Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Lois & Clark Clark's Behavior in HoL: RANT WARNING!

Okay so I was just reading part one of SymbolicAngel's new fic, "Exposure," and I got to thinking--always a dangerous activity, I know. (Just so you know, this is just my pondering one afternoon while I'm bored, so proceed with caution...)

In the scene in HoL where Clark tells Lois about his feelings and Lois rejects him, we FoLCs always have so much sympathy for Clark (for obvious reasons).

But how many times have we thought about Lois and her feelings in this situation??

I say this because I've been in the awkward situation of having a (what I thought was) a platonic male friend confess that he had deeper feelings for me than just friendship. So I can perhaps over-relate to Lois' position.

But here's my point:

This was already a very confusing time for Lois. She was suddenly confronted with the most unexpected possibility of getting married (something we all suspect she had never really considered before). That is a huge commitment to be thinking about. As a result, she was forced to re-evaluate...well, pretty much her whole life. Marriage, especially to Lex Luthor, would change her life drastically, and she knew that. She had to consider her career, whether she was ready to even consider having children, living with a romantic partner (which canon says she never really did before--see HiM), and so much more. Of course, she was trying to figure out her feelings for Lex as well. Not to mention that Lex had already succeeded in knocking out most of Lois' support structure.

So my point with that is, Lois is under *tremendous* pressure at the moment of Clark's confession.

So why are we all so mad at her for hurting Clark?

Isn't it fair to say that Clark was being selfish at this point? If Clark were thinking with his head instead of his heart, he would have acted as a the reliable, platonic friend Lois had come to know him as. Instead of confessing his love, he should have, instead, helped Lois reason through the situation. He should have asked her how she felt about Lex and the whole situation. If Clark had remained reasonable and calm, as we all know, Lois eventually would have concluded that she did not love Lex, would not marry him, and probably even realized her feelings for Clark.

Now. I have been told, on occasion, that I'm too much like an automaton when it comes to romantic relationships, but isn't it fair to say that this would have been a better approach to the whole situation for Clark to take? Isn't it fair to say the Clark was *un*fair to Lois for confusing her even more by his confession?

Of course I realize that the writers of the show needed to create mega-angst for the season finale and so forth...and of course we all like it the way it is...but my point is: Clark's actions in the situation were unfair and perhaps even out of character.

What are people's thoughts on this? Am I totally off base? Should I never have brought this up? Am I over-empathizing with Lois here?

Let me know your thoughts, I'm intersted in hearing people's reactions.

BTW: I'm terribly sorry if there has already been an extensive discussion about this before. Just let me know and I'll drop the subject.

Sure Lois was under a lot of pressure especially from Lex. However, while she let him down gently what makes us mad at Lois at least in my view is the way she blatantly made it clear to Clark just who her heart belonged to. Asking him to contact Superman for her was really not the thing to do after you just turned down someone who confessed their feelings. Also she treated Clark like all he had was a school boy crush rather than acknowledging the fact that he had genuine feelings for her.

While it's true that Clark fed into her fantasy more than he should have and to be honest brought the situation on himself she shouldn't have dismissed him so easily.

I can sympathize with Lois too, I think we've all had the platonic friend who suddenly confesses to more than platonic feelings. There's no thought that Clark was rocking the boat. I'm sure that even Clark expected to get rejected, a part of him hoped he wouldnt but realistically she never showed that kind of interest in him so why would he assume she would suddenly change her mind.

I always felt more for Clark not because Lois rejected him the way she did it. Yes she tried to be as nice as she could about it at first but then she turned around and asked him to find Superman. That was cruel and immature, it was very jr high (yes I'm using jr high as an adjective). What also upset me was that she was wiiling to give Luthor a chance but not Clark, but I do understand that Lois was looking for stability and Clark couldnt offer that though the irrational romantic in me doesn't understand that.

You're right that a calm, rational Clark would have done things completetly differently and never have confused Lois more than she already was. But the point is that he wasnt thinking rationally at all. All he knew was that the only women he ever loved was possibly going to marry another man if he didn't do something. It was an act of desperation. A stupid one but when are acts of desperation ever smart.

my two cents
Ambar

There may have been a discussion on this before, but if so I missed it!

I agree with you, actually. Well, actually, I think I'm kinda irritated at the both of them in this situation, and yet I feel for them both at the same time.

On one hand, Clark picked a pretty lousy time to tell her how he felt. But then, he felt cornered and was desperate to get her to change her mind about marrying Lex. WOULD he have told her if she were marrying someone who wasn't the 'bad guy'? I'd like to think so, but there's always that thought that maybe he did it so that she wouldn't marry Lex.

And then there's Lois. Her rejection of him didn't really bother me as much as what she asked for afterwards. She had to know that he would figure out what he wanted Superman for, even if she didn't know that he WAS superman. Did she do this as a sort of defense mechanism, to try and make Clark stop having these feelings for her?

Bah. I don't know.

And I'd probably be more Thought Provoking and make a whole lot more sense if my brain wasn't feeling rather mooshy at the moment.

And yes, I think it IS fair to say that Clark was being selfish at that moment

ETA: Also, I think Lois's rejection to Clark was more 'he's my best friend and can't lose him' rather than any sort of feelings - or apparent lack thereof - that she may have had. In her experience, relationships of the romantic variety didn't really go well, and here's this great and awesome guy who was her best friend. She probably figured, subconciously at least, that if things were to get romantic between them she would end up losing him.

Ah well. You know I always tend to side with Lois, so take my response for what it is worth.

But to me this is a situation where Clark puts Lois in an awkward, no-win situation in two ways. First when he springs it on her that he loves her, thereby threatening their (to her) safe and platonic friendship, at a time when she really needed her safe and platonic friendship. But second, when he seems to force her to choose not only between himself and Lex (which is on some level acceptable), but when he forces her to choose between himself and himself - that is, between Clark and Superman - which is not acceptable at all!

I've always thought that Clark's secret identity game with Lois was downright cruel, there's no nicer way to put it. In HoL, Clark knows that Lois has a crush on Superman. And he has been working his cute little butt off to keep her in the dark about the fact that he is in fact Superman, and he has succeeded in completely fooling her, too. Now he springs the little bombshell on her that Clark Kent loves her, so will she please choose him rather than Lex or Superman?

I think it was absolutely right and proper for Clark to hide his Superman identity from Lois for as long as he wasn't romantically pursuing her. If she wasn't going to share his life, she had no right to share his secret, certainly not until Clark could be sure that she would keep his secret if he told her. But the moment he declared his love for her, he was absolutely obliged to tell her. Or at the very, very, very least, he should have told her that he had an important secret, which would alter her perception of him, but which he could only share with her if she loved him and wanted to share her life with him.

The moment she asked him to go and get Superman for her he should have told her. But of course, the best thing he could have done would have been not to declare his love for her as Clark at all. Instead, when she started to date Lex, Clark should have gone to her as Superman and told her why Superman regarded Lex Luthor as a dangerous criminal. Lois would have listened to her hero and taken his accusations of Lex seriously, and then she wouldn't have accepted Lex's proposal. But in order to be fully honest with her, Clark should also have told her, while he was in his Superman persona, that he was aware that she had romantic feelings for him. Not only that, but he actually returned her feelings. However, there was a crucially important fact that he had hidden from her, and the two of them could never be together unless she knew that secret. Frankly, I think that at first he should only have told her that he had a secret identity at all. He should have explained to her a lot of things about himself and made her see why he needed to keep his true self a secret from the world. He should have explained that he really regarded himself as an ordinary man who just moonlighted as a hero in spandex. Then he should have asked her to think about what he had told her and ask herself if she really wanted to marry a man who led a double life and who regarded Superman as little more than a shallow mask. He should have asked her to spend a minimum of a day and a night thinking about what he had told her.

After that, he should have told her that he would now tell her his secret, on one condition. She must never tell anyone about his secret identity, and she mustn't reveal the fact that Superman led a double life at all. And then, well, he should have told her.

So I think Clark was more cruel to Lois than Lois was to Clark. Lois acted in good faith, as it were. Clark deliberately lied or hid things from Lois - information about himself and information about Lex - and in my opinion, he was as guilty as Lois for creating the situation where Lois chose to marry Lex, and where she compared Clark unfavorably with Superman.

Ann

Er,Ann can you repeat that? Kidding.I also think Lois, at this point,still thought of Clark as a brother,(more or less) so asking her brother about someone she thought was his friend didnt seem out of place.People do things like that.

Sounds like a story idea to me. Write it up.

In most of the rewrites of this particular scene in fics that I remember we've seen it from Clark's pov and thus have had the emotions skewed in that direction. I don't remember many fics using Lois pov. It might be interesting to see her thought processes as she compares Lex to Clark, and Superman.

My problem with this whole arc had always been; not that she had rejected Clark as a romantic partner, but that she would have even considered Luthor as one. Lois was, is, and had always been an independant woman. While she may have harbored deep romantic feelings for a knight in shining armor (which probably was Superman's role) she had never shown a desire or a prediliction for 'needing' a man in her life.

The whole 'support structure' theory that has always been trotted out never held much water for me. Granted the Daily Planet had been taken away and that would have been huge. But Lois was shown to be loyal to her 'real' friends and rather than running off to a man she didn't love for the sake of 'stability', I'd see her joining together with her friends in trying to get to the bottom of what happened and where they (as a group) would go from there.

Even if everything else had gone wrong, I still can't see Lois marrying anyone she doesn't love. Marriage was never important enough for her to feel as if it was something that she 'needed'. In my mind, the only reason Lois would ever commit to marriage was if she was truly in love with someone and wanted to be with that person in a 'go to bed every night and wake up every moring together' sort of way. I don't see her as a person to accept a 'marriage of conveince' as was presented on the show.

Of course, were talking about television writers here, and never let it be said that they'd let a little thing like 'being in character' get in the way of what they wanted to accomplish in their storyline.

Tank (who thinks that it's possible that true friends could have a deeper relationship than romantic partners because there's no sexual component to 'confuse' things)

I kind of agree with this. Not that Luthor shouldn't have been incorporated into some love triangle situation because those tend to grab attention, but that it was just so simple. For instance, in showing us Luthor as the bad guy behind the scenes from the very beginning we already develop a bias against Lois which makes it more difficult to accept any attraction to him. Why not hang a shroud of unconfirmed suspicion over him for a while? Knowing clearly what he does makes it easier to side with Clark and scream at the tv "don't you see?!"

It also makes it even harder, like tank said, when we don't see any really credible reason why Lois would all of a sudden be so inclined to go for a marriage of convinience. This is another of those moments when I think that the character's inner lives were skimmed over in favor or monster of the week type of stuff. Like Tank said, just the Daily Planet couldn't have been enough. But I do believe that the writers could have found a way to make us believe that Luthor was a reasonable choice for a Lois--it just would take more than a couple of episodes to show in painful detail her arrival at that choice. My theory is that such a thing would be too real and too painful to be shown in the lighthearted ABC spot that it was. A shame.

alcyone (who thinks that straight male/female friendships always end up becoming complicated with or without sex)

I'm 100% sure I'm tying the noose around my own neck by saying this, but I will anyway.

It's not cruel. At all. It's called "preserving a secret" - it's what he's been doing all his life. All his life. He's barely ever told anyone and the people who do know forced him to tell, not the other way around. You can't expect him to blurt something out that he's spent 20-some years hidden to the world - that would be completely OOC.

Not to mention Lois Lane happens to be dating *his ennemy* -- he may not be depicted as such that much in the series, but Lex Luthor is Superman's arch-nemesis. It would be completely insane of Clark to go and tell the woman Lex is dating that he's Superman! You don't tell a woman who you are if she's dating someone who has the power to hurt you. Or worse, hurt HER to get to you! Lois is known to be a friend of Superman - people already hurt/kidnap her so they can get to him; imagine if someone knew that she could tell them who he really is, she'd be in mortal danger!!! He knows that. And he *loves* her - he really, really does. He doesn't want to put her in danger! That would go against everything that is Clark or Superman.

Even if you take Smallville where Lana is married to Lex and Lana knows who Clark is - he's only told her because *she already knew*. He wouldn't have done so otherwise. He spent 7 years not telling her...

And as to him wanting for Lois to pick *Clark* and not *Superman* - that's because in the series, the real person is Clark. So of course he wants her to love the person he is and not his powers. It's the same with most anyone who happens to be in the public eye - they want to find someone who will love them for who they are, not what people think they are or imagine that they are. I don't think millionaires especially dream of being loved for their money and movie stars for their portrayal of someone in a film - they're just looking for the same thing we are, basically, which is someone who will love them, the person they are inside.

And there you go... my 2 rusted Canadian pennies.

(oh, BTW... Ann... your message box is full.. *lol* I've been trying to reply to one of your messages for a while now...)

Tank, I absolutely agree with you that my own worst problem with HoL is Lois's acceptance of Lex's proposal in the first place. Some people have argued that it makes sense, including Arawn, but it depends on how you see Lois. I don't see her as someone who would accept a marriage proposal just because she needs support or stability, or because she is desperately yearning for social acceptance, or because she would so, so much like to get rich.

And Lara, you and I should probably agree to disagree! Ah, but I agree with you that Clark most certainly couldn't blurt out his secret to Lois just because he fell in love with her the moment he saw her. He had to get to know her before he knew if he could trust her, and just like you pointed out, he had to consider her safety, too. (Ah, well - back in the comics in the seventies Lois never knew Superman's identity, but he treated her as his official girlfriend anyway and took her to dates in crowded public restaurants while he himself was dressed in his Suit, and he kissed her and danced with her in the busy streets of Metropolis while everybody was looking on... talk about being mindful of Lois's safety!!! :rolleyes: Honestly, Lara, you know that much of my anger at Clark is really anger at the way Superman treated Lois for so many years in the comics and movies, don't you?)


Okay, but if TV show Lois and Clark were just going to stay friends and partners, then it would have been okay for Clark to keep lying to her. But the closer he wanted to get to her, the more reason he had to tell her. I'll just insist that you can't ask a person to love you and trust you if you deliberately deceive that person about who you really are, by carefully hiding important aspects of yourself from your prospective loved one. If you do that to a person, then I really think you are being cruel to him or her!

Anyway, my mailbox isn't full anymore, so you can send me your private message now, Lara!

Ann