(And for goodness sake, don't give me stories where he is seriously, truly in love with someone else after he has met Lois!)
I swore I wasn't getting into this one.
But I have to point out here, Ann, that such a story would be within the rules for this forum, so authors
are quite entitled to write a story along this premise if they so choose to explore it. (Whether they'd get many readers is another thing entirely.
).
I know you didn't mean otherwise - unlike other posters who let their opinions become bludgeons, you do tend to recognise that your tastes don't hold sway here exclusively (and say so, too!
) But thought I'd nail it down anyway.
I must confess to having a wry smile every time this old horse comes around again for discussion. Back in the day, many authors like myself, Wendy and others were repeatedly told we were "killing the fandom", "destroying everything Superman stands for", that we "obviously hate Superman", that we 'don't care about the characters"...because we were writing and posting angst/tearjerkers. We'd come into a fandom, you see, which at the time had really mostly only had romances and comedies prior to that and we were told (sometimes quite viciously) that we had no right writing anything else.
Not that it stopped us.
So it's been a delight for me, personally, to see the fandom open up so much, lighten up so much, in recent years, with a new influx of authors not afraid to stretch the envelope some and explore themes and plots of all shades and hues.
We can debate this old chestnut till the cows come home, (and are welcome to do so, of course) but really it will always come down to this:
There will be stories we enjoy and which suit our tastes. There will be stories we don't. But all are welcome to be written and posted here, so long as they follow the small amount of forum rules we've laid down.
Everyone is welcome, too, to post their opinion that a story doesn't suit them (although we do like such negative fdk to be balanced with something positive). The rule here is to remember that your opinion is only one of many and in the end the story belongs to its author, who is the final authority on how its written. What won't be tolerated is telling an author that they can't write something, that they should be posting in another fandom, or demanding that admins remove stories from the mbs...simply because they don't suit an individual's specific tastes or pov.
And if a story really offends your sense of who and what the characters are so that you really can't in all conscience say anything positive about it...stop reading. Leave it to those who enjoy that sort of thing and go read something else you do like.
Life is too short for anything else.
LabRat
