I've been trying to keep out of this debate, but apparently I'm failing because here I am posting. Oh, well...

First of all, I have never written a deathfic. Not because of any particular dislike for them; I just haven't been inspired to do so. I will read them if they are well-done, but like many in this thread sometimes they hit a little too close to home to really be enjoyable. Cancer stories, the loss of a parent, etc bring up too many painful memories for me; we all have our own personal vulnerabilities. I appreciate warnings that let me decide whether or not the story might be too much for me. And I completely understand why people would not want to read them.

That, however, does not diminish a writer's right to write them. Writers write what they want. They don't always write what their readers ask for; they don't always write what will be popular and well-liked. They write what their muse wants to write. They are not bound by the wishes of their readers.

Heck, there are plenty of people out there writing fic I'd rather not read. There's slash for some rather horrifying pairings out there, just for one example wink . But just because I don't like it doesn't mean I have the right to prevent it from being written. If you don't like it, don't read it. Period. But you can't expect to dictate to an entire fandom what stories are allowed to be written.

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Of course, I haven't seen any stories by you posted here at all, at least to my knowledge. So I'll reserve my judgement about what your intentions may be until I've seen something you've actually written.
Judgment on what? Whether or not her writing is acceptable? What gives any of us the right to pass judgment on the premises she decides to explore in her writing?

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Are you up to writing a Lois and Clark story that fits the description that you yourself have formulated here? A story where Lois doesn't die, mind you, but is kept alive by Superman, just as you said.
The problem I have with this statement is that it implies someone would write a deathfic only because s/he wasn't "up to" writing something "better." Deathfic is no less a challenge than any other kind of writing. Admittedly there will be people out there who kill characters for shock value, etc, but for the most part people write deathfic because they are inspired to do so. Not because they can't manage to write a story where the characters stay alive. In most cases, at least in this fandom, death (of Lois or Clark) isn't used a quick-fix ending when the writer has painted him/herself into a corner.

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So it's no consolation to me at all that you may be "an equal opportunity killer" in other fandoms, if you've come to this one to kill Lois.
I very much doubt that anyone has come to this fandom to kill Lois. Writers aren't hitmen; they don't travel from fandom to fandom killing characters and moving on. Writers come to a fandom to explore new characters and situations. Sometimes those situations are tragic or even fatal for our characters. Sometimes they're not. Different stories call for different endings. But I don't know anyone in any fandom who writes deathfic exclusively. Everyone I'm familiar with sees that premise as one in a handful of ideas, and the majority of them, especially in FoLCdom, probably end up with the main characters safe and sound.

And, lastly:
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But, even so, Yvonne, I shudder. And not because of you, really, but because of all these women out there, all of us women, who just stand by and shrug and close our eyes while a holocaust of women are being killed every two to four years.... And then we sit down by our word processors and write a story where we'd rather kill a woman than a man. People, I shudder.
I'm sorry, but this is ridiculous. Writing about something is not the same as doing it, endorsing it, or even sympathizing with it. If I write a story where the bad guy abuses his dog, does that mean I'm pro-animal-abuse? That I turn my head away from animals who are abused in the street? No. It means I wrote a story. Bad people do bad things, even when they're only fictional bad people. With this line of logic, none of us could write about anything but happiness and rainbows and I promise you, it'd get boring really quickly wink

Besides which, you seem to be diluting your argument. If you dislike deathfic, wouldn't it be equally upsetting for us to kill Clark in a story?

If you feel that strongly about this holocaust of women being killed (and I don't mean to imply that I don't. but you brought it up), your time might be better spent with an activist or lobbyist group instead of trying to convince a message board full of mostly nonviolent fanfic writers not to kill fictional characters. I don't see how arguing against deathfic can do anything to change what's happening to women in the real world.

It's like the fallacy parents tell kids who won't eat their dinner. (As a child this argument made me crazy wink , although fortunately my parents didn't use it much.) "You should eat your dinner because children in insert-some-country-here are starving." If we don't eat it, we're not going to ship the food to the starving children. They're still going to be starving regardless of whether we eat or not.

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