Ravings of a madman

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

Anonymous

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.