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I’ve talked about this before in its own trope talk, but character deaths are a big
deal.
They’re momentous occasions both in-story and out because not only is the character
dead, which is obviously a bummer on its own, but it also means the total loss of all future
potential for a given character.
All their arcs, dynamics, relationships, everything - all lost in exchange for a one-shot gutpunch.
Now most authors recognize that this is a hefty loss for their story, so they make damn
sure the impact is worth the price.
True non-fakeout main character deaths are often heroic sacrifices, protracted tragedies,
or carefully-woven resolutions to their arcs after all the loose ends have been tied up.
They’re usually given time and narrative weight to reflect this cost.
The surviving characters will process their grief, reflect on what the loss means to them,
and are often fundamentally changed by the experience - maybe carrying on their legacy,
setting off on a lengthy quest for vengeance or viewing their layered and complex life
as a personal inspiration to guide their way forward.
This is not that trope.
“Fridging” is the cute shortened form of the full name of this trope, “stuffed
in the fridge”, named for a now-infamous issue of a Green Lantern comic where green
lantern Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend is murdered by the villain Major Force and stuffed in
the fridge for him to find when he gets home.“Fridging” is the very specific subset of character deaths
wherein a character is unceremoniously and brutally killed specifically and solely for
the narrative purpose of hurting another, more important character.
This motivation can be watsonian or doylist - as in, an in-universe villain motivation
or out-of-universe authorial intent.
In watsonian cases, the killer is specifically motivated to kill the fridge-ee because it’ll
hurt the character who cares about them.
In doylist cases, the killer might have all kinds of personal reasons to want to unceremoniously
brutalize this character, but the author’s motivation in killing this character is only
to make the more important character upset.
The only narrative role this death plays in-story is hurting a different character, and it’s
still framed as unceremonious and brisk.
Fridging almost always refers to character deaths, but sometimes the character is instead
subjected to some kind of horrible torture or fate worse than death with the same overall
impact - the character that really matters isn’t the one targeted for the horror, but
the hero who’s reacting to it, and the fridge-ee’s personal reaction to their awful situation
is usually glossed over in favor of how much that focus character suffers by proxy.
Because of Reasons, fridging disproportionately affects female characters, often barely-developed
moms or love interests whose only salient character traits are “the hero likes them”,
so when they’re brutalized or murdered, often offscreen, their more nuanced male hero
fam slash love interests can become deeply unhappy about it.
In fact, there’s a very easy litmus test to help determine if a character death constitutes
“fridging” or not: if it could happen entirely offscreen and have just as much impact
on the story - especially if it does happen offscreen - it’s probably fridging.
Its only narrative impact is how it bums out the more important characters with no exploration
of how it affects the character actually being brutalized or killed.
Getting killed offscreen is such a dismissive f*ck-you to a character.
There’s no sendoff, no admission of tragedy - the character becomes nothing more than
a plot device for someone else’s angst.
Side character or not, nobody deserves that.
Now the “offscreen” test isn’t quite enough to say if a death is fridging or not.
See, while fridging is intended solely to upset another character, well-written character
deaths almost always upset the other characters too - and since the character themself is
usually too dead to care, most of the lingering ramifications of their death only affect the
other characters, typically by… upsetting them.
So the distinction between a fridging death and a non-fridging death isn’t immediately
obvious from just this definition.
The key difference is a fridging usually makes the other characters upset briefly and shallowly,
while a solid character death makes the other characters grieve.
Frequently, fridged characters are never spoken of again after the arc they died in is resolved,
or even before it’s resolved.
(Try and convince me that Luke Skywalker was still bummed about Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru
ten minutes later.)
So as a second fridging litmus test I’d like to propose a corollary of the iconic
Sexy Lamp Test, which explores if a story would meaningfully change if a character was
replaced with a sexy lamp.
This is the property damage test.
If a dead character could be replaced by someone’s prized pokemon card collection and their loss
would have the same or more emotional impact on the plot, that character was probably fridged.
Now this is kind of a rarity for this show - but Fridging is a bad trope.
It’s not a frequently misused trope or a hard to handle trope, it’s bad writing.
Character deaths are not bad trope-wise, but fridging specifically indicates a lack of
respect for the fridged character and their narrative potential.
Fridging weighs a character’s potential worth to the story and concludes that all
their future potential and growth and dynamics in the narrative are worth less than another
character feeling kinda bad for a little while.
This is reflected both outside of the story and in the story, since this character’s
killer - be it the character who kills them or the author who makes the call - demonstrably
couldn’t give a sh*t about them in their own right, instead choosing to focus entirely
on how ending this character’s life will make another character upset for an arc or
two.
Their own life and death isn’t as important or deserving of focus as hurting the hero
by proxy.
This successfully indicates that the killer is a terrible person, but it also reflects
a level of dismissiveness from the author.
A love interest/beloved character can be killed (or deeply, deeply hurt) in a way that predominantly
affects the plot by hurting another character - without it feeling like fridging.
This is largely a matter of the execution, pun intended.
If the death is unceremonious and quick (and offscreen), that’s a pretty bad sign, since
it doesn’t really give the character their due - it doesn’t highlight the tragedy of
their life and potential lost, it just focuses on why and how this makes the main character
sad.
Every character is the hero of their own story, and if they die just to further someone else’s,
it denies that character the basic dignity of being their own person, who exists as more
than just a prop in someone else’s life.
It takes their death and the loss of their entire future life and minimizes it down into
a short, brief emotional impact on another character.
It's dismissive.
Now we’re about to enter the Spicy Take Zone, because you know the MCU is my old favorite
punching bag, but personally this is how I felt about most of the major character permadeaths
in Infinity War and Endgame, especially Gamora and Black Widow.
Loki and Vision do die fairly quickly and unceremoniously primarily to hurt the characters
invested in them, but they’re given narrative weight and some dignity in the process - it
feels unfair and tragic in-universe that they couldn’t be saved, rather than feeling like
bad writing.
But Gamora… well, it’s actually kinda fascinating.
In the two movies she’d been in, her entire arc had centered on escaping Thanos and his
deeply fucked-up abusive parenting situation, healing and growing as a person and learning
to trust and even love her new friends.
Her dynamic with Nebula was following that same track - realizing they weren’t enemies,
but victims of the same terrible situation and the same manipulative, tortuous narcissist.
Thanos’s shadow looms large over Gamora’s arc as the root cause of all the pain and
suffering in her life and the thing that scares her most that she’s constantly fighting
to escape.
In Infinity War, Thanos is told by Red Skull that in order to get the soul stone he has
to sacrifice something he loves.
So he kills Gamora.
Like, permanently.
She's dead.
Now that’s bad enough.
It’s worse that it works.
Gamora believes that Thanos is incapable of love - and quite frankly, by every indication,
she’s right.
He’s a raging narcissist who can’t see past his own chins and this should have been
the test of character that screwed him over.
(And, also, like… “you must kill your loved one to get this powerful macguffin and
become strong” is like, baby’s first obvious secret test of moral character, and it’s
frankly criminal that killing your loved ones was actually the only way to get the stone.
That's just lazy writing!
Like, you- you had the grimdark option and you had the actually interesting option and
you picked grimdark cuz you thought grimdark was AUTOMATICALLY more interesting.
That's just disappointing.)
Anyway - but it’d be bad enough if they just undercut Gamora’s whole personal arc
by saying that the irredeemably evil overarching supervillain who slaughtered her people and
tortured her and Nebula for decades actually truly loved her all along.
It crosses the line twice by having him prove that he loved her by murdering her.
Gamora’s entire arc and place in the narrative is undercut and sacrificed to give Thanos
a character trait that makes no sense for him and to make Starlord sad so he acts dumb
in the finale - oh, and to make Thanos sad, which is given more focus and weight than
Starlord being sad.
Because obviously making the pure evil villain kinda bummed out was worth the cost of one
of Marvel’s most interesting heroines.
Like, I see what they were going for, but it… it didn't work well, it was a bad idea,
and it completely undercut everything Gamora had had in the previous movies, which is very
disappointing.
Meanwhile, Black Widow’s death is similar to Gamora’s but is bad for different reasons
- because unlike Gamora, who had too much character weight and potential to warrant
her unceremonious death, Black Widow was completely underutilized by every other movie she’d
been in with the arguable exception of Winter Soldier.
We had this franchise for a decade and we never got an arc for Widow that was deeper
than "she's hot" or "she's boning the Hulk".
This made her narratively disposable, but you can tell that the writers realized she
was too disposable for it to be impactful, because for the first half of Endgame they
speedrun the whole characterization process by suddenly giving her some character focus,
a dynamic with the other heroes and an alleged personal arc about treasuring the avengers
as a found family all along.
It was an attempt to make up for lost time so we’d be sold on her Heroic Sacrifice,
but it was clearly token.
The fact that the movie completely stopped acknowledging her death five minutes after
they got back is really just kind of indicative of how little she actually mattered.
Tony’s heroic sacrifice got every hero in the MCU paying their respects, a protracted
funeral scene and an entire movie about how hard it is for the MCU to move on without
him - Tasha got a bench in a lake and a solo movie a year and a half after she died.
If we were supposed to believe she really mattered, the story should’ve acted like
it.
And it should've acted like it for longer than just, like, the hour long windup to her…
dying.
To advance the plot.
For stupid, contrived reasons.
Was she just getting to expensive?
Is that what the problem was?
I mean, come on, guys.
And it’s kind of telling that the MCU has rolled back or undercut all four of those
deaths in one way or another.
Loki and Gamora have time-displaced versions with zero character development running around
to replace their more interesting dead versions, Vision got an actual proper sendoff in Wandavision
and Wanda got to actually grieve, plus he’s got his own not-quite-the-same copy running
around now for future appearances, and of course Black Widow is finally getting that
solo movie we were promised, which is a damn hard sell at this point now that she’s already
dead and thus, frankly, irrelevant.
If the deaths had been properly impactful and narratively worth the cost, none of this
rollback would have been necessary.
Now in fairness, the fact of the matter is that characters are not… real people.
Characters are parts of a story and they exist to further a narrative, and some of them really
are just props in other character’s lives.
And that's not a morally bad thing.
But the story probably shouldn’t make you think that!
Sure, we the audience may be able to guess that the hero’s small peaceful town and
stern but fair father figure just exist to get torched by the dark lord in episode one
to set up the inciting incident and set them on the hero’s journey, but the hero doesn’t
know that, and that's what's supposed to be important about this!
To the hero that’s their whole world!
Torching that town and icing that father figure offscreen just tells the audience that the
hero might theoretically care, but we don’t have to and the story won't really convince
you that the hero DOES care.
It disconnects us from someone we’re supposed to be relating to, and it undercuts the emotional
impact of the death when the emotional impact of the death is the only thing this trope
has!
Now if the father figure had been with us for, say, two seasons or the first act or
two of a movie - serving as a mentor figure, for instance - we’d expect him to die with
some fanfare, and we'd be weirded out and upset if he didn't.
A heroic sacrifice, a dying monologue, an admission that the hero made him a better
man and so very proud, several references to him after he dies so we remember how he
affected the hero’s journey - if we didn’t get that kinda thing we’d feel cheated.
But just because we the audience haven’t seen the chapter 1 dead dad for very long,
the author feels comfortable torching the place offscreen after a single expository
line of dialogue and then expects us to feel for the hero when the story hasn’t made
this death feel meaningful!
In this structure, the amount of weight a character death is given is not proportionate
to how important the character is, it's proportional to how much screentime the character was given,
which has nothing to do with how the characters should be reacting to this loss.
Fridging is a very disliked trope for several reasons.
For one thing, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a heroic death trope people that like.
Heroic sacrifices are basically the only one that’s even halfway appreciated, since for
the most part killing a character is gonna feel bad.
But more importantly, fridging lacks the counterbalancing qualities that can make a character death
feel satisfying or earned.
A hero might die gallantly defending their loved ones, which is heartwarmingly heroic,
with an element of free will and choice - or fully at peace with their fate, making their
death a natural conclusion to their arc - or with some other caveat that makes the audience
believe that their death works to end their personal arc.
And if their death is tragic and unfair, it’ll often be tortuously prolonged to really drive
home to the audience that, yeah, sorry, it’s not a fluke or a fakeout, this character isn’t
making it through this one.
For a classic Fullmetal Alchemist example - spoiler alert - Maes Hughes, professional
funnyman and sweetheart, is unexpectedly killed fairly early in the series because he figured
out the overarching plot way too early so the villains needed him out of the way.
His death serves as a major motivation for most of the heroes, most notably Roy Mustang
- but it’s not just a token heroic motivator to get the protagonists in gear.
It feels awful.
It’s tragic, it’s unfair, he fights very hard to stop it from happening, his wife and
daughter are devastated, and the ramifications are felt all the way up to the finale.
This death would not work the same if it happened offscreen and could not be replaced by a binder
of pokemon cards.
It means too much to the story, so it’s not fridging.
Fridged characters do not get this kind of treatment - and frankly they’re lucky if
they get personal arcs at all.
They die only to make another, more important character feel sad or mad.
It’s not a heroic sacrifice, they have no agency in it, they’re not at peace with
it and their personal arcs (if they get them) aren’t neatly resolved in time for it.
Their death or brutalization is cruel and unfair because it’s designed to feel cruel
and unfair to the character they’re supposed to hurt or motivate, but as a result it undercuts
the only semi-okay parts of character deaths and just makes the experience relentlessly
unpleasant and catharsis-free for the audience.
Now this is not a mistake - this is an intentional part of the trope, because it essentially
sets up an unstable narrative situation the protagonist must now work to stabilize and
resolve - usually by hunting down and stopping the killer.
This is a motivation that starts an arc, so it’s not meant to feel like an arc resolution,
which is often the only part of a character death the audience halfway appreciates.
But it betrays a fundamental dismissal of the fridged character, which undercuts the
very emotional impact they’re trying to invoke.
As an example, when Alan Moore wrote the Killing Joke, Barbara Gordon, aka Batgirl, is shot,
paralyzed and brutalized by The Joker - entirely to upset Jim Gordon and Batman and kick off
one last terrible joke.
She’s not even killed, but how this traumatic event affects her is… entirely glossed over
in-story.
In fact, all she says to Batman afterwards, from her hospital bed, is how worried she
is about what the joker’s gonna do to her dad.
It's heroic of her to be concerned, but that’s not why her reaction was written that way.
Barbara didn’t matter to this story.
Alan Moore has actually said he kinda regrets treating her that way - he thinks his editor
probably should’ve reined him in instead of responding with, and I am apparently quoting,
“yeah, okay, cripple the bitch.”
That fundamental dismissiveness on the part of the creator really does drive home that
fridging is a fundamentally broken trope.
If the author doesn’t care about the character enough to give their pain narrative weight,
they’ll have a very hard time convincing the audience to care when they suffer.
The only way the author can make the audience care in this situation is by making this unimportant
death hurt another, more important character - but since the author doesn’t care about
the fridged character, they’ll have a hard time writing the more important character’s
reaction to their fridging!
The more important character cares more about the fridged character than the author does,
so how is the author supposed to write their grief when they clearly can’t even imagine
it?
It comes across as shallow and hollow because, on a very real level, it is.
A fridging isn’t just lacking in resolution - it’s usually lacking in real emotional
weight.
We’re lucky if we really know the character who dies, and if we don’t, then killing
them only affects us by how it affects the characters who care about them, and only if
we care about those characters in turn.
Killing off a character we’re not invested in tells us that character was never going
to matter on their own merit, which can disengage the audience from the story as a whole.
So opening a story by fridging someone sends a pretty clear message to the audience that
most characters don’t matter, which speedruns the “disengaged audience” problem right
out the gate.
Fun fact, this is how Supernatural begins.
I tried watching it way back when and lost interest after the first season or so, but
I remember the pilot cuz it’s burned into my brain.
Even at the time I could kinda tell the writing wasn’t working.
First scene: we meet our protagonists as young children in an idyllic home with their father
and mother.
Smash cut to the night, their father wakes up to see his wife stuck to the ceiling with
a horrified expression.
Then she explodes and the house burns down.
Smash cut to the main plot: it's a couple decades later, brother #1 is in college and
has a girlfriend, brother #2 shows up and tries to give him a call to adventure to make
the actual plot happen.
Brother #1 refuses because he’s got so much going for him in his personal life right now.
Then brother #1's girlfriend gets stuck to the ceiling and explodes so it's time for
a road trip!
The first time it happened it was kinda spooky.
The second time it happened I actually laughed.
I looked this up to make sure I was remembering the details right, and apparently in the plot
both of these women were killed specifically because the bad guy had plans for the protagonist
- and in the case of the girlfriend, he’s the one who introduced them in the first place
specifically so he could manipulate the protagonist by killing her.
That’s just…
I mean, god.
That’s so funny.
That's the PILOT.
No wonder death is meaningless in this show.
So fridging tries to have things both ways.
It gives us a character who clearly doesn’t matter on their own and then kills them in
a way that highlights that they didn’t matter to the story by their own merit, but then
tries to tell us that their death really really mattered to the character we’re supposed
to sympathize with.
It’s like the worst kind of damsel in distress - a character in trouble whose only trait
we’re given to care about is that they’re in trouble.
It’s almost the epitome of tell don’t show.
If we don’t care about the character and they die quickly and unceremoniously, we never
have a reason to care.
If we do care about the character and they die quickly and unceremoniously and all we
focus on is how bad it makes someone else feel, it feels like a bad use of their potential
and makes us aware of the hand of the author, which is never a good thing.
Now some authors recognize this without really recognizing the problem, and will try to play
it one of two ways.
In one school of thought, the soon-to-be-fridged character will suddenly be given an unprecedented
amount of onscreen focus and a handful of purposefully heartwarming or cute character
traits to quickly get the audience invested in this hitherto non-character so it feels
halfway momentous when they die.
I like to call this the Whedon School Of Fridging, or the Coulson Effect.
This is the author’s attempt to speedrun the Getting The Audience Invested process
without having to actually make the character stand on their own, or, like… matter.
And on the flipside, sometimes a fridged character will give some kind of token justification
for why their death is Okay Actually, usually along the lines of “I’m at peace now”
or “I already have everything I wanted” or “the real treasure was our friendship”
or something.
This is an attempt to kludge together a “satisfying character resolution” so it doesn’t feel
completely unceremonious, but it suffers from the fact that the fridged character definitely
didn’t have an arc leading up to it.
It doesn’t fully counterbalance the disengaging gutpunch of an unceremonious character death
because it feels token and disconnected.
If the character’s arc was really resolved, we probably shouldn’t need to hear them
say it out loud seconds before they die - it’s like how we shouldn’t need to hear the characters
say “I love you” to know they’re in love, you know?
“I love you” shouldn’t be a surprise to the audience and neither should “I’m
totes cool with death now” - both just end up feeling like a way to compensate for inadequate
writing last-minute.
You may recall, Black Widow’s death in Endgame did both of these things, and it was bad,
because neither of these writing tricks make up for wasted character potential.
Avoiding fridging is a matter of giving the character their narrative due.
It’s about treating them like they really are the hero of their own story and writing
their death or brutalization as if that’s where the story actually ends.
How much more impactful would a fridging be if the story actually acted like an important
story was ending with their death?
And how many riots would there be if an actually important main character was iced as unceremoniously
as these fridging victims are?
If Captain America had gone over that cliff with a token little half-smile and an "I'm
at peace now" there would've been f*ckin' riots in the streets and you know it.
I guess this is another trope that just boils down to “it’s better to write actual characters
with agency and personal goals instead of people-shaped plot devices.”
It's funny how often that happens.
So… yeah?
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