On Fridging

It’s Friday as I write this and my stomach doesn’t feel great. Which isn’t fantastic on a day when I’m supposed to be cooking. I figured it was just a ‘not hungry’ sort of thing, but it’s mid-afternoon and the tummy still feels a bit uneasy. Not full-on sick, mind you, but if I’m not careful I could easily tip that way.

Oh and hey, you know ‘refrigerator’ is a really hard word to spell?

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On Fridging

Are we all familiar with the idea of fridging? No? Okay, well it’s that thing that happens sometimes in a story where a supporting character, usually a female love interest is violently killed in order to further the development of the main character. After all, how do we get the hero fully invested in stopping the bad guys? By killing his love interest of course! I’ve seen some argument as to whether or not in even counts as fridging if the case in question isn’t a female character, but for the sake of this essay I’ll say it doesn’t have to be a female character, though for the most part it usually is.

The term ‘fridging’ (which is itself short for ‘stuffed into the fridge’) derives its name for DC Comics. There came a Green Lantern comic in which Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend Alexandra is murdered and her body is stuffed into the fridge for the hero to find. Gail Simone popularized the term and compiled a website (titled, appropriately enough, “Women in Refrigerators”)  listing examples. Because as it turned out, there were a lot of examples in comic books of male superheroes who have violence thrown on top of their love interests to give them more character development or to further the plot.

And that’s… not great.

I’m not saying that you can’t kill characters, or even that a dead love interest or family member or friend shouldn’t ever be in the story in one way or another. But there are quite a lot of characters who exist almost solely to be fridged, or else are killed off with little ceremony in order to move things forward. It’s bad enough when you kill off side characters who have little to no personality; it’s worse when they’re meant to be important to our main character and we have little impression of them.

Part of the reason this is on my mind is because I just started a book series, and two books in this has already happened twice, where the protagonist’s love interest is killed by enemy forces, and both times it happens off-page, meaning that their death wasn’t even worth the effort of writing a proper scene for it. The author sort of walks it back a bit at the end of the second book by revealing that one of the fridged characters isn’t actually dead, but it’s still a bit frustrating that we’ve led to believe that two of the main character’s lovers were killed off-page and we’re meant to be emotional about this.

There was a recent-ish interview with the writer who was running Spider-Man back in the days when Gwen Stacy was killed off (and also made Punisher???), and he admitted that he’s not proud of how it became a thing in comics to kill the love interest, and that his reasoning was to show that the status quo wouldn’t always stay the same and that heroes weren’t immune to tragedy. And I get that, I don’t think it’s necessarily bad to kill off the love interest. And not having read that storyline for myself, I can’t make a full judgment on it for myself. But I think it’s a disservice to characters, and the audience, when they’re killed off for the sole purpose of making the hero hurt. And even if you feel like you can justify it with the setting, or the tone of the story or something like that, you still can’t get away with doing it twice in one series.

How do we lessen the problems of fridging? Or at the very least, make them less egregious? Some thoughts:

-Make sure the character getting killed in question is actually a fully-developed character. If the character exists solely for the emotional impact she/he is going to have on the protagonist when killed, then that’s not a fully-developed character. Give them backstory, motivations, and maybe even a subplot.

-If it’s someone important to the main character, death should happen on-page/screen.

-Do not frame this character solely as a victim. That doesn’t mean that they weren’t a victim of violence, but that can’t be the only way the audience is meant to see the character. Is this character being killed solely for being connected to the protagonist? And if so, are they given at least a fighting chance of survival?

-Don’t relish too much in the violence of it. That doesn’t mean character death should be pleasant, or that it can’t be gruesome, but it’s one thing to have a character killed with slit throat and it’s another to go on for paragraphs at a time about all the blood everywhere.

-If you can’t think of anything else to do with this character, and killing off this character for the sake of moving forward character development is the only thing option you have… then you need to think of something better, because that’s just cheap writing.

An example of a female character getting killed off that I don’t think is really a fridging? Moira Queen in Arrow. She dies in the show’s second season, and this affects the protagonist greatly; she is his mother, after all. But she exists as a fully-developed character before her death occurs. And when she’s held at gunpoint by the villain of the season, and Oliver is told he has to choose which of these two characters (Moira and Thea, Ollie’s sister) has to die, Moira Queen stands up and says (paraphrasing here), “Screw it! I’m not playing this game. If you’re going to kill someone, kill me, but I protect my family no matter what.” And Slade’s like, “Okay then,” and kills her. 

Yes, she’s killed off, and it drives the protagonist even harder to fight against the villain. But she dies because it’s the result of a choice that’s entirely consistent with her ongoing character arc. She doesn’t have to die; there’s more that can be done with her character. She’s not killed because there’s nothing else for her to do. She’s killed because that is the way the story is going based on the choices these characters make, especially Moira herself. So I don’t think it should count as a fridging.

Maybe that’s a thin line, and maybe I’m wrong. But if I am, it’s at least better, isn’t it? If you feel you must kill a character for drama, especially a female family member or love interest, don’t make it into something that’s just there to shock the audience or galvanize the protagonist into action. And for the sake of all that’s holy, don’t do it the exact same way twice in one story, and off-page to boot.

Don’t treat your characters like crap.

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On Spoiler Culture

I haven’t slept so great these past couple of nights, and I was stressed out a bit from the job fair earlier this week. Also I’m trying to figure out a weekend to go to Clemson, but that’s becoming more difficult than I expected. 

Let’s talk about Spoiler Culture, shall we?

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On Spoiler Culture

We didn’t use to be this crazy about spoilers, did we?

I always like the idea of not spoiling movies and books and shows for other people, especially if it’s a really good twist. I still refuse to spoil the ending for Here, There Be Dragons for anyone, which is why I tell them to stay away from online summaries and just wait for me to lend them the book. So I get it: people like to keep surprises for the audience, and they understand how important those are.

But I think we’ve gone a bit too far?

When I say that, I don’t mean “people are very concerned with spoilers.” That’s not new, people freaking out about plot details they don’t want to know yet so that the story can be a surprise. But the extent to which there are people care about making sure endings are unexpected are getting weird. I realize I’m probably the last person to say this, considering the backlash we’ve had against it since Avengers: Endgame and Game of Thrones ending, but creators have gone to truly insane lengths in order to avoid spoiling the ending of fiction for people. 

There have been multiple interviews in which Marvel’s actors have admitted that they weren’t sure what the scenes they were in were actually about, much less who else was in it. Actors didn’t act with each other; they acted in different places and were digitally inserted in the scene together. Several actors were given only partial scripts, so that they had only their parts and not some of the other performers’. Sometimes they were outright lied to; Tom Holland admitted that he didn’t know he was in a funeral scene at the end, he was told it was a wedding.

HE WAS TOLD THE FUNERAL WAS A WEDDING.

That’s the ultimate bad example of doing your best to make sure that secrets don’t get out. And I understand that maybe some actors like Tom Holland have a habit of revealing too much about movies. But being told that the event he’s supposed to be in is actually another, one that calls for pretty much the exact opposite emotion? And lying to actors? Making it unclear to them what exactly they’re doing? This isn’t “I won’t tell them how the story ends,” this is “I won't tell them how the story they are telling is going at any given moment.”

Like, I wish that the worst problems were just writers and creators lying about spoilers. Do you remember that one time when the makers of Batman: Arkham Knight claimed that the titular Arkham Knight was a completely original character, only to be revealed to be Jason Todd? That wasn’t great. But it’s even worse when you’re so worried about the twist that you distort production.

And yeah, Endgame was probably the worst example of this massive attempt to cover up spoilers, but it wasn’t the first. Game of Thrones famously decided to film multiple endings for the show so that if anyone stumbled on the shooting then they wouldn’t know if it was the real ending or not. The producers also made a point that they wanted to surprise people more than they actually cared about the integrity of the story. Then we have Westworld, a show which supposedly rewrote and re-shot an episode midseason because the makers saw that fans on Reddit had predicted what the big plot twist for that episode was going to be.

There’s a lot of discussion about how people are worrying way too much about surprising audiences that they’re making stories unintelligible in order to make them unpredictable. You can’t guess what’s being foreshadowed if the actors don’t know and the foreshadowing was all nonsense anyway, right? And yeah, that’s not great, but I think the issue is just how much importance we’re putting on fiction in general.

Because… this is all fiction. If the next Avengers movie gets spoiled for you, that sucks, but so what? It’s a movie. Get over it. Yeah, be fans, write fanfic, cosplay, do your thing, that’s all great! But let’s face the facts: it’s not that important. It’s pop culture. It has worth, but ultimately, it’s meant to entertain and make money; especially when it comes to properties being pumped out by Disney.

Furthermore, if your fiction relies on a twist or surprise in order to make it work, it was probably never that great to begin with. Twists can make things better. But if you need the spoilers unspoiled in order to like the piece of fiction in question? Then that’s not great. A story should be good on its own merits; surprises shouldn’t be the only thing that keeps you watching/reading. 

Just quit this nonsense. Let’s go back to stories we enjoy for what they are, and made without ridiculous deceit in the production process.

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Spellslinger Thoughts

Do you have any idea how frustrating Rise of the Argonauts is when you learn the basics about Greek geography? Because half the islands in the game are based off of real places that aren’t islands. Delphi wasn’t an island! Iolcus wasn’t an island! Mycenae wasn’t an island! You would think it wouldn’t be hard considering how many islands Greece actually does have, in both real life and mythology, but nope! Go ahead and turn places you can find on a map into a geographical feature they obviously don’t have.

Anyhow let’s talk about Spellslinger by Sebastian de Castell.

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Spellslinger Thoughts

After reading his Greatcoats series, I decided to pick up Sebastian de Castell’s Spellslinger, which is a fantasy series aimed at a younger audience than his other books and a setting more evocative of the Western. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I didn’t know what a Spellslinger was, and while I loved his Greatcoats books for their plots, humor, setting and action the fact is that those books kind of beat you down a bit with how terrible of a world these characters live in. Their setting is like medieval Gotham on steroids; living there is a nightmare.

So what was Spellslinger going to be like? What would de Castell decide was the sort of thing that a teenage audience would be more comfortable reading? And about halfway through, I decided that Spellslinger was something like what the Inhumans television series would have been like had it been any good.

For reference: the Inhumans television series only lasted one short season, and it was about the royal family of a lost city of Inhumans on the Moon getting banished to Earth. What made this series really bad, other than the terrible special effects and stupid plots, was that the society of Inhumans was terrible. Basically, at a certain age Inhumans got powers. If they had a cool superpower, they became aristocrats who could have a normal life and pursue any career at all. If they had not as cool powers, they became slaves for life. And yet the heroes of this series were those who helped keep this system in place.

Not so in Spellslinger! In this series, we have the Jan’Tep, a society of magic users that must reach a certain threshold of power by sixteen; otherwise, they become Sha’Tep, second class citizens who usually work as servants or slaves in the mines. And our main character Kellen is a young man who starts out by trying to become a Jan’Tep, but as the story goes on and his powers don’t really materialize, he comes to realize that the Jan’Tep society is kind of awful and any reasonable person would hate it.

And the more you learn about it, the more you realize exactly how terrible the Jan’Tep society is, how awful its history is, and how self-deluded it is to keep building on this culture without acknowledging the past violence and oppression that led to it being what it is today.

Now I haven’t finished the series, but I suspect that its take on colonialism's going to be a bit better than the Solider Son trilogy by Robin Hobb. That trilogy ended without actually solving the issue at all, giving the main character a happy ending and then claiming that’s enough. Despite the fact that there’s still an oppressed minority and the two cultures haven’t actually been able to talk through anything. Yeah, “Solving Colonialism” would be a really cheesy way to solve the conflict, but deciding to ignore it wasn’t better. The main character ends up rejoining the sexist, racist imperialist society that rejected him in the first place without that society changing.

And yet this book, Spellslinger, which is the first book in the series, ends with the opposite of that. Not only is Kellen an outcast, but that’s what he wants to be. He’s not without some regrets; he’s got a surprisingly good bond with his sister, and the girl he’s crushing on is going to be left behind as he wanders around with Ferius, but he’s rejected the Jan’Tep society… because it sucks. Because it’s well and truly awful. 

Speaking of Ferius, she’s a lovely character. The stereotypical ‘mysterious woman who rolls into the town’ is, I think, usually a sign of the love interest, but in the case of Ferius she’s not. She’s the mentor figure, if a mentor that’s more interested in teaching by example rather than holding on to Kellen’s hand. I was very relieved by her not being the love interest, nor by any hints of that being the case further on. She’s just a badass lady that doesn’t take crap from anyone anywhere.

Also this book has an animal sidekick? And he’s not especially fluffy. Which maybe felt like it was trying too hard to not be a stereotypical animal sidekick in a kid’s movie, but he was still very fun to read, since he was a lot more practical than Kellen if a lot more concerned with getting shiny things and ripping out enemies’ eyeballs.

I’m very curious of the direction the rest of the series takes though; so much of the first book was about Jan’Tep society, and so at the end of the first novel when Kellen decides to leave it I kind of have to wonder what the rest of the books will be about. Most of the characters will probably be left behind, and while I understand why it makes me wonder how on Earth the series will carry on.

I suppose I’ll find out.

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On Superheroes and Accountability

I’m kind of in the tail end of an emotional crisis, I think? You know, one of those strings of weeks where I just keep telling myself I’ve contributed nothing to society, and can’t find a job because I’m apparently just that useless, and not sure what I can do about that.

Also my dad wants to see Joker, which is a bit of a surprise? Not that I’d mind seeing it, I just wasn’t expecting Dad to be into it.

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On Superheroes and Accountability

There was a post shared by the Texts from Superheroes Tumblr account, which itself screenshots and links to a Mashable article, that made me think about this. The gist of the article was that in The Dark Knight the resolution is hinged upon Batman using a device that accesses all of the cell phones in Gotham City to use them to locate the Joker. Mr. Fox is horrified at this, calling it an invasion of privacy, and Bruce can’t help but agree, but sees it as necessary. They shut down the device after its one use, and Mr. Fox resigns as Batman’s gadget-maker afterward.

However, in this year’s Spider-Man: Far From Home, the Plot involves Peter being given a computer system called E.D.I.T.H. in Tony Stark’s will, which also allows one to access any computer system in the world, including cell phones. It also gives someone control over an army of killer drones. The main Plot hinges on who gets control of this system. But unlike The Dark Knight, the possibility of destroying this entire system never comes up. In fact, no one really calls the thing unethical at all, and it’s more a question of who deserves this power rather than whether or not that power is too much for one person.

And that’s… kind of weird, guys.

Ever since the Marvel comic event Civil War, there’s been a lot of questions about accountability and the amount of power superheroes should have. That event is set off by a fight between D-list superheroes and some villains that led to the destruction of an elementary school, leading to people calling for superheroes being made answerable to the government. The problem was that the pro-registration side was essentially asking superheroes to be law enforcement, like police or even SHIELD agents, saying that at least that way they’d be accountable to the public for anything that went wrong.

Except… they wouldn’t be. As the past few years have shown us, in many instances there are cases where the police and other forms of law enforcement aren’t held accountable for anything they do wrong. I’m not going to be one of those people that tell you that cops are all evil, but facing the facts there are plenty of examples of bad cops who just get away with it. And even beyond that, we have things like the TSA being allowed to grope you at the airport or the terrible conditions of immigrants being detained at the border or the NSA illegally going through everyone’s phone and Internet data. Now imagine if the people perpetrating all of these abuses on the government’s behalf have superpowers.

That’s a bit terrifying, isn’t it? And according to some people at Marvel Comics, that’s the position we were meant to take: pro-registration. It’s awkward as fudge too, because there’s a scene where an anti-registration black superhero is killed by a cyborg Thor clone (just… roll with it), and all the pro-registration characters say “Well it’s what any cop would have done if faced with a threat! You can’t blame us for that.”

Put that on the list of “Things That Have Not Aged Well.”

One of the problems I had with CW’s Supergirl is that the show runs on the premise that our title character works for a government law enforcement agency, and at no point does someone have a problem with this. A Kryptonian, one of the most powerful types of beings in the known universe, is on a government payroll, and we’re all okay with this? Working for a government agency that has a database with the names and information of all extraterrestrial immigrants (and it’s only a bad thing when the bad guys steal it)?

It’s also a bit baffling because a lot of mainstream superhero fiction already has shown how these things can go wrong. Justice League: Unlimited did a much better storyline about how superheroes having too much power can be a bad thing, although to be fair in that show it wasn’t with invasive surveillance or government control as much as a giant laser gun from space. 

I understand that there’s a need to do more with superhero fiction than just “This person has powers/gadgets! And FIGHTS CRIME!” But Far From Home’s Plot involves casually handing a human rights violation to a high schooler, and the only questions we’re meant to ask are “Is Peter worthy of this responsibility?” instead of “HOLY S*** THAT IS TERRIFYING POWER FOR SOMEONE TO HAVE!”

The question of superhero accountability is a compelling one, which is why it’s come up in fiction so often. If you’re making superhero fiction, you’ve got to be thinking about it, especially in a time when we’re seeing how dangerous it is for people in power to have a lack of accountability. Just handing your heroes access to all of the private data in the world is just plain disturbing. And I’m not against the idea of superheroes working for the government, but there’s definitely has to be some work put into why this isn’t a terrible thing, why we shouldn’t be terrified of superhuman law enforcement.

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