What defines fridging? What's the borderline? (Potentially triggery)

[Feo Takahari]

On another site I hang out on, there was a bit of an argument over what constitutes fridging of a female character. I realized that my view on the subject is a bit different than usual, so I'd like to start a discussion here and get some input on how the line might be drawn. To start with, I'd like to outline some of the traits of the worst fridging I ever read.

Out of This World by Lawrence Watt-Evans is a story about an ordinary man tasked with saving two universes--one based on high fantasy and one based on space opera. It's the second-most-vicious
story I've read in the "deconstructive" vein, and it glories in its own hamhandedness. To give one example, most trapped-in-another-world stories star an annoying idiot who somehow accomplishes great things, so this one stars an annoying idiot who's ineffectual and accomplishes nothing. To give another, most space opera stars only white people and never explains where the other races went, so it's heavily implied that all nonwhites in the space opera universe were systematically exterminated. Getting angry at the story is almost beside the point when it clearly aims for a strong reaction--but that's a pretty big almost.

The protagonist's wife and daughter are major characters in the book, and since there's no cliche that mandates that they're annoying idiots, they're more likable characters than the protagonist. The wife's arguably better protagonist material, and the kid's, well, pretty decent for a confused and scared child. Towards the end of the book, every named female character except possibly the kid is raped, and the wife and the kid are killed afterwards. This leads into a climactic scene of the protagonist debating whether to formally join a resistance movement--in a story, it's cliche for the protagonist to rebel after the murder of his family, but he thinks this "isn't a story," and he's scared of dying himself. Will he join up? Read the sequel and find out!

I think there are two points that can be drawn from this. The first is that fridging isn't just killing off a likable woman. The reason this feels so mean-spirited is that there doesn't really seem to be a reason to get rid of the wife--her rape might serve a purpose, but all killing her afterwards does is give some angst to a character who's annoying anyway. The second is that self-awareness--knowing what you're doing and why you're doing it--is not in itself a protection against fridging. Watt-Evans clearly wants to comment on an existing trope, and he arguably succeeds in doing so. He just does so in a way that makes readers unlikely to shell out for book 2.

Do you think these are fair points? What else defines fridging? What determines whether a death is just fridging, or meaningful and appropriate?

(Off-topic, now you know why I rage so much about bad fantasy. I've pretty much cleaned the library shelves, so I've read a lot of rubbish like this.)

 

[Steerpike]

(As an aside, isn't a trigger warning a bit of an insult, implying that whoever might be affected by whatever subject you think is going to cause a trigger can't handle the topic? I've always wondered about that. It seems kind of insulting, to me. Not implying that the OP posted an insult, this is a serious question that has occurred to me many times and I wanted to ask, if anyone wants to tackle it, you can PM me if you like. Now back to the topic).

I suppose killing the characters off 'solely' to provide some emotional trauma to a male character is 'fridging.' I'm not sure I'm on-board with the definition, or at least not necessarily. Are you telling me that it is impossible to write a story about a male losing a female mate, and how he deals with grief, anger or whatever other emotions he's feeling, and where the female mate really exists as a plot point, because if you do that you're just fridging? I don't agree. In fact, any event that has an emotional impact on your main character and thus serves characterization is an inherently important event, right? It can be handled poorly, I'm sure, but I wouldn't rule out the entire universe of such stories with a offhand label.

 

[Devor]

For the "trope namer," the Green Lantern found his girl in the fridge, and then she was never mentioned again in the comics.

The definition is only relevant insomuch as it's useful. If you want to see "fridging" as always bad, then you should bear in mind the above example. Her death was horrible, and maybe motivating, but her character was irrelevant. There wasn't an enduring bond between them.

I "fridged" a male character once. His body was actually left in the "frigid air," and the FMC took his sword and went off to try and save the village. I thought it was funny because he was built up as a hero, and it wasn't perfectly clear which was the MC in that one opening chapter. But the dead guy character was still relevant to her and in a few other ways later in the story, so I don't know if it really meets the fridge standard. I also don't care.

It's not the taxonomy that's helpful when it comes to considering tropes. It's the way it helps you understand the concepts involved.

 

[Devor]

(As an aside, isn't a trigger warning a bit of an insult, implying that whoever might be affected by whatever subject you think is going to cause a trigger can't handle the topic?

I don't think so - it's not necessarily suggesting that they can't handle it, but that it sometimes helps to have a warning to brace yourself for the emotional response ahead of time.

That said, I didn't see the post as particularly triggery.

 

[Steerpike]

I don't think so - it's not necessarily suggesting that they can't handle it, but that it sometimes helps to have a warning to brace yourself for the emotional response ahead of time.

That said, I didn't see the post as particularly triggery.

I didn't either, and I don't want to derails the thread, it's just always seemed kind of patronizing to me. Even if you're just saying brace yourself, you're basically saying they're not in control of their emotions or their response or whatever.

Probably for another thread.

If the death causes any reaction whatsoever among the remaining living characters, then it's relevant, right?

 

[Feo Takahari]

I don't think so - it's not necessarily suggesting that they can't handle it, but that it sometimes helps to have a warning to brace yourself for the emotional response ahead of time.

That said, I didn't see the post as particularly triggery.

I try to err on the side of caution--I don't have any triggers, so I don't really know what triggers someone. The etiquette seems to vary from site to site, though--hardly anyone warns here, whereas folks on Tumblr literally warn for pictures of cupcakes.

 

[Devor]

If the death causes any reaction whatsoever among the remaining living characters, then it's relevant, right?

Relevance isn't too much the issue. The trope comes from the comics, where superhero after superhero had a dead girlfriend who died gruesomely in the origin story and then didn't matter. She was relevant to the origin story, but because:

Dead girlfriend = Evil villain = Need for hero,

....and not because she was in any way a well-developed character.

Like with a lot of these tropes, now it means anything that kind of sort of bears a resemblance to that.

 

[Feo Takahari]

If the death causes any reaction whatsoever among the remaining living characters, then it's relevant, right?

That can actually be a pretty high bar to clear. For a male-to-male example, early in Buffy the Vampire Slayer Xander is forced to kill his friend Jesse. This death causes little emotional reaction, is never mentioned again, and in general doesn't seem to serve a purpose--it doesn't even set the tone, since the core four characters are practically invulnerable after this.

 

[Steerpike]

That can actually be a pretty high bar to clear. For a male-to-male example, early in Buffy the Vampire Slayer Xander is forced to kill his friend Jesse. This death causes little emotional reaction, is never mentioned again, and in general doesn't seem to serve a purpose--it doesn't even set the tone, since the core four characters are practically invulnerable after this.

True. By the same token, the death of Tarah is really a plot point for Willow, and Willow's reaction to it becomes more important than the death itself. But I wouldn't consider that a "fridging" type of death. Maybe because I felt she was a more significant character as a viewer, and I cared whether she lived or died.

 

[Nihal]

The main problem with this trope seems to be to use it as an excuse rather than portraying the event as the natural course of the story. Often you're able to feel that a character was created with the sole purpose of being killed, and if you as a reader can peek through the story straight into the device being employed by the writer, having your immersion broken, I don't think it could be called "good writing".

It wouldn't be an issue if the dead wasn't a cardboard character; it surely would feel less contrived.

 

[Svrtnsse]

I'd never heard of fridging before and had to google it. In retrospect that was probably a bit silly as this thread is about trying to define it - but the pictures were funny.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

Slightly off point here but what's the problem with offing unknown characters, male or female, to create a story? I mean I don't read a lot of superhero stuff, but don't they all have a back story? And do we need to know much about that back story other than how it motivates the MC? I mean take Bats for an example. Do I need to know anything about his parents, save that he loved them and their deaths affected him greatly?

I think what you're talking about is introducing a character purely for the purpose of killing them off. In which case what your problem is is not their imminent icing, it's that they really weren't characters at all. They were just plot devices.

So it seems you have two ways around this. The first is the bats idea - don't really include them at all save for their deaths and the imapct that has on your MC. The second is as previously mentioned, the Tara approach were she's a well established character with a lot of viewer likeability whose death then hits hard and gives a massive understanding as to Willow's journey of despair and vengeance.

Either way I don't see it as a problem.

The only danger I would see would be if someone tried to combine both by having a character around for a significant portion of the story without really fleshing him out so to speak, than iced him / her as a plot device expecting everyone to understand why that would be such a terrible thing. And that would just be bad writing.

On the other side of the coin I suppose you could also think the final Episode of Enterprise where Trip - the everyman of the show as they called him - was killed off, and no one seemed to give a damn. Not his best friend, not his lover. Now that was bad writing!

Cheers, Greg.

 

[glutton]

I'm tempted to write a story where a character is set up to look like they'll be fridged for sure, only to survive the potentially fridging incident and become a total badass.

 

[Feo Takahari]

I'm tempted to write a story where a character is set up to look like they'll be fridged for sure, only to survive the potentially fridging incident and become a total badass.

I've actually seen that done. I won't spoil where I saw it, because it's such a brilliant surprise, but she gets shot in the head and left for dead, and then she shows up again with an eyepatch.

 

[glutton]

I've actually seen that done. I won't spoil where I saw it, because it's such a brilliant surprise, but she gets shot in the head and left for dead, and then she shows up again with an eyepatch.

I think I've seen that one. XD

 

[A. E. Lowan]

So... the problem with fridging is the lack of character development and follow-up on the part of he/she who is fridged, then, right? I ask because in our WIP we kill off an established character (Well, sort of established. He suffers from severe depression and his main character feature is that he's completely given up.), which serves to simultaneously give our FMC incentive to step officially into the position of leader and initiate forming a coalition of preternatural leaders, declare war on the antagonist and go looking for an army to take him on, and set up the antagonist for the sequel. So, this isn't fridging, even though the one we kill is really kind of a satellite character of the FMC, because of the limitations of his characterization he really can't be anything else?

 

[wordwalker]

Sounds like you've got it right. I'd define fridging as when "it's so much for cheap shock it barely has a cause, and the next day it barely has an effect."

 

[saellys]

I didn't either, and I don't want to derails the thread, it's just always seemed kind of patronizing to me. Even if you're just saying brace yourself, you're basically saying they're not in control of their emotions or their response or whatever.

Don't want to derail this either, but I think moderators in particular need to understand how important trigger warnings are. It's not that someone who has lived through a trauma isn't in control of their emotions or their response; it's that being triggered basically sends someone back in time. You relive the trauma in your head. The closest thing I've seen to this in an easily-referenced form is the RABIT-chasing scene in Pacific Rim. Remember how visceral Mako's memory was?

I know people who have come home to find family members murdered in their homes, and who could potentially be triggered by this thread. Feo's warning is helpful because anyone with similar experiences can decide to skip the discussion. It doesn't patronize or insult anyone; it helps make this forum more welcoming.

I think what you're talking about is introducing a character purely for the purpose of killing them off. In which case what your problem is is not their imminent icing, it's that they really weren't characters at all. They were just plot devices.

So it seems you have two ways around this. The first is the bats idea - don't really include them at all save for their deaths and the imapct that has on your MC. The second is as previously mentioned, the Tara approach were she's a well established character with a lot of viewer likeability whose death then hits hard and gives a massive understanding as to Willow's journey of despair and vengeance.

Either way I don't see it as a problem.

The only danger I would see would be if someone tried to combine both by having a character around for a significant portion of the story without really fleshing him out so to speak, than iced him / her as a plot device expecting everyone to understand why that would be such a terrible thing. And that would just be bad writing.

On the other side of the coin I suppose you could also think the final Episode of Enterprise where Trip - the everyman of the show as they called him - was killed off, and no one seemed to give a damn. Not his best friend, not his lover. Now that was bad writing!

Whether you've developed a character or not, to qualify as something other than fridging, that character's death needs to have an effect beyond how it makes the main character feel. To use your own example, when the Waynes were killed, not only did Bruce swear to avenge them and set his life as Batman in motion, but Wayne Enterprises was left without its CEO (which, as I recall, was more of a plot element in the Nolan reboot than the other franchises).

Characters are part of their world, not just part of the protagonists. Killing them off is like pulling a thread out of a tapestry. It leaves a hole, and when you pull one thread, others are disrupted. Ending one characters' plot affects others. Tara was a slightly better example; I remember her death resonating a little bit longer, but oh golly, Joss Whedon is the worst about offing characters at pivotal moments in order to give protagonists motivation they probably could have found elsewhere, and then making no attempt to explore the effects. With Wash it conveniently happened at the end of the movie, with just enough time for Zoe to be furious with grief and go kill some Reavers. Same with Penny (minus Reavers). And then with Coulson, Whedon actually brought him back to life after the fact.

If a character dies and the protagonist gets sad, the reader should get sad too, because it should feel like a real death. When real people die, the world around them is affected. If that doesn't happen, if I as a reader had no emotional connection to that character, if the only effect is that the MC is now motivated to do a thing they weren't motivated to do before and probably could have been motivated to do through some other method, that is a cheap and pointless death.

Using characters as nothing more than a way to make your MCs introspective/sad/vengeful/badass, without any effort to make those characters part of the world they inhabit and give their deaths lasting, meaningful effects, is a problem. It's lazy writing.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

Yeah I agree to a point. But having said that you've always got to consider that anyone's death does affect some more deeply than others - usually those who are close to them. And in this case we are talking about the MC who was presumably close to them. If it was great aunt Matilde who he saw once when he was five, the death would mean little. We would require the death to have greater impact on him / her than on others. And as s/he's the MC that's the point of view we as the reader most see. To return to great aunt Matilde if the story is about her great nephew then reading loads about how her death affected great uncle Berty doesn't really add to the plot. Why should he be a character in the book just to show this impact of her death on him and the rest of the cast if the story isn't really about him?

In the end it's about balance.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[saellys]

Hi,

Yeah I agree to a point. But having said that you've always got to consider that anyone's death does affect some more deeply than others - usually those who are close to them. And in this case we are talking about the MC who was presumably close to them. If it was great aunt Matilde who he saw once when he was five, the death would mean little. We would require the death to have greater impact on him / her than on others. And as s/he's the MC that's the point of view we as the reader most see. To return to great aunt Matilde if the story is about her great nephew then reading loads about how her death affected great uncle Berty doesn't really add to the plot. Why should he be a character in the book just to show this impact of her death on him and the rest of the cast if the story isn't really about him?

In the end it's about balance.

Cheers, Greg.

Note that I said the world, not just other minor characters. Phil Coulson's death in Avengers was intended to give everyone something to avenge (because, you know, they couldn't have possible gotten mad enough to pull themselves together and defeat Loki otherwise), and we were meant to assume that Hawkeye and Black Widow, for instance, were as affected as Iron Man and Captain America.

But it had absolutely no effect on the rest of the world they inhabited, which is why Whedon was able to cave to fandom's demands that he resurrect Coulson, without screwing up the broader world. I haven't watched Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. so I don't know what the official explanation for Coulson's return is, but the fact that it happened at all is evidence that there were no lasting effects from his death, apart from accomplishing something that could have been done some other way, and that adds up to a pointless death.

Yes, it should affect your MC, because they're the reader's viewpoint into your world and they were ostensibly close to that character. But if it only affects your MC, something is broken.