You guys won't be surprised that I hate deathfics. Having my 21-year-old son die in my arms increased my intolerance for such stories, but I have always hated stories that tear Lois & Clark apart permanently. That's probably because I am one of those readers who becomes totally immersed in a fic. For me, Lois and Clark have never been made-up characters that I can manipulate like Play-Doh figures. They exist as real people, maybe not in an alternate reality, but certainly in a corner of my heart, and what hurts them hurts me.
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Sometimes the "fun" is the feeling of surviving the ride. Sometimes the pleasure (REAL pleasure) comes later, when I smell the roses and pause a moment, savoring life. It's not the "sadistic" joy of pleasure DURING the pain. It's the pleasure of relief that follows.
I'm glad it's that way for some of you. It isn't for me. Emotional rollercoasters that end painfully never leave me with a feeling of relief afterwards. The better the writing and the fewer distractions arising from, for example, overly poetic language or non-American spelling or usage, the worse the reaction. After merely skimming Becky Bain's Ad Astra story, I was depressed for over a week.

Life is too short for me to waste being unnecessarily depressed, so I'm picky about what I read. Unfortunately, the wham warning on the most recent story could have applied equally well to Tank's "Love Disabled," in which one of the major characters was left broken. But his story was still a story of triumph and hope, and because I knew and enjoyed his story, I risked reading this one. Thankfully, I was unable to suspend my disbelief about the time frame of the premise long enough to get involved in the story.

I wish there was a way to let those of us who truly hate deathfics know about them ahead of time, but I can't think of anything that wouldn't impose on a different group of readers instead. But as you see from the way we describe our feelings, this isn't just a matter of preferring one kind of story over another (S1 vs S4 stories) or finding certain subject matter uninteresting (stories about secondary characters or about children/babies). Some of us are seriously distressed when we read these stories. Ah, well, I guess we'll just gritch, either publicly or privately, when we stumble onto one.

Sheila Harper
Hopeless fan of a timeless love story
http://www.sheilaharper.com/