Trope Talk: Fridging

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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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