic may bring Lois back as if she had never been dead (which she hadn't, since a wholly fictional character arguably can't be "killed").
But this is my point. I don't think fiction is harmless. I don't think stories about death are necessarily harmless.
One of the grandest stage performances available anywhere are opera performances. The music score is often sublime and so bombastic that the very exaggeration becomes sublime in itself. The actors' and actresses's voices are splendid. The orchestra and the director are magnificent. The clothes worn by the lead singers are fantastic. The entire play is like a gloriously opulent rite, a celebration - of what? Well, it is a celebration of a woman's death. Because that is what operas are about.
I don't think operas affect people's way of thinking that much. Those who watch operas are not the kind of people who are prone to using violence in their own lives. Those who do like to fight usually don't watch operas. To most people, operas are baffling and somewhat ludicrous.
I think, nevertheless, that if the killing of women becomes a genre unto itself in other venues than operas, then that may create a sort of subconscious consensus that a woman's death is not the same thing as a man's death, not in fiction and not in real life.
A strange and tragic case happened in Sweden last summer. A sixteen-year-old boy went out with a girl who wasn't his girlfriend. The girlfriend became furious. The boy regretted what he had done and wanted to prove to his girlfriend that he only belonged to her. So how could he prove that? The girl sent the boy numerous text messages and demanded that the boy must kill the other girl to prove his love for her, the true girlfriend. In the end, the desperate boyfriend obeyed and strangled his girlfriend's rival to death.
What strikes me most about this case is how a girl's life was turned into a means for a boy to prove his love for another girl. The other girl's life was expendable, since it had to be sacrificed so that the boy could prove his true feelings for his girlfriend. The boy's true feelings were more important than a girl's life. The boy and the girl were both sent to doctors to have their mental health examined, and both were declared perfectly sane. I believe that they reacted and reasoned the way they did because of the morals and ethics of the youth culture they were immersed in, and I actually believe that this youth culture may have told them that girls are less valuable than boys. Interestingly, the girl who egged her boyfriend on had absolutely no more respect for the other girl's life than the boy had.
I think that if fiction often portrays certain kinds of people as expendable, as people who can be sacrificed in order to elicit interesting reactions in others, then that does something to some people who partake of this fiction. I think it changes, very subtly, the way some people may view the very value of the lives of the people who are often sacrificed in fiction.
Now suppose that some people write a fic where they kill precisely the kind of person who is usually killed in such fics. And suppose, too, that they insist that their choice of victim was sheer coincidence which doesn't have any deeper meaning at all. To me their adherence to a general pattern, coupled with their denial that their adherence to the pattern exists, means theat they are accepting a troubling subtext of the society they live in.
I remember watching a crazy comedy from the late 1970s. In that movies a policeman was killed - and it so happened that he was the only black policeman, indeed the only black person, of that movie. I found his death troubling. If he was a "token black" of that movie, was it necessary to kill him? Was he present as some kind of anomaly only to be killed?
Or how about if there had been one Jew in a story, and one person in the story was killed? And what a coincidence, the victim was the Jew? Wouldn't many people say that the killing of this one Jewish character in the story made the whole story smack of antisemitism?
In most works of fiction the number of important male characters outweigh the number of female characters. That makes it doubly painful when the female characters are killed. Not only are they not sufficiently important to be present in the story in large numbers, but those few who are there can be killed, too. And this only underscores their lack of importance.
Ann
