#Fridging

[cheeeerie]

Okay I guess I have thoughts about it if you guys care

So. Siuan is dead.

Yes, that’s different than it is in the books, and I love Siuan (definitely a top 5 character for me in the books) but I also feel like it makes sense? For what the show is doing?

Like, I’m not dick riding for the show. It’s made some bad decisions. It seems to struggle a lot with finales, including this one—but I feel like this finale was at a lower tier because the scenes didn’t have room to breathe and there were too many contrivances, not because they killed Siuan.

I just feel like Siuan’s death makes a lot of sense here? It’s like Loial’s death in the last episode. I personally LOVE Siuan’s post-deposition plot in the books, but there are SO many book plots that it’s impossible to to adapt them all, and Siuan’s seems small enough to be one of the ones sacrificed. We can still get the breaking of the tower without her, through Leane. I also assume Verin will be more involved, since she’s still in the tower at this point (in the books she was in the TR with Alanna).

I guess I just don’t get what all the fuss is about. Yes, a queer character was killed, but there are so many queer characters in this show. It’s not like they did a “bury your gays” thing. There are still gays! There are still queer woc! This show is diverse enough that this doesn’t feel like colorism/sexism/homophobia to me, it just feels like killing off a character, and since there are so many diverse characters in the show, it just so happens that they die sometimes.

I don’t think this is fridging either. We can’t really know for sure, since we haven’t seen the fallout of Siuan’s death yet, but if her death begins the breaking of the tower, then it’s definitely doing way more than just developing Moiraine’s character. I also think that calling this fridging is really reductive to Siuan’s character. She’s NEVER existed solely for Moiraine’s development, she’s always been a strong character in her own right with her own motivations.

TL;DR: Characters die sometimes. This character died. I don’t think there’s as much to read into it as people think there is.

[idkaguyorsomething]

the 1996 doctor who movie contains a perfect textbook example of fridging, wherein an established longtime character is killed off unceremoniously, with very little agency or time spent on their own perspective when they’re literally being killed, usually as a means to provide shock value, raise the stakes, or make the main character feel bad for thirty seconds before moving on

what sets it apart from every other loving wife and children in every superhero backstory ever, though, is that the person they fridged was THEIR OWN MAIN CHARACTER

[velvet4510]

Why Magneto’s Storyline in X-Men: Apocalypse is The Worst (it’s not just Cherik)

Ok I just need to vent because this has been chewing away at my brain for far too long.

Cherik is far from the only reason why Erik’s family plotline in X-Men: Apocalypse is some of the stupidest, sloppiest, and most character-ruining pieces of writing I’ve ever seen. Haters may say “oh you’re just upset because he married someone who wasn’t Charles.” But, like, aside from the fact that the original timeline already established that Erik’s top priority was always the fight for mutantkind and he had no interest in settling down - whether that had anything to do with his feelings for Charles or not - the problems with the Apocalypse writing go WAY beyond just him & Charles:

Erik would never abandon his cause at this point. By the end of DOFP, Erik has just been imprisoned for a full 10 years thanks to the JFK situation. Meaning he has spent a full decade being forcibly inactive in the fight for mutants. And he just learned that all of his fears about humans and mutants came to pass in the future to the level where a time-traveler had to be sent to change the past. And he was so set on averting that future that he tried to kill his friend and the sister of the man he loved, and then made a whole speech on international TV begging for the mutants of the world to fight alongside him. This is the POLAR OPPOSITE of a man who would feel like settling down and walking away from the fight within the next decade. The Sentinels being cancelled did NOT make mutant life easy overnight; Stryker was still up to no good, and there is no way that there weren’t others like him doing the same. Yes, Raven’s actions made a very positive difference, but I think we have enough brain cells to agree that this did not mean things for mutants immediately became sunshine and rainbows to the level where Erik - the most (understandably) paranoid character in the X-Men series - would even consider taking a break, let alone giving up the fight permanently. Knowing what he did about the possibilities of the future would’ve made the Erik we know double down on his commitment to his cause and follow up on his actions in Washington.

Erik wouldn’t risk starting a young family at this moment in his life. Erik was a Holocaust prisoner, his people were massacred, his mom was shot when he couldn’t move the coin, and then Charles was shot when Erik accidentally deflected a bullet into him, and then every member of his Brotherhood save Raven were captured and killed. Not only is this more than enough grief for one character to have, but the man wouldn’t dare risk having a new family of his own when everyone he’s ever loved has gotten hurt (largely because of him), and when he’s an international fugitive. That is no time to risk being selfish, and he would know. He would’ve been the first to realize that a potential spouse and child would also end up killed, and so he’d avoid that altogether. In fact, he wouldn’t even consider it, because, as mentioned, he wouldn’t leave his cause behind. You know, if he was actually in character.

Magda is a human. At this point, Erik hates humans. Again, he has just been imprisoned by humans for 10 years for trying to save a mutant, and he just learned that in the future, humans would’ve wiped out mutants, exactly as he feared. Everything that happened in DOFP would only further inflame his already-passionate hatred of humans. He is not in the mental state to even begin to consider Charles’ philosophy and give a human a chance at a relationship, let alone marry a human.

The family lives in Poland. The country where Auschwitz is. The country where Erik and his family and people was imprisoned, tortured, and executed. The country where Erik had to watch Shaw kill his mother. Basically the LAST country in the freaking WORLD that Erik would want to ever see again, let alone spend the rest of his life in. Erik is fluent in multiple languages - he is shown to easily converse in French and Spanish in First Class - and has been all over the world thanks to his Nazi hunting, so if he really needed to flee the U.S., there were a hundred other countries he could’ve gone to and blended into (Canada, France, Mexico, anywhere in South America, heck, he even could’ve discovered Genosha during this time). But in the original timeline, he didn’t leave the U.S. at all despite being a national fugitive after escaping his plastic prison, and he never did get caught again, so….

Erik’s first meeting with Magda is completely OOC for him. Erik mentions that he told Magda who he was the first night they met and he trusted her then. EXCUSE ME??? Erik Lehnsherr does not trust strangers. Erik Lehnsherr does not tell the complete truth about himself and his past to just anyone; look at how deeply Charles had to probe before Erik opened up to him. This stupid line was obviously shoehorned in just to make their relationship seem like perfect soulmates and thus ensure it is doubly tragic when she gets thrown in the fridge 5 minutes later (more on that in a sec). Obviously the intention is for the audience to go “aww, he instantly trusted her, she instantly accepted him, this is true love…” Give me a break. You’re really telling me that Magda met this stranger one night, found out he was none other than the international fugitive who apparently killed the U.S. president and just tried to kill another president on live TV, and went “oh, no problem, honey, let’s make a baby and live the cottagecore dream!” That’s some BS if I’ve ever heard it, and I’m convinced the writers subconsciously knew it; there’s a reason that is revealed in a throwaway line rather than shown onscreen, because then nobody would’ve bought it.

Fridging. Magda and Nina exist in the movie for one reason and one reason only: To get brutally killed and give Erik even more grief and trauma so that he’ll seek revenge on the entire world, aka do what the plot demands of him, aka have the same journey as he did in First Class (more on that in a sec). That’s all. Neither of them are any more than one-dimensional plot devices. They are not characters at all. Magda isn’t even named in the actual movie (he doesn’t even say her name when she dies) - it’s so obvious they didn’t even know what her name would be when they made the movie. This is textbook fridging, and one of the worst examples of it of all time. It’s all the worse considering that Erik never met Magda in the original pre-DOFP timeline, meaning Magda originally most likely lived a long happy life and died old in bed. But now, she gets fridged just because the writers didn’t know what more to do with Erik. It’s misogyny of the highest level.

A parenthood story for Erik was already set up. DOFP already hinted at Erik being a father, with Peter’s comment about his mom. So if the writers wanted to show Erik as a father, and to include Magda, they already had a solution that would seamlessly flow from the previous film - make Erik and Peter’s relationship one of the centerpieces of the story, and let Magda be Peter’s mom! (You know, like she is in the comics!)

It doesn’t contribute anything new to Erik’s character development. From a screenwriting POV, this is unforgivable. May I remind you that Erik’s entire storyline in First Class revolved around grief and trauma for the loss of his family and people, especially his mom, and seeking revenge for it. Giving him a wife and daughter just so they can get killed too adds absolutely NOTHING to his character development. It’s merely retreading everything that already happened in his arc: he loses his family and goes on a roaring rampage of revenge. Completely superfluous, right down to Charles insisting that there’s good in him beyond the pain. The redundancy becomes apparent even in the dialogue, where Charles literally says “I told you since I first met you there’s good in you too.” The script itself can’t help but point out that all of this has happened before and literally nothing new has been added to Erik’s character arc.

See? It’s not just because of Cherik. Erik’s story in X-Men: Apocalypse is an atrocity in basic screenwriting and character development, on every level. And I will always despise it.

(Please tell me I’m not the only one who feels this way…)

[cleromancy]

tbh discourse around fridging is always so tedious because when some people say "fridging" what they actually mean is "i felt sad or angry because this character died" or "i wish this story had been about something else", both of which are valid emotional reactions to art but not enough for it to be a valid criticism

for it to be fridging 1) the gendered violence aspect is important, 2) the alienation of girls and women from art and story is important, 3) the element of it being used to diminish, undermine or remove female characters from importance in the narrative is important

it's at the point where people just throw the word around to mean any fictional death at all and, no dude. words mean things sometimes.

[musichawkposts]

Gonna be real, did not enjoy how they handled Cinta this season.

In a vacuum I understand the choice to kill her off. Death is a major theme in this show and this season in particular, Cinta and Brasso and their respective deaths parallel each other in really interesting ways. And I understand her death denying us, and Vel, the possibility of getting know and love this new, more vulnerable Cinta is meant to demonstrate the horrors of war, how arguably the most committed person in the cause died a meaningless death to a kid with an itchy trigger finger, mirroring Krennic's line about lawless ineptitude.

I just would have liked for them to have given them more time. Like, in this episode we see Cinta give a genuine smile for the first time, and generally be a much softer, more emotionally available person to Vel than the last time we really got to see her. That feels like it should be a big moment! I feel like that warrants time to explore what exactly led to this transformation and what it means for her as a person and her relationship with Vel! Especially given the cliffhanger we had regarding their strained relationship in Episode 3 that seemed to tease something... more.

Yet all we get are fragments of 1 episode dedicated to exploring what happened to Cinta, characterizing this new version of her, and depicting her romance with Vel. The fact that other characters have died and will almost certainly die helps but this still reads as a fridging/bury your gays moment with how little due was paid to their relationship, and to Cinta specifically as a queer woman of color. Cinta gets to speak and have emotions in 1 episode after 3 years of anticipation, without a lot of context for what caused her to change, and then she's killed moments after showing genuine warmth and love to her girlfriend for the first time, seemingly for the sake of developing her white girlfriend. It's this show's first and hopefully last major writing blunder in my opinion and I was really hoping this show would be above that since it had been! I can't help but be disappointed in a show playing into such a tired trope established in the same power structures that it's so deftly danced around thus far. I'm also not a fan of this show's unfortunate tendency to kill off interesting characters of color but I don't have much intelligent to say about that.

I'm still going to watch the show and I still think it's one of the best I've seen, at the end of the day it's one mishandled subplot out of like 6. And hey, they could end up doing something interesting with Vel, fridging aside. It just sucks that my overall impression of the show is going to be tainted by this baffling writing decision, I just can't help but be bitter about the fact we could've had truly great queer representation and got something so much worse than what this show could have and has been.

[buckys-arm-and-rios-dagger]

Diversity win! Daredevil Born Again features a MAN being fridged in the first episode!

[glitter-stained]

We should put male characters into fridges. Like yeah it should be all about the female character's grief and how she personally is handling what happened to hom, but also in a literal fridge. And to announce to the reader/viewer what character we are about to put into a fridge, we should give them the dead wife flashback cinematographic treatment while they are still alive. Make that guy repaint a nursery while holding a baby in his arm. Make him run happily on the beach in slowmo. For the love of everything holy please let that beefcake tank frolic under white bed sheet while making "deep" and mildly concerning statements about the nature of what's truly important in life.

What would this achieve, you ask? Well, it would be funny. If nothing else at least it would be funny.

[dreamoflosingsleep]

Who would’ve thought renowned child kidnapper Cad Bane had a kid? 👀

[bluespider62]

I think I have a frigding addiction 😭

For those who don't understand, fridging is a comic trope in which a character (usually female) is killed in order to further motivate the main character's (usually male) development.

Think Spider-Man's Gwen Stacy or Kyle Rayner's Alexandra Dewitt.

Apparently, I've done the same to my AU's Starscream by having Megatron kill Nightbird and forcing Star to watch as he takes the life outta his wife.

If you're wondering how Megsy did it, he crushed her spark.

Same things happens to Fire Convoy as he almost witnessed Andromeda's death, if it weren't for Alpha Trion rebuilding her into Yellow Splendid Convoy.

[besttropeveershowdown]

The Guilty Pleasure Trope Showdown: Round 1, Poll 4

Fridging

A character—usually a loved one—is killed, maimed, or traumatized solely to motivate the hero.

Propaganda:

I'm fully aware of both 1) the sexist history of this trope and 2) the fact that this trope, done poorly, can easily devalue a character's life. However, when done well, I'm a sucker for it!

I love a good revenge arc! I love exploring characters' grieving processes! I love journeys to save loved ones! I love sadistic villains! Idk there are just so many aspects of this trope that rub me the right way

No Celebrities Were Harmed

A character who's an imitation of a real-life celebrity.

Propaganda:

Is the author too cowardly to name the real person? Or is it just an open middle finger than says "try and sue me for that, Brad Pett"? Namedropping is often a bit cringe, but it's so pettily rewarding to get who's being referenced and where the jab is going.

[theflashjaygarrick]

It is so sad and ironic that fridging, a term meant to criticise the reduction of female characters into abstract vehicles for suffering and pain, ended up defining the Alex Dewitt (the character it was named after) by just her tragic death even more.

Before dying Alex made her mark on the narrative. She was cool. She was principled. She was brave. She was designed as an 'uncle ben' type figure; to be more competent and instantly likeable for the reader than Kyle was (this is the intention behind her creation as claimed by writer Ron Marz in his 2020 interview with GamesRadar, I'm not saying he succeeded in this aim. I think he did miss the mark, hence the fridging). When she was attacked by a villain Alex wasn't a helpless damsel, she grabbed a knife and fought back even if it was futile. Alex was a short-lived character but she sure as hell was an impactful one.

And that is not to say that there wasn't evident sexism in the event or its execution, there 100% was. Her death was more graphic and voyeuristic than Uncle Ben's. The trope of a 'better' female character getting passed over as protagonist for a less competent man is as frustrating as it is frequent. Also no matter how fun she was at her time it still doesn't change the fact that Alex is dead and still hasn't (and likely won't ever) come back to life. And also Gail Simone's coining of the term fridging was a significant and crucial step in reckoning with the misogyny (that still exists) in comics. And I am 100% glad the term exists and is increasingly popular in media criticism.

But it still saddens me instead of being known as a really cool and loveable (but tragically killed off - and in an unfortunate gross way) Green Lantern character, for many she is just that girl who was killed and shoved in a fridge. Most people don't know her name. To them she is just Green Lantern's nameless girlfriend. Hell, I have had people claim she was Hal's girlfriend and not Kyle's.

Anything that gave Alex character, that made her a loveable and memorable character if only briefly, is gone. In her place is just that girl who was shoved in the fridge. Y'know the reason the trope was named that. Katma was it?

[waywardtfw]

You know what??? Screw tumblr era fan-fiction. I’m going to start writing fan fiction about the Epic of Gilgamesh. Clearly we need to tackle this issue at the root. Team Gilgamesh/Enkidu for life!!!!!

[velvet4510]

FYI Harry Potter and the Cursed Child isn’t real and Astoria Greengrass died old and wrinkled after a long and full and happy life, never fridged by any narrative for any male angst.

[hollow-keys]

Something that gets me is that Gail Simone's Women in Refrigerators list (which you can read here) is so poorly defined that it includes women who are disabled, have experienced trauma or ar infertile regardless of circumstance. It includes Aurora because she has DID, Starfire because she was raped and enslaved, Oracle for being paralysed (who doesn't even get to be called Oracle, she's called Batgirl I), being infertile gets several characters, including Firestar, on the list, and perhaps funniest, Rogue is there for being, and I quote, "Just plain messed up." Apparently, any of these things happening makes a female character inherently disempowered regardless of circumstance. How progressive.

[tawked]

As a The Killing Joke Enjoyer

I actually find the way it's handled in Arkham Knight really tasteless.

There's a very brief section of the game wherein we see the moment Barbara is shot in hallucination / flashback, and we as Batman are forced to inhabit that room while Barbara bleeds and whimpers on the floor. This is a little "changing environment" stage where you have to wander around her apartment to trigger an environmental thing, so that the exit appears. Batman has to pace around in the moment listening to Barbara on the floor.

Upsetting! Do not like it! Not a fan!

Artistically, I understand why the scene works this way. We're experiencing Batman's rumination and fixation in the way he ruminates and fixates. He would sit in that moment. It is an artistically effective scene.

Now, part of the reason I think people dislike TKJ is that they read Barbara Gordon as fridged,* a reading I personally as a disabled dude do not completely vibe with, because it implies a very particular ableist lens. I discuss and defend the fridged reading at the end of the post, dw I think it's relevant and important,

however

it accepts the framing of Barbara as woman, but rejects the disabled framing of Barbara in a scene wherein she acquires a disability. It's engagement with one critical lens at the expense of another, when we should be wearing double-lensed glasses and engaging with both concepts equally.

So, in the disability lens: able-bodied readers often want narratives wherein the acquisition of a disability is an arduous, poignant thing. It needs to feel "earned" to the able-bodied audience, but the way in which a disability is "earned" is often, for the disabled audience, alienating in its focus on trauma and grief.

It is worth noting that the moment you acquire a disability can be totally random and meaningless. When I acquired a disability, it was not a slow or meaningful experiences. I didn't learn anything from it, I wasn't put upon a character arc and the world didn't slow down or start to revolve around my disabilities. It just

👏

happened.

That Barbara's disablement is handled this way in TKJ feels honest to me, personally. It just

👏

happens, and the world keeps moving, the situation continues to unfold. There's no sense of slowing down, no sense of the world coming to revolve around you and your disablement. One moment you're able, the next you aren't, and no one really has the time for it, least of all yourself.

To me, that feels real.

But it is the kind of writing that is often unsatisfying to able-bodied audiences, especially able-bodied audiences who were by then accustomed to women being fridged and disabilities being unimportant.

The thing is, when "earning" a disabled character in fiction, we the audience are expected to sit in the moment of disablement for a whole narrative, with the disability being the focus, meticulously explored but always in the tone of loss and misery, trauma on full display for maximum melodrama.

I point to Stephen Strange here because his narrative, at least in the MCU film, is about disability and follows these specific tropes and conventions, but I actually believe this is more of a demand placed on previously known as able-bodied characters, and especially in comic books where the expectation is that disability is a brief sad phase included simply for drama's sake, ie. the many times Batman has been wheelchair'd.

This is why I actually like that Barbara is pop pop on the floor hard cut hospital bed "save my dad."

And like, what I often ask myself when I see Barbara as fridged takes, with this specific lens in mind, is:

What do you want instead?

Do you want her to not be shot and disabled? That feels like the direct denial of a disabled narrative, itself an insistence upon an ableist norm, one that seems laughable with the hindsight of how earned it becomes with her stories as Oracle. This is the ableist norm we returned to when she was cured, the ableist norm Gail Simone lays out in a statement that can be read as "disability cannot exist in this genre" if taken on its own merits no less (I like Gail Simone, I just think she is - or was, in 2011 - the kind of person who, upon being told about "crip theory," would frown and say "but crip is a slur...") The statement was:

Arms and legs get ripped off, and they grow back, somehow. Graves don't stay filled. But the one constant is that Barbara stays in that chair. Role model or not, that is problematic and uncomfortable, and the excuses to not cure her, in a world of purple rays and magic and super-science, are often unconvincing or wholly meta-textual. And the longer it goes on, the more it has stretched credibility.

by "wholly meta-textual" here, she means people like Barbara as representation of disabled people - she's discussed before that people like Barbara "as a role model" and claimed disabled people have emailed in to say they actually want her to be cured, though no such emails have ever materialized in defense of this argument. My point by including this prolonged aside about Simone is to present that the whole "feminist lens" vs. "disabled lens" framing was an ongoing discourse before and during Barbara's cure.

Do we want to sit in the moment of disability in The Killing Joke, earn it by showing disabled misery for the audience? Arkham Knight does that and it's fucking awful dude. It's Barbara whimpering on the floor and building a little "when I had legs" shrine for herself in the Clock Tower. This isn't for me, and in my biases, I presumme it's for some able-bodied hater who has never lived the moment of acquired disability. This hypothetical strawman hater seemingly expects disablement to be performed according to a standard that may well be alienating to the very people he claims he wants represented. What is his quest?

Do we want more exploration of Barbara before she becomes disabled? Well that's the entirety of her appearances from 1966 - 1988; you aren't supposed to read The Killing Joke in isolation, implied by the fact that it doesn't tell you who Barbara Gordon even is.

What really shocks me is, Barbara is initially introduced in the Arkhamverse as Oracle, The Killing Joke is only implied by the presence of her moniker and some loose dialogue. If you don't read her dossier in Arkham Asylum you don't actually learn that she uses a chair. While I think this has its own flaws and runs adjacent to erasure, the "GBFF as a representation of queer people"-ification of Barbara, it's worth noting that in Asylum and City, there is no perceived need to "earn" the disability. The disability is introduced simply as fact.

This does not force me to sit in the moment of disablement.

To then include the moment of disablement for, what, shallow shock value? "Earned" status? Recontextualizing it purely as motivation for Batman by removing her immediate rejection of Joker's ideology? feels so jarring and uncomfortable to me, man.

I don't like that Arkham Knight includes a prolonged scene of Barbara on the floor.

Anyway an additional bias I need to confess here is that I didn't grow up during the era when women were being killed off left and right, and that has never really been my experience of comics. I'm sure it happens a lot, I just abandon comics the second I'm bored, and if a writer is the kind of dude who uses women in his stories like that he's probably boring in other areas, so I miraculously haven't really been affected by the trope in any direct way.

I say this to say, I, as

1. a man and

2. someone who hasn't read enough comics who use the trope to have been 'hit' by it

don't have the same very real and genuine sense of alienation from the medium in the form of seeing people who look like me killed off repeatedly in service to others.

I don't want to undermine the problematic, othering nature of this trope for women who had to exist in comics spaces when it was common and men were presented as the only ones who can endure the injuries of superheroism. That sense of deliberate alienation is real, we're being affected by similar conventions in slightly different ways.

I think fridging is a shit trope and that in acknowledging the othering nature of disabled misery porn writing, it'd be very silly of me to not also acknowledge that for a lot of women, Barbara's disablement fit within a pattern of othering in which they had to consistently see themselves written out of heroic roles.

I'm not saying anybody is incorrect or that my personal reading of Barbara as a disabled character is correct (I have other disabled friends who hate my take on The Killing Joke and Barbara lol, we are none of us monoliths), just that I feel the concept that Barbara's disability needed to be "earned" is very naive, and "earned disability" writing overall ala Arkham Knight often prioritizes narrative accessibility for able people at the expense of disabled peoples' ability to participate with the relevant media.

As an aside, I would like to propose "shelving" as a term to refer to characters acquiring a disability and subsequently being removed from spotlighted roles, ala Barbara Gordon. Removes the disablement-as-death framing while acknowledging the consequence of narrative removal or irrelevance.