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Speaker 4: Hello and welcome back to this episode of Superhero FA.
Speaker 4: Today we're going to be discussing the topic of fridging,
Speaker 4: and we have special guests Jessica Plumber joining us. Fridging,
Speaker 4: as many of you may know, as a concept that
Speaker 4: comes to us out of comic books, but really we
Speaker 4: can see it across a lot of different media. And
Speaker 4: Rieky and I have had a couple different conversations about
Speaker 4: this recently, both this topic as well as.
Speaker 5: Related ones, and it just made me want to really
Speaker 5: made me.
Speaker 4: Realize that we've we've touched on it a couple of times,
Speaker 4: we've never really had the chance to dive in and
Speaker 4: really get into it. So let me just start by Jessica,
Speaker 4: introduce yourself to people who haven't heard you on this
Speaker 4: podcast before. Although it's pretty difficult, you're one of our
Speaker 4: best returning guests, and tell us what is fridging?
Speaker 1: All right? Hi, I'm Jessica Plummer. I am a huge
Speaker 1: comic book nerd with a particular interest in comic book
Speaker 1: history and gender and sexuality as depicted in comic books.
Speaker 1: And fridging is short for or the verb form for
Speaker 1: women in refrigerators, which is a term that was coined
Speaker 1: by Gail Simone in nineteen ninety nine. Gal Simone is
Speaker 1: a very well known and successful comic book writer, but
Speaker 1: this was a couple of years before her first professional
Speaker 1: comic book writing, so she was a comic book fan
Speaker 1: who noticed that it was very difficult to find a
Speaker 1: female character in comics who had not been killed, raped, assaulted, maimed,
Speaker 1: psychically or magically violated, or otherwise harmed. And the term
Speaker 1: so she had she had a list of these women,
Speaker 1: and the term has now evolved to specifically refer to
Speaker 1: when those things happened to a female character for the
Speaker 1: purposes of forwarding a male character storyline.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 5: I think that's a great Yeah.
Speaker 4: Thanks, I think that's a great uh to think that
Speaker 4: definition of it. And I like that you really capture
Speaker 4: a number of different things that it has now come
Speaker 4: to me, mostly the idea of the woman character having
Speaker 4: these things happen as a way of advancing the male
Speaker 4: character's storyline, you know, so that it can be the
Speaker 4: thing that inspires him to get back in the fight,
Speaker 4: or the thing that inspires him to stop fighting, or
Speaker 4: the thing that motivates him to go after someone and
Speaker 4: go on a revenge plot or whatever it is. But
Speaker 4: also that it's not just about women dying. It's that
Speaker 4: about horrible things being done to women's bodies, and that
Speaker 4: particularly that in a visual format where it's depicted in
Speaker 4: ways that are sometimes eroticized or sometimes just incredibly gruesome.
Speaker 4: But it's hard to kind of divorce the idea of
Speaker 4: violence done to women's bodies in a culture where that's
Speaker 4: already you know, such an issue Rieky, what's been your
Speaker 4: experience with this term.
Speaker 7: Yeah, well, I'm very familiar with the discussion that was
Speaker 7: presented by Gail, and of course I'm a huge Green
Speaker 7: Lantern fan, so I'm also familiar with the original incident
Speaker 7: that this gets its name.
Speaker 5: From, which was So what is that original incident?
Speaker 7: It was a nineteen ninety four issue of Green Lantern.
Speaker 7: At this point, Kyle Rayner has become the new Green
Speaker 7: Lantern from Earth because hal Jordan went insane and became
Speaker 7: a supervillain Parallax, and Kyle becomes the new Green Lantern,
Speaker 7: and his girlfriend Alexandra de Witt helps him like she's
Speaker 7: there to support him and suggests that he changes costume,
Speaker 7: et cetera. And then a villain named Major Force discovers
Speaker 7: that Kyle is Green Lantern and attacks Alexandra in her
Speaker 7: home over their home, I guess their apartment, and then
Speaker 7: leaves a note for Kyle saying there's a surprise for
Speaker 7: you in the fridge.
Speaker 5: Love a.
Speaker 7: So he assumes it's from his girlfriend and looks in
Speaker 7: the fridge and sees her body stuffed in the fridge.
Speaker 7: And that's where this name comes from. Fridging women and refrigerators,
Speaker 7: because this incident was so blatantly just like for Kyle's benefit, right,
Speaker 7: Like the character herself, I mean, was not a prominent
Speaker 7: character and was just kind of introduced to be this
Speaker 7: vehicle for his for his trauma and for his revenge
Speaker 7: against Major Force. And the writer actually even admitted that
Speaker 7: he was like, yeah, I like she was the throwaway
Speaker 7: character that I wrote so that Kyle could experience this.
Speaker 7: And that's like the dissatisfaction with this trope. It's like
Speaker 7: you are not even writing real characters for you know,
Speaker 7: these women. They are just there to service the storyline
Speaker 7: of the male superhero protagonist.
Speaker 4: Right, And so let's get you what are some other
Speaker 4: examples you all can think of to help ground our
Speaker 4: listeners and like what we're talking about here?
Speaker 1: Oh boy, how many hours do we have for this podcast?
Speaker 1: I mean, I think that the most famous example in
Speaker 1: comics is probably Gwen Stacy in Spider Man comics, which
Speaker 1: of course they adapted into the movies, the Andrew Garfield movies.
Speaker 1: There's uh, Barry Allen's Mom, which we have now had
Speaker 1: to see across like five different mediums. There's what's her face?
Speaker 1: Maggie Chillen Hall in The Dark Night, perfect example, Rachel.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Rachel. I have not seen that movie and
Speaker 1: since it was in theaters, because it made me so mad.
Speaker 7: Well you said Maggie Jill, I was thinking Katie Holmes
Speaker 7: when she died.
Speaker 1: She died as Maggie Chill in Hall, I mean Gomora
Speaker 1: in whichever Adventures movie that was. And Black Widow yep,
Speaker 1: which is really telling because you know, you hear the
Speaker 1: argument of well, this it's just something that happens to
Speaker 1: supporting characters. Black Widow is not a supporting character in
Speaker 1: the Avengers. She is a member of the Avengers. And
Speaker 1: out of that lineup, the original six, how many of
Speaker 1: them are women and how many of them died? Right,
Speaker 1: same with the Guardians.
Speaker 4: And I think this is one of those times where
Speaker 4: like you can look at individual instances and some of
Speaker 4: them seem completely ridiculous like that. I think the original
Speaker 4: friging idea that we talked about some like Black Widow, Like,
Speaker 4: I think there's a argans you made of like it
Speaker 4: makes sense that this is what her character would want
Speaker 4: to do, that sacrifice, but it's that the a as
Speaker 4: you said, she's the only woman character, and then b
Speaker 4: that her death. You know, we get a whole literal
Speaker 4: funeral scene for Tony Stark, and we get very little
Speaker 4: of Black Widow's death and Natasha's death except for the
Speaker 4: fact that she then winds up being her death is
Speaker 4: the motivation for a villain in her sister, Elena, which
Speaker 4: we later get. And I think, just as you said, like,
Speaker 4: it's that this is such a pattern, you know, that
Speaker 4: the fact that it keeps happening again and again and again.
Speaker 5: And I think, you know, I've seen some great pieces.
Speaker 4: I'm like, there's some examples of it that like, yeah,
Speaker 4: really sin to make sense for the story, and others
Speaker 4: that are just completely ludicrous, but any of them like
Speaker 4: the fact that we're just doing it again and again
Speaker 4: and again without being thoughtful of it, you know, talk
Speaker 4: about like why is that important? Why is it significant
Speaker 4: that this is what keeps happening to women characters?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it's it's about the volume of it, right,
Speaker 1: It's about when you look at a few numbers, there's
Speaker 1: the the fact that female characters are disproportionately underrepresented in
Speaker 1: really most media. I was gonna say comics and superhero media,
Speaker 1: but it's it's most media. Like if you look at studies,
Speaker 1: I mean children's books and television. Even in like crowd scenes,
Speaker 1: like extras, women female characters are extremely underrepresented. It's particularly
Speaker 1: egregious and superhero media. Again, six Avengers, only one of
Speaker 1: them is a woman, So you already have a much
Speaker 1: smaller group that you're working with, and then the amount
Speaker 1: of times that this sort of thing happens to them,
Speaker 1: because it's not just killing, it's also as I said
Speaker 1: in the original definition, assaults, rapes, being nimed, paralyzed. Barbara
Speaker 1: Gordon's a famous example of that. Those happen at a
Speaker 1: disproportionately high rate to female characters compared to male characters.
Speaker 1: So you already have fewer to work with. Because you know,
Speaker 1: people who argue that this trope is not a real thing,
Speaker 1: We'll say, well, bad things happen to men and to
Speaker 1: male character and they do, but they happen to a
Speaker 1: much smaller percentage of a much larger pool. And when
Speaker 1: they do happen, and this is kind of going off
Speaker 1: of what you asked me, but when they do happen,
Speaker 1: those things tend to be about the men that they're
Speaker 1: happening to and not about some like a woman in
Speaker 1: their life and how that woman feels about that.
Speaker 4: I mean, as I'm thinking about it, Like, there's a
Speaker 4: couple of instances where the death of women characters is
Speaker 4: a primary motivation for another woman character, Elena and.
Speaker 5: Her being Natasha's sister.
Speaker 4: But I'm trying to think of any female characters where
Speaker 4: the death of a man in her life is a
Speaker 4: major motivator and we don't really know that male character
Speaker 4: except in terms of as her partner, as her as
Speaker 4: her person.
Speaker 1: The closest example I can think of is Wonder Woman
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty four. He has its own problems. But that's
Speaker 1: That's the other thing. Not only are there fewer female characters,
Speaker 1: fewer of them are the main.
Speaker 5: Character, right.
Speaker 4: Mostly we get introduced to them already as the sidekick,
Speaker 4: as the love interest, as the mother. As they are,
Speaker 4: they are defined by the relationship to someone else.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I'm glad you brought up the Wonder Woman movies
Speaker 7: because that, to me highlights a big difference between men
Speaker 7: and women when they die. In in the Wonder Woman movie,
Speaker 7: Chris Pine's character with Steve Trevor, right, he sacrifices himself
Speaker 7: like it's a noble sacrifice in that final battle and yes,
Speaker 7: like she is motivated by it, but he he isn't
Speaker 7: nimed or you know, raped, as you said in regards
Speaker 7: to these the women who suffer these terrible fates. In
Speaker 7: the midst of the battle, he sacrifices himself and it
Speaker 7: also advances like stopping the villain.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 7: And then in Wonder Woman nineteen eighty four, the very
Speaker 7: next movie, they bring him back in a weird way,
Speaker 7: but they bring the character back. And that's the other
Speaker 7: thing with this trope, like when men die, they come
Speaker 7: back and the women don't.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, it's called dead men defrosting. That's the name
Speaker 1: of the sub trope.
Speaker 7: And this is true even when it's like the male
Speaker 7: main character suffers some some harm, right, Like Batman had
Speaker 7: his back broken by Baine in Nightfall, but he came
Speaker 7: back and was like even stronger than ever. Superman famously
Speaker 7: died and has come back both in comics and in
Speaker 7: the movies, and it's like almost immediate.
Speaker 4: And actually Batman is a great example because you know,
Speaker 4: he has this injury that would be completely debilitating for
Speaker 4: a lot of people, and he manages to pretty much
Speaker 4: completely heal. Barbara Gordon bat Girl also has a very
Speaker 4: bad back injury, but it leaves her permanently paralyzed. There
Speaker 4: is no healing that comes to her character. Her character
Speaker 4: is just you know, and and and and even then,
Speaker 4: it's not even like, you know, I think one of
Speaker 4: the kind of a greedious things in that original Green
Speaker 4: Lantern thing, and that happens a lot in Fridging is
Speaker 4: it's not even that someone wants to kill the female
Speaker 4: character because of who she is, you know, it is
Speaker 4: just a you know, it's a different like when someone
Speaker 4: goes after Lois Lane.
Speaker 5: Generally, it's not because they know she's Superman's girlfriend.
Speaker 4: It's because she's a badass reporter and they need to
Speaker 4: kill off the bad ass reporter, Like it's about what
Speaker 4: she is doing. Whereas you know, in those cases like
Speaker 4: you know, his girlfriend, or when Joker goes after Barbara Gordon,
Speaker 4: it's not because Barbara Gordon is a thorn in his side.
Speaker 4: It's that he wants to prove some point to Commissioner
Speaker 4: Gordon and to Batman. So even the villain is seeing
Speaker 4: the woman character just as a plot device to have
Speaker 4: an effect on the male character that they want to
Speaker 4: have that effect on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean that I have so many thoughts about
Speaker 1: everything you both said. And yeah, like with Batman being
Speaker 1: breaking Batman's back in Nightfall, that story is not about
Speaker 1: a female character. That's not like Batman doesn't get his
Speaker 1: back broken because of how any female character in the
Speaker 1: story will feel about it. There's only one female character
Speaker 1: in that story, and it's Robin's dad's doctor who Bruce
Speaker 1: Wayne is being really inappropriate with. But it's not about
Speaker 1: her feelings, doctor Seandrakin solving very obscure character. The point
Speaker 1: is it's about Batman. It's about what happens to Batman
Speaker 1: and how he feels about it. When Superman dies, obviously
Speaker 1: he's dead, so it's not about how he feels about it.
Speaker 1: But it's not it's not Lois's story, Like, that's not
Speaker 1: a story. That's not her narrative. It's maybe a collective
Speaker 1: narrative about how everybody feels about it, but it's not.
Speaker 1: He does not die to motivate Lois to like learn
Speaker 1: I think it's called Kuklar or something that Kryptonian jiu
Speaker 1: jitsu and become a superhero. Like that's not what that's for. Whereas, yeah,
Speaker 1: like you said, when Barbara Gordon is shot by the Joker.
Speaker 1: Not only is she at least for the span of
Speaker 1: that particular universe until it was rebooted. You know what,
Speaker 1: thirty years later, she was paralyzed from the waist down.
Speaker 1: She could not walk. There was no magical cure, but
Speaker 1: it was like you said to drive Commissioner Gordon insaying
Speaker 1: to prove a point to Batman. And what One of
Speaker 1: the things that gets me about a lot of these
Speaker 1: incidents is that they become iconic, right, And so Matthew's
Speaker 1: you mentioned before that, like these are visual mediums, So
Speaker 1: these images of violence get repeated over and over again,
Speaker 1: and every artist has to take their stab at drawing.
Speaker 1: Barbara Gordon getting shot through the spine, Electra getting stabbed
Speaker 1: by Bullseye, Supergirl lying dead in Superman's arms, Like we
Speaker 1: see these moments of trauma and violence that women are
Speaker 1: subjected to over and over again. But also Barbara Gordon
Speaker 1: in particular, like somehow her getting shot also manages to
Speaker 1: be a point of motivation for Booster Gold, Like twenty
Speaker 1: years later, there's a storyline where like he's trying to
Speaker 1: prove you can change the past. So he's trying to
Speaker 1: stop her from getting shot, and he's unable to do it.
Speaker 1: So he keeps traveling back in time and she keeps
Speaker 1: getting shot over and over and over again, and so
Speaker 1: they like remember that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so they somehow managed to dig up this story
Speaker 2: of this woman being frigged who, despite all the odds,
Speaker 2: went on to like become Oracle and establish her own
Speaker 2: identity and like.
Speaker 1: Very much move past this really crappy piece of writing.
Speaker 1: And like even Alan Moore will say it was a
Speaker 1: crappy piece of writing, and they went right back to
Speaker 1: it and just like rubbed our faces in it like
Speaker 1: a dog in its own mess.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 7: And that's the same for the flash I mean, Flashy
Speaker 7: tried to time travel and save as a mother. He
Speaker 7: caused flashpoints and it's like you can't actually do that. Sorry,
Speaker 7: she's got to stay dead.
Speaker 1: Jeff john seems to really really love stories about how
Speaker 1: everything would be bad if a woman didn't die or
Speaker 1: get hurt. Like he's done it a few times.
Speaker 7: I wasn't going to name names, but since you did, oh.
Speaker 1: He knows what I think.
Speaker 7: Yeah. Well, okay, so Jeff Jahns is like a very
Speaker 7: prominent writer and now I'm sure like some upper management
Speaker 7: with DC Comics, and he has in some way like
Speaker 7: overseen a lot of this era that we're talking about,
Speaker 7: like nineties to two thousands, because the original Fridging was
Speaker 7: in ninety four, and then there was just like a
Speaker 7: series even after Gail Simone called it out, there was
Speaker 7: just a series of these that kept happening. And then like,
Speaker 7: while I was doing research for this, do you recall
Speaker 7: Blackest Night the Green Lantern crossover?
Speaker 1: Tragically?
Speaker 7: Yes, this was like one of his big things. In
Speaker 7: Blackest Night, the Black Lanterns, who are essentially just DC
Speaker 7: zombies invade the entire universe. Is a huge crossover, and
Speaker 7: they bring back a bunch of these friged women as
Speaker 7: Black Lanterns, including the original one, Alexandra de Wit, who
Speaker 7: uses her black ring to create a refrigerator construct to
Speaker 7: re torment Kyle in this fight. It is ridiculous.
Speaker 1: I mean, they like they love going back into these wells.
Speaker 1: This is way back in the nineties, well before Black
Speaker 1: As Night. There's a storyline where Kyle is teamed up
Speaker 1: with Guy Gardner and Kyle is still a pretty new
Speaker 1: hero at this point, and they go to Guy's mom's
Speaker 1: house and they realize the fridge is open and they're
Speaker 1: both like, oh god, oh no, because they're fighting major force.
Speaker 1: They're tracking down the villain who killed Alice, and they're
Speaker 1: freaking out and Kyle is like having a panic attack.
Speaker 1: He can't go near it. And so Guy is the
Speaker 1: one who opens the fridge and he realizes it's not
Speaker 1: his mom because she wasn't home at the time. It
Speaker 1: was the neighbor who came over to like feed the
Speaker 1: cat or something, and it's so it's a woman who's
Speaker 1: like never even named. But again, it's like, hey, remember
Speaker 1: when we did this, We're gonna do it again. We're
Speaker 1: going to keep doing it. We think it's really cool.
Speaker 4: And it's so interesting to me how not only is
Speaker 4: that happening, but now like let's back it up, yeah,
Speaker 4: and you can really see how it makes sense to me.
Speaker 4: And it's horrible, but like that a lot of people
Speaker 4: keep doing it, even after the term fridging really became popular.
Speaker 4: You mentioned that Gael Simone has created a website called
Speaker 4: Women and Refrigerators. It's still there and she has as
Speaker 4: to keep it as a historical artifact, not updated the
Speaker 4: HTML in any way since nineteen ninety nine, which is
Speaker 4: very apparent in the website, but among other things.
Speaker 5: It has some of the responses she's.
Speaker 4: Gotten, and some of them I think are like interesting
Speaker 4: conversations and push back, and some are just you know,
Speaker 4: like anytime guys in a guy's world or called out
Speaker 4: for doing something and they push back. But it definitely
Speaker 4: seems like there are some who are like, all right, well,
Speaker 4: you think we've done enough fridging, bet And I think
Speaker 4: it also become significant that some of the stories that
Speaker 4: I think gain a lot of the most sort of
Speaker 4: public traction are often ones where they don't do fridging,
Speaker 4: like John Wick, one of the first John Wick move,
Speaker 4: which I think was a big part of kind of
Speaker 4: launching Keanu Reeves into like the social position he has
Speaker 4: now is kind of like one of the most beloved
Speaker 4: you know, action stars and things like that, and he's
Speaker 4: also just a fantastic guy in eight million ways.
Speaker 5: But like.
Speaker 4: The movie, the whole point of the movie is that
Speaker 4: his dog gets killed, and like the dog is connected
Speaker 4: to his wife. It's one of the last things he
Speaker 4: has from his wife. But like, it's not it's if
Speaker 4: you want to say anything with it gets freached, it's
Speaker 4: the dog. And I remember that being a real thing
Speaker 4: that people were commenting on of like how nice it
Speaker 4: was that it wasn't about the death of a woman,
Speaker 4: you know. And then he does have this like relationship
Speaker 4: with her memory, but it's not that And and to
Speaker 4: give one other example of the good Daredevil, I mean,
Speaker 4: you know, the original Netflix MCU Daredevil.
Speaker 5: No commentary on the newer one.
Speaker 4: You can find me in Jessica having many commentaries on
Speaker 4: that in a previous episode. But I remember one thing
Speaker 4: that really struck me was that the only thing I'd
Speaker 4: really known about Wilson Fisk and Vanessa I knew from
Speaker 4: the Spider Man into the Spider Verse animated movie, which
Speaker 4: is fantastic, and that may have even come out after
Speaker 4: one or two seasons of Daredevil, I don't remember the timing,
Speaker 4: But in that Vanessa is fridged, you know, and it's
Speaker 4: because of his own actions. But everything that's motivating Fisk
Speaker 4: is to try and bring back Vanessa. I think she
Speaker 4: had just left him. She had maybe she had died. Yeah, no,
Speaker 4: she had. She had been in the process of leaving
Speaker 4: him and then gotten hit by a bus. And so
Speaker 4: he's trying to like undo all that. But so we
Speaker 4: had that horrific death. But in the TV show, there's
Speaker 4: none of that. She's just a solid partner for him
Speaker 4: and a character in her own right and still very
Speaker 4: much like a character in his story. But they basically
Speaker 4: undid the Fridging storyline. So yeah, so I think it's
Speaker 4: interesting also now that we are getting some examples, but
Speaker 4: the show very noteworthy because they're not the norm by
Speaker 4: any means.
Speaker 1: Yeah, good, go ahead.
Speaker 7: Well I'm glad you brought up john Wick Matthew because
Speaker 7: I think movies should get a certain degree of forgiveness. Forgiveness,
Speaker 7: I guess for using a trope like this because you
Speaker 7: only have two to three hours, and I think it's
Speaker 7: a narrative shortcut to say, like, someone dies and this
Speaker 7: character now wants to go do this action y stuff
Speaker 7: for the next two hours because of it. Right, And
Speaker 7: there's examples like Inigo Montoya, right, you killed my father
Speaker 7: prepared to die, Luke Skywalker, Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen
Speaker 7: get killed, and that's why he decides to go with
Speaker 7: Obi Wan kenob Russell Crowe Gladiator, like his family is killed.
Speaker 7: So like, those are examples of the trope, you know,
Speaker 7: sometimes with women, but mostly like family adjacent I would
Speaker 7: say in these cases and yeah, Like just I'm not
Speaker 7: saying it's a good thing, but yeah, they die and
Speaker 7: the character has now has to go on this journey.
Speaker 7: Like I think that's okay.
Speaker 5: I hear what you're.
Speaker 4: Saying, but like I do think you know the fact
Speaker 4: that in most cases you talked about like one isn't
Speaker 4: a woman one. It's a man and a woman who
Speaker 4: died at the same time in the same way. Like,
Speaker 4: I just kind of feel like, if you're writing a
Speaker 4: movie now, if you want to do a vengeance plot, great,
Speaker 4: but maybe don't have it be a woman, and surely
Speaker 4: don't have it be a girlfriend. And if you do,
Speaker 4: don't display her body having gruesome things done to it,
Speaker 4: you know. Make it about a father, make it about
Speaker 4: a brother, make it about a professor, you know.
Speaker 5: Like I just feel like.
Speaker 4: Because there's so much of it, You're right, I don't
Speaker 4: need a fully like I don't think we have time
Speaker 4: to have a fully realized other character who's going to
Speaker 4: die to advance our main characters storyline. But just if
Speaker 4: it feels like a woman who's only characteristic is that
Speaker 4: she's important to this man and she dies in.
Speaker 5: A particularly gruesome way.
Speaker 4: I think at least like that's the I'm at least
Speaker 4: gonna hold movies to that bar, like, can you at
Speaker 4: least clear that? And you know, I'm not saying it
Speaker 4: never can be a female character who dies again, but maybe, like,
Speaker 4: let's just do something else for a while.
Speaker 7: I think there's a distinction, because death is just gruesome,
Speaker 7: right Uncle Owen an opera were I guess shot by
Speaker 7: blaster and then the house was burned and we see
Speaker 7: their corpses, So that is gruesome. But the fridging aspect,
Speaker 7: I think is missing to a degree because there's no
Speaker 7: indication that they were, like the two of them were
Speaker 7: treated differently and that the entpreu was violated in the
Speaker 7: ways that we've been discussing, right, I think that that
Speaker 7: is a distinction that should be noted. I get your
Speaker 7: point that if like women have suffered this fate a
Speaker 7: lot more so, maybe like this time, they don't. But
Speaker 7: it's his family, right, Like it is shown to be
Speaker 7: his family that he lives with. And I don't know,
Speaker 7: I'm not saying like I'm okay with these deaths, but
Speaker 7: from a narrative standpoint, I think that fridging is often
Speaker 7: dismissed as lazy writing and for a movie. I just
Speaker 7: think like that this is writing.
Speaker 4: I guess from the one you mentioned, I wouldn't think
Speaker 4: of his friging, but I want to let just jump
Speaker 4: in here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think I think it is the question of
Speaker 1: whether it is writing or whether it is lazy writing,
Speaker 1: because to be honest, like when Matthew and You're putting
Speaker 1: out other possibilities, you mentioned a father I'm sick of
Speaker 1: those two. I'm so sick of narratives that are like
Speaker 1: my dad died, and so I got like, as a man,
Speaker 1: I have to go do these manly things because the
Speaker 1: fatherhood because they're both cliches, right, the guy the young
Speaker 1: man with the dead father, the guy with the dead
Speaker 1: wife like or the dead mother like. These these are
Speaker 1: We've seen them a million times, and so I do
Speaker 1: think it is about if you're going to use them,
Speaker 1: because you need to motivate your protagonist, and often the
Speaker 1: way to do that is the you know, if it's
Speaker 1: a fan, like in the case of Luke, I think
Speaker 1: it's less motivation. To me, that motivation has always been less.
Speaker 1: He is grieving them because he fully stops thinking about
Speaker 1: them the second he gets to most Isley does not
Speaker 1: care but it's it's cutting that cord for him, it's
Speaker 1: giving him that freedom or whether it is a revenge
Speaker 1: quest or whatever. To approach it thoughtfully right and to
Speaker 1: not just like be like, oh, here's the trope, and
Speaker 1: I'm pulling it out of the trope bucket and applying
Speaker 1: it without Because I also take Regie's point that you know,
Speaker 1: you can movies do exist to a certain extent on
Speaker 1: their own. They are in conversation with like the whole
Speaker 1: of cinematic history. But it's not like something floating in
Speaker 1: a superhero universe where we've seen this eight hundred times
Speaker 1: with these same characters over and over again. But I
Speaker 1: also think, like to that point of being thoughtful about it,
Speaker 1: I think Daredevil is actually a great example because the
Speaker 1: show did was very thoughtful. It was not thoughtful about
Speaker 1: all the deaths that it used, and it was particularly
Speaker 1: not thoughtful in terms of race, but in terms of gender.
Speaker 1: I do think that they were very conscious of fridging
Speaker 1: and how those characters have historically been treated, because in
Speaker 1: the comics, Vanessa is dead, Karen is super dead. Karen
Speaker 1: is one of those characters whose death we have to
Speaker 1: see over and over again because every artist wants to
Speaker 1: draw it, and neither of those characters die in the show. Electra,
Speaker 1: who died in the comics and then came back, does
Speaker 1: die in the show. But I don't watch season two
Speaker 1: of Daredevil for all and Defenders for all their flaws
Speaker 1: and think that her death is about Matt. I feel
Speaker 1: like they really did try to make it Electris story.
Speaker 1: And so when people talk about Fridging, no one's saying
Speaker 1: you can't kill a female character. It's don't use them
Speaker 1: as canon fodder for a male character. And I do
Speaker 1: think that the Dared Devil writers were quite intentional about that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Yeah, I think it's a good point because I agree,
Speaker 4: like I definitely hear that point of you know, you
Speaker 4: can't establish it as well. So I think the bar
Speaker 4: is a lot lower to me in a movie than
Speaker 4: in a comic book or TV show. But like, to me,
Speaker 4: the things you talked about are very different than like,
Speaker 4: for example, Karen Rachel in the Batman movies, or another
Speaker 4: good example recently, I think Deadpool two, where you know
Speaker 4: Deadpool one is, among other things, this incredible romance, very gruesome,
Speaker 4: fucked up romance in romance, and then they kill off
Speaker 4: her character. Early in Deadpool two, and I think it's
Speaker 4: actually an interesting story. Like at the there are people
Speaker 4: who want to argue that the movie isn't defridging because
Speaker 4: at the very end he does bring her back to life,
Speaker 4: but still for the entire movie is her death that
Speaker 4: motivates him. And also the story at least has come
Speaker 4: out of Hollywood is that they only added that that
Speaker 4: scene at the end where she's resurrected because people were
Speaker 4: so annoyed at the fridging the test audiences that they showed.
Speaker 1: It to Yeah. I mean, and that's the thing. Audiences
Speaker 1: know the term, they're familiar with the trope, they can
Speaker 1: identify it, and that's like I don't in most cases,
Speaker 1: certainly for most comic book writers and plenty of TV
Speaker 1: and movie writers. I don't think they're avoiding it because
Speaker 1: they feel that it would be poor writing or problematic writing.
Speaker 1: I think they're avoiding it because they know they're going
Speaker 1: to get called out if they use it. Which the
Speaker 1: other thing I was going to say about Daredevil is
Speaker 1: that he is one of two characters in comics who
Speaker 1: they're just endless jokes about how if you date him,
Speaker 1: you'll die because he has so many dead girlfriends, way
Speaker 1: more than have been adapted into the TV show. The
Speaker 1: other character who's famous for that is Kyle Rayner of
Speaker 1: the original Women in Refrigerators theme so.
Speaker 5: Interesting and breaking out of the comic book's mold, is.
Speaker 4: It fair to say that pretty much every woman who
Speaker 4: James Bond sleeps with to get information about the bad
Speaker 4: guy winds up getting fridged?
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean, James Bond. If you're a Bond girl
Speaker 7: in the first half of the movie, you're done for, right.
Speaker 7: If you're a Bond girl in the second half of
Speaker 7: the movie, like the you ride off into the sunset
Speaker 7: or whatever with him. But first half Bond girls have
Speaker 7: a very high mortality rate, and it it has become
Speaker 7: I might trope on it in its own right right
Speaker 7: beyond like this concept of originator, I think Bond as
Speaker 7: a franchise is so well known. That's like yep, like
Speaker 7: she's she's going to be dead.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and one of the things kind of connected to this,
Speaker 4: and they don't move on to a different aspect of it.
Speaker 4: But I think also is an interesting subplot that I
Speaker 4: wonder if this happens in comic book movies, because it
Speaker 4: happens in action movies all the time is you know,
Speaker 4: the movie starts out with the villain killing the girlfriend
Speaker 4: or the wife of our hero, and so our hero
Speaker 4: has to go on this vengeance plot along with the
Speaker 4: course of which he seduces another beautiful woman and has
Speaker 4: sex with her. And like, you know, I think widows,
Speaker 4: you know, I don't believe in widow celibacy, Like I
Speaker 4: think widows and widowers should get to, you know, enjoy
Speaker 4: life going forward. But I do think it's kind of
Speaker 4: a funny thing of like, oh, you're so sad about
Speaker 4: this that you're gonna go.
Speaker 5: Be with another woman about it?
Speaker 4: And one of my favorite examples, one of my favorite
Speaker 4: movies of all time. But I think it is blatant
Speaker 4: about this is Desperado. And now, granted, like if the
Speaker 4: bar of you know, are you going to be so
Speaker 4: upset about your your dead ex that you know you
Speaker 4: don't sleep with this person, it's Selmahayak, And so that's
Speaker 4: a very very high bar to begin with.
Speaker 5: But and she looks amazing in the movie as doesn't.
Speaker 1: Dead would want would want him to sleep with? Somema Hyak, right, I.
Speaker 4: Mean that movie is bipanic start to finish but still
Speaker 4: it is just funny to me that it's like he's
Speaker 4: so upset and so sad, and so this other woman's like, well,
Speaker 4: I can to fix that. And that's a very common
Speaker 4: trope in these movies. Does that happen in comic books
Speaker 4: a lot?
Speaker 1: Did?
Speaker 4: Don someone come along and say, Kyle, that's so sad
Speaker 4: about the refrigerator, let me let me help you feel better.
Speaker 1: Not Kyle so much, but I mean, it's Frank Castle's
Speaker 1: whole deal, Like he sleeps around all the time, but
Speaker 1: he's still clearly not over his dead wife Maria because
Speaker 1: he's murdering a hundred people a day about it.
Speaker 5: But that's fair.
Speaker 1: He's not gonna like when some random nameless woman who's
Speaker 1: only in the story for one issue throws herself at
Speaker 1: him for no reason. He's gonna catch it, because these
Speaker 1: comics are a male fantasy, so.
Speaker 7: Right, I mean, it's it's kind of Batman's whole deal, right,
Speaker 7: Like that is another case of family, like it's his parents.
Speaker 7: But there's always like a woman character who like, oh, like,
Speaker 7: maybe I can stop being Batman because like she makes
Speaker 7: me happy. The type of deal is like a very
Speaker 7: it seems like a very common Batman storyline to me, surely.
Speaker 1: Batman must have dead girlfriends Cloud.
Speaker 5: So we're saying cloud the phantasm.
Speaker 4: Uh Like, often it's like people who like they start
Speaker 4: to become vigilantes as well because of him, but then
Speaker 4: he has to put them down Huntress. I think there's
Speaker 4: a storyline with that. Oh, that's also no storyline.
Speaker 1: They're they're not romantically connected. She's his daughter in some universes.
Speaker 7: Oh okay, okay, But also, unless you're Catwoman being a
Speaker 7: Batman or I guess Bruce Wayne, romantic interest has like
Speaker 7: a James Bondian mortality rate.
Speaker 1: I feel like, yeah, Catwoman dies a lot, but she
Speaker 1: gets better because those deaths, and those deaths are about her.
Speaker 1: She's she's having an adventure and she dies, and she
Speaker 1: gets better because she's got nine lives.
Speaker 5: Yeah, she's a cat she got nine lives. Well and.
Speaker 4: Oh well, And we've talked a lot about the whole
Speaker 4: idea of being the plot point for a male character.
Speaker 4: But as we said at the beginning, it's not just
Speaker 4: that this is about like women dying. It's often that
Speaker 4: it's about like horrible violence done to their bodies and
Speaker 4: that being displayed and either like eroticized, like you know,
Speaker 4: her body being displayed and like, oh, look the knife
Speaker 4: just perfectly ripped apart her clothing to show her underwear
Speaker 4: or whatever, or that it's just pure gore. And I
Speaker 4: remember we we tried to record this a couple of
Speaker 4: days ago. We had some technical difficulties, but we actually
Speaker 4: got into a conversation about like was the body of
Speaker 4: was the the body of the original friged woman cut
Speaker 4: up in order to be put into a refrigerator based
Speaker 4: on the physics of like is there enough space with
Speaker 4: the shelves and stuff like that, and not wanting to
Speaker 4: go back into that, but just it's a good example.
Speaker 4: Why is it why why is it that that the
Speaker 4: particular violence against women's bodies is such an important part
Speaker 4: of like naming this and and and one of most
Speaker 4: problematic parts about this, Like I think it's obviously people
Speaker 4: why it's like not good, but like talk more about
Speaker 4: why is that significant?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean again, it's it's there's a few things there,
Speaker 1: like the actual just pure violence which is like put
Speaker 1: on display and in many of these famous cases, like
Speaker 1: I was saying, repeated and reiterated and riffed on, so
Speaker 1: we have to see it again and again. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it's also often very sexualized. In two thousand and four,
Speaker 1: when Stephanie Brown, who is the female Robin but this
Speaker 1: was under her identity as Spoiler, was killed by Black Mask,
Speaker 1: she was captured and tortured by him for lengthy period
Speaker 1: of time with a power drill, and it we were
Speaker 1: not meant to read that art as that he was
Speaker 1: deliberately sexually assaulting her. He was just torturing her, But
Speaker 1: the art was drawn in such a way that it
Speaker 1: very much sexualized her. She was sixteen at the time,
Speaker 1: and it just seemed to be because that was how
Speaker 1: that artist knew to draw women. Like I don't think
Speaker 1: it was intentional. I don't think he was like, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna make this really hot. I think that was the
Speaker 1: only way that he knew to draw women well.
Speaker 4: And if you want to get a fairly phallic power tool,
Speaker 4: a power drill is pretty high up on that list, like.
Speaker 1: Fun fact, fun fact. At the time, even though Stephanie
Speaker 1: Brown had been around for I think eleven years in canon,
Speaker 1: there was no action figure of her, but you could
Speaker 1: almost immediately after that storyline ran by an action figure
Speaker 1: of Black Mask holding the power.
Speaker 5: Drill Jesus yikes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was a thing that happened even pretty recently,
Speaker 1: just a few twenty eighteen, which I guess is not
Speaker 1: that recent, but it feels recent to me. There was
Speaker 1: a story called Heroes in Crisis, which was about It
Speaker 1: was a DC story about a bunch of characters dying. Basically,
Speaker 1: it was kind of a who Done it. One of
Speaker 1: the characters who died was poison Ivy and DC she
Speaker 1: got better almost immediately, like within this story, but DC
Speaker 1: released cover like a preview of what a cover of
Speaker 1: one of the issues would look like, and it was
Speaker 1: her dead body, and it was posed in such an
Speaker 1: inappropriately sexual like look at my breast, look at my
Speaker 1: ass way. There was so much and it was her
Speaker 1: dead body. There was so much backlash that they actually
Speaker 1: pulled that cover and released that comic with a different
Speaker 1: cover because people are like, what on earth is this?
Speaker 1: So it's not as prevalent as it used to be,
Speaker 1: but it's by no means gone, right.
Speaker 7: Yeah, So I think one of the issues going on
Speaker 7: here with the difference between how male and female death
Speaker 7: is treated is that I said, as I said earlier,
Speaker 7: like males often get to experience the noble sacrifice. Right,
Speaker 7: they are heroes themselves, so they fall in combat. Whereas
Speaker 7: so many of these women, even when they are superheroes
Speaker 7: like Barbara Gordon is Back Girl, they are assaulted in
Speaker 7: their homes in a domestic setting like the original Alexander DeWitt,
Speaker 7: like the refrigerator that's their kitchen, And there's several other
Speaker 7: examples in DC Sue Dibney, Big Barta, they are attacked
Speaker 7: in their homes. Last time we tried to record, you
Speaker 7: mentioned kat Matoui, who was Green Lantern John Stewart's wife
Speaker 7: at the time. I looked it up. She was also
Speaker 7: attacked in their kitchen and I was like, why does
Speaker 7: this keep having in kitchens? Is because you know the
Speaker 7: whole women, you know, go go to the kitchen and
Speaker 7: make me a sandwich thing. Right, Like I'm not saying
Speaker 7: that that's that's good, but that's the idea is Like
Speaker 7: to these writers, women quote unquote belong in the kitchen,
Speaker 7: and that's where they're going to be attacked.
Speaker 4: Right, no matter how, they don't get to die wearing
Speaker 4: their superhero costume. Yeah, I'm guessing as well, it's often
Speaker 4: they're just dressed in civilian clothes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all of those characters. I mean, Sue was not
Speaker 1: a superhero, but all those characters wearing civilian clothes. And
Speaker 1: like I said that when we tried to record this before,
Speaker 1: bart is not even a good cook, Like it's explicit
Speaker 1: that she doesn't know how to cook earth food.
Speaker 7: I actually looked up that scene she she is in
Speaker 7: her costume, but that makes me more ridiculous because like,
Speaker 7: why is she wearing this costume in her home? And
Speaker 7: why was she defeated? Like she is a very power full, being.
Speaker 1: Awesome.
Speaker 4: Right, Well, there's so much here to talk about, but
Speaker 4: I want to change directions a little bit. And part
Speaker 4: of what got Jessica gonna be talking about this and
Speaker 4: wanting to discuss it uh reeky with you and make
Speaker 4: us a full episode is.
Speaker 5: Obviously this is a This is a.
Speaker 4: A trope that is specifically about violence done to women
Speaker 4: in regard to male characters. But as you pointed out, Riki, like,
Speaker 4: there's lots of other deaths of male characters to motivate
Speaker 4: male characters or of any other kind of characters, but
Speaker 4: quite a lot of the times it's a white person's
Speaker 4: character who is motivated by the death of a character
Speaker 4: of color. And part of how it came up was
Speaker 4: Jessica and I were talking about how there was something
Speaker 4: in another recent show that we haven't been watching but
Speaker 4: that we've been hearing about we are a white character,
Speaker 4: where there was a really interesting, uh, person of color
Speaker 4: character introduced, but who wound up dying specifically as a
Speaker 4: way of helping to motivate the white character. And there's
Speaker 4: kind of a larger conversation in terms of, like when
Speaker 4: we think about intersectionality, but also of like respecting specific
Speaker 4: things of like, you know, it's interesting to note that, yeah,
Speaker 4: like minority groups, oppressed groups, groups that are not the
Speaker 4: group in power, those kind of characters often get treated
Speaker 4: in similar ways. But also recognizing that there's a lot
Speaker 4: of very specific misogyny in fridging that you don't want
Speaker 4: to kind of erase, and so I want to cut
Speaker 4: throw it out for both of you, Like, what's your
Speaker 4: thought of a term like fridging being applied to like,
Speaker 4: you know, in how many action movies of the eighties
Speaker 4: did you ever see it is always like the black
Speaker 4: best friend of our white superhero or action figure character.
Speaker 4: In Captain the Winter Soldier, and actually this was called
Speaker 4: out by a number of people. There's a lot of
Speaker 4: problems with what's Stemestore, Captain America's actual name, Oh god,
Speaker 4: mister Patriot or something like.
Speaker 5: That, Oh us agent, us agent, thank you.
Speaker 4: He has a black best friend and that black best
Speaker 4: friend is killed and that's part of what makes him
Speaker 4: sort of break bad. How do you see that in
Speaker 4: terms of like it? It's not the specificness of fridging,
Speaker 4: but it's similar rhymes in a way to me, Like,
Speaker 4: is it appropriate to talk about that, like it's friging
Speaker 4: of color? Is that a term that really should only
Speaker 4: be used for women? But we can think of other
Speaker 4: terms to describe the similarity there. What's kind of your
Speaker 4: thoughts on that?
Speaker 7: Well, Like, fridging is just a thing that Gael Simone
Speaker 7: made up, right, the word at least, like the concept
Speaker 7: to describe a trend she was seeing, and she wanted
Speaker 7: to use it as a discussion point for a bigger
Speaker 7: trend in comics that most of the characters, most of
Speaker 7: the main characters are male, right, So she wasn't necessarily
Speaker 7: just saying, look at all this fridging, it's bad. It
Speaker 7: was more look at all these women who are dying
Speaker 7: because they are associated with a male main character, and
Speaker 7: there aren't enough female main characters, right, So, I think
Speaker 7: in terms of a race discussion, I've put it the
Speaker 7: same way as like, if there are too many minority
Speaker 7: side characters who are dying to motivate the main characters,
Speaker 7: like maybe we should be asking why aren't there more
Speaker 7: minority main characters?
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, I agree, it's a function of who gets
Speaker 1: to be the protagonist and who doesn't, because, like you
Speaker 1: were saying, you see it across all axes of privilege.
Speaker 1: In terms of whether to apply the term fridging, I'm
Speaker 1: sort of torn because I think often in media criticism
Speaker 1: I say this as a white woman, white women can
Speaker 1: take up a lot of the error in the room.
Speaker 1: And I mean if you're looking at comics to this day,
Speaker 1: but even more so in nineteen ninety nine, female characters
Speaker 1: were massively overwhelmed by male characters, but white female characters
Speaker 1: still massively overwhelmed characters of color and still do. So.
Speaker 1: It's like, on the one hand, I think there is
Speaker 1: value in specificity, in being able to name things because
Speaker 1: there are ways in which even though they often they
Speaker 1: come from the same root of like you know, all
Speaker 1: of our stories meant. So many of our story center
Speaker 1: white male, straight, Christian, able body, et cetera. There are
Speaker 1: differences in how white women are treated compared to say,
Speaker 1: black men, in white men's narratives, and I think it's
Speaker 1: important to be able to identify those differences. And you
Speaker 1: mentioned intersectionality black women are treating they have different tropes
Speaker 1: that they are forced to put up with. But at
Speaker 1: the same time, I don't want to be like, you
Speaker 1: can't have that word, that word's for women when we
Speaker 1: don't have another word that gets it across in such
Speaker 1: a clear fashion. So I'm of two minds.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I think that's kind of like the with
Speaker 4: so many of these intersectionality discussions. I think this is
Speaker 4: kind of the crux of the debate that we get
Speaker 4: to is how do you both recognize that there are
Speaker 4: similar dynamics that happen two different groups, but also that
Speaker 4: when the dynamic has happens to one group, there are
Speaker 4: ways in which it is specific. You know that misogyny
Speaker 4: and racism look a lot alike but are different in
Speaker 4: different ways, you know, and things like that, as well
Speaker 4: as misogyn noir where you're hitting both. You know, like,
Speaker 4: I am sure there are black women characters who get fridged.
Speaker 5: But if you're really.
Speaker 4: Introduce to see it like an analysis that it's probably
Speaker 4: very rarely shown rodically the way that it often is
Speaker 4: with with with white women characters, or if it is
Speaker 4: and it's in a very different way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think they're like there's a way that also
Speaker 1: that like white female characters are, they're given this sort
Speaker 1: of saintly treatment that often black female characters are not.
Speaker 1: And also there are other tropes that we do have
Speaker 1: that don't speak to exactly the same thing, but there
Speaker 1: are that overlap that refer to killing off characters from
Speaker 1: other demographics, Like there's burier gaze or the sort of
Speaker 1: a trope of like the black guy dies first in
Speaker 1: horror movies, like that kind of thing. So they don't
Speaker 1: speak to the same thing, but they speak to the
Speaker 1: idea that there are all these different tropes functioning kind
Speaker 1: of at the same time.
Speaker 5: Yeah, no, it's very true. It's very true.
Speaker 7: Yeah. I mean the horror movie thing is in combination
Speaker 7: with the final girl phenomenon, right, where in usually a
Speaker 7: white woman is the last survivor, and in a lot
Speaker 7: of the eighties movies, the first victim was often black,
Speaker 7: and it got to the point where people in the
Speaker 7: industry called it out in either in like parodies or
Speaker 7: just in kind of mainstream movies. What was the Deep
Speaker 7: Blue Sea the Shark movie, the ll cool Jay character
Speaker 7: actually called out and says, oh, hell no, like I'm
Speaker 7: gonna be the first to die in this situation, and
Speaker 7: he actually survives nice And I think like that that
Speaker 7: is what these discussions can be valuable for, is recognizing
Speaker 7: these trends and how they are used to keep certain
Speaker 7: people down and then subverting it and saying, look like
Speaker 7: we're not going to resort to that, and we're actually
Speaker 7: going to have you know, this character survive in this scenario.
Speaker 4: Yeah, That's where I think also the discussion we were
Speaker 4: all having earlier about like the answer to this isn't
Speaker 4: to get more vengeance plots, but with different people dying,
Speaker 4: you know, it's like, maybe there can be motivations beyond vengeance.
Speaker 4: You know, maybe there can be especially when it's vengeance
Speaker 4: about a character who only gets introduced for the purpose
Speaker 4: of being an object of vengeance.
Speaker 1: Later definitely, But I also think like they're the idea
Speaker 1: of subverting a trope, of subverting those expectations because I mean,
Speaker 1: this is this is a story about a white woman.
Speaker 1: But when I try to think of female characters whose
Speaker 1: deaths are not Fridging, whose deaths are not about men,
Speaker 1: the story I come back to over and over again
Speaker 1: is Buffy, who herself died twice. And there are other
Speaker 1: female characters who die on that show and their deaths
Speaker 1: are not about men. But Buffy at its core was
Speaker 1: about subverting horror expectations for cute blonde girl and you know,
Speaker 1: having that genre savbiness and turning it on its head.
Speaker 4: M yeah, I think we've talked about a number of those.
Speaker 4: We talked about how Daredevil does that. This is less
Speaker 4: in the motivation for someone else, but in terms of
Speaker 4: the violence towards women's bodies, we did absoute a while
Speaker 4: ago on the movie Birds of Prey, which is very intentional.
Speaker 4: I know, Margot Robbie is a big part of this.
Speaker 4: You know that there are two scenes. There's one where
Speaker 4: Harley Quinn is being tortured, but what you see is
Speaker 4: what's in her head to try to help her deal
Speaker 4: with the pain, and another where the villain is basically
Speaker 4: trying to strip a woman naked in order to you know,
Speaker 4: humiliate her and show his power over her. But instead
Speaker 4: of having a very like salacious shot of like, oh,
Speaker 4: isn't it so terrible that because he did that, now
Speaker 4: you can see her ass in that song, and by
Speaker 4: the way, is and it doesn't look nice. It's immediately
Speaker 4: shown as like the camera moves so that we don't
Speaker 4: see her nakedness.
Speaker 5: We just see her reacting to it in a way that.
Speaker 4: Again and like that shouldn't be notable, like, but it
Speaker 4: really was because it was so often that's used as, Hey,
Speaker 4: how do we get some you know, tna into this movie.
Speaker 4: Let's have a villain do something mean and strip a
Speaker 4: woman naked or something like that.
Speaker 1: Well, and I think it's worth noting that that villain,
Speaker 1: the character that you and McGregor played, was Black Mask,
Speaker 1: who's the character who tortured Stephanie Brown with power drill
Speaker 1: in the comics.
Speaker 4: Oh I didn't realized that, but yeah, yeah, there we go,
Speaker 4: there we go. All right, Well, this has been a
Speaker 4: great discussion. There's one last thing I was gonna mention,
Speaker 4: but I want to give each of you a chance.
Speaker 4: If there's one last thing you want to bring up,
Speaker 4: or a question you want to ask, or comment you
Speaker 4: want to make.
Speaker 7: I guess I'll go because recently, I guess last year,
Speaker 7: two years ago, I don't even know at this point,
Speaker 7: the Secret Invasion TV show in the MCU. It's just
Speaker 7: absolutely like baffling in how they treated the character of
Speaker 7: Maria Hill. And I would argue that it was a fridgiing.
Speaker 7: It didn't have you know, a lot of the domesticity
Speaker 7: or any of the sexual connotations. But I went into
Speaker 7: that series thinking she was going to be a big
Speaker 7: part of it, right, her and Nick Fury working together,
Speaker 7: maybe she would be a scroll and that would be interesting.
Speaker 7: But instead they just killed her right in front of
Speaker 7: Nick Fury, and then he got mad and went on
Speaker 7: the whole quest because dang it, like gotta gotta do
Speaker 7: something about that. And I just it was so upsetting
Speaker 7: to me, like in this age, like after a decade
Speaker 7: to twenty years of this discussion, that they that they
Speaker 7: did that, and it's just I was just like baffled
Speaker 7: by that. So that's my closing on Should we still
Speaker 7: be discussions discussing fridging, Yes, because it just happened in
Speaker 7: like one of the biggest franchises.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I would just throw into that while it's not
Speaker 4: a woman and he and other times was a very
Speaker 4: well developed character. Spoilers for the new version of Daredevil,
Speaker 4: but we've talked about this boor on this podcast have
Speaker 4: been out for a while. Uh Foggy having a death
Speaker 4: that is one purely to motivate Daredevil. I think is
Speaker 4: like it doesn't have the misogynistic aspects, but it has
Speaker 4: the bad, bad, lazy writing aspects of let's just kill character,
Speaker 4: just moving someone else.
Speaker 7: It has this aspect of setting audience expectations and then
Speaker 7: like pulling the rug out right like that that's it.
Speaker 7: I think we I haven't watched it early yet, but
Speaker 7: that's like the same feeling of like I'm going into
Speaker 7: this expecting to enjoy this character interacting, you know, in
Speaker 7: the storyline. It's like, no, we're not.
Speaker 5: Going to give you that.
Speaker 7: Come on, It's like what why, Like that's that's what
Speaker 7: we wanted?
Speaker 1: Well, and isn't that like a big part of you know,
Speaker 1: the MCU is so infamously uh cagey about spoiler culture
Speaker 1: and like none of the actors get a whole script
Speaker 1: and they're you know, in a green screen room by
Speaker 1: themselves and they don't know what's going on. And it's
Speaker 1: also they can shock the audience, and it's like shock
Speaker 1: is not the only or uh, in most cases the
Speaker 1: best emotion that you want your audience to be having,
Speaker 1: like if that's what you're going for, And a lot
Speaker 1: of fridging comes down to shock value, especially the more
Speaker 1: gruesome kinds, Like if all you have is shock, maybe
Speaker 1: go back to the drawing board, because there's some richer
Speaker 1: emotions you could be trying to draw out of your audience.
Speaker 5: I think it's really true.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Speaker 1: The only other thing that I would say is we're
Speaker 1: talking a lot about Gail Simone, so I think it's
Speaker 1: worth pointing out that a couple of years after the
Speaker 1: Women in Refrigerators' website launched, she did become a professional
Speaker 1: comic book writer, and her run on Birds of Prey,
Speaker 1: which just like the movie, was an all female team.
Speaker 1: In the comics it was an all female team, was
Speaker 1: a landmark in how female characters were written and treated
Speaker 1: in comic books. And I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Speaker 1: Track it down. It is incredible. And Barbara Gordon and
Speaker 1: Black Canary are the main characters. Those are both characters
Speaker 1: who have very much been fridged in the comics. We
Speaker 1: talked about Barbara Black Canary was kidnapped and tortured in
Speaker 1: a sexualized fashion, a deliberately sexualized fashion to motivate Green Arrow. This.
Speaker 1: Gael Simone did not create the Birds of Prey teams.
Speaker 1: She took over that book, but she really brought it
Speaker 1: to a new level, and you know, put her money
Speaker 1: where her mouth was in terms of, like, here's how
Speaker 1: you can write female characters. So I wanted to give
Speaker 1: her her props for that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we didn't even talk about how Actually with the
Speaker 4: TV show Daredevil, the TV show Green Arrow, a huge
Speaker 4: motivating factor is that, you know, he goes off in
Speaker 4: his love trift with the sister of his girlfriend and
Speaker 4: she eyes in the first scene, you know, and that's.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she did. She did crawl the hell out of
Speaker 1: that fridge.
Speaker 5: Though she did fridge.
Speaker 4: They let it was a new actress who did, but
Speaker 4: they did get to do that. There's one other thing
Speaker 4: that maybe a huge kind of worms when I want
Speaker 4: to throw out is there so quick thing? Because I
Speaker 4: totally forgot about it, but it's very relevant to discussion.
Speaker 4: And I'm sad that neither of you saw Marvel Cloak
Speaker 4: and Dagger did you No.
Speaker 5: I thought it was a great show.
Speaker 4: I was very sad it didn't get more airtime, more discussion,
Speaker 4: especially because it did something really wild that I'm curious
Speaker 4: what you guys think about that. I think overall I
Speaker 4: wound up not being a huge fan of But I'm
Speaker 4: curious is that there's a female cop in it who
Speaker 4: has She's an important character because she's constantly relating to
Speaker 4: our main characters and the thing that they do to
Speaker 4: help her decide that, yes, things are as bad as
Speaker 4: it should be, so she should help these vigilante kids.
Speaker 4: Is she comes home and her cop boyfriend is in
Speaker 4: the fridge, And it felt like it was a very
Speaker 4: specific like, look, look what if we reverse it?
Speaker 5: Does that make it okay?
Speaker 4: And I kind of love it, and I kind of
Speaker 4: am like, maybe maybe it's the like you know, it's
Speaker 4: it's if it's good for you, it's.
Speaker 5: Good for me.
Speaker 4: But I would rather get rid of it entirely. But
Speaker 4: also like, this is kind of an interesting comment on it.
Speaker 4: Neither of you've seen it, and I'm curious just how
Speaker 4: you react to the idea.
Speaker 7: I'm okay, I.
Speaker 1: I think you can do it. Once he took it,
Speaker 1: he took it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I wish the show was more popular because no
Speaker 4: one I know who talks about Fridging has ever seen
Speaker 4: the scene, and it's really kind of wow.
Speaker 1: I that is really something that watch the show.
Speaker 4: I'll see if I can pretty sure it's Cloak and Dagger,
Speaker 4: my Cloak and Dagger and Runaways to me here in
Speaker 4: kind of a similar box they came out around the
Speaker 4: same time.
Speaker 5: I'm pretty sure it is Cloaking Dagger.
Speaker 4: Though not Runaways, but I'll double check on that and
Speaker 4: I'll put it in the show notes.
Speaker 1: It makes sense to me that it would be Cloak
Speaker 1: and Dagger, but based on the characters.
Speaker 5: I think so.
Speaker 4: The last little thing I was gonna mention is because
Speaker 4: we talking for about how with a lot of these characters,
Speaker 4: there's now this visual motif that gets repeated again and
Speaker 4: again and again. And while I don't I think Bruce
Speaker 4: Wayne's parents are killed, and we have had stories that
Speaker 4: are more about him being sad about his mother's death
Speaker 4: and other stories that are more sad about his father's death.
Speaker 5: So don't generally think of it.
Speaker 4: Falling into that, But almost every retelling of Batman in
Speaker 4: the last twenty years shows her pearls, breakings pearls, and
Speaker 4: there's if you think that there's no like visual scene
Speaker 4: to his father's death that is in any way universalized
Speaker 4: like that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, so there we go. All right, this
Speaker 5: has been a fantastic episode.
Speaker 7: Actually, I'm sorry, I want to go back to something
Speaker 7: from the very beginning of the discussion. We're Jess gonna
Speaker 7: mention Gwen Stacy because that in a way predates a
Speaker 7: lot of them, right, Like we've talked about a lot
Speaker 7: about the nineties and the two thousands, but Gwen Stacy
Speaker 7: was what sixties.
Speaker 1: Seventies, early seventies.
Speaker 7: And I do think there's a difference in Gwen Stacy
Speaker 7: because she was a well established character. Like we said,
Speaker 7: a lot of these fridged women are written into the
Speaker 7: stories so like the writers know like okay, like six
Speaker 7: issues down the line, we're going to kill her. But
Speaker 7: Gwen Stacy's, like I think a big deal in that
Speaker 7: she was an established character and it wasn't domestic, right
Speaker 7: like it happened Well, I guess she was kidnapped, so
Speaker 7: she may have been kidnapped from home, And I don't know,
Speaker 7: there's something there's something that is different to me about it,
Speaker 7: and I can't quite put my finger on it, but
Speaker 7: I just wanted to mention that because it I do
Speaker 7: think that it can be a part of this discussion,
Speaker 7: but I I find I find it less problematic.
Speaker 1: I guess I think the thing about Gwen Stacy because
Speaker 1: that was one of the first major deaths in comics, right,
Speaker 1: and certainly nobody saw it coming because killing the superhero's
Speaker 1: love interest was just it was not a thing that
Speaker 1: you were going to do at the time, Like it
Speaker 1: was truly shocking. And I do think even though I
Speaker 1: dunked on like going for shock value a minute ago,
Speaker 1: I do think in that case, like they weren't trying
Speaker 1: to get more and more extreme with the violence to
Speaker 1: be shocking. They like it was, they were doing something bold.
Speaker 1: I think it it opened the door for the trope
Speaker 1: to develop.
Speaker 7: Yeah, but I think that's the thing. Yeah, it's like
Speaker 7: the Cloak and Dagger, Like if it happens once, like
Speaker 7: the first time, you're like, oh, okay, get one that's different.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, so here's my question. Do you feel differently about
Speaker 1: them you doing it again in the movies?
Speaker 4: So regal that you answered that, I have a lot
Speaker 4: of thoughts about the movies. You answered that first at.
Speaker 7: This point, like we all know, right, Like if you're
Speaker 7: a Spider Man fan, you know, so as soon as
Speaker 7: like the Green the Amazing Spider Man too, as soon
Speaker 7: as Green Goblin became the villain and they were in
Speaker 7: that abandoned building or whatever, I was like, well, here
Speaker 7: we go, like it's about to happen. And I didn't
Speaker 7: love it because it didn't have any shock or surprise value.
Speaker 7: I will say I love the callback in Spider Man
Speaker 7: No Way Home where Andrew Garfield Spider Man saves MJ
Speaker 7: in a very similar fashion and and maybe that's like again,
Speaker 7: that's kind of like a subversion, right, and and him
Speaker 7: having that Catharsis moment was really touching to me. So
Speaker 7: I I like that, But doing it in movies, it's like, no,
Speaker 7: Like why I know, there's like casting rumors about the
Speaker 7: next Tom Hollands Spider Man movie. I'm like, no, like,
Speaker 7: please know, Gwen Stacy, well.
Speaker 1: Because just one thing real quick, because it's no I
Speaker 1: feel like you get that surprises. Like you said, in
Speaker 1: the movies, there was no shock. You knew what was
Speaker 1: going to happen because they were just doing what was
Speaker 1: in the comics. There's a moment in season three of Daredevil.
Speaker 1: I recently rewatched it to prep for the new show
Speaker 1: where Matt and Bullseye are fighting in a church and
Speaker 1: Karen is there and Bullseye throws one of Matt's billy
Speaker 1: clubs at Karen and we have a close up of
Speaker 1: her face and she gasps and that, like I said,
Speaker 1: that's one of those very iconic moments in comics where
Speaker 1: we've seen Karen from being somehow penetrated by a billy club.
Speaker 1: It's a blunt object. It doesn't make any sense, but
Speaker 1: we see her killed by Bullseye. But then the camera
Speaker 1: pulls back and we see that it actually wasn't Karen
Speaker 1: who was hit. Father Lantam stepped in front of her
Speaker 1: and he was the one who was killed. And that
Speaker 1: was a surprising moment because they set it up specifically
Speaker 1: to reference that comic and then they went no. And
Speaker 1: again it speaks to the intention with which the show
Speaker 1: approached those famous comic book deaths.
Speaker 4: Well, so let me just pull it back to the
Speaker 4: Gwen Stacy thing. It sounds like this is going to
Speaker 4: come a shock to both of you, but there are
Speaker 4: people who really like the Spider Man movie who didn't
Speaker 4: read the comics.
Speaker 1: No, I don't think that's true.
Speaker 5: I had no idea.
Speaker 4: Again, I think it's important, like even today, the number
Speaker 4: of people who watch comic book movies compared to them
Speaker 4: is many times multitude bigger than the number of people
Speaker 4: who read comic books. But there is at least there's
Speaker 4: no I'm not bullying.
Speaker 5: I felt like I was getting bullied, you know, like
Speaker 5: everyone knew it. I didn't know.
Speaker 4: It because also back then, like we weren't all reading,
Speaker 4: like on the internet about what the comic story was
Speaker 4: based on. Most of the people in THEOROI went to
Speaker 4: had no idea that was coming. We were completely shocked
Speaker 4: by it because again, especially the way that it's shot,
Speaker 4: and because the way it's shot I think is very intentional,
Speaker 4: I think really plays into this discussion. Because he does
Speaker 4: catch her, he does hit her with the web that
Speaker 4: should save her, but of course the thing is that
Speaker 4: the web stretches a little bit, and so he catches her,
Speaker 4: but then her body still hits the ground, and it
Speaker 4: is done in this like incredibly beautiful way.
Speaker 5: Her body is like splayed out.
Speaker 4: With her arms to each degree in the side. It's
Speaker 4: almost like Christ like and I remember like that was
Speaker 4: one of the first things I read about fridging, was
Speaker 4: describing that scene and how it's because like for a minute,
Speaker 4: you think he's gonna save her, but then he doesn't
Speaker 4: save her and she dies in this incredibly like beautiful way,
Speaker 4: and then I think, you're right. I found it incredibly
Speaker 4: touching in no way home, I'm sorry, in far from home.
Speaker 4: But still what that is doing is a leaving Andrew
Speaker 4: Garfield's feelings about it, and he gets to have a
Speaker 4: Catharsis about it, but Gwen is still dead and see,
Speaker 4: I just wanted to throw that in there. But also
Speaker 4: I would say I think that that also kind of
Speaker 4: underlines maybe kind of a really good closing statement on this,
Speaker 4: but also that you guys say it is that we're
Speaker 4: talking about fridging and it's a really important discussion to have.
Speaker 5: But I don't think we're saying.
Speaker 4: Like there's an iron line and these eighty percent of
Speaker 4: things are fridging and these twenty percent aren't. I think
Speaker 4: there's a lot of stuff that's in a nuanced gray area.
Speaker 4: And black Widow, I think one we talked about. I
Speaker 4: think Wen Stacy, we can talk about it. I think
Speaker 4: there's a lot of ones where we can say, like
Speaker 4: it has some elements of fridging, but not all of them,
Speaker 4: or like maybe if there wasn't happening so often, we
Speaker 4: wouldn't even think about it, because this is not one
Speaker 4: of the more gregious examples. But yeah, the point isn't
Speaker 4: to say, like, you know, we three can decide forever,
Speaker 4: Like Gwen Sacy has you.
Speaker 5: Know, like Gwen Stacy, Gene what the name.
Speaker 4: Of the woman who came up with all this, Gelsimone,
Speaker 4: Gel Simone, thank you, Genames on my mind. Gail Simone
Speaker 4: has said like officially like this is this is fridging,
Speaker 4: this isn't, but more just it's a really helpful lens
Speaker 4: through which to look at all this.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, And I will say one final thought about
Speaker 1: Gwen Stacy, which just like Sarah Lance, she is a
Speaker 1: character who has in some ways very much clawed her
Speaker 1: way out of the fridge. Like that version of Gwen
Speaker 1: Stacy is still dead, like the version from the main
Speaker 1: Marvel universe is still dead, but there is we have
Speaker 1: Spider Gwen. Now we have a version of the character
Speaker 1: from another universe, and in her universe it was Peter
Speaker 1: Parker who died and she's she was bitten by the
Speaker 1: radioactive Spider. She survived. She is a major character. She's
Speaker 1: starred in many comics. Now, she's in the Spider Verse movies.
Speaker 1: She's in a show for preschoolers that my three year
Speaker 1: old nephew loves, like he knows who Gwen Stacy is,
Speaker 1: not because she died, but because she's a superhero. And
Speaker 1: you know, you have characters like Barbara Gordon who turned
Speaker 1: herself into Oracle, which I will note was by in
Speaker 1: comics written by John Ostrander and Kim Yale, so there
Speaker 1: was a female writer involved in that. You have Sarah Lance,
Speaker 1: who they were like, wait, this character is great, Let's
Speaker 1: bring her back and give her her own insane TV show,
Speaker 1: which is by far the best show of this whole
Speaker 1: Arrow Verse. Like I do think even as we see
Speaker 1: Fridging decline, we are seeing more of these characters, like
Speaker 1: I said, climb back out of the for and really
Speaker 1: it's it's so satisfying to watch when they do.
Speaker 4: Yeah, doesn't doesn't the Harley Show involve mister Freeze's wife
Speaker 4: like breaking out of the literal being frozen and getting
Speaker 4: to have some adventures.
Speaker 1: I haven't watched it, but it sounds like that's a
Speaker 1: thing that they would do, and I really hope so,
Speaker 1: because poor Nora, she deserves the thought out.
Speaker 5: She's not Fridge, she's freezered. But it's part of the trope.
Speaker 4: Freaky wrap us up so I can go eat.
Speaker 7: Okay, My wrap up is that once again, it's not
Speaker 7: necessarily wrong right to kill a character to motivate a character,
Speaker 7: depending on how how you do it and how you've
Speaker 7: developed the characters in whatever medium it is. But I
Speaker 7: do think given that these discussions are happening, you you
Speaker 7: should be more thoughtful about it about who you're killing,
Speaker 7: why you're killing them, and if there's a possibility to
Speaker 7: subvert expectations, at least in the short term, right, Like,
Speaker 7: I think that's a good thing, and just like give
Speaker 7: the audience something different, and then if that keeps happening,
Speaker 7: maybe it does become the new norm and we should
Speaker 7: find something new and different to do, because that's the
Speaker 7: thing is, like, these stories are going to continue, whether
Speaker 7: it's comic books or other media, and we should find
Speaker 7: new and different ways to tell these stories, even if
Speaker 7: they are with familiar characters.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I agree, Well, thank you both.
Speaker 4: Thank you everyone. This is kind of a crazy couple
Speaker 4: of weeks going on right now. We've got and Or
Speaker 4: coming out. I'm doing some traveling. I'm also trying to
Speaker 4: get the house ready off the nursery and for all
Speaker 4: that kind of stuff. So we're not gonna have any
Speaker 4: bonus content on this in probably next week's episode, but
Speaker 4: we'll be getting back to it, and of course we
Speaker 4: do have our bonus episodes coming out in the middle
Speaker 4: of every month. Thank you to both Riki and and Jessica.
Speaker 4: Jessica is a great writer and has done so much
Speaker 4: stuff about comic books. You can find all of that
Speaker 4: in the show notes. Thank you all for listening. We
Speaker 4: have spoken, and we are out, and let's make sure
Speaker 4: it saves