Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Fanfic Related "The Dying Dandy" and the LnC deathfic

Well, in that case, I'll just say, "I'm tired of Ann complaining about how Lois deathfics mean that the world is deeply sexist". How many times do we need to beat that (genderless, asexual) dead horse? Okay, some of us don't like Lois deathfic. Duly noted. Can we move on to another topic now?

PJ

Respectfully, Pam (and Terry, too) no. (although, of course, you personally can move on - your choice)

and I really sincerely mean that.

But if it is valid to keep writing Lois deathfics (or any other genre like alternate beginnings or next gen or whatever), then it is surely valid to discus those themes.

If you intend to censor discussion of the deathfic theme then also censor deathfic.

for the record, I do not think either is the proper approach.

c.
Socrates: "an unexamined life is not worth living")

Thank you, Carol.

I have tried not to attack deathfics this time, but to discuss them. A point I have tried to make is that we seem to live at a time when the general culture finds it easy to tell stories about widowers and hard to tell stories about widows. The cultural climate seems to ask for stories where fictional men live and suffer and fictional women die. But it has not always been like that.

I think it is just a little too easy to come up with reasons why LnC deathfics should be about Lois dying and not Clark. There are reasons such as Clark being more sensitive (that's doubtful), Lois being the easier to kill (true, but not a problem in a fictional world which has kryptonite), and Clark being the main character anyway (debatable). My point is that if a Lois deathfic has been written in the recent few years, maybe the main reason is that the general culture of our time decrees that deathfics should be about dying women and suffering men.

Ann

P.S. I was talking about movies generally from the 1990s which tell stories about women losing their loved ones, and I forgot the most successful of them all, Titanic! How could I forget? And wouldn't you know that that movie is from the 1990s, from 1997?

you're welcome, Ann.

but have to add that I forget sometimes that this is all very trivial stuff.

c.

Wow. I don't recall ever telling anyone what to write or not write or post or not post. In fact, I did write a Clark deathfic once. I even just gave an idea for a Lois deathfic above. But if I somehow gave you the impression that I thought no one should post deathfics, I apologize. I just thought we were having a discussion here where anyone could give his or her thoughts.

Will bow out of the discussion now. My real life has enough conflict so I try to avoid it in my hobby. Sorry if I offended anyone.

ML

ML, I forgot to tell you... the deathfic that you described but wouldn't write seemed like an interesting fic to me, because Lois was such an active force in it. I like the idea of her being Clark's "guardian angel", as it were.

And I can't prevent anyone from writing any fics whatsoever, but I hope I have the right to discuss them. But I agree that such discussions should try to address other questions than whether or not a person likes such fics.

Again, a point I tried to address here is whether fics such as deathfics are sensitive to cultural trends in society as a whole. I have tried to say here that for whatever reason, the 1990s were interested in discussing how the lives of women are impacted by the deaths of men, but the "noughties" (as the British call them) have switched the gender roles here, for whatever reason. But since most movies and stories are about men in any case, the "male death stories" of the 1990s were few and far between compared with the "male life stories". Today most stories are still about men, and that makes women's starring roles as dead bodies or disembodied spirits more problematical than the "male death stories" of the 1990s, in my opinion.

Ann

I just wanted to chime in, if the movie you mean is The Lovely Bones. I haven't seen the movie yet, but I read the book it was based on (by Alice Sebold) a few years ago, and that's not the impression I got from it. In the book, she lives out her afterlife in her own heaven, tailored to her. She gets anything she wants as soon as she thinks of it. Yet, something that stuck with me even after I forgot many other details of the book is that when she describes her heaven, she says there is only one thing she cannot have, and it is the thing she would like the most: to be alive again.

Quote from page 19 of the paperback:
And from page 20:
(Mr Harvey being her murderer.)

Also, she describes her family's chronicles for years after her death, and considering what they go through, I can't say I read a "happy as can be" tone in her narration.

If she comes across "happy as can be" in the movie then it was seriously misinterpreted by the screenplay writer, IMHO. o_0

Julie

Julie, some reviews of the movie commented on how it differed in tone quite substantially from the book, to the detriment of the movie.

I've not read the book, but I have friends who did and also saw the film. Night and day, I gather.

c.

Telling people not to write about certain themes is censorship. And I am opposed to censorship.

Is this subject worth a reasonable discussion? Yes. Should we encourage "more variety and thought in fic"? Yes.

But that's not what this thread is about. This thread is like many others, in that it was begun to protest Lois dying in fan fiction, specifically fan fiction posted on this site.

If we were being deluged with a spate of Lois deathfics (we're not), if writers were treating Lois' death as a mere inconvenience in Clark's life (I know of no such instance - please let me know if there are any such), if Lois was written as a one-dimensional generic character whose death was used only to show us how profound Superman's respect for all life might be, then I would join the chorus. I would object to any writer marginalizing Lois Lane. She is, indeed, essential to the fiction posted on this website, and to the love story continued by the tales written and posted here.

You have the right not to read deathfic, Carol. And I respect your right. But since you don't read deathfic, are you sure that you're accurate in characterizing any female protagonist's death as "easy?" Or that "we...gush about the suffering of the entitled male?"

Tossing every Lois deathfic into such a category isn't discussing the issue. It's profiling. And doing so reveals a strong bias in your worldview, just as any author who writes female characters as disposable reveals a strong bias in his or her worldview.

Nearly every time a dead-Lois story pops up, a thread such as this one either appears or is revived. My experience is that the same thing doesn't happen with dead-Clark stories. If it did, I'd have little or no objection to these threads.

But the propensity of some FOLCs to protest Lois' death without balancing it with protests of Clark's death bothers me. And I think it has a dampening effect on writers. I've written two stories where Lois and Clark are separated permanently, once by death and once by a personality change in Lois, and both times I've been clobbered pretty hard. I accept that not everyone will love every word I post here. People just aren't that way, and not every story touches every reader. But we're going to squash someone's creativity and drive if we aren't more careful.

If we want to have a discussion of deathfics in general, I think that's a good idea. If we want to discuss Lois deathfics or Clark deathfics specifically, that's probably a good idea too. But condemning any genre out of hand is a bad idea and leads to a form of censorship, whether mandated by the sysops or by the tenor of public reaction. It would be akin to someone condemning nfic because he or she dislikes reading erotic literature. Hey, if you don't like nfic, don't read it! It doesn't mean that you should condemn its existence.

Same goes with deathfic.

Terry, you raise some good points.

Maybe part of the problem is that culturally, women have been marginalized for so long that it's hard to appreciate an honest effort by an author to find beauty in the death of a woman. In that sense, Toc is right: we have been tinted by our culture.

I'd like to ask everyone on both sides of the death-fic argument to please remain calm and not be offended by each-other, even though we disagree. We should also be wary of how we are interpreting the statements made here: science shows that text-only communication is not perfect; we miss out on tone and facial expression, and our own mood dictates how we read a thing.

Was this thread started as an attack, a plea, or a neutral discussion? I haven't a clue, but it has opened the door for valid discussion.

Point taken that I don't read Lois deathfics, Terry, although in the beginning I did read a couple. But haven't done so in a few years now. But part of it is that death is too much what RL is and so there you go. Shallow I know.

But, oddly I admit, I frequently read the comments on such fics, I think to gauge from those comments how the topic is treated. Now this is a very imperfect way to go about that task I admit, but there it is. Generally (I'm tempted to say always, but 'always' statements are suspect . what I've found is that no mention is made of Lois's actual dying, her suffering, etc. Mostly comments are 'poor Clark' etc. Now that doesn't mean of course that the fic itself did not focus on Lois' dying but it does suggest that it did, I think.

I'm not willing to do a tally of Lois deathfics (and here too I would include - dead-Lois fics) vs Clark death and dead-Clark fics - too depressing a topic, but my impression is that were someone to do that, they would come up with a very unbalanced list.

You must remember too that, as Mary put it so well above, we do live in culture that is still biased in this regard, and so I think perhaps it's understandable that some of us might draw attention to the pattern when it occurs in L&C fanfics.

btw, I have admitted to my 'biased worldview' - I'm a feminist. But I like to think that feminism is about equality of the sexes.

c.

I do not think your viewpoint is shallow, Carol. When I go to funerals, the custom where I live is for the attendees to pass in front of the open casket in order to view the departed once more. I don't do that. I don't want my final memory of a friend or loved one to be horizontal in a box and slathered with makeup. If your preference is shallow, then so is mine, but I don't buy it.

I don't want to go through the Archive and tally up the Lois death tales vs. the Clark death tales, either. Although I agree with you that it is probable that stories where Lois dies are in the majority between those two topics.

The stories which do not focus (or, for that matter, describe in great detail) Lois' death can probably be split into two categories: those which are guilty of the infraction of which you charge them, namely 'poor Clark' stories, or those which do not linger on her death because death is a nasty, brutal thing and this is a PG-13 or below board. Anything which described in slow and horrifying detail Lois (or anyone else) being disemboweled while still alive surely belongs in the Nfic folder. And I would draw the line at reading such a story myself.

All that being said, I still believe that too much is made of this point. I agree that our culture has, in the past, marginalized women, just as people of non-Caucasian heritage have been marginalized. But starting a new thread every time Lois dies in a story, irrespective of the circumstances, is beating a dead horse. If feminism means treating men and women equally, then a thread such as this one should pop up when a Clark-dying story is posted.

And while I haven't made a survey of such threads compared to Clark-dying stories, I don't recall such a thread. If there is one out there, I'd like to read it. If there is not such a thread, then the natural conclusion is that the FOLCs who are drawn to such threads as this one to blast (however gently and elegantly and politely) Lois-death stories aren't treating men and women equally.

I'd like to make the comment that the database for this study is this fanfic board. Now, without detailed analysis of members gender's I think it is safe to say that the female readers and writers have a large majority over the male readers and writers here.

If there were more Lois deathfics than Clark deathfics on this board I would expect it to be due to the prevalence of female writers and cannot be extended to the general populace.

We write fantasy cloaked in the costume of a superhero and a human female's relationship. Most of we women are more interested in seeing and writing about a man grieving for us than the other way around.

It's the same way we like Clark to take the lead in the romance department. There have been fine stories where Lois is the super one, but the romance still plays out in the more traditional manner, IIRC, because that's our fantasy.
Artemis

Interesting, Artemis. And I believe that you are quite correct about that. But equally interestingly, if there was a prevalence of male writers on these boards, I don't think that that would necessarily lead to a greater number of Clark deathfics.

Yes, that's definitely true, I think. But is the opposite also true? Are men in general particularly interested in reading stories that are told from a woman's point of view, and which describe a woman grieving for a male character? I don't think so, not when it comes to most men. As I said in an earlier post, most stories are about men, because women like to read about (and see) men they can fantasize about and imagine having a relationship with, and most men like to see (but not so often read about) men they can identify with and imagine being themselves. Hence the general shortage of stories about women in popular culture.

But the fact that the general culture looks like that (in order to cater to our fantasies) also means that boys and girls are brought up to value the lives of men and women differently.

Speaking about male writers of fanfic, however, I must point out that we have had some brilliant male writers on these boards, both current writers and writers who are no longer active here. Among these writers are Terry Leatherwood, of course, whose brilliant style of writing is impressive indeed. There is also Bob Bartholomew (wonder if I got your name right this time, Bob?), who is a master at writing about emotions and romance. There is the absolutely inimitable Tank Wilson, truly one of a kind, and among past writers there has been the brilliant Shayne Terry. Sorry if I forgot anyone I should have mentioned.

Interestingly, however, all these four men, Terry, Bob, Tank and Shayne, have often written fics told from Lois's perspective. They have certainly shown the ability to take an interest in a woman's feelings and point of view. And two of the writers, Tank and Shayne, have written Clark deathfics. Shayne, as far as I know, has written no Lois deathfic even if he has definitely written a Clark deathfic.

So some men are interested in imagining women grieving for a male character, and they are also interested in describing a female character and her emotions. Still, as I said, most men and women seem to prefer stories about men, making it more likely that men will be the heroes and that the main female character may end up playing the part of a dead body in stories aimed at the general population.

Ann

Terry wrote:

This bothered me a bit because it's not what I was suggesting. Expressing myself poorly again.

I wasn't asking for gory-detail fics, although of course I was asking that the hypothetical fic not avoid those details if the author chose to kill Lois is that CSI way. I guess it's the interpretation that that's all I was expecting. But dying's not nearly that simple nor limited to the strictly physical.

Further to Ann's comment about about gender and reading/writing preferences. Recent studies of preteen readers have found that generally, girls will read a story with either a male or female as the main protagonist but boys will boycott stories with female main protagonists. There was some discussion of this pattern when the first Harry Potter books turned out to be so popular.

Artemis's point about the gender of most folcs explaining reference for Lois death fics because that allows them to fantaize about their importance as wives, mothers, lovers has been made before, and also in this thread. What can I say?? We women are martyr's in the service of our men.

And I will repeat, but only because Terry reused 'the dead horse' metaphor - it's no more dead-horsing around to write an exposition on death-fic than it is to write a death-fic fantasy.

One thing that is a bit OT - I didn't think gfic specifically censored graphic gory details. I thought it was only the graphic sexual details. Anyway, I don't have difficulty with that policy, I was just unaware of it.

c.

No, it's not only graphic sexual details which will elevate your story to nfic. Graphic violence would also be considered beyond the PG13 rating.

That's why we have so much trouble with the old term of the 'n' in nfic meaning naughty. It gives quite the wrong impression. The nfic folder is actually for a lot more than just LNC romps. It's for graphic adult themes - sex, violence, anything else you can think of....

Of course, despite a lot of previous discussion, we've never been able to come to a conclusion on anything to replace it which would be a little more appropriate, so in the meantime we're stuck with it.

LabRat