As for the Long, Strange Journey (I seem to remember it as Long, Strange Trip), it wasn't "our" Clark who was evil. It was another version of him.
Bottom line (or more specifically, the point I want to make): Terry gets accolades for posting a story where Lois remains hopelessly corrupted. Dandello gets accolades for posting a story where Clark is redeemed. Lois can be hopelessly corrupted, but Clark is incorruptible. That's what makes me so depressed.
My real problem, of course, is that I have spent so many years reading Superman comics and watching Superman movies, and I have come across many stories where I think Superman made a choice that was morally wrong. And yet, Superman is never regarded as evil or acknowledged as evil.
In spite of how I hate the movie "Superman II", where Superman zapped Lois's mind into oblivion to cover up the fact that he had made love to her and to remove her knowledge of his secret identity, I wouldn't go so far as to describe his actions in that movie as "evil". I do find them cowardly and contemptible and extremely un-heroic, but not downright evil. Interestingly, though, there is a fic posted here on these boards where I think Superman crosses the line into evilness, and that is, also interestingly, a fic by Terry. I mention his name only because Terry is also the person who wrote the fic about the evil Lois.
In the fic where I think Terry's Superman crosses the line into evilness he actually rips open the chest of a criminal, Bill Church, and rips out the heart from his chest, thus killing him. It is a very graphic, horrible and hate-filled way of killing a person. And yet, a major point of Terry's fic is to prove that Superman did nothing illegal when he killed Bill Church like that, and therefore he should not be punished by the law. (The question of whether or not Superman did something evil when he ripped out Bill Church's heart is not really discussed.) A major point of that fic is to exonerate Superman and say that Superman can be Superman even if he has literally ripped a bad person's heart out of his chest.
Clark is not condemned as evil in the fic where he kills a man by ripping out his heart. But Lois was definitely portrayed as morally corrupt and, in the words of Star Wars-speak, lost to the other side in The Cold Shoulder. I only read parts of TCS, so I don't know exactly what Lois did or didn't do in that fic, but it is my impression that she didn't kill anyone. And yet we all "know" that she became evil there. Clark, on the other hand, ripped out a criminal's heart in that other fic, but there were no major complaints about the fact that Clark was allowed to commit murder in such a gruesome way and still be regarded as at least basically himself afterwards. (Well, there were strong complaints from one person, namely from me. What I disliked the most was not that Clark ripped out Bill Church's heart, although I certainly disliked it. In my opinion it was worse that the fic didn't really censor Clark for his actions and that in the end, we were still asked to accept Clark Kent as a good person, and the general public of the LnC universe were asked to regard Superman as a trustworthy hero.)
So Clark can do horrible things and still be good, but Lois can become hopelessly evil even if she hasn't done anything comparable to ripping a person's heart out of his chest. Because Lois's moral compass can be made to point the wrong way, due to the fact that she is Lois, but Clark is morally infallible almost regardless of what he does, because he is Clark. And therefore there is always some excuse or explanation that takes the sting out of his seemingly horrible transgressions. Because he is Clark, and he is Superman.
Ann
