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