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So, yes, I do feel that Lois is an endangered person, and I feel that we may actually contribute a little to her death in the wider world of the Superman mythology if death-of-Lois fics become popular here, and certainly if they become a lot more popular than death-of-Clark fics.
Oh dear. Ann, I'm afraid I have to disagree with you again.

I do recognize that out in the big bad world - comics, movies, other TV-incarnations - there are people who want to dispense with Lois Lane. Whether or not that number is large, I cannot begin to say.

But I think you're looking at it from a perspective that many of us are not. Although there are definitely a number of people who follow Superman in all his different forms and incarnations, I think I'm safe in saying that the majority of FoLCs are here to this day primarily due to our love for the L&C TV series. So perhaps we're not thinking of how our actions could affect the Superman community at large.

How common are deathfics in this fandom, anyway? There are approx. 2700 stories on the Archive. If deathfics amounted to as much as 5%, that would be 135 stories. I haven't counted, but I doubt there are that many.

I can only speak for myself, but I don't anticipate a surge of deathfics to come in in the future. And I would certainly never expect them to become "popular".

Why? Well, just because of the nature of FoLCdom - a sub-fandom of the larger Superman phenomena, if you want to think of it as that. Yes, there are people open to reading deathfic (just as there are people opposed), but most of us are here because we loved the romance of Lois & Clark. We want the love story. So many stories are pre-relationship and pre-revelation, because as readers many of us love watching them fall in love, with variations, over and over again. The notion of them being together for the rest of their lives is one of the things we want celebrated. Yes, we may also want action plots, and heroic Superman feats, and varying levels of angst before the big payoff at the end, but we want them together. A few deathfics (no matter who dies) being submitted and receiving praise is not an indication that the fandom is undergoing a radical shift to the Dark Side, in my opinion.

Kathy

"Our thoughts form the universe. They always matter." - Babylon 5