somniloquence

what a wonderful post! so many excellent issues you raised!!! we are at the end of the day a pretty generic (as in genre :-) bunch, aren't we???

i think there may be one thing, however, worse than death stories, which is the ones where they fall out of love (or have never been)...i'm thinking of something like kat allison's end of the road, where you want them to make it with every fiber of your being. b/c death can still retain that moment of love that transcends...everydayness, however, seems the true opposite of romance (in fact, hatred doesn't count either...i don't give a damn is the real kiss of death :-)

i think personally i avoid death fics for two reasons. one is exactly what you describe: i'm invested in the characters and their true love and happy togetherness, and death really doesn't fit the image (old age death stories after a long happy life together are thus not that much a problem...) the other reason i tend to avoid deathfic--unless i totally trust the writer--is that all too often is becomes melodramatic. death to make the hero realize that he loved after all; death before he could confess his love; death to make a point (and now that i'm thinking about it, it might at times be that spiteful death that resembles our teenage utter self-involved 'i wish i were dead so you'd feel guilty'...)

so yes, if death is not deus ex machina for the author to create angst; if it genuinely becomes a plot element to explore emotions, i'll read it (though there are still many times when ff needs to be pure escape for me and i'd probably hesitate in that mood...)