WEBVTT 00:00:00.060 --> 00:00:01.879 This video was sponsored by World Anvil! 00:00:01.879 --> 00:00:06.160 100% guaranteed to not do terrible things to supporting characters. 00:00:06.160 --> 00:00:10.610 I’ve talked about this before in its own trope talk, but character deaths are a big 00:00:10.610 --> 00:00:11.610 deal. 00:00:11.610 --> 00:00:14.660 They’re momentous occasions both in-story and out because not only is the character 00:00:14.660 --> 00:00:18.560 dead, which is obviously a bummer on its own, but it also means the total loss of all future 00:00:18.560 --> 00:00:20.210 potential for a given character. 00:00:20.210 --> 00:00:25.419 All their arcs, dynamics, relationships, everything - all lost in exchange for a one-shot gutpunch. 00:00:25.419 --> 00:00:29.410 Now most authors recognize that this is a hefty loss for their story, so they make damn 00:00:29.410 --> 00:00:31.369 sure the impact is worth the price. 00:00:31.369 --> 00:00:35.700 True non-fakeout main character deaths are often heroic sacrifices, protracted tragedies, 00:00:35.700 --> 00:00:39.280 or carefully-woven resolutions to their arcs after all the loose ends have been tied up. 00:00:39.280 --> 00:00:42.480 They’re usually given time and narrative weight to reflect this cost. 00:00:42.480 --> 00:00:46.000 The surviving characters will process their grief, reflect on what the loss means to them, 00:00:46.000 --> 00:00:50.110 and are often fundamentally changed by the experience - maybe carrying on their legacy, 00:00:50.110 --> 00:00:53.460 setting off on a lengthy quest for vengeance or viewing their layered and complex life 00:00:53.460 --> 00:00:55.820 as a personal inspiration to guide their way forward. 00:00:55.820 --> 00:00:57.350 This is not that trope. 00:00:57.350 --> 00:01:00.890 “Fridging” is the cute shortened form of the full name of this trope, “stuffed 00:01:00.890 --> 00:01:04.479 in the fridge”, named for a now-infamous issue of a Green Lantern comic where green 00:01:04.479 --> 00:01:08.369 lantern Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend is murdered by the villain Major Force and stuffed in 00:01:08.369 --> 00:01:12.780 the fridge for him to find when he gets home.“Fridging” is the very specific subset of character deaths 00:01:12.780 --> 00:01:17.420 wherein a character is unceremoniously and brutally killed specifically and solely for 00:01:17.420 --> 00:01:20.679 the narrative purpose of hurting another, more important character. 00:01:20.679 --> 00:01:24.460 This motivation can be watsonian or doylist - as in, an in-universe villain motivation 00:01:24.460 --> 00:01:26.380 or out-of-universe authorial intent. 00:01:26.380 --> 00:01:30.509 In watsonian cases, the killer is specifically motivated to kill the fridge-ee because it’ll 00:01:30.509 --> 00:01:31.869 hurt the character who cares about them. 00:01:31.869 --> 00:01:35.930 In doylist cases, the killer might have all kinds of personal reasons to want to unceremoniously 00:01:35.930 --> 00:01:39.630 brutalize this character, but the author’s motivation in killing this character is only 00:01:39.630 --> 00:01:41.570 to make the more important character upset. 00:01:41.570 --> 00:01:45.359 The only narrative role this death plays in-story is hurting a different character, and it’s 00:01:45.359 --> 00:01:47.679 still framed as unceremonious and brisk. 00:01:47.679 --> 00:01:51.289 Fridging almost always refers to character deaths, but sometimes the character is instead 00:01:51.289 --> 00:01:55.119 subjected to some kind of horrible torture or fate worse than death with the same overall 00:01:55.119 --> 00:01:58.719 impact - the character that really matters isn’t the one targeted for the horror, but 00:01:58.719 --> 00:02:02.509 the hero who’s reacting to it, and the fridge-ee’s personal reaction to their awful situation 00:02:02.509 --> 00:02:06.969 is usually glossed over in favor of how much that focus character suffers by proxy. 00:02:06.969 --> 00:02:10.789 Because of Reasons, fridging disproportionately affects female characters, often barely-developed 00:02:10.789 --> 00:02:14.580 moms or love interests whose only salient character traits are “the hero likes them”, 00:02:14.580 --> 00:02:18.260 so when they’re brutalized or murdered, often offscreen, their more nuanced male hero 00:02:18.260 --> 00:02:21.220 fam slash love interests can become deeply unhappy about it. 00:02:21.220 --> 00:02:25.260 In fact, there’s a very easy litmus test to help determine if a character death constitutes 00:02:25.260 --> 00:02:29.110 “fridging” or not: if it could happen entirely offscreen and have just as much impact 00:02:29.110 --> 00:02:32.950 on the story - especially if it does happen offscreen - it’s probably fridging. 00:02:32.950 --> 00:02:37.090 Its only narrative impact is how it bums out the more important characters with no exploration 00:02:37.090 --> 00:02:40.069 of how it affects the character actually being brutalized or killed. 00:02:40.069 --> 00:02:42.930 Getting killed offscreen is such a dismissive f*ck-you to a character. 00:02:42.930 --> 00:02:46.269 There’s no sendoff, no admission of tragedy - the character becomes nothing more than 00:02:46.269 --> 00:02:48.260 a plot device for someone else’s angst. 00:02:48.260 --> 00:02:50.350 Side character or not, nobody deserves that. 00:02:50.350 --> 00:02:53.680 Now the “offscreen” test isn’t quite enough to say if a death is fridging or not. 00:02:53.680 --> 00:02:57.640 See, while fridging is intended solely to upset another character, well-written character 00:02:57.640 --> 00:03:00.879 deaths almost always upset the other characters too - and since the character themself is 00:03:00.879 --> 00:03:04.819 usually too dead to care, most of the lingering ramifications of their death only affect the 00:03:04.819 --> 00:03:06.969 other characters, typically by… upsetting them. 00:03:06.969 --> 00:03:10.190 So the distinction between a fridging death and a non-fridging death isn’t immediately 00:03:10.190 --> 00:03:12.180 obvious from just this definition. 00:03:12.180 --> 00:03:16.590 The key difference is a fridging usually makes the other characters upset briefly and shallowly, 00:03:16.590 --> 00:03:19.340 while a solid character death makes the other characters grieve. 00:03:19.340 --> 00:03:23.480 Frequently, fridged characters are never spoken of again after the arc they died in is resolved, 00:03:23.480 --> 00:03:24.970 or even before it’s resolved. 00:03:24.970 --> 00:03:28.390 (Try and convince me that Luke Skywalker was still bummed about Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru 00:03:28.390 --> 00:03:29.390 ten minutes later.) 00:03:29.390 --> 00:03:32.890 So as a second fridging litmus test I’d like to propose a corollary of the iconic 00:03:32.890 --> 00:03:36.629 Sexy Lamp Test, which explores if a story would meaningfully change if a character was 00:03:36.629 --> 00:03:37.659 replaced with a sexy lamp. 00:03:37.659 --> 00:03:39.440 This is the property damage test. 00:03:39.440 --> 00:03:43.159 If a dead character could be replaced by someone’s prized pokemon card collection and their loss 00:03:43.159 --> 00:03:47.640 would have the same or more emotional impact on the plot, that character was probably fridged. 00:03:47.640 --> 00:03:51.430 Now this is kind of a rarity for this show - but Fridging is a bad trope. 00:03:51.430 --> 00:03:56.140 It’s not a frequently misused trope or a hard to handle trope, it’s bad writing. 00:03:56.140 --> 00:03:59.720 Character deaths are not bad trope-wise, but fridging specifically indicates a lack of 00:03:59.720 --> 00:04:02.660 respect for the fridged character and their narrative potential. 00:04:02.660 --> 00:04:05.519 Fridging weighs a character’s potential worth to the story and concludes that all 00:04:05.519 --> 00:04:09.069 their future potential and growth and dynamics in the narrative are worth less than another 00:04:09.069 --> 00:04:11.780 character feeling kinda bad for a little while. 00:04:11.780 --> 00:04:15.580 This is reflected both outside of the story and in the story, since this character’s 00:04:15.580 --> 00:04:19.180 killer - be it the character who kills them or the author who makes the call - demonstrably 00:04:19.180 --> 00:04:22.420 couldn’t give a sh*t about them in their own right, instead choosing to focus entirely 00:04:22.420 --> 00:04:26.210 on how ending this character’s life will make another character upset for an arc or 00:04:26.210 --> 00:04:27.210 two. 00:04:27.210 --> 00:04:30.240 Their own life and death isn’t as important or deserving of focus as hurting the hero 00:04:30.240 --> 00:04:31.240 by proxy. 00:04:31.240 --> 00:04:34.419 This successfully indicates that the killer is a terrible person, but it also reflects 00:04:34.419 --> 00:04:36.680 a level of dismissiveness from the author. 00:04:36.680 --> 00:04:41.040 A love interest/beloved character can be killed (or deeply, deeply hurt) in a way that predominantly 00:04:41.040 --> 00:04:44.590 affects the plot by hurting another character - without it feeling like fridging. 00:04:44.590 --> 00:04:46.800 This is largely a matter of the execution, pun intended. 00:04:46.800 --> 00:04:51.020 If the death is unceremonious and quick (and offscreen), that’s a pretty bad sign, since 00:04:51.020 --> 00:04:54.470 it doesn’t really give the character their due - it doesn’t highlight the tragedy of 00:04:54.470 --> 00:04:58.950 their life and potential lost, it just focuses on why and how this makes the main character 00:04:58.950 --> 00:04:59.950 sad. 00:04:59.950 --> 00:05:03.819 Every character is the hero of their own story, and if they die just to further someone else’s, 00:05:03.819 --> 00:05:07.669 it denies that character the basic dignity of being their own person, who exists as more 00:05:07.669 --> 00:05:09.500 than just a prop in someone else’s life. 00:05:09.500 --> 00:05:13.620 It takes their death and the loss of their entire future life and minimizes it down into 00:05:13.620 --> 00:05:16.560 a short, brief emotional impact on another character. 00:05:16.560 --> 00:05:17.560 It's dismissive. 00:05:17.560 --> 00:05:21.300 Now we’re about to enter the Spicy Take Zone, because you know the MCU is my old favorite 00:05:21.300 --> 00:05:25.810 punching bag, but personally this is how I felt about most of the major character permadeaths 00:05:25.810 --> 00:05:28.990 in Infinity War and Endgame, especially Gamora and Black Widow. 00:05:28.990 --> 00:05:32.849 Loki and Vision do die fairly quickly and unceremoniously primarily to hurt the characters 00:05:32.849 --> 00:05:36.880 invested in them, but they’re given narrative weight and some dignity in the process - it 00:05:36.880 --> 00:05:40.710 feels unfair and tragic in-universe that they couldn’t be saved, rather than feeling like 00:05:40.710 --> 00:05:41.710 bad writing. 00:05:41.710 --> 00:05:44.289 But Gamora… well, it’s actually kinda fascinating. 00:05:44.289 --> 00:05:48.080 In the two movies she’d been in, her entire arc had centered on escaping Thanos and his 00:05:48.080 --> 00:05:51.940 deeply fucked-up abusive parenting situation, healing and growing as a person and learning 00:05:51.940 --> 00:05:53.880 to trust and even love her new friends. 00:05:53.880 --> 00:05:57.690 Her dynamic with Nebula was following that same track - realizing they weren’t enemies, 00:05:57.690 --> 00:06:01.830 but victims of the same terrible situation and the same manipulative, tortuous narcissist. 00:06:01.830 --> 00:06:05.729 Thanos’s shadow looms large over Gamora’s arc as the root cause of all the pain and 00:06:05.729 --> 00:06:09.069 suffering in her life and the thing that scares her most that she’s constantly fighting 00:06:09.069 --> 00:06:10.069 to escape. 00:06:10.069 --> 00:06:13.680 In Infinity War, Thanos is told by Red Skull that in order to get the soul stone he has 00:06:13.680 --> 00:06:15.259 to sacrifice something he loves. 00:06:15.259 --> 00:06:16.289 So he kills Gamora. 00:06:16.289 --> 00:06:17.289 Like, permanently. 00:06:17.289 --> 00:06:18.289 She's dead. 00:06:18.289 --> 00:06:19.289 Now that’s bad enough. 00:06:19.289 --> 00:06:20.539 It’s worse that it works. 00:06:20.539 --> 00:06:24.389 Gamora believes that Thanos is incapable of love - and quite frankly, by every indication, 00:06:24.389 --> 00:06:25.389 she’s right. 00:06:25.389 --> 00:06:28.500 He’s a raging narcissist who can’t see past his own chins and this should have been 00:06:28.500 --> 00:06:30.460 the test of character that screwed him over. 00:06:30.460 --> 00:06:34.539 (And, also, like… “you must kill your loved one to get this powerful macguffin and 00:06:34.539 --> 00:06:39.180 become strong” is like, baby’s first obvious secret test of moral character, and it’s 00:06:39.180 --> 00:06:43.620 frankly criminal that killing your loved ones was actually the only way to get the stone. 00:06:43.620 --> 00:06:45.130 That's just lazy writing! 00:06:45.130 --> 00:06:49.009 Like, you- you had the grimdark option and you had the actually interesting option and 00:06:49.009 --> 00:06:52.650 you picked grimdark cuz you thought grimdark was AUTOMATICALLY more interesting. 00:06:52.650 --> 00:06:53.780 That's just disappointing.) 00:06:53.780 --> 00:06:57.491 Anyway - but it’d be bad enough if they just undercut Gamora’s whole personal arc 00:06:57.491 --> 00:07:00.770 by saying that the irredeemably evil overarching supervillain who slaughtered her people and 00:07:00.770 --> 00:07:04.460 tortured her and Nebula for decades actually truly loved her all along. 00:07:04.460 --> 00:07:09.810 It crosses the line twice by having him prove that he loved her by murdering her. 00:07:09.810 --> 00:07:13.730 Gamora’s entire arc and place in the narrative is undercut and sacrificed to give Thanos 00:07:13.730 --> 00:07:17.819 a character trait that makes no sense for him and to make Starlord sad so he acts dumb 00:07:17.819 --> 00:07:22.319 in the finale - oh, and to make Thanos sad, which is given more focus and weight than 00:07:22.319 --> 00:07:23.819 Starlord being sad. 00:07:23.819 --> 00:07:28.389 Because obviously making the pure evil villain kinda bummed out was worth the cost of one 00:07:28.389 --> 00:07:30.110 of Marvel’s most interesting heroines. 00:07:30.110 --> 00:07:34.900 Like, I see what they were going for, but it… it didn't work well, it was a bad idea, 00:07:34.900 --> 00:07:38.979 and it completely undercut everything Gamora had had in the previous movies, which is very 00:07:38.979 --> 00:07:39.979 disappointing. 00:07:39.979 --> 00:07:44.009 Meanwhile, Black Widow’s death is similar to Gamora’s but is bad for different reasons 00:07:44.009 --> 00:07:47.340 - because unlike Gamora, who had too much character weight and potential to warrant 00:07:47.340 --> 00:07:52.039 her unceremonious death, Black Widow was completely underutilized by every other movie she’d 00:07:52.039 --> 00:07:54.280 been in with the arguable exception of Winter Soldier. 00:07:54.280 --> 00:07:58.280 We had this franchise for a decade and we never got an arc for Widow that was deeper 00:07:58.280 --> 00:08:00.700 than "she's hot" or "she's boning the Hulk". 00:08:00.700 --> 00:08:04.500 This made her narratively disposable, but you can tell that the writers realized she 00:08:04.500 --> 00:08:08.229 was too disposable for it to be impactful, because for the first half of Endgame they 00:08:08.229 --> 00:08:12.639 speedrun the whole characterization process by suddenly giving her some character focus, 00:08:12.639 --> 00:08:16.060 a dynamic with the other heroes and an alleged personal arc about treasuring the avengers 00:08:16.060 --> 00:08:17.539 as a found family all along. 00:08:17.539 --> 00:08:20.840 It was an attempt to make up for lost time so we’d be sold on her Heroic Sacrifice, 00:08:20.840 --> 00:08:22.530 but it was clearly token. 00:08:22.530 --> 00:08:25.440 The fact that the movie completely stopped acknowledging her death five minutes after 00:08:25.440 --> 00:08:29.099 they got back is really just kind of indicative of how little she actually mattered. 00:08:29.099 --> 00:08:33.169 Tony’s heroic sacrifice got every hero in the MCU paying their respects, a protracted 00:08:33.169 --> 00:08:36.979 funeral scene and an entire movie about how hard it is for the MCU to move on without 00:08:36.979 --> 00:08:40.669 him - Tasha got a bench in a lake and a solo movie a year and a half after she died. 00:08:40.669 --> 00:08:43.479 If we were supposed to believe she really mattered, the story should’ve acted like 00:08:43.479 --> 00:08:44.479 it. 00:08:44.479 --> 00:08:47.620 And it should've acted like it for longer than just, like, the hour long windup to her… 00:08:47.620 --> 00:08:48.620 dying. 00:08:48.620 --> 00:08:49.620 To advance the plot. 00:08:49.620 --> 00:08:51.640 For stupid, contrived reasons. 00:08:51.640 --> 00:08:53.060 Was she just getting to expensive? 00:08:53.060 --> 00:08:54.350 Is that what the problem was? 00:08:54.350 --> 00:08:55.350 I mean, come on, guys. 00:08:55.350 --> 00:08:59.829 And it’s kind of telling that the MCU has rolled back or undercut all four of those 00:08:59.829 --> 00:09:01.339 deaths in one way or another. 00:09:01.339 --> 00:09:04.890 Loki and Gamora have time-displaced versions with zero character development running around 00:09:04.890 --> 00:09:09.320 to replace their more interesting dead versions, Vision got an actual proper sendoff in Wandavision 00:09:09.320 --> 00:09:12.620 and Wanda got to actually grieve, plus he’s got his own not-quite-the-same copy running 00:09:12.620 --> 00:09:16.029 around now for future appearances, and of course Black Widow is finally getting that 00:09:16.029 --> 00:09:20.500 solo movie we were promised, which is a damn hard sell at this point now that she’s already 00:09:20.500 --> 00:09:22.500 dead and thus, frankly, irrelevant. 00:09:22.500 --> 00:09:26.700 If the deaths had been properly impactful and narratively worth the cost, none of this 00:09:26.700 --> 00:09:28.360 rollback would have been necessary. 00:09:28.360 --> 00:09:32.940 Now in fairness, the fact of the matter is that characters are not… real people. 00:09:32.940 --> 00:09:36.640 Characters are parts of a story and they exist to further a narrative, and some of them really 00:09:36.640 --> 00:09:39.279 are just props in other character’s lives. 00:09:39.279 --> 00:09:41.580 And that's not a morally bad thing. 00:09:41.580 --> 00:09:44.040 But the story probably shouldn’t make you think that! 00:09:44.040 --> 00:09:47.070 Sure, we the audience may be able to guess that the hero’s small peaceful town and 00:09:47.070 --> 00:09:50.990 stern but fair father figure just exist to get torched by the dark lord in episode one 00:09:50.990 --> 00:09:54.130 to set up the inciting incident and set them on the hero’s journey, but the hero doesn’t 00:09:54.130 --> 00:09:57.040 know that, and that's what's supposed to be important about this! 00:09:57.040 --> 00:09:59.310 To the hero that’s their whole world! 00:09:59.310 --> 00:10:02.800 Torching that town and icing that father figure offscreen just tells the audience that the 00:10:02.800 --> 00:10:06.660 hero might theoretically care, but we don’t have to and the story won't really convince 00:10:06.660 --> 00:10:08.320 you that the hero DOES care. 00:10:08.320 --> 00:10:12.530 It disconnects us from someone we’re supposed to be relating to, and it undercuts the emotional 00:10:12.530 --> 00:10:15.730 impact of the death when the emotional impact of the death is the only thing this trope 00:10:15.730 --> 00:10:16.730 has! 00:10:16.730 --> 00:10:20.220 Now if the father figure had been with us for, say, two seasons or the first act or 00:10:20.220 --> 00:10:23.950 two of a movie - serving as a mentor figure, for instance - we’d expect him to die with 00:10:23.950 --> 00:10:26.750 some fanfare, and we'd be weirded out and upset if he didn't. 00:10:26.750 --> 00:10:30.250 A heroic sacrifice, a dying monologue, an admission that the hero made him a better 00:10:30.250 --> 00:10:33.540 man and so very proud, several references to him after he dies so we remember how he 00:10:33.540 --> 00:10:36.950 affected the hero’s journey - if we didn’t get that kinda thing we’d feel cheated. 00:10:36.950 --> 00:10:41.100 But just because we the audience haven’t seen the chapter 1 dead dad for very long, 00:10:41.100 --> 00:10:44.700 the author feels comfortable torching the place offscreen after a single expository 00:10:44.700 --> 00:10:48.170 line of dialogue and then expects us to feel for the hero when the story hasn’t made 00:10:48.170 --> 00:10:49.590 this death feel meaningful! 00:10:49.590 --> 00:10:52.270 In this structure, the amount of weight a character death is given is not proportionate 00:10:52.270 --> 00:10:57.310 to how important the character is, it's proportional to how much screentime the character was given, 00:10:57.310 --> 00:11:01.029 which has nothing to do with how the characters should be reacting to this loss. 00:11:01.029 --> 00:11:03.690 Fridging is a very disliked trope for several reasons. 00:11:03.690 --> 00:11:07.100 For one thing, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a heroic death trope people that like. 00:11:07.100 --> 00:11:10.260 Heroic sacrifices are basically the only one that’s even halfway appreciated, since for 00:11:10.260 --> 00:11:12.820 the most part killing a character is gonna feel bad. 00:11:12.820 --> 00:11:16.860 But more importantly, fridging lacks the counterbalancing qualities that can make a character death 00:11:16.860 --> 00:11:18.410 feel satisfying or earned. 00:11:18.410 --> 00:11:22.100 A hero might die gallantly defending their loved ones, which is heartwarmingly heroic, 00:11:22.100 --> 00:11:25.560 with an element of free will and choice - or fully at peace with their fate, making their 00:11:25.560 --> 00:11:29.250 death a natural conclusion to their arc - or with some other caveat that makes the audience 00:11:29.250 --> 00:11:31.589 believe that their death works to end their personal arc. 00:11:31.589 --> 00:11:35.740 And if their death is tragic and unfair, it’ll often be tortuously prolonged to really drive 00:11:35.740 --> 00:11:40.000 home to the audience that, yeah, sorry, it’s not a fluke or a fakeout, this character isn’t 00:11:40.000 --> 00:11:41.000 making it through this one. 00:11:41.000 --> 00:11:44.390 For a classic Fullmetal Alchemist example - spoiler alert - Maes Hughes, professional 00:11:44.390 --> 00:11:48.430 funnyman and sweetheart, is unexpectedly killed fairly early in the series because he figured 00:11:48.430 --> 00:11:51.690 out the overarching plot way too early so the villains needed him out of the way. 00:11:51.690 --> 00:11:55.290 His death serves as a major motivation for most of the heroes, most notably Roy Mustang 00:11:55.290 --> 00:11:59.269 - but it’s not just a token heroic motivator to get the protagonists in gear. 00:11:59.269 --> 00:12:00.329 It feels awful. 00:12:00.329 --> 00:12:04.829 It’s tragic, it’s unfair, he fights very hard to stop it from happening, his wife and 00:12:04.829 --> 00:12:08.040 daughter are devastated, and the ramifications are felt all the way up to the finale. 00:12:08.040 --> 00:12:12.480 This death would not work the same if it happened offscreen and could not be replaced by a binder 00:12:12.480 --> 00:12:13.580 of pokemon cards. 00:12:13.580 --> 00:12:16.390 It means too much to the story, so it’s not fridging. 00:12:16.390 --> 00:12:19.620 Fridged characters do not get this kind of treatment - and frankly they’re lucky if 00:12:19.620 --> 00:12:20.949 they get personal arcs at all. 00:12:20.949 --> 00:12:24.960 They die only to make another, more important character feel sad or mad. 00:12:24.960 --> 00:12:28.310 It’s not a heroic sacrifice, they have no agency in it, they’re not at peace with 00:12:28.310 --> 00:12:32.240 it and their personal arcs (if they get them) aren’t neatly resolved in time for it. 00:12:32.240 --> 00:12:36.050 Their death or brutalization is cruel and unfair because it’s designed to feel cruel 00:12:36.050 --> 00:12:39.709 and unfair to the character they’re supposed to hurt or motivate, but as a result it undercuts 00:12:39.709 --> 00:12:43.810 the only semi-okay parts of character deaths and just makes the experience relentlessly 00:12:43.810 --> 00:12:46.120 unpleasant and catharsis-free for the audience. 00:12:46.120 --> 00:12:49.880 Now this is not a mistake - this is an intentional part of the trope, because it essentially 00:12:49.880 --> 00:12:53.760 sets up an unstable narrative situation the protagonist must now work to stabilize and 00:12:53.760 --> 00:12:56.449 resolve - usually by hunting down and stopping the killer. 00:12:56.449 --> 00:13:00.339 This is a motivation that starts an arc, so it’s not meant to feel like an arc resolution, 00:13:00.339 --> 00:13:03.500 which is often the only part of a character death the audience halfway appreciates. 00:13:03.500 --> 00:13:07.060 But it betrays a fundamental dismissal of the fridged character, which undercuts the 00:13:07.060 --> 00:13:09.040 very emotional impact they’re trying to invoke. 00:13:09.040 --> 00:13:13.850 As an example, when Alan Moore wrote the Killing Joke, Barbara Gordon, aka Batgirl, is shot, 00:13:13.850 --> 00:13:18.230 paralyzed and brutalized by The Joker - entirely to upset Jim Gordon and Batman and kick off 00:13:18.230 --> 00:13:19.449 one last terrible joke. 00:13:19.449 --> 00:13:24.420 She’s not even killed, but how this traumatic event affects her is… entirely glossed over 00:13:24.420 --> 00:13:25.420 in-story. 00:13:25.420 --> 00:13:28.290 In fact, all she says to Batman afterwards, from her hospital bed, is how worried she 00:13:28.290 --> 00:13:30.209 is about what the joker’s gonna do to her dad. 00:13:30.209 --> 00:13:34.460 It's heroic of her to be concerned, but that’s not why her reaction was written that way. 00:13:34.460 --> 00:13:36.220 Barbara didn’t matter to this story. 00:13:36.220 --> 00:13:39.750 Alan Moore has actually said he kinda regrets treating her that way - he thinks his editor 00:13:39.750 --> 00:13:43.330 probably should’ve reined him in instead of responding with, and I am apparently quoting, 00:13:43.330 --> 00:13:45.139 “yeah, okay, cripple the bitch.” 00:13:45.139 --> 00:13:48.759 That fundamental dismissiveness on the part of the creator really does drive home that 00:13:48.759 --> 00:13:51.120 fridging is a fundamentally broken trope. 00:13:51.120 --> 00:13:54.130 If the author doesn’t care about the character enough to give their pain narrative weight, 00:13:54.130 --> 00:13:57.500 they’ll have a very hard time convincing the audience to care when they suffer. 00:13:57.500 --> 00:14:01.269 The only way the author can make the audience care in this situation is by making this unimportant 00:14:01.269 --> 00:14:04.880 death hurt another, more important character - but since the author doesn’t care about 00:14:04.880 --> 00:14:08.170 the fridged character, they’ll have a hard time writing the more important character’s 00:14:08.170 --> 00:14:09.170 reaction to their fridging! 00:14:09.170 --> 00:14:12.480 The more important character cares more about the fridged character than the author does, 00:14:12.480 --> 00:14:16.480 so how is the author supposed to write their grief when they clearly can’t even imagine 00:14:16.480 --> 00:14:17.480 it? 00:14:17.480 --> 00:14:20.060 It comes across as shallow and hollow because, on a very real level, it is. 00:14:20.060 --> 00:14:24.190 A fridging isn’t just lacking in resolution - it’s usually lacking in real emotional 00:14:24.190 --> 00:14:25.190 weight. 00:14:25.190 --> 00:14:28.259 We’re lucky if we really know the character who dies, and if we don’t, then killing 00:14:28.259 --> 00:14:31.440 them only affects us by how it affects the characters who care about them, and only if 00:14:31.440 --> 00:14:33.560 we care about those characters in turn. 00:14:33.560 --> 00:14:36.769 Killing off a character we’re not invested in tells us that character was never going 00:14:36.769 --> 00:14:40.160 to matter on their own merit, which can disengage the audience from the story as a whole. 00:14:40.160 --> 00:14:43.899 So opening a story by fridging someone sends a pretty clear message to the audience that 00:14:43.899 --> 00:14:47.980 most characters don’t matter, which speedruns the “disengaged audience” problem right 00:14:47.980 --> 00:14:48.980 out the gate. 00:14:48.980 --> 00:14:51.100 Fun fact, this is how Supernatural begins. 00:14:51.100 --> 00:14:54.651 I tried watching it way back when and lost interest after the first season or so, but 00:14:54.651 --> 00:14:57.250 I remember the pilot cuz it’s burned into my brain. 00:14:57.250 --> 00:14:59.670 Even at the time I could kinda tell the writing wasn’t working. 00:14:59.670 --> 00:15:03.079 First scene: we meet our protagonists as young children in an idyllic home with their father 00:15:03.079 --> 00:15:04.079 and mother. 00:15:04.079 --> 00:15:06.209 Smash cut to the night, their father wakes up to see his wife stuck to the ceiling with 00:15:06.209 --> 00:15:07.209 a horrified expression. 00:15:07.209 --> 00:15:09.170 Then she explodes and the house burns down. 00:15:09.170 --> 00:15:12.200 Smash cut to the main plot: it's a couple decades later, brother #1 is in college and 00:15:12.200 --> 00:15:14.980 has a girlfriend, brother #2 shows up and tries to give him a call to adventure to make 00:15:14.980 --> 00:15:16.220 the actual plot happen. 00:15:16.220 --> 00:15:19.730 Brother #1 refuses because he’s got so much going for him in his personal life right now. 00:15:19.730 --> 00:15:22.769 Then brother #1's girlfriend gets stuck to the ceiling and explodes so it's time for 00:15:22.769 --> 00:15:23.769 a road trip! 00:15:23.769 --> 00:15:25.839 The first time it happened it was kinda spooky. 00:15:25.839 --> 00:15:28.470 The second time it happened I actually laughed. 00:15:28.470 --> 00:15:31.860 I looked this up to make sure I was remembering the details right, and apparently in the plot 00:15:31.860 --> 00:15:35.440 both of these women were killed specifically because the bad guy had plans for the protagonist 00:15:35.440 --> 00:15:38.180 - and in the case of the girlfriend, he’s the one who introduced them in the first place 00:15:38.180 --> 00:15:40.569 specifically so he could manipulate the protagonist by killing her. 00:15:40.569 --> 00:15:41.569 That’s just… 00:15:41.569 --> 00:15:42.569 I mean, god. 00:15:42.569 --> 00:15:43.569 That’s so funny. 00:15:43.569 --> 00:15:44.569 That's the PILOT. 00:15:44.569 --> 00:15:46.060 No wonder death is meaningless in this show. 00:15:46.060 --> 00:15:48.670 So fridging tries to have things both ways. 00:15:48.670 --> 00:15:51.980 It gives us a character who clearly doesn’t matter on their own and then kills them in 00:15:51.980 --> 00:15:55.050 a way that highlights that they didn’t matter to the story by their own merit, but then 00:15:55.050 --> 00:15:58.720 tries to tell us that their death really really mattered to the character we’re supposed 00:15:58.720 --> 00:16:00.000 to sympathize with. 00:16:00.000 --> 00:16:03.839 It’s like the worst kind of damsel in distress - a character in trouble whose only trait 00:16:03.839 --> 00:16:05.750 we’re given to care about is that they’re in trouble. 00:16:05.750 --> 00:16:07.570 It’s almost the epitome of tell don’t show. 00:16:07.570 --> 00:16:10.870 If we don’t care about the character and they die quickly and unceremoniously, we never 00:16:10.870 --> 00:16:11.940 have a reason to care. 00:16:11.940 --> 00:16:15.000 If we do care about the character and they die quickly and unceremoniously and all we 00:16:15.000 --> 00:16:18.960 focus on is how bad it makes someone else feel, it feels like a bad use of their potential 00:16:18.960 --> 00:16:21.970 and makes us aware of the hand of the author, which is never a good thing. 00:16:21.970 --> 00:16:26.399 Now some authors recognize this without really recognizing the problem, and will try to play 00:16:26.399 --> 00:16:27.470 it one of two ways. 00:16:27.470 --> 00:16:30.779 In one school of thought, the soon-to-be-fridged character will suddenly be given an unprecedented 00:16:30.779 --> 00:16:34.180 amount of onscreen focus and a handful of purposefully heartwarming or cute character 00:16:34.180 --> 00:16:37.880 traits to quickly get the audience invested in this hitherto non-character so it feels 00:16:37.880 --> 00:16:39.509 halfway momentous when they die. 00:16:39.509 --> 00:16:42.790 I like to call this the Whedon School Of Fridging, or the Coulson Effect. 00:16:42.790 --> 00:16:45.720 This is the author’s attempt to speedrun the Getting The Audience Invested process 00:16:45.720 --> 00:16:50.339 without having to actually make the character stand on their own, or, like… matter. 00:16:50.339 --> 00:16:54.090 And on the flipside, sometimes a fridged character will give some kind of token justification 00:16:54.090 --> 00:16:58.040 for why their death is Okay Actually, usually along the lines of “I’m at peace now” 00:16:58.040 --> 00:17:01.450 or “I already have everything I wanted” or “the real treasure was our friendship” 00:17:01.450 --> 00:17:02.450 or something. 00:17:02.450 --> 00:17:05.800 This is an attempt to kludge together a “satisfying character resolution” so it doesn’t feel 00:17:05.800 --> 00:17:10.370 completely unceremonious, but it suffers from the fact that the fridged character definitely 00:17:10.370 --> 00:17:11.760 didn’t have an arc leading up to it. 00:17:11.760 --> 00:17:15.171 It doesn’t fully counterbalance the disengaging gutpunch of an unceremonious character death 00:17:15.171 --> 00:17:17.280 because it feels token and disconnected. 00:17:17.280 --> 00:17:20.800 If the character’s arc was really resolved, we probably shouldn’t need to hear them 00:17:20.800 --> 00:17:24.860 say it out loud seconds before they die - it’s like how we shouldn’t need to hear the characters 00:17:24.860 --> 00:17:27.623 say “I love you” to know they’re in love, you know? 00:17:27.623 --> 00:17:29.960 “I love you” shouldn’t be a surprise to the audience and neither should “I’m 00:17:29.960 --> 00:17:33.740 totes cool with death now” - both just end up feeling like a way to compensate for inadequate 00:17:33.740 --> 00:17:34.740 writing last-minute. 00:17:34.740 --> 00:17:38.640 You may recall, Black Widow’s death in Endgame did both of these things, and it was bad, 00:17:38.640 --> 00:17:41.480 because neither of these writing tricks make up for wasted character potential. 00:17:41.480 --> 00:17:44.310 Avoiding fridging is a matter of giving the character their narrative due. 00:17:44.310 --> 00:17:47.800 It’s about treating them like they really are the hero of their own story and writing 00:17:47.800 --> 00:17:51.570 their death or brutalization as if that’s where the story actually ends. 00:17:51.570 --> 00:17:54.980 How much more impactful would a fridging be if the story actually acted like an important 00:17:54.980 --> 00:17:56.590 story was ending with their death? 00:17:56.590 --> 00:18:01.120 And how many riots would there be if an actually important main character was iced as unceremoniously 00:18:01.120 --> 00:18:02.530 as these fridging victims are? 00:18:02.530 --> 00:18:05.850 If Captain America had gone over that cliff with a token little half-smile and an "I'm 00:18:05.850 --> 00:18:09.120 at peace now" there would've been f*ckin' riots in the streets and you know it. 00:18:09.120 --> 00:18:13.710 I guess this is another trope that just boils down to “it’s better to write actual characters 00:18:13.710 --> 00:18:17.120 with agency and personal goals instead of people-shaped plot devices.” 00:18:17.120 --> 00:18:19.150 It's funny how often that happens. 00:18:19.150 --> 00:18:20.150 So… yeah? 00:18:20.150 --> 00:18:22.000 And thanks again to World Anvil for sponsoring this video! 00:18:22.000 --> 00:18:25.130 As you may know, World Anvil is designed to help organize your worldbuilding, making the 00:18:25.130 --> 00:18:28.170 whole process easier for writers, gamers and creators of all stripes! 00:18:28.170 --> 00:18:31.630 It’s a browser-based worldbuilding and novel writing software with interactive worldmaps, 00:18:31.630 --> 00:18:35.300 family trees, a fully customizable calendar, custom wikis you can use for your characters 00:18:35.300 --> 00:18:38.810 and events, a built-in word processor with a scrivener-like layout, and plot and story 00:18:38.810 --> 00:18:39.810 timelines. 00:18:39.810 --> 00:18:42.850 They also recently added a new tool called “Chronos” that lets you create multiple 00:18:42.850 --> 00:18:46.300 visual timelines, which also connects to a map view - or more than one map view - to 00:18:46.300 --> 00:18:48.430 show how things change in your story over time. 00:18:48.430 --> 00:18:52.450 You can use it to navigate events, wars, character lives, the spread of a religion - pretty much 00:18:52.450 --> 00:18:53.920 anything that happens in spacetime. 00:18:53.920 --> 00:18:57.400 You can also make them public so other people can use them to track your story and world! 00:18:57.400 --> 00:19:00.350 So if all that sounds interesting, check out the link in the description for more details, 00:19:00.350 --> 00:19:03.820 and if you wanna spring for an annual membership, you can now get 30% off with the promo code 00:19:03.820 --> 00:19:04.890 OVERLYSARCASTIC!