You should really read Women in Refrigerators. You don't seem to understand what fridging is.

Anonymous

echogolfoscar:

sigma7:

phoenix:

brevoortformspring:

I think I understand what fridging is just fine. I simply do not agree that every instance of something bad happening to a female character within the context of a super hero story constitutes fridging.

I absolutely agree with this.  It’s like the tendency to say every Original Character MUST be a Mary Sue.

I’ve never liked how some people have taken fridging to such lengths that you can’t do ANYthing to a female character, else you get called out for it.  And it can frequently just be an emotional reaction to being a fan of said characters.

There IS a fine line between bad things happening to characters, and actual fridging, and that mileage is going to vary for everyone, but sometimes it’s just an overreaction.

And I’m doing a terrible job of explaining my thoughts, and have begun rambling, so shutting up now. >.<

These are two terms that’ve been watered down by overuse, which is a shame, because they have their uses.

If a character serves no purpose, has no characterization other than to die and serve as angst- or anger-fodder, to provoke another character, then they’re fridge meat.  If you kill a female character after establishing her, giving her some attributes other than simply to suffer and die, that’s not a fridging.  May not be smart, but it’s not a fridging.

If an author creates (or strongly favors) a character in their narrative, that’s fine.  But when it becomes ridiculous — when their capabilities are far outside the norm to the point that other, longer established characters serve as little more than mouthpieces for just how exceptional that character is, and when that character meets with unqualified success disproportionate to their true merits, that’s a Mary Sue.  (You’ll notice that during comics crossovers or group books, the characters from the writer’s regular books stand out disproportionately: the Teen Titans in Crisis on Infinite Earths, Aztek in Morrison’s JLA, Spider-Woman in anything Bendis-shaped…that’s obnoxious, but it’s not Mary Sueing.  Now King Mob….)

You know comics way more than me, but I disagree with your argument about the killing of an established female character. My understanding of fridging is that it’s the suffering/death of a female character with no purpose other than to advance another character’s plot. How/Why the character dies is the important bit, not her characterization before the fact. An established female character could still be fridged, if the purpose of her death was to spur someone to action or raise the stakes. For example, Tasha Yar was fairly well-established as a character up to “Skin of Evil”¹, but the manner of her death, a handwave from Armus just to establish his evilness, was totally fridging².

¹ It was TNG’s first season, so she had about as much backstory as anyone else.

² Even if it was a result of Denise Crosby wanting out of the show, it’s still bad writing.

That’s actually an excellent point (I don’t know if killing a non-female character purely in service of another character is technically fridging, but if not, it needs a name).  I was trying to leave an out for a female character who has completed the hero’s journey and dies a good death, one that serves her story before anybody else.  None are readily coming to mind, at least, none that I like.  But I’m sure they’re out there.  (Maybe BSG’s Number Three.  Dunno.)

“Skin of Evil” had a decent final scene but everything else about that episode was just abysmal.  The only way I’d argue that it wasn’t fridging Yar would be that until that final scene (and rarely ever after) it had no appreciable effect on the emotions of the characters.  There’s no urgency or restrained anger in any of them (well, Data gets a pretty saucy line, but that’s more indicative of how badly writers could fumble his character), though that just seems like another indication of how incapable this episode was of working on any level.  But yeah, her death was wholly unnecessary and didn’t even serve the plot in any meaningful manner except to please Crosby (temporarily; I’m so very glad Sela went almost unused after her introduction).

There’s a different kind of unnecessary death that seems to be endemic to comics, the “I will kill your C-list characters to show how badass my villain is” ploy.  Bendis pulled it on Alpha Flight, Robinson probably exemplified it in his Starman that had an utterly idiotic sequence where a Z-list character mows through a Justice League offshoot like they were gingerbread men, and every crossover sacrifices deadwood in the name of making the “event” so very memorable.  (Rarely do the crossover writers actually kill one of their own characters; at least Morrison dispatched Aztek thusly.)  Or, worse, kill a statistic of background, never-seen characters to goad the protagonist on – Stamford in Civil War, Enterprise did it with Florida, JJ Abrams did it to an entire planet, v4 of the Legion did it about once a year.  Diminishing returns sets in, especially if the atmosphere rapidly returns to normal after that plot – DC One Million wiped out Montevideo and I don’t think it was ever referenced again.  It’s just such a lazy move that reeks of hackery and underscores how shallow the character’s universe is, that everyone is only seen in terms of their relationship to him/her.