...death is too much what RL is and so there you go. Shallow I know.
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.
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.
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.
