You can kill characters. You can fuck with continuity. But when you do both at the same time you piss people off.

I don't so much mind the continuity rewrite—there've been a few stealth rewrites and one overt one since Crisis, and this one made a lot more sense than Zero Hour. (Not to mention this will no doubt result in Legion of Super Heroes reboot v6.0 or v7.0... I forget what number we're on by now...) It's that they felt the need to drag the Golden Age Superman and Lois Lane out of their storybook ending to make them misguided dupes and then kill them off in pointless fashion. We're not talking about some two-bit Suicide Squad character getting axed and replaced here, this is the iconic figure that DC Comics—and really, costumed superheroes as a genre—owes its very foundation to. Horribly disrespectful and unnecessary to the story. I'm just surprised they didn't have an abandoned refrigerator in the wreckage on Earth-2 for Lois' corpse to get thrown into .

How is Lois's death a refrigerator death?

It's not exploitative in the context of the story itself, but on a meta level the writers specifically brought the beloved venerable character out of a respectful retirement for the specific purpose of having her die and traumatizing her husband into a mindless fight scene .

I don't think it's much different from the way they brought him out of retirement--they were both exploited, and her gender had little to do with her death. I wince when I see the refrigerator clause invoked, because it almost seems (I'll proactively cop to overreacting) like no woman can die again, ever.

What's the origin, as opposed to meaning, of that term refrigerator death ? I remember hearing it in conjunction with IC but it seemed to be a pre-existing notion, and if there was dead woman in a fridge in IC I completely missed it or forgot about it.

Wikipedia's entry on Women In Refrigerators.

eta: By the definition in that article, Lois's death counts, but I think that since Superman's death counts too, and that Lois's life had always been his motivating factor, it's hardly out of left field or out of context for the story.

And I finished The Wake. I really liked the art; it was like colored charcoal.

It, appropriately, had a very denouement feeling, and I liked the way it dealt with some of the consequences of having a new Dream, in that it's hard to accept him. It's hard to accept the other denizens of the Dreaming who were brought back as well. Their very existence pokes at the nature of identity and the idea that death defines life. Poor Fiddler's Green, who merely wants to rest in peace.

I love Delirium. And the word "forgettery."

Matthew is awesome. Best talking bird ever!

So the first Despair was killed a long, long time ago, huh? I wonder how that happened. Now I understand the bit about Despair "becoming" Desire's twin: they were always twins, of course, but the "becoming" part was referring to the new Despair taking over.

Ha! The chick who dumped Dream and forced him into Brief Lives was THESSALY?!

And oh! Aw! Destruction showed up!! I mean, he didn't show up, show up, but he stopped by. I like Destruction for some reason, even though we don't see much of him.

The wake and funeral were both very lovely. I think it was exactly what the story deserved, if that makes any sense. It felt right. Even the breaking of the fourth wall to include the reader in the ceremony.

I don't understand why Gaiman wrote two extra issues after it, though. "Exiles" was better than "Soft Places," and I must say, it was nice to see the old Dream again for a bit, but "The Wake" closed things out so nicely it didn't feel necessary. "The Tempest" was better than "Midsummer Night's Dream," even though I don't really care for The Tempest. And I do wonder whether the Guy Fawkes thing was a V for Vendetta shout-out. Since I am a Shakespeare fan, it was cool to have an issue with him as the main character. Still odd as the final issue of the series, though. Or maybe not so odd. It's a bittersweet tale because we see that Dream, even 300 years ago, was so very trapped by his sense of responsibility. He will never leave his island. And it takes 60 years of hardcore captivity to give him the perspective that leads to his way off the island.

I have now read Sandman. I feel enriched and cool.

Thanks for the link - I really should remember Wikipedia as a info source.

So the death of Tara isn't technically a refrigerator death, because Willow's not a male superhero, but it's pretty damn close. Closer conceptually than it is to the "dead lesbian cliche" that got brought up at the time.

Heh, and I just realized that ALIAS is built on a reverse-fridge death.

Ha! The chick who dumped Dream and forced him into Brief Lives was THESSALY?!

Does Victor know about this?

I have now read Sandman.

Actually, in addition to the two Death on-off paperbacks, there's another Sandman book that Gaiman wrote where different artists tackle a story for a different eternal.

I think the trope ends up being a chick dying to motivate a guy because our heroes are guys. So don't fight the deaths of the women--fight their non-heroness. Also, the gender of a character has very little to do with how much I like them. And I hate the premise that it should. Just write characters well, and I'll be there.