Poorly Lads - but not S&H-type Poorly...

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

Thanks everyone who's been adding to the Poorly Lads Storylist - amongst other things I've added a new category (Amnesia - and as usual I know there are more amnesia fics out there than are on the list so far... *g*) and changed "Non-serious injury" to "Non-serious injury, a selection of...", defined as focus on the injury in the story, because otherwise half the Pros stories ever written would be in that category! *g* But the reason I'm popping in again...

One of the things that set me off creating the storylist was a comment over at prosfinder that there seemed to be relatively few stories in Pros where the lads are very seriously injured or chronically ill (for example, with cancer) compared to similar stories in Starsky and Hutch fandom in particular, and in the course of creating the lists, gideonbd77 has now said something similar:

I find it rather curious that there are so few Pros stories about serious/chronic illness in a fandom with so many H/C plots. Maybe Pros fans prefer H/C stories where the lads recover fully and have a happy ending?

I've got to admit that I'm not madly keen on reading chronic-illness stories myself, so if I saw a story was going to be about cancer or AIDs (for example) then I'd probably hesitate before diving in - and I might only do that if it was one of my favourite authors even. I don't actually mind death stories, but I do find chronic illness rather depressing - whilst death can be redeemed by the idea that they'll be reunited in the afterlife/next world/insert belief here, and in theory that would include death through chronic illness, there's just something about the latter that I find less... readable I guess. Maybe in hearing other people's thoughts I'll be able to figure out what/why that is! Perhaps it just comes down to the fact that I love the romance of stories (not soppy-kissy romance, but yearning-and-then-requited romance) and there's not much romantic yearning to be had in chronic disease...

I dunno - what d'you think? And is it true that there are more of these kinds of stories in S&H (or other fandoms)? And if so, I wonder why? As Gideon suggested, are we just more prone to happy endings? (Not in my case particularly, it's the middle I'm turned on or off by!) Hmmn...