funnily enough, the DOOM franchise makes fun of this trope with the main character's pet bunny as his only motivation for literally going to hell itself and going full genocide on demonkind
I have a semi-headcanon that any death would have been ok for the soul stone, and Red Skull made up the loved one rule because he's just that much of a dick.
If it was just any death, Skull could have gotten it himself. Because it requires a loved one, it's inherently out of his reach, because he doesn't actually love anyone. Hence "I guide others to a treasure I cannot possess." He's a dick, but he wouldn't give up having an Infinity Stone just to be a dick to a handful of other people who might come along decades later.
@@kaizokuAUTO did it matter little though? the Rebellion wouldn't have been anywhere near what it was without the Organas, and I'm sure we'll learn more in season 2 of Andor
There is a book called "Leia: Princess of Alderaan", which is set around the time Leia is 16, which really tries to flesh out her relationship to her parents and her planet more. Basically a lot of the conflict of the book is around the fact that Alderaan is a really beautiful and peaceful planet, and one of the few that managed to stay relatively unaffected by the Empire's rule. This means that she's confronted with two choices: either join the rebellion along with her parents, and risk bursting this peaceful bubble and putting the planet fully under Imperial control or worse; or (as one the side characters would have it) stop the rebel activity, and ignore the Empire in order to preserve the status quo in Alderaan. (spoilers, but not really) She chooses to join the rebellion and fight the empire, even if it means putting herself, her family and her entire planet at risk, because this is bigger than they are.
I mean he did come back to life and was a character on his own, serving as one of the protagonists of that arc before Goku's arrival. I mean Dragon Ball gets a pass because most of it's dead characters come back later anyway. Cheap death for motivation plus cheap resurrection.
Plus Freeza just would not freaking go down, it makes sense that he’d finally kill a protagonist. And Goku didn’t know he could be brought back I think? Since he had already been revived once and he didn’t know the Namek balls worked differently he thought he was dead for good
Pfft, speaking of franchises where death is meaningless. Krillin gets killed, iirc, *five times* throughout the series. Plus a couple more implied offscreen deaths in alternate/future timelines. He doesn't get fridged, he IS the fridge. (Not to mention all the times characters fruitlessly sacrifice themselves, like Chiaotzu using Self-Destruct on Nappa.)
Or faux-fridged for their own protection (ie, the villain won't go after the hero's SO if they are thought already 'dead', ... Dragon goes to smoke a town and arrives to see [an illusion of] a smoking ruin - bonus points if said dragon then wastes a bunch of time trying to track down the other dragon invading its territory, giving the heroes time they otherwise wouldn't have to prepare to fight it! 😃). ... Note: I am sure I'm not anywhere near the first person to have either of those ideas!
"Hey dude, are you okay?" "Just thinking about my wife, she'd have loved this. " "Oh, what happened?" "Her job doesn't give her enough free time to go on adventures. "
I have a dnd character like this! The entire time he’s been pining for his wife and two daughters, talking about he misses them, the whole party thinks they’re all dead. No, all three of them are ALSO adventurers on their own adventures, he just misses them and the party has no idea and will not be ready lol
I like that at the end of Full Metal Alchemist, Hiromu Arakawa still mentioned Nina, like she was never forgotten even what was sixty 25 minute anime episodes later.
@@skaryzgik it’s like at least a year later. Iirc Ed is 14 at the beginning, 16 at the end and the scene yall are talking about is definitely leaning towards the later
@@skaryzgikThe Nina thing happens pretty early in the story, and I believe (not including the brothers’ attempt at bringing back their mother) FMA takes place across roughly a year or two. And her death still affects them by the end of the series. Additionally, her death isn’t used for character _motivation_ so much as character _development,_ (they’re absolutely devastated by this, and its their first exposure to the horrors of the world and Alchemy, and results in their change in how they want to use Alchemy) while also tying into one of the central themes of the story in a ton of ways (that being how people aren’t gods no matter what abilities you have, and the dangers of having the hubris to believe otherwise-Ed needs to learn that he’s “always been a normal human who can’t even save a little girl” (a line he states in the final episode), and her death is literally the result of someone believing that they can tamper with life despite its fragility. It also ties nicely into the value of human connection that the story presents). Also, in the 2003 adaptation, the episode she dies, the ending sequence is changed to a montage of original scenes with her and the Elric brothers.
I don't think her death falls into the fridging trope because the other characters actually cared, but to me as a viewer her demise had almost no emotional impact. I was simply not all that invested in her. I'm willing to bet that If you switched her for an adult woman with the same character traits a lot of people would have cared more about what happened to the dog than her. It is similar to how Junji Ito characters going through horrible things usually does not impact me emotionally, the characters often do not feel enough like actual people for me to care and the whole read is more of a grotesque spectacle than something I'd actually be sad about.
@@animeotaku307 I like to imagine Thanos attempted to cope by buying another chair from like bed bath and beyond or something but he still couldn't move on 😂
Fridging gets even WORSE when, as Red said, the characters aren’t sad for long enough, but the villains are made out to be more evil because of it for the *REST OF THE STORY.*
@@RuneKatashima ok, but Danny isn't mentioned at all for the rest of the story and his death is followed by an eight year time skip. Also, Joseph Joestar didn't have a dog. Its Jonothan. It's a total fridge, but it's not what this guy is talking about.
Regarding the fridging of Black Widow, I think one of the single best things about the Hawkeye show is the way it actually bothers to show how much Nat's death affects Clint, seeing as they were best friends. It's a bit late, and it'll never change the fact that Iron Man is still the only one that got a damn funeral (they couldn't at least make it a Tony+Nat event?), but I think it affords more weight to her death than just giving her a token solo movie after the fact.
Gamora and Black Widow fell into the exact same position even though they fell differently AND I WON’T STOP BRINGING THIS UP BC IT'S SO ANNOYING AND DUMB
Just because we didn't see the fueral's on screne doesn't mean they didn't happen. It's kind of silly to assume that since we never saw a Blackwidow funeral scene it never happened.
Supernatural was so good at fridging that when the main character finally died for real and went to heaven the big emotional reunion was seeing his beloved car again and not like, the numerous friends and family who died for him.
The show was too afraid to introduce any new main character other than Sam, Dean, and Cas. Sure there were a few recurring characters but they never lasted long.
Not even his dad was important enough for a reunion?! Geez and they made so much of that in the first few seasons too. There's a reason I only like the first 5 and only because sometimes the Monster of the Week was neat. After that it turned to nothing but shit and the Leviathan season made me stop entirely. Even with a limited budget they could have made it work if they were creative, but let's face it they are not. And there are 15 seasons....... each worse than the one before it.
We know Luke and Leia are twins because she didn't bring up Alderaan ever again. She's cracking wise in her very next scene ("Aren't you a little short for a Stormtrooper?"/"Can someone get this walking carpet out of my way?")
I like it even more that she tells them it was easy because Vader wanted them to escape. In the next scene she has flown directly to the rebel base in the company of people she never met, anyone of them could be a spy, without changing the ship that was potentially bugged by the empire. I have no problem with a bump in the plot now and then, but telling people later it was intentional to show she was not experienced and hotheaded early in the story is just as bad as additional effects.
Lisa’s death is almost a criticism of fridging. Dracula is motivated to do what he does in that series, with little thought to Lisa, and her wishes. Alucard actually grieves for her, and fights for her and what she would’ve wanted. Once Dracula actually gives some thought to Lisa, he realizes how misguided he’s been.
Also Dracula is absolutely destroyed by her death. He doesn't just get over it. He spends over a year destroyed by her murder and plans out the world's longest suicide note. Also, I would absolutely watch a Vlad and Lisa slice of life show. But that's beside the point.
Exactly; it's Dracula's driving motivation for the entire part of the series he's in, AND we get to see him go from passionate rage and vengeance to dispassionate indifference, only focused on getting rid of the problem. It fundamentally BREAKS him as a person. Which is why it's so damn effective
I know this trope is usually denounced as a sexist one because it usually happens to female characters, but I think it's also closely related to a cliche often found in films about cops or soldiers - the protagonist has this friend who is clearly set up to be happier than the protagonist (he's a week away from retiring, he just got engaged, he's going to be a dad soon, there's a lot of variants) and three minutes later he get his brains blown out and the protagonist is left to bemoan why it was the guy with so much to live for who got killed.
@@GamerBurgerz I just elaborated why I dislike one of the things and not both, idk how you got anger from that, I also never said I didn't care but that I'm fine with what the trope is, so again that's a pretty weird response all things considered, though I did delete the comment you responded to so it's not that I don't agree that it was unnecessary.
This cliche sucks tho the wife / gf / whatever usually dies at the begining of a movie while the buddie usually dies a little bit later. You have to establish how pure and innocent he is before you kill him for a shock value. Meanwhile according to Hollywood women are pure and innocent by default so they don't need the basic character building In practice woman usually dies to kick start plot while man dies to show how edgy the world is. In both cases it turns characters into props That's why I propose "husband in fridge". Maybe gender bending will make the trope better. Ah, wait. Tragic gay death is also a cheap, overused trope
The worst part is when the characters only get angry and sad about it when it’s convenient. Like, they’ll be totally fine for 4 episodes and then suddenly extremely angsty
“Well written character deaths…” *shows Lisa Tepes* her death was tragic not only for the family she left behind, but for the people she wanted to help. The fact that the charlatan healer was the one who accused her of witchcraft and that despite being on deaths doorstep she pleaded her husband to spare the people (which takes a huge degree of love and strength) proves that there is more to her character than “Dracula’s dead wife”.
And even when they take down Dracula, the big bad is torn at one point trying to fight them because killing his son would mean killing the last remnant of his wife :D
@@temporalbutterfly9186 Lisa Tepes has personality and interests, I hate how most of the dead wife or love interest trope they just give them no character beside loving the male characters .
There is more to her than Dracula's dead wife, but I would say this is instead one of the few well executed examples of Fridging, but her overall impact is entirely for the benefit of Dracula and Alucard's character motivations. She's a saint and we get a couple scenes with her being perfect, but we care because of what we see it doing to Dracula. I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just saying it is still a fridge
We gotta name a new trope “green lantern syndrome”, because there’s so many of them at this point it’s impossible for a writer to give them all justice so someone’s favorite is getting shafted.
Here's a funny idea: Character finds their love interest in a fridge. Hard cut to them arguing over the air conditioning being broken and resulting in the love interest sitting in the refrigerator to not incinerate.
Lets rewrite Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to Indi's fridge landing directly next to Marion and when it opens and he falls out, she goes "Oh my, haven't seen you in a long time Indi"
That basically happens in _Gurren Lagann._ The main character opens up a containment unit that looks somewhat like a fridge although I imagine is supposed to be a futuristic variant on a treasure chest, and finds the girl who eventually becomes his primary love interest.
At first, I was confused when you said Luke Skywalker's aunt and uncle* were fridged: they have to be real characters to be fridged, right?... and then I realized how that's pretty much *exactly* the point.
@@Jurgan6 . . . *smacks forehead* yyyyeah I messed that up - thanks, going to fix that that real quick... pretty sure I was watching this to fall asleep and was thus only half awake when I commented, and was thinking of Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen as his *guardians*, not his parents
While I know that the handling of Gamora's death was probably bad writing, its incredibly cathartic for me to watch as someone who was abused as a child. It paints the picture of Thanos's love as inherently abusive. That he may love her, but to him love is about "improving" those you care about through incredible pain. He shows the same love for life at large, believing that culling half of it and thereby insuring resource security is a manifestation of that love. But that love is toxic, it torments Gamora her whole life, it eventually kills her. And that's what being an abused child feels like, being loved in a way that will kill you
I agree, I think thanos is one of the more interesting villains because of this. I dislike how she paints it as an attempt to add characterization to a “pure evil” villain when thanos wasn’t shown to be that. He was a twisted monster, but he never saw it. He was the hero of his own story. He wanted to do what he saw as saving the universe. His genuine love for Gamora only pushes forward how twisted he’s become.
I definitely feel like this angle on abuse and love was something interesting to explore, I definitely wouldn’t call it bad writing just because it didn’t follow the clear narrative tropes.
I think the issue is that that was ultimately a narrative potential, and not the actual story that was told. The story that was told was that he actually loved her in a way that wasn't painted as bad and that existed to make him a more human and sympathetic villain. He was not written as the abuser, but rather as the parent who is just trying to do their best--it was just written so badly that you ended up with the subtexts of abusive love that never get expanded upon or fulfilled. Had that been the intent and focus it would have been a much better story; however, viewing something as better because of unfulfilled narrative potential is a disservice to the story and yourself.
@@Kat-xy7fm how did you ever get that impression? His abusive relationship with his “children” is emphasized over and over again. He has sympathetic qualities as a person but when you boil it down marvel tells the story of a deeply traumatized man driven insane by tragedy who turns to single mindedly pursing power and genocide at any cost for the “greater good”. The subtext of absuive love, and that just having love and good intentions isnt enough to be a good person is written in bold in every scene related to the characters.
Stuff like this is why I think Edward Elric doesn't feel like a Mary Sue. Yes, he's ridiculously smart, badass, and overcompetent, but he's among a whole host of characters who are also all of those things. He's not always the one solving the mystery, killing the bad guy, or saving the day. Maes Hughes being so fucking far ahead of everyone else, including our protagonists, is a great example of what I'm talking about
@@justanotheryoutubecommente2 and let's not forget mustang bringing himself back to life with nothing but spite, and killing lust with nothing but unadulterated hatred. In the same god damn scene
2:07, in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Ginny calls out Harry for having reacted that way to what happened to her in the second book. She reminds Harry that (unlike him) she has actually been possessed by Voldemort before and Harry mentions that he (like the audience) had basically forgotten about that. So Ginny tells him “well, I didn’t”.
11:42 That funeral scene was the one time in my adult life that a cartoon made me cry. I was a single father at the time and the way that they put so much screen time into showing how much he loved his daughter, before she was even born, had me identifying with him. At her reaction to him being buried, I couldn't contain myself. Cruel but beautiful writing.
“Did I mention that I absolutely love my kids, that I’m only 3 weeks from being able to retire? Maybe that my son was born with an unnatural hair color, and that I like to wear my hair in a braid over my right shoulder? Ooooh, and I really don’t think we should ever leave this wonderful, completely idyllic town that we live in with all the people just always getting along and being the literal best?”
@@alexmansfield3268 Also powerful, but the dad death curse definitely isn't as strong as the mom one. All Might surviving the mentor death curse is also impressive, but not that unusual. Though, Gran Tourino surviving a double mentor death curse is seriously impressive. Still, the sheer power of the mom death curse is perhaps the greatest in all anime, so to survive it Inko Midoria must be monstrously powerful.
An interesting case that hits a LOT of the beats, but still feels compelling is Inigo Montoya. His father never even APPEARS, but we hear Inigo's story and he is clearly so emotionally devastated, even years later, that we do feel the weight of this death. And because it's something that drives multiple character relationships, it is sewed into the whole narrative. And shit, NOTHING hits emotionally quite like "I want my father back you son of a bitch". But in a wikipedia synopsis version of the story, it might look like a fridging.
I think this has more to do with the fact that it is just a part of Inigo's backstory. If we were to have seen his father and then he was killed off a scene later, that would be a lot more of a fridge since that character was actually introduced. Not even introducing the character kind of minimizes the potential for fridging since they are more backstory than character.
I think the biggest difference, based on Red's analysis, is that Inigo never forgets his father. It's fundamental to his life, he is still grieving and we feel that grief even as he might be playful in his fight with the Dread Pirate Roberts - the loss of his father permeates everything in his life. If his dad were fridged, we'd get none of that sense of grief, certainly not for the entire movie. It's be more like "my dad died so now I fight bad guys, whatevs"
@@claremiller9979 yeah agreed, a Fridged inigo's father would have inspired him to become a duelist but now he fights because ooh shiny, Inigo fights to find the killer of his father one day and do some pain
I think the difference is that such grief is part of his character from the get go, and it is a crucial part of his arc. The dead father wasn't something that was just thrown in to give him a sad, nor it falls into the idea of his father being an unrealized character, because he's never a character of the story itself. I think the big telltale of fridging that I wish was zeroed in a bit more, is that a fridged character is eminently, a disposable character, like the history can move along without them without aftershocks besides the initial shock of their death. It's a character that had a role in the story, but now they feel superfluous, or never really got enough development to secure their narrative spot. Sure, there are characters created to be fridged and those are their own type of bad writing, but they are hardly more than plot devices. But when a character's own potential is deemed worthless and they may serve more to give other characters a sad with their passing, that's the most egregious fridging for me.
The whole of Alderaan was fridged so that Leia could ignore her own grief over watching the destruction of everything she had ever loved to help Luke mourn the mentor figure he knew for a handful of days. Don't @ me.
@@GrosvnerMcaffrey He knew OF Ben, but it's made clear he didn't really have anything to do with him, and that Owen had warned him off interacting more.
I'm honestly surprised that no one's mentioned Heimdall. Like, he was important enough for Thor to refer to him as his best friend in Ragnarok, dies pretty unceremoniously, and then...never gets brought up again. What an absolute waste of a great character, and Idris Elba in particular. The guy is too good and too sexy to be treated in this manner.
@@newsystembad Which is inexcusable since they have so much to work with. I could write 5 movies with the premises they've squandered, and theyd objectively suck but still treat the characters better. They seem to have actual no idea, which goes to show whoever the writers are just....shouldn't.
As I understood, didn't Idris Ebla ask to written out that way? He hated playing Heimdall. Maybe he forced the issue. And you make a point, there is very little time for the characters to deal with what is happening- until the movie is over, and we head to Endgame.
Did you watch the movie? Thanos killed Heimdall and Thor said, "You'll die for that!" Later on when Thor lodged his axe on Thanos's chest, he said, "I told you, you die for that". Rocket also asks Thor of his best friend and he said, "Stabbed through the heart". That's not "never". If anything, the Warriors 3 were ignored.
Shout out to all of those Fix-It Fanfics that created entire, completely Alternate Universes centered around those fridged characters finally getting justice.
Raise a glass to the Fix-It Fics that not only do fridged characters justice but also to filling plotholes in ways that make sense, to exploring forgotten or more minor plot points, to rewriting arcs that actually follow thru and stay in character, and to fleshing out and breathing life into any and every background character both named and unnamed! Let us raise our glasses to the hard working authors of such fics for feeding us some damn good food!
Having a large ensemble cast( meaning more than 10 main characters and/or more than 10 secondary characters) means that the tertiary characters (aka the background characters, aka the ones who only exist to show that the town isn't populated by just 10 people) who are usually the target of this trope will not get much screen time to begin with
You know what would be cool, an anthology style show where every episode subverted a poor writing trope. The fridging episode could set up another character to be the main character, and then after his love interest dies off screen the perspective changes to her, and as a vengeful ghost she try’s to get back everything that fridging took away from her
There's sort of already existing tropes around that, the Revenge Fantasy Trope and the R@pe and Revenge Trope. When both of those tropes are used with female characters, it get annoying because it basically always shows a women getting stronger AFTER being almost killed/murdered/r@ped. As if a woman need to be physically assaulted and/or mentally abused before she can be considered a strong or badass character >:(
@@LeoDBW Why do y'all always twist things into the most negative outlook? The point is "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" not "you're only strong once you've been violated". Jesus Christ.
@@chicade4810 I'm sorry but I simply don't believe in that bullshit. You know most real victims do not automaticaly turns into strong persons once they've been assaulted or abused? Some were maybe already strong BEFORE, and some other actually have a hard time healing, and they feel guilty BECAUSE OF THOSE STUPID TROPES, because they think that they're not strong enough compared to the characters! Its also insulting to the victims who didn't make it out alive.
@@chicade4810 "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is also a very dumb perspective. If I break your arms and legs and you somehow survive, you aren't going to be anywhere near as a strong as you once were. (If you deflect away from this by claiming mental strength or some other bizarro coping mechanism to illustrate that YEAH ACTUALLY THEY DID GET STRONGER JUST IN A DIFFERENT WAY, I will laugh at you.)
with fma, all the character deaths mattered, even after the characters were dead. hughes showed up in flashbacks constantly, nina was probably one of the most traumatic things ed and al ever went through (like number two at the very least), and the rockbells are dead before the story even begins and we STILL see not just how deeply winry was affected by the loss of her parents and scar by what he'd done, we also get to see some of who they were as people. even the villains' deaths matter - hell, kimblee has one of my favorite deaths pretty much ever.
The way I test if a character is being fridged is: "Does this death haunt the surviving characters beyond motivating them in the moment?" If a character still thinks of them and could be described as being haunted by that death, then it's not fridging. Ben Parker's death isn't fridging (usually) because his death is still a big part of Peter's heart.
Thank you. I was just wondering if his Uncle Ben counted as a fridge and hoping it didn’t, because what he says when he’s dying becomes Peter’s driving philosophy, which isn’t the same as getting revenge. Next time, you’re there for a purpose to help people.
It is also his call to adventure. People think it is Peter being bitten by the spider, but for a while he refuses to use his new given abilities other than himself.
I have been wondering about this in regards to a backstory to one of my characters (not the main protagonist but a side main character). Some time before the main story, the character, a former swordsman, once had a girlfriend and the two were held at daggerpoint by a thief. The swordsman thinks he could take on the thief and not have his girlfriend give the money, even though she insists against risking himself. Unfortunately, the swordsman nearly gets himself killed and his girlfriend pushes him out of the way and gets stabbed instead. The swordsman is devastated by her loss and his reckless action. he doesn't get revenge on the thief as the latter disappeared. He forsakes his sword and becomes quiet. He found friendship with the main protagonists who try to help him get through in life. At first, he does not reveal his troubled past. Only later in the story he does and he has to come to terms with it. I have been pondering whether or not if this backstory counts as fridging or is an acceptable character death. I am not exactly sure.
"Your eyes so much like your mother's... I think. She didn't get much screening." I just died, love these trope discussions and breakdowns! Plz keep it up!
When the hero's parents where dating his father was like: "I've forgotten if they're green or they're blue...Your eyes are the sweetest I've ever seen."
Can you explain Inigo Montoya? Is it our personal attachment to that character that makes us almost feel his father's death, even though we don't see it (or only see his father for a few moments before he dies), or is it that he just repeats his line so much, we just want him to succeed? Everything you explain in this video makes it seem like we shouldn't care so much, but when he finally meets that murderer, that line just gives you chills.
Personally, I'd say that it's because the narrative very clearly makes it clear that Inigo cares about his father, *after* having set Inigo up as a basically honorable man and therefore likable. First we're shown that Inigo is likable, honorable, and kind when he can manage it, and we start rooting for him to get away from Vizzini and find a better situation. And *then* we're shown the grief and the rage that's carried him this far and that has shaped his *entire life* up to this point, and continue to see it woven into every choice he makes in the movie from then on. From there, because we'd been primed to root for Inigo, we've become invested in his revenge quest, because we were properly sold on why we should be rooting for him to get it. The constant reminders of Inigo's loss and how it affected him reinforces our investment in his quest, and the occasional reminders that he is a fundamentally loyal and kind man reinforce that we care about him enough that we want him to succeed. In short, we didn't need to know Inigo's father very well, we just needed to know that he *mattered*, and from the moment Inigo started telling his story, it became very clear that he *did* matter very intensely. His death was given the weight it needed for the audience to care about it, and so his death was not a fridging. -Eleanora
This is very much colored by my knowledge of the book, but I think what works is that Rugen basically killed him to get out of paying for a sword. The in-universe characters have the same "wtf" moment the audience does with the sudden death, and then the grief goes on to be the spark that drives a character who is a bucket of revenge plot with a shiny sword (affectionate). The far-reaching ramifications of Domingo's death take away a lot of the fridging element, and the remaining elements being recognized in-story absolves the rest, in my opinion.
The whole ‘sacrificing someone you love’ thing kinda reminds me of Once Upon a Time. The main spell used in the series involved giving up the heart of the one person you love the most. The main villain brought her dead father back to life just so she could use his heart for the spell! (Or something like that it’s been awhile since I’ve watched the series)
Well, you’re half right, she DID kill her father but at that point in the story bringing someone back from the dead was something magic explicitly couldn’t do. (Something later seasons kinda retconned but the point remains). She did, however, went out of her way to rescue him from her mother in Wonderland, screwing over the Mad Hatter in the process
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The interesting thing about Barbara Gordon's case is that while the original reason for her being paralyzed was definitely to motivate a male character, her agency and place in the narrative didn't stop when she was "fridged". Barbara dealing with her new disability and finding a new way to help people as Oracle became a large part of her character and, as some would argue, resulted in some of the best development and characterization she has ever gotten, to the point that some fans prefer her as Oracle to her as Batgirl.
This is one reason why I think the idea of Fridging is weird. Just because a character doesn't get focused on in one story after something happens to them, doesn't mean they can't be the focus of their own story later on.
@@LemonMoon Like with Gamora. Now she has to live in an unfamiliar world with everyone else remembering a different version of her. It hasn't been focused on yet, but it will be.
@@LemonMoon This discussion interest me a lot because I watched this video became I was scared I accidentally made a fridging plot in my own story, so you tell me. In my story, near the end of what I call the first generation, a character is lost in an apocalypse by falling into the earth. You spend a lot of time with this character throughout the series as they are essentially a main character. In fact, they one of the first characters you meet, and has a lot of time devoted to her characterization and motivation. The other character, who is their love interest grieves for an undisclosed amount of time, and defeats the villain by the end of the arc as per the other character's wish. As everything seems to back to normal, the second protagonist realizes that the other didn't come back, and is completely overtaken by grief. To the point that they do everything they can to find the other, which they don't, and later die themselves, asking for his son to find her if she is not "up there" with him. It's revealed later during what I call the second generation, that she is alive, and had been it what was essentially stasis for her, and now you see her grief and sorrow when she realizes that her husband died, trying his damn hardest to find her. I was scared that having her "die" in that moment could be considered that. Opinions?
@@alvarogarcia4735 No. Fridging is killing a character just to motivate another character, but not really lingering on how their death effects everyone for more than a scene or two. You’re plot sounds like the opposite of that
Sometimes I actually really like the off screen dismissive death scenes that many people consider bad writing. Sure, sometimes it's just cheap and quick and not caring about that character at all. But sometimes that particular dry and cold death can really fit the mood and emphasize a senseless tragedy, especially if it happens pretty suddenly. But in most cases that's not the case.
One of the biggest examples of fridging is Barbara Gordon in The Killing Joke. This is her most pivotal story ever and it's a Batman/Joker story. She only gets harmed because the Joker tries to prove that it takes one bad day to become like him. And he uses Jim as proof. He doesn't harm Barbara because he knows she's Batgirl, or because she did anything to personally spite him. He did it to hurt Gordon and Bruce. The movie made it even worse when they attempted to "flesh out" her character.... by making her have sex with Bruce (one of her fathers best friends). Why do women in media primarily exist to have sex with men, or be harmed to further a man's character development (usually they're harmed BY MEN)?
because unfortunately a recurring fault of male-protagonist stories is how female characters are reserved to emotional support roles, same reason why outside of father figures, male characters often don't fill that role. Women are seen as "pure" and "innocent", so as to make a male villain even more evil by daring to harm one.
As a lover of Barbara, I think you're overlooking some things, as there's a bit more to her being paralyzed than just the effect it has on Gordon and Bruce. That is the primary reason behind Joker doing it yes, but Barb has probably fought Joker in that universe before, so it's also him getting revenge on her and her worst nightmare come true (as she states she was scared of him as a kid to Gordon just before she opens the door). As well, this is where her origin story as Oracle comes from. Unable to walk or fight, Barb decides to continue to help Bruce by being his tech girl who relays him info and such while he's out on the job. (Works great in the Arkham games!) The event does a lot for her personally. But you are right about the sex part. I hate the animated movie lol. That bit never happened in the original comic. Bruce and Babs--while a few comics have tried to suggest they've had romantic history--usually come across as more father/daughter or student/mentor, and I'm glad 90% of Batman fans prefer them that way too. I'm totally fine with the idea of her idolizing and one-sidedly crushing on him, like a daydreaming kid might with an adult, but Bruce is much too responsible (and joyless) to ever allow himself to do such a thing with her. Barb may be a little brash and sassy, but I think she has more self-awareness and self-control than the movie made her out to be. That over-reaching "edgy maturity" was a trip wasn't it. At least the voice acting was good lol.
The Killing Joke example also shows how it can be fixed. Because Kim Yale and John Ostrander then took that bad writing and turned it into one of the most empowering stories in superhero comics with the birth of Oracle
@@driveasandwich6734 Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow wrapped up the entire bronze age of Superman stories and is the definite case example of how to end a series. Saga of the Swamp Thing kicked off the second era of horror comics when Moore was tasked with saving the wretched series. I get that the Killing Joke was really bad, but there's a reason his name can be found in the same sentences as Jack Kirby and Stan Lee.
@@samuelhain2160 Oh, I definitely did not attempt to imply anything negative about Moore when I suggested his works embodies comics as a whole. I actually really like Killing Joke.
@@zyanbob did anyone riot, or even really cared, when after more than a decade of canon one of the founding avengers was killed in exchange for a mcguffing and was never mentioned again 5 minutes after? imagine that death happening the same way to any other avenger apart from the two boring ones. imagine it with steve or peter. people would go apeshit.
That's just it though, both Gamora and Widow WERE main characters. Gamora was 100% a main in the GotG movies. Widow was supposed to be a main, but ended up getting a combination of fumbled and shoved to the side for other heros. The Black Widow solo movie has been requested by fans for YEARS, since pre-Winter Soilder days, but the MCU kept ignoring it. I blame what happened to Widow, Gamora, Loki, and Vision in the Infinity War saga on the Russos having their heads so far up Steve Rogers' ass that they can confirm his dental records. They backburnered any character that wasn't him or related in anyway to his whole "tragic romance" to Peggy. Which they fulfilled by proceeding to bend space-time over a pipe despite the MASSIVE consequences, instead of letting Rogers do the actual HEALTHY thing and MOVE ON with his damn life, the way Peggy herself actually did.
It reminds me of the case of The Last of Us 2, where Joel was killed for the sake of advancing the plot and the character development of Abby and Ellie, and people absolutely rioted because of it (and by that I mean got really mad and made sure everyone on the internet knew about how mad it made them).
My biggest issue with the gamora situation is that instead of taking the time to see how her death impacts the full team, how they continue on without her.... There's now just a time displaced version of her, except she's missing 5 years of experiences with the guardians, and now the focus is about finding new Gamora. I'm really feel hesitant that in Guardians 3, Peter will be chasing after her like "I love you" even though this isnt the Gamora he knew, and he'd essentially end up replacing the Gamora who loved him with someone he has no history with but who looks exactly like Gamora.
To be fair, GotG3 actually handles it really well. The movie really hammers home that New Gamora is not and never will be a replacement for Prime Gamora, but interacting with her helps Peter process through his grief and find the closure he needs to finally move on.
This was recommended to me in May 2023. For the future viewers, Nick Lowe and Zeb Wells just fridged Kamala Khan in Amazing Spider-Man #26. CZcams recommendations have some sick algorithm
Trope talk suggestion for you; "The noodle incident" or just "The Incident" is a literary tool that gives more literary weight to an event or mcguffin than a description would, mostly by context and the reader's imagination. Named because of a short series of Calvin and Hobbes comics wherein everyone at school gives the eternally frustrated 6-year-old grief about something he did in the past that is now known only as "The noodle incident." It is hinted at vaguely many times, but the writer ultimately leaves it up to your imagination; which is a strength because whatever the audience dreams up will be way more literarily impactful (in this case funny) than anything he could write down. And that's not even the only time that comic uses a noodle incident, see, there's this kids book calvin always wants read called "Hampster Hewwy and the Gooey Kablooey" and Now I'm ranting. Another instance this trope is used is in an S.C.P. story wherein a certain slime MUST NEVER come into contact with a human corpse. Why? That's classified. A foundation researcher files the suggestion to test the slime on a human corpse because it's never listed what happens, only that it is a V E R Y bad idea, and the researcher is curious. He gets demoted and heavily scolded by an O-5, who states "Just don't." A "Noodle Incident" is a rare trope that involves telling the audience that something exists or happened, but not telling them what it was, in order to give the plot point more narrative weight than a description would give it, partly because of the imaginations of the audience. It is a great trope that I think you should cover.
Yeah, Maes Hughes death was a hard hit to everyone who knew him and his family. You see the genuine grief Ed & Al suffer because Hughes become an unintentional father figure for them, and the pinnacle of this grief for Roy was when he unleashed hellish fury on Envy to the point where he nearly killed the immortal shapeshifter and had him begging for mercy. Hughes was essentially the group Dad and heart of the team. Unfortunately the kill a loved one of the main characters doesn’t always work well as the sole fuel to drive the story.
i've seen alot of people get unhealthily attached to characters and holy shit you would think this shit was happening to a real person with how some of these people....coped
I have never understood why people get worked up about "fridging". Most characters in stories are only there to move the protagonist along in the story the author is trying to tell. That the death of the character/s is unceremonious or offscreen is more about hiding the action from the protagonist (whose eyes we usually see through) so that the reveal has narrative weight and potentially shock value. No one complains about the (perhaps) millions of people loyal to the the Empire who were vaporized in several different suspicious Death Star explosions. The deaths of each individual in those space stations was not carefully viewed through their eyes, we only see dust pushed rapidly in all directions by a massive pressure wave. Why? Because they were a fucking plot point and aren't real, just like our protagonist! Some people really like George R. R. Martin and all the intricate stories he tells about so many varied different characters. I did too until I realized most of the people I was reading about were going to die and not really affect the arc of the story too much. Maybe someone exists who wants to read about the lives of everyone on Scarif before it got nuked and there might even be some beautiful stories in there, but almost everyone there was a plot point, even the protagonists. Yes, we had invested time in getting to know them so it felt right that we see their noble ends play out, but to Kyle's girlfriend in the fridge, we hardly knew ye and that doesn't make us or the writers bad people for using imaginary people as plot points in other imaginary people' stories.
I think I read once that the fridging litmus test is "if they were the protagonist, would this death feel earned?" And I'm so glad you acknowledged that.
@@willhuey4462 To be fair to that particular fridging (I agree it was, but there's actually a reason behind the scenes) they couldn't get the actor back due to Legal issues. I believe he was either suing them or trying to for something to do with the first movie. Because of that, they had to write him out of the story and they were clearly feeling kind of petty. I'm not saying that makes it all better, I hate that death too, it's just that there Was a reason outside of, "What can we do to impact the story?"
I mean, are the millions of deaths that happened when the Death Star destroyed Alderaan fridging because they were off-screen? A movie doesn't have time to focus on every single character, there is a difference between killing one in a way without focus and in a mean-spirited way.
That's just a stupid way to go about it. A protagonist's death is always without question the most heavy a death could be, because the protagonist is the character the audience is following. A protagonist dying means that either the story is over, or there's going to be a new protagonist. And changing protagonists is always a huge goddamn deal. No matter how main a main character is they can't compare to the weight of the death of the protagonist. There's a large and insurmountable difference between the two.
That honestly sounds ridiculous. It would be impractical as hell to characterize and develop literally every single side character to the level of the protagonist. It's like watching the news of how someone was killed from an accident and thinking about how you don't feel as sad as when your parents died, and blame the universe for bad writing in your life.
That’s because Nora Fries wasn’t fridged. Dr. Fries’s sole motivation is curing her terminal illness. She is vitally important to their story and is treated as such.
@@katherineperry6380I mean, one could argue that Nora is less of a character and more of a plot point for Dr freeze, but that's an entirely different discussion
People in these comments seem to be forgetting that a character we barely know can die suddenly as a narrative reason to motivate a character and still not be considered fridging IF the motivated character doesn't act like they forgot that person died 5 mins later. Seeing death, even of strangers, is incredibly emotionally impactful or traumatic for the average individual. The character writing needs to reflect that if they've suffered any kind of loss.
Fridging is killing off a character for the sole purpose of motivating another character. The time and effort the author puts into the emotional aftermath of the said character have no bearing on whether that character was fridged or not. Ironically having the character feel nothing at all for the dead character makes the dead character not fridged as the other character isn't motivated by the act of that person dying.
Perhaps the audience gets to retroactively know the character as the story progresses. The more we see the memories of them from the main character's perspective the more the audience feels they were genuinely important. More so if the story touches on other people the deceased character had interacted with during their life while the main character journeys onward. We keep getting reminded that it was a good and heroic person that was killed. We meet people who were educated in a school they founded or taught at. Or a spend a night with a mountain shepherd who would have lost their best stock if the deceased character hadn't helped hoist them out of a crevasse decades ago, and now an extended family is supported with the dividends of that perilous effort. Stories that even the main character wouldn't have heard about, and each time it is another twist of the knife. Through this method the audience would get to know and feel for a character that technically only had about 5 minutes of screen/page time.
I'm wondering your thoughts about Arcane and that one scene. [SPOILERS] [SPOILERS] Regarding Arcane, with Viktor. Episode 5 is when we have a character, Sky, a character who has a love interest in Viktor but that Viktor doesn't reciprocate. Prior to that she has a brief appearance in Episode 4, but doesn't say anything; just gives Viktor an admiring look. However, come Episode 8, she dies due to Viktor's meddling with magic, trying to save Viktor from what appeared to be a self-inflicted situation where he's trying to evolve his own body without Shimmer via the Hexcore in desperation. Many people hopped in and called this fridging. While I can 100% see that being the case, I was curious about it after watching your video, and wanted to hear your thoughts on it. You define fridging as a character whom is killed by a villain unceremoniously, and sometimes off-screen, for the protagonist to feel bad. But... A) Viktor is the one that kills Sky, not a villain. B) Viktor is visibly traumatized by this death, holding that guilt over him over several scenes, and even prepared to commit suicide over this action, only stopped by his friend. Sky gets somewhat of a funeral scene even, as Viktor tries to keep her death a secret but gives her some amount of respect by spreading her ashes at his favorite hideout spot. C) Its seemingly done on purpose; Viktor as a character thought that he was only worth what he contributed, and that nobody would care about himself. Sky is the direct antithesis to that, which he tragically did not foresee until he dug too far into science, which results in Sky dying by his own foolishness. Viktor is the character we follow, and we as the audience are just as dethatched from Sky as Viktor is, until her sudden death by Viktor's own hand. While yes, Sky does die for the plot and to motivate Viktor, it's not done unceremoniously. In fact, there's entire scenes leading up to the finale where Viktor is broken over the death and is even prepared to annihilate his own arc via suicide to 'give Sky her due' so to speak. Would you consider this fridging?
I would say it is not fridging, because it completely changes the trajectory Victor's character arc is going on. It's not a he's sad for this week's episode and maybe a mention here or there, he breaks out of his tunnel vision focus on curing himself with magitek to try to destroy what he has created, and when he can't (because of magic?) He asks his best friend, the only other character he trusts, to do it for him. It impacts him for the rest of the season.
I used to call this"the Krillin effect" when I was watching Dragon Ball: the fastest way for a villain to show they are really serious is to kill Krillin violently in front of Goku. Instant motivation
the first one didnt kill him in front of Goku, of course it didn't change the fact that Goku killed him with an unusual coldness, Freeza was lucky that Goku spared him, those were the two instances were Goku was really mad
@@devforfun5618 But Krillin got killed a lot and always to make Goku or the current "real fighter" motivated to defeat the villain. I remember that Goku turns into SSJ for the first time when Freeza kills Krillin
Well the fact that Dragon Ball has ready access to resurrection does smooth things over. Not only that, but Krillin has more personality and more overall plot importance than most fridged characters. He has an arc. Plus what you're describing only really happens twice. Krillin dies a third time but that's when pretty much everyone dies because EVERYTHING is going to crap right then.
@@FranciscoAreasGuimaraes Krillin dies three times. Once to Tambourine, once to Frieza, and once to Buu. The first two do serve as motivation for Goku, but in the third instance everyone else is dead, too, so Goku has a whole pile of dead friends and relatives to avenge.
I find the soul stone take quite interesting. I've always read the soul stone test as more of a test of will than a test of morality. The test was to ensure the wielder of the stone had the will necessary to use the stone to its potential, rather than a test to ensure the wielder was morally good. I mean, it chose the RED SKULL as its guardian. I quite enjoyed it as a sort of demonstration of the near total amorality of the stones, and the importance allocated to the soul stone was because it acted as the test for the stones as a whole- each stone can be used by anyone with the strength, while the stones together can only be wielded by someone with the will to go the whole way.
I don’t actually disagree with that…I just really hate the way the deaths were handled, and the way none of the other stones required such harsh actions to get them
The test itself is still contrived regardless. It could be anything; the only reason it has to be this is to give everyone else even more survivor's guilt for the next hour, and to reset Gamora for no fucking reason, apparently. The morality angle is irrelevant; an indifferent universe is a far more believable universe. But the test itself undermines any intent to portray the stones as amoral and indifferent when it's so specifically designed to give viewers emotional gut punches.
@@emblemblade9245 agreed, i feel like it would have fit much better if each stone had it's own test/trial to be able to wield them. they don't have to be as extreme as the soul stone's, but i think it would have made the "soul for a soul" work better and not feel as out of place.
I feel like it really plays into Red's 'tipping the author's hand' point. Because regardless of the stones' standards, it's pretty obvious that the authors wrote that scene for shock value. For a lot of people (myself included) the writer's influence was so obvious that trying to parse the in-universe reasoning for it feels like dodging the question
the issue to me is, who set up the test? because be it the stone or some entity, they were clearly evil, a hero would set up a saftey feature of 'You must kill that which you love' Test 1)have something not you that is loved by you, 2)when they say No not even for power would i break my heart - they turn to leave,,,,,, Congratulations, test passed, have power of the soul stone because you stayed true to your heart not power,,,,, but love something but kill it thats a lock set by a sadistic entity that dosnt want complete narcissists getting the stone 'no loved thing, no stone' but at the same time wants you to cut your heart out to get the stone
I think The Boys did a good job of avoiding this by having Hughie mention Robin every now and then and getting an apology out of A-Train 3 seasons later.
It's done a lot better in the Radio Drama. Luke brings them up more than once to both Ben and Leia before finally snapping about how much he's lost because of the empire yelling "Vader Murdered my Aunt and Uncle!" Ben's death was less about implying that he was more important to Luke than his family and more about how his death was the straw that broke the camel's back for Luke after he went though a rapid succession of tragic and scary events.
I love the term "Fridge-e" because it sound like that person is becoming a fridge though someone else's act. Like, yes they get stuffed in fridges, but my brain just goes "They are now Fridge-man/Fridge-woman/The Human Fridge!"
It's interesting that you mention Coulson because what you say about speedrunning his emotional arc is kinda true, it was enough for him to become a fan favorite and people to actually demand for him to get a bigger story.
Occasionally, some writers 'intentionally' kill rather important characters without a fanfare, often even offscreen, to empathize the feeling of emptiness and futility, or to make the audience experience through the 'denial phase'. On other cases, director Tomino Yoshiyuki, most known for Gundam series, is very infamous for brutalizing and slaughtering major characters without fanfare. He mostly does it to empathize the harsh reality of war, where people don't really die dramatically like movies or anime, but are rather cut down like grass.
Somewhat related, a recent Ryan Reynolds promo for Free Guy has Deadpool explain how awful fridging is, then proceed to say “in other words, Deadpool 2.”
@@Booksds they also call out Vanessa's fridging in the Deadpool Christmas special. It was the only version of Deadpool 2 that I saw so I didn't think much of it. If I had seen the official version I might've been pissed.
I just realized that the whole plot of Frankenstein is basically the monster trying to fridge characters, while Frankenstein is too self centered for it to work
@@brandonlyon730 I mean the scientist. The monster kept killing the people in the scientist's life and the whole time the scientist was focused on himself.
Victor Frankenstein's self-centeredness and unreliable narrator tendencies make it so frustrating to read certain parts of it. Many of the other characters(even interesting ones) after they die are only talked about in how their deaths affected Victor.(Stop reading here if you don't want spoilers) When Victor dies the creature complains about how the awful things he did and deaths he caused hurt HIM and one of the things he says is interestingly almost exactly the same thing Victor said after Justine was executed for a crime she didn't commit, even though he could quite probably have proved her innocent if he told the truth, instead of prioritizing his not looking crazy over her LIFE. This is one of the things Victor and his creation have in common. They are both VERY self-centered in how they view the consequences of their actions.
The Fridging stems from A. That as you said the creature IS killing them just to make Victor sad and upset B. This is transcribed by Walton who hasn't met the rest of these characters and only knows them from Victor's stories of them. C. That Victor would have mostly only thought of their deaths in how they affected him anyway because that's in character for him. Frankstein is simply unreliable narrator telling about unreliable narrator telling about unreliable narrator.
Wait- Just realized that Demon Slyare could technically be considered a fridging because none of the mc’s family (exept his sister, sort of) have any personality or care put into them
Maybe not? They appear sometimes and are pretty important to the goal of the MC. To put it in a more humorous way, I don't expect my pokemon cards to empower me with love to kill a demon. (From that one episode with family and stuff)
Nope, Tanjiro thinks of his family quite a lot and suffering from survivor's guilt is a pretty big part of his character. There's like the entire dream sequence in Mugen Train. Demon Slayer is actually really good at handling character deaths, especially when they could just be used as generic backstory. Like Shinobu's sister dying causes her to fundamentally change her own personality in an attempt to emulate her sister, but fundamentally fails at it *because* her sister is dead. She wants to take up her sisters noble cause of wanting to befriend and redeem demons, but can't actually do it in practice *because* her sister was killed by a demon and that disconnect causes her immense turmoil. Rengoku's death affects literally every character in the story, just an arc later Uzui laments he can't be like Rengoku and save everyone and as mentioned by Obanai later in that arc, it's a huge blow to the Corp as they're down one of their strongest. It motivates the main trio to get stronger and gives Tanjito this really bleak reality check by showing even someone who's really strong can still die.
This video helped me realize just exactly why Maria Robotnik’s death never felt like fridging, even though she is literally introduced into the series through her own death in Shadow’s backstory.
I mean... She is a little fridged. Not like entirely, but she does mostly serve as a motivation for Shadow. There is a whole problem with the Sonic franchise and the girl characters being either less relevant, sacrificed, used as motivation for the male characters, and so on. Of course there are differences between all the various media, the games, the comics, the cartoons and movies, but that is a real issue.
Now I wanna see a story where the fridged character actually is a binder of Pokémon cards, and the character you’d expect to get fridged actually sticks around as a supporting character.
Damn I can feel the loss. I saw the movie before my inner eye. A heartwarming tale of revenge porn, the prequel to John Wick. For all who haven't notice: The firdged John Wick's dog
SAO Abridged actually handles this kind of beautifully. In the original series there's a character in what's basically a filler episode who gets super fridged. I don't think she's ever mentioned again, but i stopped after season one so i wouldn't know. In the abridged series her death has a very serious effect on the MC and visibly haunts him going forward, ultimately driving him to actually become a better person. Maybe not the best possible example, but compared to the source material it's leagues ahead.
SAO abridged usually used it for gags but yeah it did actually have a lasting narrative impact compared to SAO original’s whole party introduction and subsequent fridging right after meeting them Give me a personality trait of any of the dudes from that party? Hell give me a personality trait of the women outside of soft and quiet? Okay maybe the women one was unfair since giving a personality to any of the women in the show outside the vague tropes they embody is impossible, SAO is really just a cardboard cutout surrounded by doting cardboard cutouts with heart eyes one of which carrying an insect plotline
An interesting use/subversion of this trope is in Alfred Hitchcock's "Rope." The 'fridged' victim is killed at the very beginning of the movie, and while the rest of the movie is about the killers and their former teacher who is slowly figuring out what they did, the absence of the victim is played up more and more as the movie goes on, too, and even in the ending credits the characters are listed by their relationship to the victim.
I think the real issue with fridging is when the characters/author forget about the fridged character after a certain point. It's one thing to sacrifice a minor character for emotional impact. It's another thing to do it and then FAIL TO REMAIN INTERESTED IN THE EMOTIONAL IMPACT.
I mean, I wouldn't consider the subject of any murder mystery as 'fridged'. It isn't offing a character for cheap motivation points; it's the point around which the whole story revolves.
The actual best antidote to fridging IMO is the lean harder into the unceremonious and random nature of the death. You mostly see this in war stories, where a character just eats it from a stray random bullet, but it can work in other genre if you build to accommodate it similarly. Example: Fairly early into The Things They Carried, a member of the main character's squad gets murked out of nowhere, leading to a protracted section of the squad reacting. The squad leader starts ratcheting up the discipline, taking his failure to protect a man personally. One of the other squadmates is just taken in by how the guy just hit the dirt like unmanned flesh in the shape of a puppet. The main viewpoint character has no idea how to even respond to the situation. Make it an overt thing that now this character's noun class has gone from person to thing, that they'll never get the chance to fulfill their hopes and dreams, and leave them with a pile of unresolved baggage other characters will need to resolve. Make the death actually bother the cast more than just in the moment, make them have nightmares of just becoming an object, a corpse. And don't just kill girlfriends to make the real boy sad for two and a half seconds. Death is a real occupational hazard for the kinds of nonsense heroes conventionally get up to, and it should be something they have to grapple with philosophically and practically.
I think that depends on how empty feeling you want the story to feel. If it's high energy, it doesn't work good to lean into the pointlessness of the death.
God, you're reminding why I loved that book so much. One of the best postmodern works imo. The imagery of how the corpses would pile up and just be a part of the many things they carried was brilliant. Kiowa's and Curt's deaths got me the most.
It's *merc-ed I think I do agree with most of this. It's always more interesting to have characters be affected by a death beyond "it is sad". There's usually potential to make someone reevaluate morals, realize they have to step up, etc. ... but how is this exact thing not applicable to Gamora or Natasha? The Avengers are more adamant than ever to make sure Nat's death is not for nothing, and she is brought up by Wanda and Clint at the funeral, even if it's for Tony. Meanwhile, Quill forgets the repercussions of messing up the plan, because his connection to Gamora is greater. He is not a level-headed character. He'd rather get in some punches on someone who's wronged him and someone he loves, than look at a big picture. And Quill doesn't live long *after* learning of Gamora's death, but everything in the Guardians' other movies suggests that Gamora would not just be forgotten by Quill or the others.
@@kylefrank638 it doesn’t really apply because the tone of the stories and the killed characters are different. The Things They Carried is a dark war story deliberately setting up a bleak tone by emphasizing how random and fucked up death can be, utilizing relatively unestablished characters dying seemingly out of nowhere to illustrate the horrors of war. It could be argued that that’s still fridging cuz those characters mightve only existed to die but I haven’t read the book so I’m not super comfy judging that and it seems to have been excecuted quite well I definitely have seen the MCU movies so I can tell u that this doesn’t apply to Gamora or Natasha because the suddenness of their deaths was bad because of the story potential that was wasted and how it wrecked Gamora’s story arc, even if the other character’s reactions were written perfectly well their deaths wouldn’t’ve been satisfying because Gamora and Natasha’s characters weren’t being respected and their potential was needlessly (out of universe needlessly obviously) cut short
I'm actually planning on a story idea where the protag has his best friend die in front of him, brutally and almost unceremoniously killed by a minor villain on the verge of death. So before he kicks it, he decides to deal a personal blow to one of the people that ended him. But this will then serve as a launch pad for the plot, where he essentially get's rent in half by the grief. One of his halves, representing his anger and hatred of the forces that killed his friend, will serve as the hero of the plot. The other, representing his feelings of hopelessness and depression over losing the first person willing to befriend him, the villain. The story ends with the two fighting and, eventually, reconciling and rejoining. Very notably, this is going to take place in a sequel arc, so the friend and protag will already have some development behind them to give the death weight, and I'm definitely planning to make the most of Hitchcockian suspense to make it as yucky-feeling as possible.
The best part about Maes Hughs is that not only did he figure out the main conspiracy before everyone else, but he wasn't even an alchemist that looks at the world in a "give & take" lense. Maes should have been the last character out of a full cast of fucking alchemists to figure out why everything was happening as it was.
The only fridging I've seen that actually had an impact was when the mc didn't actually care all that much after his lover's death. It was meant to be a hint (in a long line of hints) that the mc is an actively malicious character despite the fairly standard hero's journey he has been set up with. His (lack) of reaction gave me chills.
Their was an Anime called Afro Samurai that uses fridging to further a story of revenge in a very interesting way. Because it starts with a dad being fridge by the big bad wanting the Number 1 headband said to make its wearer a God like warrior and only someone with the Number 2 Headband and challenge Number 1, and his dying breath asking his son to not seek revenge. His son known as Afro ignores this and joins a sword masters dojo to gain the power to get revenge only for raiders to fridge all the other students he met in that same episode and Afro killing his own master to he The 2. Following this sets a trend of every potential ally being fridges within at least 2 episodes of meeting them. The final two fights go to s spell out that the path Afro had followed has done nothing but turn him into an uncaring monster. Ignoring the wishes of your father, throwing away the lives of everyone who tries to help you, never stopping, never mourning. The Big Bad even takes time to tell the protagonist that he’s a monster “You really think that if I didn’t kill your father you’d be any different? You’d still be the same cold blooded killer you are now. Your just a killer with an excuse”
@@sigh824 it's the Prince of Nothing series by R Scott Bakker. Epic fantasy with multiple povs and it gets a bit graphic at times. One of my favorites ❤
Borderlands 3's sure had an impact... Fan favorite character as a side character, killed off uncerimoniously and stupidly to make the shitlord child angry. And hurt people. Before being forgotten aside from when the shit gets angry. An impact in the community namely in the form of r a g e
I'm watching this while trying to think of how Mia Fey from Ace Attorney fits into this. I guess ordinary rules about character death don't really apply to her since she's literally still around afterwards anyway
@@trucluu7894 Eh, admittedly, you could argue that that's still a way of making her death about the feelings of other characters rather than about Mia herself, which would count as fridging. In fact, I feel like Godot's deal is either an instance of retroactive fridging, or a critique of fridging itself - he's entirely motivated by Mia's death and wants to direct all narrative attention to how it affected him and how important she was to him, but it isn't until the end of the game that he realizes he can't keep up that vision of events. I think that part of why Mia's deal still doesn't come across as fridging is that she's still a very distinct character; and while I don't actually think that her still being around is the only reason for that, it's definitely part of it.
@@Miju001 red does mention that fridging must be “trivial” in a way, as to the narrative, it’s an “used and toss” kind of deal, but in mia case, her death lingered. I think that godot is actuallya counter example, because he would not be godot if it is any other character death, and his reaction to mia death is contrasted with Phoenix reaction to the death. Both men grow in opposite way to one another
@@trucluu7894 I would like to disagree on Godot, specifically. On the one hand, you're right that Godot is one of the main forces behind bringing Mia's death to the forefront; and I don't think that should be dismissed. But on the other hand, he does so by centering the narrative around it entirely on himself and his feelings towards it. For all intents and purposes, when it comes to Godot, everything that concerns Mia's death and its consequences has nothing to do with Mia herself. Again, I believe this is actually part of Godot's well-constructed character flaws rather than a fault of the narrative (at least not fully), but what I just said is a huge part of Red's "prized Pokémon card collection" test (albeit, not all of it, as you pointed out).
Unrelated but this reminded me of "The big buff black guy that dies first", a character in a ratman's parody of action movies. That's actually his in story name, people call him like that and that's how he presents himself. Somehow he survives till the end and his character arc ends with him being scared during the final climatic battle, because he know he's gonna get fridged, he's the big buff black guy that dies first after all. But then Chuck Norris calls him John, BBBGTDF is confused, Chuck explains that hencefort, his name is John and since now he's a named main character he's functionally immortal, so John joins his friends in the last battle, kills a bunch of people and survives. Stupid as all hell, but i now feel the need to find my old ratman comics and read them again.
Reminds me of Order of the Stick, where the audience knowing a characters name can actually make that character more powerful. A generic soldier both survives and becomes a secondary character just by saying her name.
The SAME g*ddamn MacGuffin took away BOTH of the action-oriented semi-main female characters in the MCU. The psychic and magical female characters? They're fine, they can live. The butt-kicking gals who have belonged to a name-of-the-movie group? Marvel yeets them off a cliff for a magic rock and a cheap attempt at creating sympathy for male characters who apparently weren't sufficiently compelling and needed a "boost". Heck, in Endgame they actually managed to RETROACTIVELY META-FRIDGE Peggy Carter. All that cool stuff she did while she was working through her grief over Steve, trying to distract herself with work and struggle against sexism? And how that lead to her later creating SHIELD together with Howard Stark? I can't imagine that went nearly the same with Captain America standing alongside her the whole time (never mind the large scale ripple-effects from him having been present through everything overall and what that suggests he stood by through in order to have not drastically change history, effectively being character assassination on Steve himself). WHY DOES MARVEL HATE WOMEN WITH GUNS SO MUCH!?!?
Gomorra’s (I’ve never seen it written, I hope I’m spelling it right) death was the moment I lost interest in the MCU. She had a very compelling character arc that spoke to me on a personal level as a survivor of abuse, and by killing her halfway through it, Marvel said they didn’t actually care about her arc, and all but explicitly said they thought the experience that has largely defined my life wasn’t real. If a story doesn’t care about its characters or its audience and the stakes are a lie, why would I get invested in it?
The thing with Killing Joke, though, is that Barbara's story went *on* from there, and what happened to her was given weight in later stories -- she became "Oracle", a badass in a wheelchair and things snowballed from there. She was only a plot-device in KJ, but that scene was shocking and horrifying to readers *because* Barbara had weight, personality, and meaning in the previous and later stories. I'm an on-again, off-again reader of the Batman stories, and (that editor's asshatted comment aside) Barbara's crippling wasn't a true "fridging". Abhorrent, violent, misogynistic, yes. Fridged, no.
Don't forget trying to smooth over the damage by just yoinking an alternate-reality version and acting like treating a woman like a replacement goldfish fixes everything.
at least in the case of black widow any of the two could do it, but since she couldn't have a family she didn't let hawk eye do that because he had a family, it was an heroic sacrifice, the case with thanos was really bad, if they didnt want to change that because of black widow, they could have Thanos order another person to sacrifice someone
The Gamora who went over the cliff is not the one who was brought forward in time. She is missing years of development, so she is not the same. We shall see what happens, but they didn't necessarily cheapen her death. If the coming stories make her development retread too fast or easy, then we can critique just bringing an alternate past version forward. As for Widow, it is a natural culmination of her trying to clear her ledger, was an active choice by the character who died, and it was going to be her or her best friend. Neither wanted the other to go, and they fought damn hard to be the one who made the sacrifice play. There could have been more attention made to her death though.
I think the problem has less to do with not setting up characters well enough, and more to do with not giving them the respect they deserve afterwards. A parent who dies at the beginning to give the main character motivation is fridged if the impacts of that death are ignored. A soldier who talks about their girlfriend and kid right before dying and giving the main character motivation to win the battle isn't fridged if the main character goes and visits the girlfriend afterwards and repeatedly spends time remembering and mourning them. Sometimes characters exist to die but aren't important enough to be given a lot of screen time. The problem is just if the impact of the death only serves to advance the plot in one specific way, and once it serves that purpose it's ignored.
Ah I get it. But I still don't see how fridging is that bad. Is that just me? Like in your example, so what if the mc isn't shown constantly remembering the dead side character? Who cares, they're just that, a side character who exists to further the plot. It's one thing if an important character is given an "unceremonious" death, but who cares that the parents with 5 minutes of screen time die at the start of the movie so the mc can start his revenge story? Like I understand what fridging is and I want to write stories so I'll avoid it because people will criticise it, but it's so weird to me that someone could watch a movie and actually say "wow I hated how the parents with 5 minutes of screen time who died at the start were killed solely to advance the plot" like wtf?
@@ReblazeGaming It's because it says that the character who you're motivating by killing their loved one(s) doesn't really care that much about their dead loved ones. You can't claim that a death has weight and that it matters to a character if you then proceed to never *show* that character being affected by the death beyond the immediate aftermath. Expecting the audience to *infer* your character's emotional arc because you can't be bothered to show how this death has changed everyone around it is lazy writing. Either give death the narrative weight it deserves or give your character a more appropriate motivation. Like, imagine how much worse Lion King would be as a movie if instead of showing Simba feeling, denying, and finally reckoning with the grief of Mufasa's death and the guilt he felt for being "responsible" for it, he was sad for like two minutes and then continued to act with the exact same recklessness and childlike innocence he had before Mufasa was killed even while he's deposing Scar later on. *That* is the problem with fridging: it takes a death and says "This brutal and/or unceremonious death matters to the characters, but I'm not gonna bother to *convince* you that it matters to those characters in spite of the particularly unfair manner in which I killed them."
That's what I'm doing in my book saga. The main characters who die, do die when their worth as characters is overdue (Mainly, the protagonist has more friends to rely on in the case of the dude who fills the best friend role, and the other protagonist has resolved his love triangle drama in the case of the Character C of the love triangle), but like hell I'm going to make their deaths forgotten, even when the saga is at its climax. The main characters LITERALLY CHANGE DESIGNS to reflect their trauma. They go from plain coloured clothing, which was chosen to reflect how untouched they were, to a mixture of the colour they're related to thematically and black to both reflect their growth into actual characters AND their grief. It's explicit that they never ditch the black for the rest of the saga after their respective loved ones die.
@@ReblazeGaming agree with you so much. this whole thing that "oh, every character needs to be tony stark levels of mourning" (ofc im exaggerating) is just ridiculous. what, just so it could be "not fridging" and "im not doing any 'tropes' so that means im a good writer' shit. not all deaths are equal even in stories. seeing this video now the writing principle of "have your character deaths have meaning and importance" only really applies to characters that we actually care or are very central to the story. plus do we really need like 2 seasons worth of development or something for a parents' death to be 'something' or your entire village getting razed? how bout just some empathy you know? what, you don't care about his entire village getting razed because it only happened for like 10 mins and we're continuing onto his revenge plot now? you don't care about a character that "died offscreen" when usually that's dramatic effect so we could see the dead body at the same time as the main character. that's just fallacious imo
When I learned about this trope, I wondered how cool it would be if a side character is fridged and the hero sets out to bring them back. When they do, the side character reflects on how the death affected them and how they hated how only the hero noticed or cared they were gone
magneto is a great example of this. in the movies alone, FOUR female characters are fridged for his character development (his mom, wife and kid, mystique), and that's not even counting the comics
I felt like Mystique was different. They had turned her into prequel-Wolverine, and when they chose to do Dark Phoenix, they had written themselves into a corner, so they had to get her out of the way. Her death did definitely get handled better than any of the named character deaths in the original trilogy.
@@Jim4815162342 i get what you’re saying. for me, mystique was erik’s motivation to go out and try to kill jean, forwarding the plot, so that’s basically why i included her haha edited for grammar
@@OneWingedRose Admittedly, yes. But there were major flaws in all of the X-Men movies. And unlike the MCU, we didn't get time to invest in them enough to overlook the problems.
By the way, Red, I think it's amazingly effective how well your color-coding works. Any given slide, I know immediately what words are talking about what character. Out-freaking-standing layout and design. Thanks!
A good way that fridging was averted, in my opinion, is Tanjiro's family in Demon Slayer. In the first episode of the series, a demon slaughters the boy's family. The only survivor is his sister Nezuko, but she quickly turns into a demon. This entire incident is what incites the plot, with Tanjiro becoming a demon slayer to not only avenge his family, but also find a way to turn his sister back into a human. In a lesser piece of media, that would be the last we'd hear of Tanjiro's family. For example, look at Goblin Slayer. Now I'm not saying that's a bad series, because I've never seen it. But in the beginning of Goblin Slayer, the Priestess' entire adventure squad gets killed by goblins. The only survivor is the Fighter, who... well, I think it's easy to assume why the bad guys in a dark fantasy would kidnap a girl. And that's the last we hear of the Priestess' fallen comrades. The Fighter later gets freed from her imprisonment, but is irreversibly traumatized by her abuse and is in no condition to continue adventuring. And that's the last we hear of her. She's written out of the story completely after that. The Priestess' friends were all fridged. In Demon Slayer, however, Tanjiro's mother and kid siblings are frequently seen in flashbacks and dreams. Since their deaths and Nezuko almost dying are the main driving force behind Tanjiro's quest, of course the story would show him constantly remembering his family. They were killed off, but the memory of them functionally makes these characters just as important and prevalent as the protagonist. A great example of this is in the Entertainment District Arc, where Nezuko goes berserk and Tanjiro calms her down by reciting a lullaby that their mother used to sing to them. Nezuko remembers her mother, and breaks down crying. The infamous dead mom anime trope is used in this instance to remind both the characters and the audience of Nezuko's humanity. Once Priestess' friends are removed from life, Goblin Slayer becomes all about her and an edgy medieval Doomguy. That's not an attack, by the way. I _love_ edgy characters. But Tanjiro's family are never treated as a simple plot device. Does Spider-Man still think about Gwen Stacy? Why would he, now that he's with Mary Jane? Does Miles Morales still think about his universe's Peter Parker? Why would he, now that the Ultimate Universe no longer exists? Does Superman still think about Krypton? Probably, but one day Earth will also die and he'll just have to find a new planet. Does Mark Grayson think about all those people that his father killed? He can't, he doesn't have time to mourn. This brings me to another great way to salvage the trope of using death as a plot device: Speedball, aka Robbie Baldwin. The inciting incident of Marvel's Civil War event is the Stamford Incident. A team of young superheroes, led by Speedball, film themselves trying to take down the villain Nitro. Their inexperience and lack of preparation result in Nitro using his powers to detonate and kill everyone in the town, including Speedball's teammates. Speedball survives due to his powers, and is then blamed for the entire incident and thrown in prison. This is what leads to the Superhero Registration Act, requiring every superhero to disclose their true identity to the public. Speedball eventually recovers and decides to abide by this law, in an attempt to right his wrongs. The Marvel writers didn't _have_ to explore the consequences of the Stamford Incident. After all, it was just a plot device designed to give a reason for Iron Man and Captain America to fight. And Speedball's just some C-List superhero from the Silver Age, he's not that important to the grand scheme of Earth-616. But those deaths _were_ important. 612 people died in that explosion, 60 of whom were children. Robbie builds himself a new suit, fitted with spikes that impale his body. This was to activate his powers, as well as punish himself. There were 612 spikes, with 60 of them being longer than the rest. Robbie gave himself a new name, Penance. Robbie's dead friends also aren't forgotten after their narrative purpose, dying in an incident that incites Civil War, was fulfilled. The people of Atlantis mourned the loss of Nimona, one of the heroes who died, and even prosecuted Nitro. Speaking of Nitro, Robbie eventually tracks him down, and beats the ever-living shit out of him while shouting the names of the people he killed. Hell fucking yeah! _This_ is in my opinion the most important means of avoiding fridging: Remind the readers that the killed off character was a person, with a name, an age, and a family. That's why we write down the names of the dead when we build memorials. Why we have funerals and graveyards and works dedicated to our departed. Someone doesn't cease to be a person after they die. In real life, you aren’t "written out of the story" after you die. The ripples outlast the splash that created them. That's how all the best character deaths avoided fridging. Peter Parker never forgot Uncle Ben. Bruce Wayne never forgot his parents. Naruto and Goku never knew their real parents, but you can still see how their actions outlasted their lives. And in the case of Goku, the memory of his adoptive grandfather Gohan lives on, when Goku named his son in his honor. The problem with fridging is that the story often has no more use for that character once they're killed off and the death is used as a plot device. But it doesn't _have_ to be like that.
I recently read a book that opened with a fridging incident (entire found family slaughtered like animals) and it was the first time I felt like I understood the significance of the dead characters to the main character more than the writer did. Like he did such a good job establishing what they meant to the hero in a short time frame only to basically call them dead irrelevant extras in the epilogue narration. Kinda soured my experience and made me feel stupid for caring.
@@Kingdomheatsox2 Oh, it was actually a Japanese light novel called Bungo Stray Dogs: Stormbringer, which doesn’t even have an official English translation yet, so I don’t think it would be much help. But if I were to offer advice on not ‘screwing it up’, my problem was that the significance of the dead characters was well established and then decently reiterated throughout the novel from the mc’s pov, only to be undercut by an omniscient narrator in the epilogue waxing about them being unspecial and quickly forgotten, “a single line of names on a long list of victims”. Which would be true from the perspective of say, an uncaring god or whatever, but not the mc who lost the only people who ever loved him that he just spent 400 pages trying to avenge. I found it to be a counterintuitive 180. The change in perspective cheapened the emotional impact by straight up pointing out the fact that the characters we were meant to mourn at the beginning were just disposable props in an angsty backstory.
@@Kingdomheatsox2 Yeah, Japanese isn't my first language, so it's possible I misread that part as overly cynical/dismissive. The gist of it still stuck out to me because it was kind of the opposite of the general theme and the language surrounding the characters designed to last. It’s not a big deal though, more of a nitpick and really I’d chalk it down to a Freudian slip by an author with bigger fish to fry. It was a good book and I liked it, just when focusing on the use of this trope alone it does kind of fizzle out when the author begins to forget about characters (who are admittedly forgettable out of universe) that should mean everything to the lead in-universe.
As someone who started watching Bungo Stray Dogs last week, that sounds like a bummer considering how things were handled in Season 2. Spoilers for anyone else, but Even if the orphans were ultimately plot devices for Oda in the end, I still feel like they did a good job of establishing the impact of their death on Oda for the rest of his arc (at least, coming from my very inexperienced knowledge/taste in media lol)
Even the villains in FMA continue to acknowledge Hughes. While most just use him to taunt the rest of the cast, Wrath actually calls back to his funeral and how he thought everyone’s grief was insufferable
funnily enough, the DOOM franchise makes fun of this trope with the main character's pet bunny as his only motivation for literally going to hell itself and going full genocide on demonkind
and it works
RIP Daisy
Wait, so John Wick ripped off the DOOM franchise? Did not see that coming.
DAISY
Bonus that his family also died, but he doesn’t really care about that. It was Daisy that pushed him over the edge.
I have a semi-headcanon that any death would have been ok for the soul stone, and Red Skull made up the loved one rule because he's just that much of a dick.
God tier head cannon
Headcannon absolutely accepted.
Good idea
If it was just any death, Skull could have gotten it himself. Because it requires a loved one, it's inherently out of his reach, because he doesn't actually love anyone. Hence "I guide others to a treasure I cannot possess." He's a dick, but he wouldn't give up having an Infinity Stone just to be a dick to a handful of other people who might come along decades later.
Perhaps there’s a rule that red skull can’t kill anyone to get the stone
The best example of fridging is the tragic off-screen loss of Squidward's hopes and dreams.
Mr Krabs: What a baby
@@PanzerLord Me: (Drops a dime down the street drain to watch Krabs' angst.)
No,if you look carefully,it happens before SpongeBob starts
Actually we watch it fall out a window and die in the background as SpongeBob bought the pineapple
EMOTIONAL (and spiritual) DAMAGE
The entire planet of Alderaan got fridged and Leia didn't even cared about it on her next scene.
And it makes Bail Organa's characterisation in the prequels and Kenobi lack impact, because we already know the outcome AND how little it mattered.
@@kaizokuAUTO did it matter little though? the Rebellion wouldn't have been anywhere near what it was without the Organas, and I'm sure we'll learn more in season 2 of Andor
@@mercury2157 that's only true in the Lore, not in the actual story of the Star Wars OT.
There is a book called "Leia: Princess of Alderaan", which is set around the time Leia is 16, which really tries to flesh out her relationship to her parents and her planet more.
Basically a lot of the conflict of the book is around the fact that Alderaan is a really beautiful and peaceful planet, and one of the few that managed to stay relatively unaffected by the Empire's rule. This means that she's confronted with two choices: either join the rebellion along with her parents, and risk bursting this peaceful bubble and putting the planet fully under Imperial control or worse; or (as one the side characters would have it) stop the rebel activity, and ignore the Empire in order to preserve the status quo in Alderaan.
(spoilers, but not really)
She chooses to join the rebellion and fight the empire, even if it means putting herself, her family and her entire planet at risk, because this is bigger than they are.
@@maxgustafsson7802 touche
I’ll have you know that Krillin wasn’t fridged, he was freezered.
I mean he did come back to life and was a character on his own, serving as one of the protagonists of that arc before Goku's arrival. I mean Dragon Ball gets a pass because most of it's dead characters come back later anyway. Cheap death for motivation plus cheap resurrection.
Plus Freeza just would not freaking go down, it makes sense that he’d finally kill a protagonist.
And Goku didn’t know he could be brought back I think? Since he had already been revived once and he didn’t know the Namek balls worked differently he thought he was dead for good
By this train of thought, krillin's first death was him being piccled
Pfft, speaking of franchises where death is meaningless. Krillin gets killed, iirc, *five times* throughout the series. Plus a couple more implied offscreen deaths in alternate/future timelines. He doesn't get fridged, he IS the fridge.
(Not to mention all the times characters fruitlessly sacrifice themselves, like Chiaotzu using Self-Destruct on Nappa.)
@@jasonblalock4429 Nappa: “that tickled”
I love the idea of having a hero where everyone thinks his wife is fridged but she’s actually super alive and he just misses her
Or faux-fridged for their own protection (ie, the villain won't go after the hero's SO if they are thought already 'dead', ... Dragon goes to smoke a town and arrives to see [an illusion of] a smoking ruin - bonus points if said dragon then wastes a bunch of time trying to track down the other dragon invading its territory, giving the heroes time they otherwise wouldn't have to prepare to fight it! 😃). ... Note: I am sure I'm not anywhere near the first person to have either of those ideas!
she actually gets put in a fridge but it ends up protecting her a la indiana jones 4
"Hey dude, are you okay?"
"Just thinking about my wife, she'd have loved this. "
"Oh, what happened?"
"Her job doesn't give her enough free time to go on adventures. "
I have a dnd character like this! The entire time he’s been pining for his wife and two daughters, talking about he misses them, the whole party thinks they’re all dead. No, all three of them are ALSO adventurers on their own adventures, he just misses them and the party has no idea and will not be ready lol
You just described the big twist in Memento.
“Yeah ok, cripple the b*tch” not gonna lie that sentence hit me like a freight train
It made me wonder if I ever listened the video even though I regularly listen to the video list while I’m writing… that editor needed Jesus.
Like seriously what in gods green earth possessed len wein to say such a thing???
@@rzionrnrzfm5925 Misogyny.
@@nkbujvytcygvujno6006 ain't that a tragedy.
@@rzionrnrzfm5925 Ikr? Like what the fuck did she do to him?
I like that at the end of Full Metal Alchemist, Hiromu Arakawa still mentioned Nina, like she was never forgotten even what was sixty 25 minute anime episodes later.
Did those "sixty 25 minute anime episodes" total closer to the "three seconds" range of in-story time, or the "multiple years" range?
The latter definitely
@@skaryzgik it’s like at least a year later. Iirc Ed is 14 at the beginning, 16 at the end and the scene yall are talking about is definitely leaning towards the later
@@skaryzgikThe Nina thing happens pretty early in the story, and I believe (not including the brothers’ attempt at bringing back their mother) FMA takes place across roughly a year or two. And her death still affects them by the end of the series.
Additionally, her death isn’t used for character _motivation_ so much as character _development,_ (they’re absolutely devastated by this, and its their first exposure to the horrors of the world and Alchemy, and results in their change in how they want to use Alchemy) while also tying into one of the central themes of the story in a ton of ways (that being how people aren’t gods no matter what abilities you have, and the dangers of having the hubris to believe otherwise-Ed needs to learn that he’s “always been a normal human who can’t even save a little girl” (a line he states in the final episode), and her death is literally the result of someone believing that they can tamper with life despite its fragility. It also ties nicely into the value of human connection that the story presents).
Also, in the 2003 adaptation, the episode she dies, the ending sequence is changed to a montage of original scenes with her and the Elric brothers.
I don't think her death falls into the fridging trope because the other characters actually cared, but to me as a viewer her demise had almost no emotional impact. I was simply not all that invested in her.
I'm willing to bet that If you switched her for an adult woman with the same character traits a lot of people would have cared more about what happened to the dog than her.
It is similar to how Junji Ito characters going through horrible things usually does not impact me emotionally, the characters often do not feel enough like actual people for me to care and the whole read is more of a grotesque spectacle than something I'd actually be sad about.
Maes Hughes can indeed not be replaced by a pack of pokemon cards.
Nah
Not even a holofoil collection
He's worth at least 5
But I'd love to see someone try!
Too soon, man! 😂
I laughed so hard during this when I imaged the Thanos scene but he was throwing a binder of pokemon cards off a cliff
Reminds me of HISHE’s take where he throws his throne off the cliff.
What did it cost? Everything.
@@animeotaku307 I like to imagine Thanos attempted to cope by buying another chair from like bed bath and beyond or something but he still couldn't move on 😂
He might aswell jump off that cliff at that point.
Thanos: At last… soulstone.
Living Gamorra: What did it cost you?
Thanos: Looking that up now…
Red Skull: Wait… that fucking worked?
Fridging gets even WORSE when, as Red said, the characters aren’t sad for long enough, but the villains are made out to be more evil because of it for the *REST OF THE STORY.*
This comment is about Joseph Joestar's dog.
@@RuneKatashima You know what? You’re absolutely right. I should watch JoJo.
@@RuneKatashima ok, but Danny isn't mentioned at all for the rest of the story and his death is followed by an eight year time skip. Also, Joseph Joestar didn't have a dog. Its Jonothan. It's a total fridge, but it's not what this guy is talking about.
Have you ever heard about this thing called women in refrigerators?
@@danubeisreallypeculiarrive7944 Ooo, I just looked it up! It’s an old website that lists what comics have fridging, right?
Regarding the fridging of Black Widow, I think one of the single best things about the Hawkeye show is the way it actually bothers to show how much Nat's death affects Clint, seeing as they were best friends.
It's a bit late, and it'll never change the fact that Iron Man is still the only one that got a damn funeral (they couldn't at least make it a Tony+Nat event?), but I think it affords more weight to her death than just giving her a token solo movie after the fact.
Yeah, poor quicksilver didn’t get shit next to nothing…
@@cosmicspacething3474 I mean, Clint's son's middle name is Pietro, and Clint knew the guy for all of 5 minutes. That's not nothing.
I haven’t started watching Hawkeye yet. I have been reading the comics run that show seems to be baed on though.
Gamora and Black Widow fell into the exact same position even though they fell differently AND I WON’T STOP BRINGING THIS UP BC IT'S SO ANNOYING AND DUMB
Just because we didn't see the fueral's on screne doesn't mean they didn't happen. It's kind of silly to assume that since we never saw a Blackwidow funeral scene it never happened.
Supernatural was so good at fridging that when the main character finally died for real and went to heaven the big emotional reunion was seeing his beloved car again and not like, the numerous friends and family who died for him.
Some times I think that show just might be an over complex parody >.>
The show was too afraid to introduce any new main character other than Sam, Dean, and Cas. Sure there were a few recurring characters but they never lasted long.
@@Andrewtr6
Indeed
Not even his dad was important enough for a reunion?! Geez and they made so much of that in the first few seasons too. There's a reason I only like the first 5 and only because sometimes the Monster of the Week was neat. After that it turned to nothing but shit and the Leviathan season made me stop entirely. Even with a limited budget they could have made it work if they were creative, but let's face it they are not. And there are 15 seasons....... each worse than the one before it.
@@dreadcthulhu5
Be honest. Is Supernatural worth watching at all?
We know Luke and Leia are twins because she didn't bring up Alderaan ever again. She's cracking wise in her very next scene ("Aren't you a little short for a Stormtrooper?"/"Can someone get this walking carpet out of my way?")
the force comes with a bit of sociapathy it seems
I like it even more that she tells them it was easy because Vader wanted them to escape. In the next scene she has flown directly to the rebel base in the company of people she never met, anyone of them could be a spy, without changing the ship that was potentially bugged by the empire. I have no problem with a bump in the plot now and then, but telling people later it was intentional to show she was not experienced and hotheaded early in the story is just as bad as additional effects.
Written and Directed by George Lucas
(Along with rewrites by others)
The whole planet was put in the fridge 😂😂😂
@@alexmouse5758 it takes the willpower of a green lantern to shove a whole planet in Kyle Rayner’s fridge
Lisa’s death is almost a criticism of fridging. Dracula is motivated to do what he does in that series, with little thought to Lisa, and her wishes. Alucard actually grieves for her, and fights for her and what she would’ve wanted. Once Dracula actually gives some thought to Lisa, he realizes how misguided he’s been.
Also Dracula is absolutely destroyed by her death. He doesn't just get over it. He spends over a year destroyed by her murder and plans out the world's longest suicide note. Also, I would absolutely watch a Vlad and Lisa slice of life show. But that's beside the point.
Exactly; it's Dracula's driving motivation for the entire part of the series he's in, AND we get to see him go from passionate rage and vengeance to dispassionate indifference, only focused on getting rid of the problem. It fundamentally BREAKS him as a person. Which is why it's so damn effective
Character: What is my purpose?
Author: You die to make another character feel bad.
C: Oh... my god.
Yeah, welcome to the club
Yay! Another one!
You deliver butter.
I know this trope is usually denounced as a sexist one because it usually happens to female characters, but I think it's also closely related to a cliche often found in films about cops or soldiers - the protagonist has this friend who is clearly set up to be happier than the protagonist (he's a week away from retiring, he just got engaged, he's going to be a dad soon, there's a lot of variants) and three minutes later he get his brains blown out and the protagonist is left to bemoan why it was the guy with so much to live for who got killed.
No, no, stop making sense or else we can't whine about women being most affected.
@@numberlan2336 or, hear me out, you can dislike both things...*at the same time!*
@UCrAqthNBzB9ce0wPffYRNhg if you don't care why are you getting angry in the comments section of a youtube video all about the trope?
@@GamerBurgerz I just elaborated why I dislike one of the things and not both, idk how you got anger from that, I also never said I didn't care but that I'm fine with what the trope is, so again that's a pretty weird response all things considered, though I did delete the comment you responded to so it's not that I don't agree that it was unnecessary.
This cliche sucks tho the wife / gf / whatever usually dies at the begining of a movie while the buddie usually dies a little bit later. You have to establish how pure and innocent he is before you kill him for a shock value. Meanwhile according to Hollywood women are pure and innocent by default so they don't need the basic character building
In practice woman usually dies to kick start plot while man dies to show how edgy the world is. In both cases it turns characters into props
That's why I propose "husband in fridge". Maybe gender bending will make the trope better. Ah, wait. Tragic gay death is also a cheap, overused trope
"It's a terrible day for rain."
"What do you mean? It's not raining."
"Yes, it is."
"Oh... so it is."
*cries*
What's this from?
@@marymohr2799 fullmetal alchemist: brotherhood
@@marymohr2799
Full Metal Alchemist, during the funeral of Maes Hughes
@@marymohr2799 full metal alchemist
The worst part is when the characters only get angry and sad about it when it’s convenient. Like, they’ll be totally fine for 4 episodes and then suddenly extremely angsty
Like when in the final battle they suddenly bring up that character or get a flashback with them and it’s like wait are we still supposed to care
“Well written character deaths…” *shows Lisa Tepes* her death was tragic not only for the family she left behind, but for the people she wanted to help. The fact that the charlatan healer was the one who accused her of witchcraft and that despite being on deaths doorstep she pleaded her husband to spare the people (which takes a huge degree of love and strength) proves that there is more to her character than “Dracula’s dead wife”.
And even when they take down Dracula, the big bad is torn at one point trying to fight them because killing his son would mean killing the last remnant of his wife :D
@@dianarojo-jewell4070 God that scene killed me, the way he refers to Adrian/Alucard as Lisa’s greatest gift to him and completely breaks down.
@@temporalbutterfly9186 Lisa Tepes has personality and interests, I hate how most of the dead wife or love interest trope they just give them no character beside loving the male characters .
There is more to her than Dracula's dead wife, but I would say this is instead one of the few well executed examples of Fridging, but her overall impact is entirely for the benefit of Dracula and Alucard's character motivations. She's a saint and we get a couple scenes with her being perfect, but we care because of what we see it doing to Dracula. I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just saying it is still a fridge
@@dianarojo-jewell4070 much as I absolutely despise how they handled the last season that scene still gets me
I feel like "Watsonian v. Doylist" deserves a Trope Talk in and of itself. A lot of younger people have never even heard those terms before.
Honestly I consider myself well-versed in writing and trope related things (for someone of my age/experience) and Ive barely heard of it
For the folks playing at home Watsonian is in-universe (a character in the world) / Doylist is out-of-universer (the author)
This concept has a lot of crossover with "The Thermian Argument", Folding Ideas had a great video on it.
Not a lot to say. It's the explanations from the point of view of a character in the story(Watson) or the author arranging the plot(Doyle).
myself included
Kyle Rayner's girlfriend may not be alive but more people know her trope than they know anything about Kyle.
Ironic
Do you remember the time his girlfriend became Green Lantern after she was dead?
The worst part is that people know aboot Hal "The man without a personality" Jordan.
We gotta name a new trope “green lantern syndrome”, because there’s so many of them at this point it’s impossible for a writer to give them all justice so someone’s favorite is getting shafted.
@KY5 [10th Main Account] turn yourself in to the police...
Here's a funny idea: Character finds their love interest in a fridge.
Hard cut to them arguing over the air conditioning being broken and resulting in the love interest sitting in the refrigerator to not incinerate.
Lets rewrite Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to Indi's fridge landing directly next to Marion and when it opens and he falls out, she goes "Oh my, haven't seen you in a long time Indi"
That basically happens in _Gurren Lagann._ The main character opens up a containment unit that looks somewhat like a fridge although I imagine is supposed to be a futuristic variant on a treasure chest, and finds the girl who eventually becomes his primary love interest.
At first, I was confused when you said Luke Skywalker's aunt and uncle* were fridged: they have to be real characters to be fridged, right?... and then I realized how that's pretty much *exactly* the point.
You mean his aunt and uncle? Cause his parents, well, that’s another story.
@@Jurgan6 . . . *smacks forehead*
yyyyeah I messed that up - thanks, going to fix that that real quick... pretty sure I was watching this to fall asleep and was thus only half awake when I commented, and was thinking of Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen as his *guardians*, not his parents
While I know that the handling of Gamora's death was probably bad writing, its incredibly cathartic for me to watch as someone who was abused as a child. It paints the picture of Thanos's love as inherently abusive. That he may love her, but to him love is about "improving" those you care about through incredible pain. He shows the same love for life at large, believing that culling half of it and thereby insuring resource security is a manifestation of that love. But that love is toxic, it torments Gamora her whole life, it eventually kills her. And that's what being an abused child feels like, being loved in a way that will kill you
I agree, I think thanos is one of the more interesting villains because of this. I dislike how she paints it as an attempt to add characterization to a “pure evil” villain when thanos wasn’t shown to be that. He was a twisted monster, but he never saw it. He was the hero of his own story. He wanted to do what he saw as saving the universe. His genuine love for Gamora only pushes forward how twisted he’s become.
Dude, I was having a good day. You didn't need to remind me that my life is inherently cursed.
I definitely feel like this angle on abuse and love was something interesting to explore, I definitely wouldn’t call it bad writing just because it didn’t follow the clear narrative tropes.
I think the issue is that that was ultimately a narrative potential, and not the actual story that was told. The story that was told was that he actually loved her in a way that wasn't painted as bad and that existed to make him a more human and sympathetic villain. He was not written as the abuser, but rather as the parent who is just trying to do their best--it was just written so badly that you ended up with the subtexts of abusive love that never get expanded upon or fulfilled. Had that been the intent and focus it would have been a much better story; however, viewing something as better because of unfulfilled narrative potential is a disservice to the story and yourself.
@@Kat-xy7fm how did you ever get that impression? His abusive relationship with his “children” is emphasized over and over again. He has sympathetic qualities as a person but when you boil it down marvel tells the story of a deeply traumatized man driven insane by tragedy who turns to single mindedly pursing power and genocide at any cost for the “greater good”. The subtext of absuive love, and that just having love and good intentions isnt enough to be a good person is written in bold in every scene related to the characters.
Maes hughs didn't just figure out the plot too early, he figured out the plot before anyone even knew they should be looking
Stuff like this is why I think Edward Elric doesn't feel like a Mary Sue. Yes, he's ridiculously smart, badass, and overcompetent, but he's among a whole host of characters who are also all of those things. He's not always the one solving the mystery, killing the bad guy, or saving the day. Maes Hughes being so fucking far ahead of everyone else, including our protagonists, is a great example of what I'm talking about
@@justanotheryoutubecommente2 and let's not forget mustang bringing himself back to life with nothing but spite, and killing lust with nothing but unadulterated hatred. In the same god damn scene
Hughes*
It will never not be too soon. RIP Hughes
@@Ladyoftheroundtable it was envy
2:07, in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Ginny calls out Harry for having reacted that way to what happened to her in the second book. She reminds Harry that (unlike him) she has actually been possessed by Voldemort before and Harry mentions that he (like the audience) had basically forgotten about that. So Ginny tells him “well, I didn’t”.
That was a good moment
@@steampocalypse2429 Agreed
Agreed but she actually says ''Lucky you"
@@Pandie2828 Oh. Good point. I misremembered
In some ways it is more impactful if a character DOESN'T die but has permanent consequences...that way there is a constant reminder.
11:42
That funeral scene was the one time in my adult life that a cartoon made me cry. I was a single father at the time and the way that they put so much screen time into showing how much he loved his daughter, before she was even born, had me identifying with him. At her reaction to him being buried, I couldn't contain myself. Cruel but beautiful writing.
“Did I mention that I absolutely love my kids, that I’m only 3 weeks from being able to retire? Maybe that my son was born with an unnatural hair color, and that I like to wear my hair in a braid over my right shoulder? Ooooh, and I really don’t think we should ever leave this wonderful, completely idyllic town that we live in with all the people just always getting along and being the literal best?”
*timer appears counting down*
Goku can move over, Deku's mom is 100% the most powerful anime character, she survived the mom death curse.
@@sayerglasgow115 yeah but what about his dad
@@alexmansfield3268 Also powerful, but the dad death curse definitely isn't as strong as the mom one. All Might surviving the mentor death curse is also impressive, but not that unusual. Though, Gran Tourino surviving a double mentor death curse is seriously impressive.
Still, the sheer power of the mom death curse is perhaps the greatest in all anime, so to survive it Inko Midoria must be monstrously powerful.
@@sayerglasgow115 True, but Gran Tourino wasn't the real mentor. All Might's real mentor definitely got death cursed.
An interesting case that hits a LOT of the beats, but still feels compelling is Inigo Montoya. His father never even APPEARS, but we hear Inigo's story and he is clearly so emotionally devastated, even years later, that we do feel the weight of this death. And because it's something that drives multiple character relationships, it is sewed into the whole narrative.
And shit, NOTHING hits emotionally quite like "I want my father back you son of a bitch".
But in a wikipedia synopsis version of the story, it might look like a fridging.
I think this has more to do with the fact that it is just a part of Inigo's backstory. If we were to have seen his father and then he was killed off a scene later, that would be a lot more of a fridge since that character was actually introduced. Not even introducing the character kind of minimizes the potential for fridging since they are more backstory than character.
That's a damn good point. It's definitely not fridging, but someone knowing only the plot beats of the story could definitely see it that way.
I think the biggest difference, based on Red's analysis, is that Inigo never forgets his father. It's fundamental to his life, he is still grieving and we feel that grief even as he might be playful in his fight with the Dread Pirate Roberts - the loss of his father permeates everything in his life.
If his dad were fridged, we'd get none of that sense of grief, certainly not for the entire movie. It's be more like "my dad died so now I fight bad guys, whatevs"
@@claremiller9979 yeah agreed, a Fridged inigo's father would have inspired him to become a duelist but now he fights because ooh shiny, Inigo fights to find the killer of his father one day and do some pain
I think the difference is that such grief is part of his character from the get go, and it is a crucial part of his arc. The dead father wasn't something that was just thrown in to give him a sad, nor it falls into the idea of his father being an unrealized character, because he's never a character of the story itself.
I think the big telltale of fridging that I wish was zeroed in a bit more, is that a fridged character is eminently, a disposable character, like the history can move along without them without aftershocks besides the initial shock of their death. It's a character that had a role in the story, but now they feel superfluous, or never really got enough development to secure their narrative spot. Sure, there are characters created to be fridged and those are their own type of bad writing, but they are hardly more than plot devices. But when a character's own potential is deemed worthless and they may serve more to give other characters a sad with their passing, that's the most egregious fridging for me.
Okay, now I want to see a story where a character actually gets motivated by the death of their sexy lamp
A Christmas Story
The whole of Alderaan was fridged so that Leia could ignore her own grief over watching the destruction of everything she had ever loved to help Luke mourn the mentor figure he knew for a handful of days. Don't @ me.
I’ve seen fanfiction that does Alderaan’s death better.
He knew Ben for longer that's why he recognized him after he was attacked by the sand people
@@GrosvnerMcaffrey He knew OF Ben, but it's made clear he didn't really have anything to do with him, and that Owen had warned him off interacting more.
I'm honestly surprised that no one's mentioned Heimdall. Like, he was important enough for Thor to refer to him as his best friend in Ragnarok, dies pretty unceremoniously, and then...never gets brought up again.
What an absolute waste of a great character, and Idris Elba in particular. The guy is too good and too sexy to be treated in this manner.
They're just not as progressive and diverse as they claim and incompetent writing.
@@njalsand133 Oh yeah, for sure. The new rash of live-action schlock had kinda conclusively proven that they're already creatively bankrupt.
@@newsystembad
Which is inexcusable since they have so much to work with. I could write 5 movies with the premises they've squandered, and theyd objectively suck but still treat the characters better. They seem to have actual no idea, which goes to show whoever the writers are just....shouldn't.
As I understood, didn't Idris Ebla ask to written out that way? He hated playing Heimdall. Maybe he forced the issue. And you make a point, there is very little time for the characters to deal with what is happening- until the movie is over, and we head to Endgame.
Did you watch the movie?
Thanos killed Heimdall and Thor said, "You'll die for that!" Later on when Thor lodged his axe on Thanos's chest, he said, "I told you, you die for that". Rocket also asks Thor of his best friend and he said, "Stabbed through the heart". That's not "never".
If anything, the Warriors 3 were ignored.
Shout out to all of those Fix-It Fanfics that created entire, completely Alternate Universes centered around those fridged characters finally getting justice.
Hear, hear!
If they care enough, they will often say "Fine, I'll do it myself!"
Raise a glass to the Fix-It Fics that not only do fridged characters justice but also to filling plotholes in ways that make sense, to exploring forgotten or more minor plot points, to rewriting arcs that actually follow thru and stay in character, and to fleshing out and breathing life into any and every background character both named and unnamed!
Let us raise our glasses to the hard working authors of such fics for feeding us some damn good food!
Read my mind lmao
Having a large ensemble cast( meaning more than 10 main characters and/or more than 10 secondary characters) means that the tertiary characters (aka the background characters, aka the ones who only exist to show that the town isn't populated by just 10 people) who are usually the target of this trope will not get much screen time to begin with
You know what would be cool, an anthology style show where every episode subverted a poor writing trope. The fridging episode could set up another character to be the main character, and then after his love interest dies off screen the perspective changes to her, and as a vengeful ghost she try’s to get back everything that fridging took away from her
There's sort of already existing tropes around that, the Revenge Fantasy Trope and the R@pe and Revenge Trope. When both of those tropes are used with female characters, it get annoying because it basically always shows a women getting stronger AFTER being almost killed/murdered/r@ped. As if a woman need to be physically assaulted and/or mentally abused before she can be considered a strong or badass character >:(
@@LeoDBW Why do y'all always twist things into the most negative outlook? The point is "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" not "you're only strong once you've been violated". Jesus Christ.
@@chicade4810 I'm sorry but I simply don't believe in that bullshit. You know most real victims do not automaticaly turns into strong persons once they've been assaulted or abused? Some were maybe already strong BEFORE, and some other actually have a hard time healing, and they feel guilty BECAUSE OF THOSE STUPID TROPES, because they think that they're not strong enough compared to the characters! Its also insulting to the victims who didn't make it out alive.
This is practically a plot point in American Gods
@@chicade4810 "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is also a very dumb perspective.
If I break your arms and legs and you somehow survive, you aren't going to be anywhere near as a strong as you once were.
(If you deflect away from this by claiming mental strength or some other bizarro coping mechanism to illustrate that YEAH ACTUALLY THEY DID GET STRONGER JUST IN A DIFFERENT WAY, I will laugh at you.)
with fma, all the character deaths mattered, even after the characters were dead. hughes showed up in flashbacks constantly, nina was probably one of the most traumatic things ed and al ever went through (like number two at the very least), and the rockbells are dead before the story even begins and we STILL see not just how deeply winry was affected by the loss of her parents and scar by what he'd done, we also get to see some of who they were as people.
even the villains' deaths matter - hell, kimblee has one of my favorite deaths pretty much ever.
The way I test if a character is being fridged is: "Does this death haunt the surviving characters beyond motivating them in the moment?" If a character still thinks of them and could be described as being haunted by that death, then it's not fridging. Ben Parker's death isn't fridging (usually) because his death is still a big part of Peter's heart.
This is a good rule addition. I'm adding it to my trope manual.
Totally agree!!👍
Thank you. I was just wondering if his Uncle Ben counted as a fridge and hoping it didn’t, because what he says when he’s dying becomes Peter’s driving philosophy, which isn’t the same as getting revenge. Next time, you’re there for a purpose to help people.
It is also his call to adventure. People think it is Peter being bitten by the spider, but for a while he refuses to use his new given abilities other than himself.
I have been wondering about this in regards to a backstory to one of my characters (not the main protagonist but a side main character).
Some time before the main story, the character, a former swordsman, once had a girlfriend and the two were held at daggerpoint by a thief. The swordsman thinks he could take on the thief and not have his girlfriend give the money, even though she insists against risking himself. Unfortunately, the swordsman nearly gets himself killed and his girlfriend pushes him out of the way and gets stabbed instead. The swordsman is devastated by her loss and his reckless action. he doesn't get revenge on the thief as the latter disappeared. He forsakes his sword and becomes quiet. He found friendship with the main protagonists who try to help him get through in life. At first, he does not reveal his troubled past. Only later in the story he does and he has to come to terms with it.
I have been pondering whether or not if this backstory counts as fridging or is an acceptable character death. I am not exactly sure.
"Your eyes so much like your mother's... I think. She didn't get much screening." I just died, love these trope discussions and breakdowns! Plz keep it up!
When the hero's parents where dating his father was like: "I've forgotten if they're green or they're blue...Your eyes are the sweetest I've ever seen."
Can you explain Inigo Montoya? Is it our personal attachment to that character that makes us almost feel his father's death, even though we don't see it (or only see his father for a few moments before he dies), or is it that he just repeats his line so much, we just want him to succeed?
Everything you explain in this video makes it seem like we shouldn't care so much, but when he finally meets that murderer, that line just gives you chills.
Personally, I'd say that it's because the narrative very clearly makes it clear that Inigo cares about his father, *after* having set Inigo up as a basically honorable man and therefore likable. First we're shown that Inigo is likable, honorable, and kind when he can manage it, and we start rooting for him to get away from Vizzini and find a better situation. And *then* we're shown the grief and the rage that's carried him this far and that has shaped his *entire life* up to this point, and continue to see it woven into every choice he makes in the movie from then on.
From there, because we'd been primed to root for Inigo, we've become invested in his revenge quest, because we were properly sold on why we should be rooting for him to get it. The constant reminders of Inigo's loss and how it affected him reinforces our investment in his quest, and the occasional reminders that he is a fundamentally loyal and kind man reinforce that we care about him enough that we want him to succeed.
In short, we didn't need to know Inigo's father very well, we just needed to know that he *mattered*, and from the moment Inigo started telling his story, it became very clear that he *did* matter very intensely. His death was given the weight it needed for the audience to care about it, and so his death was not a fridging. -Eleanora
This is very much colored by my knowledge of the book, but I think what works is that Rugen basically killed him to get out of paying for a sword. The in-universe characters have the same "wtf" moment the audience does with the sudden death, and then the grief goes on to be the spark that drives a character who is a bucket of revenge plot with a shiny sword (affectionate).
The far-reaching ramifications of Domingo's death take away a lot of the fridging element, and the remaining elements being recognized in-story absolves the rest, in my opinion.
The whole ‘sacrificing someone you love’ thing kinda reminds me of Once Upon a Time. The main spell used in the series involved giving up the heart of the one person you love the most. The main villain brought her dead father back to life just so she could use his heart for the spell! (Or something like that it’s been awhile since I’ve watched the series)
Well, you’re half right, she DID kill her father but at that point in the story bringing someone back from the dead was something magic explicitly couldn’t do. (Something later seasons kinda retconned but the point remains). She did, however, went out of her way to rescue him from her mother in Wonderland, screwing over the Mad Hatter in the process
Ah yes, Fridging, the worst use of a Fridge after Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull
i mean, that fridge did save him, and it upset the villains of the movie (idk, didn't watch it)
...was Indiana Jones "reverse-fridged"?
Do you have any idea who is replying to your comment right now? It's the FUNNIEST MAN ALIVE! Me funny (!!!) vids are so extremely funny, if you don't cry tears of laughter, you are allowed to thumb down me XTREMELY FUNNY vids! Do you think me funny (!!!) vids are funny, dear shu
I'd it wasn't the worst one. That fridge was just one dumb moment. It didn't actively remove narrative potential from the series.
Whaddya mean? Of course fridges are effective against atomic blasts! It works as well as duck and cover (sarcasm)
@@Healermain15 The fridge has apparently held up to scientific scrutiny.
Can we stop treating Crystal Skull like it's as bad as Temple of Doom?
The interesting thing about Barbara Gordon's case is that while the original reason for her being paralyzed was definitely to motivate a male character, her agency and place in the narrative didn't stop when she was "fridged". Barbara dealing with her new disability and finding a new way to help people as Oracle became a large part of her character and, as some would argue, resulted in some of the best development and characterization she has ever gotten, to the point that some fans prefer her as Oracle to her as Batgirl.
This is one reason why I think the idea of Fridging is weird. Just because a character doesn't get focused on in one story after something happens to them, doesn't mean they can't be the focus of their own story later on.
@@Andrewtr6 A lot of fridging kills the characters, so they can’t really be a focus later since most stories don’t have a resurrection mechanic.
@@LemonMoon Like with Gamora. Now she has to live in an unfamiliar world with everyone else remembering a different version of her. It hasn't been focused on yet, but it will be.
@@LemonMoon This discussion interest me a lot because I watched this video became I was scared I accidentally made a fridging plot in my own story, so you tell me. In my story, near the end of what I call the first generation, a character is lost in an apocalypse by falling into the earth. You spend a lot of time with this character throughout the series as they are essentially a main character. In fact, they one of the first characters you meet, and has a lot of time devoted to her characterization and motivation. The other character, who is their love interest grieves for an undisclosed amount of time, and defeats the villain by the end of the arc as per the other character's wish. As everything seems to back to normal, the second protagonist realizes that the other didn't come back, and is completely overtaken by grief. To the point that they do everything they can to find the other, which they don't, and later die themselves, asking for his son to find her if she is not "up there" with him. It's revealed later during what I call the second generation, that she is alive, and had been it what was essentially stasis for her, and now you see her grief and sorrow when she realizes that her husband died, trying his damn hardest to find her. I was scared that having her "die" in that moment could be considered that. Opinions?
@@alvarogarcia4735 No. Fridging is killing a character just to motivate another character, but not really lingering on how their death effects everyone for more than a scene or two. You’re plot sounds like the opposite of that
Sometimes I actually really like the off screen dismissive death scenes that many people consider bad writing. Sure, sometimes it's just cheap and quick and not caring about that character at all. But sometimes that particular dry and cold death can really fit the mood and emphasize a senseless tragedy, especially if it happens pretty suddenly. But in most cases that's not the case.
One of the biggest examples of fridging is Barbara Gordon in The Killing Joke. This is her most pivotal story ever and it's a Batman/Joker story. She only gets harmed because the Joker tries to prove that it takes one bad day to become like him. And he uses Jim as proof. He doesn't harm Barbara because he knows she's Batgirl, or because she did anything to personally spite him. He did it to hurt Gordon and Bruce. The movie made it even worse when they attempted to "flesh out" her character.... by making her have sex with Bruce (one of her fathers best friends). Why do women in media primarily exist to have sex with men, or be harmed to further a man's character development (usually they're harmed BY MEN)?
because unfortunately a recurring fault of male-protagonist stories is how female characters are reserved to emotional support roles, same reason why outside of father figures, male characters often don't fill that role. Women are seen as "pure" and "innocent", so as to make a male villain even more evil by daring to harm one.
As a lover of Barbara, I think you're overlooking some things, as there's a bit more to her being paralyzed than just the effect it has on Gordon and Bruce. That is the primary reason behind Joker doing it yes, but Barb has probably fought Joker in that universe before, so it's also him getting revenge on her and her worst nightmare come true (as she states she was scared of him as a kid to Gordon just before she opens the door). As well, this is where her origin story as Oracle comes from. Unable to walk or fight, Barb decides to continue to help Bruce by being his tech girl who relays him info and such while he's out on the job. (Works great in the Arkham games!) The event does a lot for her personally.
But you are right about the sex part. I hate the animated movie lol. That bit never happened in the original comic. Bruce and Babs--while a few comics have tried to suggest they've had romantic history--usually come across as more father/daughter or student/mentor, and I'm glad 90% of Batman fans prefer them that way too. I'm totally fine with the idea of her idolizing and one-sidedly crushing on him, like a daydreaming kid might with an adult, but Bruce is much too responsible (and joyless) to ever allow himself to do such a thing with her. Barb may be a little brash and sassy, but I think she has more self-awareness and self-control than the movie made her out to be.
That over-reaching "edgy maturity" was a trip wasn't it. At least the voice acting was good lol.
Jason todd
Probably because you don't know how to find a good story?
@@jadenjerries2094 Would fridging be any better killing off male characters for female development?
The Killing Joke example also shows how it can be fixed. Because Kim Yale and John Ostrander then took that bad writing and turned it into one of the most empowering stories in superhero comics with the birth of Oracle
@@Niop_Tres It’s way too common in DC and Marvel comics, like often times the definitive writer of a series is ironically not the creator
@@Niop_Tres The issue nowadays is that the reverse is now true: new writer swoops in and screws up a good story that somebody else was working on.
@@patrickfrost9405 Funny how Alan Moore's work is always a good example, eh?
@@driveasandwich6734 Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow wrapped up the entire bronze age of Superman stories and is the definite case example of how to end a series. Saga of the Swamp Thing kicked off the second era of horror comics when Moore was tasked with saving the wretched series. I get that the Killing Joke was really bad, but there's a reason his name can be found in the same sentences as Jack Kirby and Stan Lee.
@@samuelhain2160 Oh, I definitely did not attempt to imply anything negative about Moore when I suggested his works embodies comics as a whole.
I actually really like Killing Joke.
You gave a good litmus test at the end.
“If a main (or fan-favourite) character were killed off in the same manner, would people riot?”
Could you give me some examples of characters not rioting for?
@@zyanbob did anyone riot, or even really cared, when after more than a decade of canon one of the founding avengers was killed in exchange for a mcguffing and was never mentioned again 5 minutes after?
imagine that death happening the same way to any other avenger apart from the two boring ones. imagine it with steve or peter.
people would go apeshit.
Hasbro sure learned that shit the hard way after Transformers: the Movie.
That's just it though, both Gamora and Widow WERE main characters. Gamora was 100% a main in the GotG movies. Widow was supposed to be a main, but ended up getting a combination of fumbled and shoved to the side for other heros. The Black Widow solo movie has been requested by fans for YEARS, since pre-Winter Soilder days, but the MCU kept ignoring it.
I blame what happened to Widow, Gamora, Loki, and Vision in the Infinity War saga on the Russos having their heads so far up Steve Rogers' ass that they can confirm his dental records. They backburnered any character that wasn't him or related in anyway to his whole "tragic romance" to Peggy. Which they fulfilled by proceeding to bend space-time over a pipe despite the MASSIVE consequences, instead of letting Rogers do the actual HEALTHY thing and MOVE ON with his damn life, the way Peggy herself actually did.
It reminds me of the case of The Last of Us 2, where Joel was killed for the sake of advancing the plot and the character development of Abby and Ellie, and people absolutely rioted because of it (and by that I mean got really mad and made sure everyone on the internet knew about how mad it made them).
My biggest issue with the gamora situation is that instead of taking the time to see how her death impacts the full team, how they continue on without her.... There's now just a time displaced version of her, except she's missing 5 years of experiences with the guardians, and now the focus is about finding new Gamora. I'm really feel hesitant that in Guardians 3, Peter will be chasing after her like "I love you" even though this isnt the Gamora he knew, and he'd essentially end up replacing the Gamora who loved him with someone he has no history with but who looks exactly like Gamora.
Spoilers from the future:
He does pine after her but thankfully they don't get back together.
Spoiler:
Peter's main character arc in gotg vol 3 is for him to move on from Gamora and let her alternate self be happy with her new family
To be fair, GotG3 actually handles it really well. The movie really hammers home that New Gamora is not and never will be a replacement for Prime Gamora, but interacting with her helps Peter process through his grief and find the closure he needs to finally move on.
This was recommended to me in May 2023.
For the future viewers, Nick Lowe and Zeb Wells just fridged Kamala Khan in Amazing Spider-Man #26.
CZcams recommendations have some sick algorithm
*shaking my fist* Zeb Wells! How dare you create Paul and break up MJ and Peter and do all that other terrible writing!
Trope talk suggestion for you; "The noodle incident" or just "The Incident" is a literary tool that gives more literary weight to an event or mcguffin than a description would, mostly by context and the reader's imagination.
Named because of a short series of Calvin and Hobbes comics wherein everyone at school gives the eternally frustrated 6-year-old grief about something he did in the past that is now known only as "The noodle incident." It is hinted at vaguely many times, but the writer ultimately leaves it up to your imagination; which is a strength because whatever the audience dreams up will be way more literarily impactful (in this case funny) than anything he could write down. And that's not even the only time that comic uses a noodle incident, see, there's this kids book calvin always wants read called "Hampster Hewwy and the Gooey Kablooey" and Now I'm ranting.
Another instance this trope is used is in an S.C.P. story wherein a certain slime MUST NEVER come into contact with a human corpse. Why? That's classified. A foundation researcher files the suggestion to test the slime on a human corpse because it's never listed what happens, only that it is a V E R Y bad idea, and the researcher is curious. He gets demoted and heavily scolded by an O-5, who states "Just don't."
A "Noodle Incident" is a rare trope that involves telling the audience that something exists or happened, but not telling them what it was, in order to give the plot point more narrative weight than a description would give it, partly because of the imaginations of the audience. It is a great trope that I think you should cover.
DBZA's Jockstrap Incident
The author of that SCP even called it a noodle incident (what happens when it comes into contact with dead bodies).
YES! COVER IT!
@@iron_Will yeah.
The Rocky Port Incident
Imagine a fridging where the character is motivated because the villain broke their fridge
I can totally see internet meme Skeletor doing that to He-Man.
You've just summoned the dream smp fanfic writers
I mean this is Kirby in a nutshell. Went on a whole damn adventure because of some cake he didn't get to eat.
@@kaboomgaming4255 I know I’ve seen at least one crack fic like this.
Sounds like a follow-up plot to The Big Lebowski.
Yeah, Maes Hughes death was a hard hit to everyone who knew him and his family. You see the genuine grief Ed & Al suffer because Hughes become an unintentional father figure for them, and the pinnacle of this grief for Roy was when he unleashed hellish fury on Envy to the point where he nearly killed the immortal shapeshifter and had him begging for mercy. Hughes was essentially the group Dad and heart of the team. Unfortunately the kill a loved one of the main characters doesn’t always work well as the sole fuel to drive the story.
You can die for a plot point and not be fridged, but if you live to die for a plot point, you were probably fridged.
"Characters aren't real people" That's probably the most unintentional hot take of the whole video even though it shouldn't be
Is it really a hot take?
As a writer, I always thought that’s what everyone was thinking.
However, the reactions to those characters are, and the writer’s motives are as well.
i've seen alot of people get unhealthily attached to characters and holy shit you would think this shit was happening to a real person with how some of these people....coped
@@thefvguy5648 Yes. Some people start to feel way too strongly about a character
I have never understood why people get worked up about "fridging". Most characters in stories are only there to move the protagonist along in the story the author is trying to tell. That the death of the character/s is unceremonious or offscreen is more about hiding the action from the protagonist (whose eyes we usually see through) so that the reveal has narrative weight and potentially shock value. No one complains about the (perhaps) millions of people loyal to the the Empire who were vaporized in several different suspicious Death Star explosions. The deaths of each individual in those space stations was not carefully viewed through their eyes, we only see dust pushed rapidly in all directions by a massive pressure wave. Why? Because they were a fucking plot point and aren't real, just like our protagonist! Some people really like George R. R. Martin and all the intricate stories he tells about so many varied different characters. I did too until I realized most of the people I was reading about were going to die and not really affect the arc of the story too much. Maybe someone exists who wants to read about the lives of everyone on Scarif before it got nuked and there might even be some beautiful stories in there, but almost everyone there was a plot point, even the protagonists. Yes, we had invested time in getting to know them so it felt right that we see their noble ends play out, but to Kyle's girlfriend in the fridge, we hardly knew ye and that doesn't make us or the writers bad people for using imaginary people as plot points in other imaginary people' stories.
I think I read once that the fridging litmus test is "if they were the protagonist, would this death feel earned?" And I'm so glad you acknowledged that.
final destination 2 was an example of fridging the male equivalent what happened to alex in between the movies.
@@willhuey4462 To be fair to that particular fridging (I agree it was, but there's actually a reason behind the scenes) they couldn't get the actor back due to Legal issues. I believe he was either suing them or trying to for something to do with the first movie. Because of that, they had to write him out of the story and they were clearly feeling kind of petty. I'm not saying that makes it all better, I hate that death too, it's just that there Was a reason outside of, "What can we do to impact the story?"
I mean, are the millions of deaths that happened when the Death Star destroyed Alderaan fridging because they were off-screen? A movie doesn't have time to focus on every single character, there is a difference between killing one in a way without focus and in a mean-spirited way.
That's just a stupid way to go about it. A protagonist's death is always without question the most heavy a death could be, because the protagonist is the character the audience is following. A protagonist dying means that either the story is over, or there's going to be a new protagonist. And changing protagonists is always a huge goddamn deal. No matter how main a main character is they can't compare to the weight of the death of the protagonist. There's a large and insurmountable difference between the two.
That honestly sounds ridiculous. It would be impractical as hell to characterize and develop literally every single side character to the level of the protagonist. It's like watching the news of how someone was killed from an accident and thinking about how you don't feel as sad as when your parents died, and blame the universe for bad writing in your life.
This might be just me fangirling but I think it’s so awesome when writers like alan moore can look back at previous mistakes and admit them as such
I also heard that Sylvester Stallone said that in retrospect, it might have not been a good idea to kill off Apollo Creed in Rocky 4.
Funny that the trope is called fridging and yet not named after the greatest fridged character, Nora Fries, who is actually refrigerated
That’s because Nora Fries wasn’t fridged. Dr. Fries’s sole motivation is curing her terminal illness. She is vitally important to their story and is treated as such.
@@katherineperry6380I mean, one could argue that Nora is less of a character and more of a plot point for Dr freeze, but that's an entirely different discussion
People in these comments seem to be forgetting that a character we barely know can die suddenly as a narrative reason to motivate a character and still not be considered fridging IF the motivated character doesn't act like they forgot that person died 5 mins later. Seeing death, even of strangers, is incredibly emotionally impactful or traumatic for the average individual. The character writing needs to reflect that if they've suffered any kind of loss.
Fridging is killing off a character for the sole purpose of motivating another character. The time and effort the author puts into the emotional aftermath of the said character have no bearing on whether that character was fridged or not. Ironically having the character feel nothing at all for the dead character makes the dead character not fridged as the other character isn't motivated by the act of that person dying.
Nice Kyoka Jiro cosplay, btw ^-^.
invincible is good at not doing this i think
Perhaps the audience gets to retroactively know the character as the story progresses. The more we see the memories of them from the main character's perspective the more the audience feels they were genuinely important. More so if the story touches on other people the deceased character had interacted with during their life while the main character journeys onward. We keep getting reminded that it was a good and heroic person that was killed. We meet people who were educated in a school they founded or taught at. Or a spend a night with a mountain shepherd who would have lost their best stock if the deceased character hadn't helped hoist them out of a crevasse decades ago, and now an extended family is supported with the dividends of that perilous effort. Stories that even the main character wouldn't have heard about, and each time it is another twist of the knife. Through this method the audience would get to know and feel for a character that technically only had about 5 minutes of screen/page time.
So uncle Ben? He's killed off to motivate Spiderman but his impact is felt constantly throughout all of Spidermans stories
“100% guaranteed to not do horrible things to your supporting character” No no no, that’s the writer’s job
I'm wondering your thoughts about Arcane and that one scene. [SPOILERS]
[SPOILERS]
Regarding Arcane, with Viktor. Episode 5 is when we have a character, Sky, a character who has a love interest in Viktor but that Viktor doesn't reciprocate. Prior to that she has a brief appearance in Episode 4, but doesn't say anything; just gives Viktor an admiring look.
However, come Episode 8, she dies due to Viktor's meddling with magic, trying to save Viktor from what appeared to be a self-inflicted situation where he's trying to evolve his own body without Shimmer via the Hexcore in desperation.
Many people hopped in and called this fridging. While I can 100% see that being the case, I was curious about it after watching your video, and wanted to hear your thoughts on it. You define fridging as a character whom is killed by a villain unceremoniously, and sometimes off-screen, for the protagonist to feel bad. But...
A) Viktor is the one that kills Sky, not a villain.
B) Viktor is visibly traumatized by this death, holding that guilt over him over several scenes, and even prepared to commit suicide over this action, only stopped by his friend. Sky gets somewhat of a funeral scene even, as Viktor tries to keep her death a secret but gives her some amount of respect by spreading her ashes at his favorite hideout spot.
C) Its seemingly done on purpose; Viktor as a character thought that he was only worth what he contributed, and that nobody would care about himself. Sky is the direct antithesis to that, which he tragically did not foresee until he dug too far into science, which results in Sky dying by his own foolishness. Viktor is the character we follow, and we as the audience are just as dethatched from Sky as Viktor is, until her sudden death by Viktor's own hand.
While yes, Sky does die for the plot and to motivate Viktor, it's not done unceremoniously. In fact, there's entire scenes leading up to the finale where Viktor is broken over the death and is even prepared to annihilate his own arc via suicide to 'give Sky her due' so to speak. Would you consider this fridging?
I would say it is not fridging, because it completely changes the trajectory Victor's character arc is going on. It's not a he's sad for this week's episode and maybe a mention here or there, he breaks out of his tunnel vision focus on curing himself with magitek to try to destroy what he has created, and when he can't (because of magic?) He asks his best friend, the only other character he trusts, to do it for him. It impacts him for the rest of the season.
I always love when opening a trope talk, Red describes something and then goes “This isn’t that”
I used to call this"the Krillin effect" when I was watching Dragon Ball: the fastest way for a villain to show they are really serious is to kill Krillin violently in front of Goku. Instant motivation
the first one didnt kill him in front of Goku, of course it didn't change the fact that Goku killed him with an unusual coldness, Freeza was lucky that Goku spared him, those were the two instances were Goku was really mad
@@devforfun5618 But Krillin got killed a lot and always to make Goku or the current "real fighter" motivated to defeat the villain. I remember that Goku turns into SSJ for the first time when Freeza kills Krillin
Well the fact that Dragon Ball has ready access to resurrection does smooth things over. Not only that, but Krillin has more personality and more overall plot importance than most fridged characters. He has an arc. Plus what you're describing only really happens twice. Krillin dies a third time but that's when pretty much everyone dies because EVERYTHING is going to crap right then.
@@FranciscoAreasGuimaraes Krillin dies three times. Once to Tambourine, once to Frieza, and once to Buu. The first two do serve as motivation for Goku, but in the third instance everyone else is dead, too, so Goku has a whole pile of dead friends and relatives to avenge.
In the manga Krillin only dies twice
I find the soul stone take quite interesting. I've always read the soul stone test as more of a test of will than a test of morality. The test was to ensure the wielder of the stone had the will necessary to use the stone to its potential, rather than a test to ensure the wielder was morally good. I mean, it chose the RED SKULL as its guardian. I quite enjoyed it as a sort of demonstration of the near total amorality of the stones, and the importance allocated to the soul stone was because it acted as the test for the stones as a whole- each stone can be used by anyone with the strength, while the stones together can only be wielded by someone with the will to go the whole way.
I don’t actually disagree with that…I just really hate the way the deaths were handled, and the way none of the other stones required such harsh actions to get them
The test itself is still contrived regardless. It could be anything; the only reason it has to be this is to give everyone else even more survivor's guilt for the next hour, and to reset Gamora for no fucking reason, apparently.
The morality angle is irrelevant; an indifferent universe is a far more believable universe. But the test itself undermines any intent to portray the stones as amoral and indifferent when it's so specifically designed to give viewers emotional gut punches.
@@emblemblade9245 agreed, i feel like it would have fit much better if each stone had it's own test/trial to be able to wield them. they don't have to be as extreme as the soul stone's, but i think it would have made the "soul for a soul" work better and not feel as out of place.
I feel like it really plays into Red's 'tipping the author's hand' point. Because regardless of the stones' standards, it's pretty obvious that the authors wrote that scene for shock value. For a lot of people (myself included) the writer's influence was so obvious that trying to parse the in-universe reasoning for it feels like dodging the question
the issue to me is, who set up the test? because be it the stone or some entity, they were clearly evil, a hero would set up a saftey feature of 'You must kill that which you love' Test 1)have something not you that is loved by you, 2)when they say No not even for power would i break my heart - they turn to leave,,,,,, Congratulations, test passed, have power of the soul stone because you stayed true to your heart not power,,,,, but love something but kill it thats a lock set by a sadistic entity that dosnt want complete narcissists getting the stone 'no loved thing, no stone' but at the same time wants you to cut your heart out to get the stone
Every trope talk I see brings me close and closer to writing a half-thesis half-novel about every trope in existence.
I think The Boys did a good job of avoiding this by having Hughie mention Robin every now and then and getting an apology out of A-Train 3 seasons later.
I always hated how much longer and deeply Luke mourns the death of a guy he barely knew than the people who literally raised him !
It's done a lot better in the Radio Drama. Luke brings them up more than once to both Ben and Leia before finally snapping about how much he's lost because of the empire yelling "Vader Murdered my Aunt and Uncle!"
Ben's death was less about implying that he was more important to Luke than his family and more about how his death was the straw that broke the camel's back for Luke after he went though a rapid succession of tragic and scary events.
Maybe Obi Wan was manipulating his emotions to keep Luke from being even more useless than he already was.
Yeah but they didn't let him go to Tachi Station to pick up those power converters!
AtomicBananaPress unforgivable im glad they’re dead
At least they got more than his childhood best friend who got maybe a second of Luke looking sad
I don't know why but I immediately found the word "Fridging" very funny.
And then you started saying "Fridgee" and this was already beyond perfect
My first thought was Fridge Horror. Too bad it’s not that
I love the term "Fridge-e" because it sound like that person is becoming a fridge though someone else's act.
Like, yes they get stuffed in fridges, but my brain just goes "They are now Fridge-man/Fridge-woman/The Human Fridge!"
@KY5 [10th Main Account] sir, no
It's interesting that you mention Coulson because what you say about speedrunning his emotional arc is kinda true, it was enough for him to become a fan favorite and people to actually demand for him to get a bigger story.
Occasionally, some writers 'intentionally' kill rather important characters without a fanfare, often even offscreen, to empathize the feeling of emptiness and futility, or to make the audience experience through the 'denial phase'. On other cases, director Tomino Yoshiyuki, most known for Gundam series, is very infamous for brutalizing and slaughtering major characters without fanfare. He mostly does it to empathize the harsh reality of war, where people don't really die dramatically like movies or anime, but are rather cut down like grass.
One of the Deadpool books actually had a spin on fridging. Nobody was actually dead, but it *did* characterize one of the antagonists as obsessive.
Somewhat related, a recent Ryan Reynolds promo for Free Guy has Deadpool explain how awful fridging is, then proceed to say “in other words, Deadpool 2.”
@@Booksds That... actually makes sense.
Yeah, Deadpool 2 was literally the first movie I thought of when her criteria came up
Wich one?
@@Booksds they also call out Vanessa's fridging in the Deadpool Christmas special. It was the only version of Deadpool 2 that I saw so I didn't think much of it. If I had seen the official version I might've been pissed.
I just realized that the whole plot of Frankenstein is basically the monster trying to fridge characters, while Frankenstein is too self centered for it to work
Are you referring to the monster or the scientist himself?
@@brandonlyon730 I mean the scientist. The monster kept killing the people in the scientist's life and the whole time the scientist was focused on himself.
Victor Frankenstein's self-centeredness and unreliable narrator tendencies make it so frustrating to read certain parts of it. Many of the other characters(even interesting ones) after they die are only talked about in how their deaths affected Victor.(Stop reading here if you don't want spoilers)
When Victor dies the creature complains about how the awful things he did and deaths he caused hurt HIM and one of the things he says is interestingly almost exactly the same thing Victor said after Justine was executed for a crime she didn't commit, even though he could quite probably have proved her innocent if he told the truth, instead of prioritizing his not looking crazy over her LIFE. This is one of the things Victor and his creation have in common. They are both VERY self-centered in how they view the consequences of their actions.
@@brandonlyon730 Frankenstein is not the name of the creature.
The Fridging stems from
A. That as you said the creature IS killing them just to make Victor sad and upset
B. This is transcribed by Walton who hasn't met the rest of these characters and only knows them from Victor's stories of them.
C. That Victor would have mostly only thought of their deaths in how they affected him anyway because that's in character for him.
Frankstein is simply unreliable narrator telling about unreliable narrator telling about unreliable narrator.
Wait- Just realized that Demon Slyare could technically be considered a fridging because none of the mc’s family (exept his sister, sort of) have any personality or care put into them
Maybe not? They appear sometimes and are pretty important to the goal of the MC.
To put it in a more humorous way, I don't expect my pokemon cards to empower me with love to kill a demon. (From that one episode with family and stuff)
Nope, Tanjiro thinks of his family quite a lot and suffering from survivor's guilt is a pretty big part of his character. There's like the entire dream sequence in Mugen Train. Demon Slayer is actually really good at handling character deaths, especially when they could just be used as generic backstory.
Like Shinobu's sister dying causes her to fundamentally change her own personality in an attempt to emulate her sister, but fundamentally fails at it *because* her sister is dead. She wants to take up her sisters noble cause of wanting to befriend and redeem demons, but can't actually do it in practice *because* her sister was killed by a demon and that disconnect causes her immense turmoil.
Rengoku's death affects literally every character in the story, just an arc later Uzui laments he can't be like Rengoku and save everyone and as mentioned by Obanai later in that arc, it's a huge blow to the Corp as they're down one of their strongest. It motivates the main trio to get stronger and gives Tanjito this really bleak reality check by showing even someone who's really strong can still die.
@@arcanedoughnut2016 But are the parents their own characters?
@@thenotsoamazinggracetnsag3463 Yes, if you're paying attention
They're not like really deep characters but they are definitely characters.
This video helped me realize just exactly why Maria Robotnik’s death never felt like fridging, even though she is literally introduced into the series through her own death in Shadow’s backstory.
I mean... She is a little fridged. Not like entirely, but she does mostly serve as a motivation for Shadow. There is a whole problem with the Sonic franchise and the girl characters being either less relevant, sacrificed, used as motivation for the male characters, and so on. Of course there are differences between all the various media, the games, the comics, the cartoons and movies, but that is a real issue.
What made you feel that way?
Now I wanna see a story where the fridged character actually is a binder of Pokémon cards, and the character you’d expect to get fridged actually sticks around as a supporting character.
And the supporting character mourns the loss of the pokemon cards!
You want Odd Taxi.
It's just one of an ensemble, and it's his gotcha app game that's destroyed; but is similar.
Damn I can feel the loss. I saw the movie before my inner eye. A heartwarming tale of revenge porn, the prequel to John Wick.
For all who haven't notice: The firdged John Wick's dog
"People-shaped plot devices." Funniest way to express the problem.
2:39 That feels different after Reading the JJK manga
SAO Abridged actually handles this kind of beautifully. In the original series there's a character in what's basically a filler episode who gets super fridged. I don't think she's ever mentioned again, but i stopped after season one so i wouldn't know.
In the abridged series her death has a very serious effect on the MC and visibly haunts him going forward, ultimately driving him to actually become a better person. Maybe not the best possible example, but compared to the source material it's leagues ahead.
SAO abridged usually used it for gags but yeah it did actually have a lasting narrative impact compared to SAO original’s whole party introduction and subsequent fridging right after meeting them
Give me a personality trait of any of the dudes from that party? Hell give me a personality trait of the women outside of soft and quiet?
Okay maybe the women one was unfair since giving a personality to any of the women in the show outside the vague tropes they embody is impossible, SAO is really just a cardboard cutout surrounded by doting cardboard cutouts with heart eyes one of which carrying an insect plotline
An interesting use/subversion of this trope is in Alfred Hitchcock's "Rope." The 'fridged' victim is killed at the very beginning of the movie, and while the rest of the movie is about the killers and their former teacher who is slowly figuring out what they did, the absence of the victim is played up more and more as the movie goes on, too, and even in the ending credits the characters are listed by their relationship to the victim.
Hitchcock really was a master of the craft
A post-mortem character arc does sound pretty interesting tbh.
I think the real issue with fridging is when the characters/author forget about the fridged character after a certain point. It's one thing to sacrifice a minor character for emotional impact. It's another thing to do it and then FAIL TO REMAIN INTERESTED IN THE EMOTIONAL IMPACT.
I mean, I wouldn't consider the subject of any murder mystery as 'fridged'. It isn't offing a character for cheap motivation points; it's the point around which the whole story revolves.
The actual best antidote to fridging IMO is the lean harder into the unceremonious and random nature of the death. You mostly see this in war stories, where a character just eats it from a stray random bullet, but it can work in other genre if you build to accommodate it similarly. Example: Fairly early into The Things They Carried, a member of the main character's squad gets murked out of nowhere, leading to a protracted section of the squad reacting. The squad leader starts ratcheting up the discipline, taking his failure to protect a man personally. One of the other squadmates is just taken in by how the guy just hit the dirt like unmanned flesh in the shape of a puppet. The main viewpoint character has no idea how to even respond to the situation.
Make it an overt thing that now this character's noun class has gone from person to thing, that they'll never get the chance to fulfill their hopes and dreams, and leave them with a pile of unresolved baggage other characters will need to resolve. Make the death actually bother the cast more than just in the moment, make them have nightmares of just becoming an object, a corpse. And don't just kill girlfriends to make the real boy sad for two and a half seconds. Death is a real occupational hazard for the kinds of nonsense heroes conventionally get up to, and it should be something they have to grapple with philosophically and practically.
I think that depends on how empty feeling you want the story to feel.
If it's high energy, it doesn't work good to lean into the pointlessness of the death.
God, you're reminding why I loved that book so much. One of the best postmodern works imo. The imagery of how the corpses would pile up and just be a part of the many things they carried was brilliant. Kiowa's and Curt's deaths got me the most.
Take it from John Wick's Dog.
It's *merc-ed
I think I do agree with most of this. It's always more interesting to have characters be affected by a death beyond "it is sad". There's usually potential to make someone reevaluate morals, realize they have to step up, etc. ... but how is this exact thing not applicable to Gamora or Natasha? The Avengers are more adamant than ever to make sure Nat's death is not for nothing, and she is brought up by Wanda and Clint at the funeral, even if it's for Tony. Meanwhile, Quill forgets the repercussions of messing up the plan, because his connection to Gamora is greater. He is not a level-headed character. He'd rather get in some punches on someone who's wronged him and someone he loves, than look at a big picture. And Quill doesn't live long *after* learning of Gamora's death, but everything in the Guardians' other movies suggests that Gamora would not just be forgotten by Quill or the others.
@@kylefrank638 it doesn’t really apply because the tone of the stories and the killed characters are different. The Things They Carried is a dark war story deliberately setting up a bleak tone by emphasizing how random and fucked up death can be, utilizing relatively unestablished characters dying seemingly out of nowhere to illustrate the horrors of war. It could be argued that that’s still fridging cuz those characters mightve only existed to die but I haven’t read the book so I’m not super comfy judging that and it seems to have been excecuted quite well
I definitely have seen the MCU movies so I can tell u that this doesn’t apply to Gamora or Natasha because the suddenness of their deaths was bad because of the story potential that was wasted and how it wrecked Gamora’s story arc, even if the other character’s reactions were written perfectly well their deaths wouldn’t’ve been satisfying because Gamora and Natasha’s characters weren’t being respected and their potential was needlessly (out of universe needlessly obviously) cut short
I love how the Supernatural pilot fridges Sam’s girlfriend on both a Doylist and a Watsonian level.
I'm actually planning on a story idea where the protag has his best friend die in front of him, brutally and almost unceremoniously killed by a minor villain on the verge of death. So before he kicks it, he decides to deal a personal blow to one of the people that ended him. But this will then serve as a launch pad for the plot, where he essentially get's rent in half by the grief. One of his halves, representing his anger and hatred of the forces that killed his friend, will serve as the hero of the plot. The other, representing his feelings of hopelessness and depression over losing the first person willing to befriend him, the villain. The story ends with the two fighting and, eventually, reconciling and rejoining.
Very notably, this is going to take place in a sequel arc, so the friend and protag will already have some development behind them to give the death weight, and I'm definitely planning to make the most of Hitchcockian suspense to make it as yucky-feeling as possible.
The best part about Maes Hughs is that not only did he figure out the main conspiracy before everyone else, but he wasn't even an alchemist that looks at the world in a "give & take" lense. Maes should have been the last character out of a full cast of fucking alchemists to figure out why everything was happening as it was.
At least Hughes' death saved everybody by proxy.
The only fridging I've seen that actually had an impact was when the mc didn't actually care all that much after his lover's death. It was meant to be a hint (in a long line of hints) that the mc is an actively malicious character despite the fairly standard hero's journey he has been set up with. His (lack) of reaction gave me chills.
What story? It sounds interesting
Their was an Anime called Afro Samurai that uses fridging to further a story of revenge in a very interesting way. Because it starts with a dad being fridge by the big bad wanting the Number 1 headband said to make its wearer a God like warrior and only someone with the Number 2 Headband and challenge Number 1, and his dying breath asking his son to not seek revenge. His son known as Afro ignores this and joins a sword masters dojo to gain the power to get revenge only for raiders to fridge all the other students he met in that same episode and Afro killing his own master to he The 2. Following this sets a trend of every potential ally being fridges within at least 2 episodes of meeting them. The final two fights go to s spell out that the path Afro had followed has done nothing but turn him into an uncaring monster. Ignoring the wishes of your father, throwing away the lives of everyone who tries to help you, never stopping, never mourning. The Big Bad even takes time to tell the protagonist that he’s a monster
“You really think that if I didn’t kill your father you’d be any different? You’d still be the same cold blooded killer you are now. Your just a killer with an excuse”
Very interested in what this is 👀
@@sigh824 it's the Prince of Nothing series by R Scott Bakker. Epic fantasy with multiple povs and it gets a bit graphic at times. One of my favorites ❤
Borderlands 3's sure had an impact... Fan favorite character as a side character, killed off uncerimoniously and stupidly to make the shitlord child angry. And hurt people. Before being forgotten aside from when the shit gets angry. An impact in the community namely in the form of r a g e
Damn even seeing Hughes as an example made me tear up all over again
I'm watching this while trying to think of how Mia Fey from Ace Attorney fits into this. I guess ordinary rules about character death don't really apply to her since she's literally still around afterwards anyway
And her death still affects the characters afterwards. She is the motivation of both sequels, which is why i think it doesn’t fall under fridging
@@trucluu7894 Eh, admittedly, you could argue that that's still a way of making her death about the feelings of other characters rather than about Mia herself, which would count as fridging. In fact, I feel like Godot's deal is either an instance of retroactive fridging, or a critique of fridging itself - he's entirely motivated by Mia's death and wants to direct all narrative attention to how it affected him and how important she was to him, but it isn't until the end of the game that he realizes he can't keep up that vision of events. I think that part of why Mia's deal still doesn't come across as fridging is that she's still a very distinct character; and while I don't actually think that her still being around is the only reason for that, it's definitely part of it.
@@Miju001 red does mention that fridging must be “trivial” in a way, as to the narrative, it’s an “used and toss” kind of deal, but in mia case, her death lingered. I think that godot is actuallya counter example, because he would not be godot if it is any other character death, and his reaction to mia death is contrasted with Phoenix reaction to the death. Both men grow in opposite way to one another
@@trucluu7894 I would like to disagree on Godot, specifically. On the one hand, you're right that Godot is one of the main forces behind bringing Mia's death to the forefront; and I don't think that should be dismissed. But on the other hand, he does so by centering the narrative around it entirely on himself and his feelings towards it. For all intents and purposes, when it comes to Godot, everything that concerns Mia's death and its consequences has nothing to do with Mia herself. Again, I believe this is actually part of Godot's well-constructed character flaws rather than a fault of the narrative (at least not fully), but what I just said is a huge part of Red's "prized Pokémon card collection" test (albeit, not all of it, as you pointed out).
Unrelated but this reminded me of "The big buff black guy that dies first", a character in a ratman's parody of action movies.
That's actually his in story name, people call him like that and that's how he presents himself.
Somehow he survives till the end and his character arc ends with him being scared during the final climatic battle, because he know he's gonna get fridged, he's the big buff black guy that dies first after all.
But then Chuck Norris calls him John, BBBGTDF is confused, Chuck explains that hencefort, his name is John and since now he's a named main character he's functionally immortal, so John joins his friends in the last battle, kills a bunch of people and survives.
Stupid as all hell, but i now feel the need to find my old ratman comics and read them again.
It is satire like that which makes me miss the spoofs of old.
Reminds me of Order of the Stick, where the audience knowing a characters name can actually make that character more powerful. A generic soldier both survives and becomes a secondary character just by saying her name.
At this point, the 'soul stone' should be called the 'fridge stone'.
yaaaasssss
Man, thats COLD hehehehe
😎
@@nozzrik4472 pfft
@Mullerornis lol
The SAME g*ddamn MacGuffin took away BOTH of the action-oriented semi-main female characters in the MCU. The psychic and magical female characters? They're fine, they can live. The butt-kicking gals who have belonged to a name-of-the-movie group? Marvel yeets them off a cliff for a magic rock and a cheap attempt at creating sympathy for male characters who apparently weren't sufficiently compelling and needed a "boost".
Heck, in Endgame they actually managed to RETROACTIVELY META-FRIDGE Peggy Carter. All that cool stuff she did while she was working through her grief over Steve, trying to distract herself with work and struggle against sexism? And how that lead to her later creating SHIELD together with Howard Stark? I can't imagine that went nearly the same with Captain America standing alongside her the whole time (never mind the large scale ripple-effects from him having been present through everything overall and what that suggests he stood by through in order to have not drastically change history, effectively being character assassination on Steve himself).
WHY DOES MARVEL HATE WOMEN WITH GUNS SO MUCH!?!?
Gomorra’s (I’ve never seen it written, I hope I’m spelling it right) death was the moment I lost interest in the MCU. She had a very compelling character arc that spoke to me on a personal level as a survivor of abuse, and by killing her halfway through it, Marvel said they didn’t actually care about her arc, and all but explicitly said they thought the experience that has largely defined my life wasn’t real. If a story doesn’t care about its characters or its audience and the stakes are a lie, why would I get invested in it?
The thing with Killing Joke, though, is that Barbara's story went *on* from there, and what happened to her was given weight in later stories -- she became "Oracle", a badass in a wheelchair and things snowballed from there. She was only a plot-device in KJ, but that scene was shocking and horrifying to readers *because* Barbara had weight, personality, and meaning in the previous and later stories. I'm an on-again, off-again reader of the Batman stories, and (that editor's asshatted comment aside) Barbara's crippling wasn't a true "fridging". Abhorrent, violent, misogynistic, yes. Fridged, no.
There's no better example of fridging then yeeting someone you love off a cliff to get an object that progresses the plot.
.... Marvel? I haven't seen it yet just heard about it
Edit: Like I haven't seen where Thanos throws Gamora off a cliff but I've heard about it
Don't forget trying to smooth over the damage by just yoinking an alternate-reality version and acting like treating a woman like a replacement goldfish fixes everything.
@@AnInsideJoke That's what happens when a franchise has its trajectory determined by marketers.
at least in the case of black widow any of the two could do it, but since she couldn't have a family she didn't let hawk eye do that because he had a family, it was an heroic sacrifice, the case with thanos was really bad, if they didnt want to change that because of black widow, they could have Thanos order another person to sacrifice someone
The Gamora who went over the cliff is not the one who was brought forward in time. She is missing years of development, so she is not the same. We shall see what happens, but they didn't necessarily cheapen her death. If the coming stories make her development retread too fast or easy, then we can critique just bringing an alternate past version forward.
As for Widow, it is a natural culmination of her trying to clear her ledger, was an active choice by the character who died, and it was going to be her or her best friend. Neither wanted the other to go, and they fought damn hard to be the one who made the sacrifice play. There could have been more attention made to her death though.
I think the problem has less to do with not setting up characters well enough, and more to do with not giving them the respect they deserve afterwards. A parent who dies at the beginning to give the main character motivation is fridged if the impacts of that death are ignored. A soldier who talks about their girlfriend and kid right before dying and giving the main character motivation to win the battle isn't fridged if the main character goes and visits the girlfriend afterwards and repeatedly spends time remembering and mourning them. Sometimes characters exist to die but aren't important enough to be given a lot of screen time. The problem is just if the impact of the death only serves to advance the plot in one specific way, and once it serves that purpose it's ignored.
The death of Luke's parents is fridging the death of uncle ben is not
Ah I get it. But I still don't see how fridging is that bad. Is that just me? Like in your example, so what if the mc isn't shown constantly remembering the dead side character? Who cares, they're just that, a side character who exists to further the plot. It's one thing if an important character is given an "unceremonious" death, but who cares that the parents with 5 minutes of screen time die at the start of the movie so the mc can start his revenge story?
Like I understand what fridging is and I want to write stories so I'll avoid it because people will criticise it, but it's so weird to me that someone could watch a movie and actually say "wow I hated how the parents with 5 minutes of screen time who died at the start were killed solely to advance the plot" like wtf?
@@ReblazeGaming It's because it says that the character who you're motivating by killing their loved one(s) doesn't really care that much about their dead loved ones. You can't claim that a death has weight and that it matters to a character if you then proceed to never *show* that character being affected by the death beyond the immediate aftermath. Expecting the audience to *infer* your character's emotional arc because you can't be bothered to show how this death has changed everyone around it is lazy writing. Either give death the narrative weight it deserves or give your character a more appropriate motivation.
Like, imagine how much worse Lion King would be as a movie if instead of showing Simba feeling, denying, and finally reckoning with the grief of Mufasa's death and the guilt he felt for being "responsible" for it, he was sad for like two minutes and then continued to act with the exact same recklessness and childlike innocence he had before Mufasa was killed even while he's deposing Scar later on. *That* is the problem with fridging: it takes a death and says "This brutal and/or unceremonious death matters to the characters, but I'm not gonna bother to *convince* you that it matters to those characters in spite of the particularly unfair manner in which I killed them."
That's what I'm doing in my book saga. The main characters who die, do die when their worth as characters is overdue (Mainly, the protagonist has more friends to rely on in the case of the dude who fills the best friend role, and the other protagonist has resolved his love triangle drama in the case of the Character C of the love triangle), but like hell I'm going to make their deaths forgotten, even when the saga is at its climax. The main characters LITERALLY CHANGE DESIGNS to reflect their trauma. They go from plain coloured clothing, which was chosen to reflect how untouched they were, to a mixture of the colour they're related to thematically and black to both reflect their growth into actual characters AND their grief. It's explicit that they never ditch the black for the rest of the saga after their respective loved ones die.
@@ReblazeGaming agree with you so much. this whole thing that "oh, every character needs to be tony stark levels of mourning" (ofc im exaggerating) is just ridiculous. what, just so it could be "not fridging" and "im not doing any 'tropes' so that means im a good writer' shit. not all deaths are equal even in stories. seeing this video now the writing principle of "have your character deaths have meaning and importance" only really applies to characters that we actually care or are very central to the story. plus do we really need like 2 seasons worth of development or something for a parents' death to be 'something' or your entire village getting razed? how bout just some empathy you know? what, you don't care about his entire village getting razed because it only happened for like 10 mins and we're continuing onto his revenge plot now? you don't care about a character that "died offscreen" when usually that's dramatic effect so we could see the dead body at the same time as the main character. that's just fallacious imo
When I learned about this trope, I wondered how cool it would be if a side character is fridged and the hero sets out to bring them back. When they do, the side character reflects on how the death affected them and how they hated how only the hero noticed or cared they were gone
Now I want to see a movie where a character is motivated because their fridge died (off screen) and their lunch was ruined.
magneto is a great example of this. in the movies alone, FOUR female characters are fridged for his character development (his mom, wife and kid, mystique), and that's not even counting the comics
I felt like Mystique was different. They had turned her into prequel-Wolverine, and when they chose to do Dark Phoenix, they had written themselves into a corner, so they had to get her out of the way. Her death did definitely get handled better than any of the named character deaths in the original trilogy.
@@Jim4815162342 i get what you’re saying. for me, mystique was erik’s motivation to go out and try to kill jean, forwarding the plot, so that’s basically why i included her haha
edited for grammar
@@Jim4815162342 Also, the actress wanted to be done with X-Men movies I believe.
Gods, Apocalypse was such a bad film lol.
@@OneWingedRose Admittedly, yes. But there were major flaws in all of the X-Men movies. And unlike the MCU, we didn't get time to invest in them enough to overlook the problems.
By the way, Red, I think it's amazingly effective how well your color-coding works. Any given slide, I know immediately what words are talking about what character. Out-freaking-standing layout and design. Thanks!
A good way that fridging was averted, in my opinion, is Tanjiro's family in Demon Slayer. In the first episode of the series, a demon slaughters the boy's family. The only survivor is his sister Nezuko, but she quickly turns into a demon. This entire incident is what incites the plot, with Tanjiro becoming a demon slayer to not only avenge his family, but also find a way to turn his sister back into a human.
In a lesser piece of media, that would be the last we'd hear of Tanjiro's family. For example, look at Goblin Slayer. Now I'm not saying that's a bad series, because I've never seen it. But in the beginning of Goblin Slayer, the Priestess' entire adventure squad gets killed by goblins. The only survivor is the Fighter, who... well, I think it's easy to assume why the bad guys in a dark fantasy would kidnap a girl. And that's the last we hear of the Priestess' fallen comrades. The Fighter later gets freed from her imprisonment, but is irreversibly traumatized by her abuse and is in no condition to continue adventuring. And that's the last we hear of her. She's written out of the story completely after that. The Priestess' friends were all fridged.
In Demon Slayer, however, Tanjiro's mother and kid siblings are frequently seen in flashbacks and dreams. Since their deaths and Nezuko almost dying are the main driving force behind Tanjiro's quest, of course the story would show him constantly remembering his family. They were killed off, but the memory of them functionally makes these characters just as important and prevalent as the protagonist. A great example of this is in the Entertainment District Arc, where Nezuko goes berserk and Tanjiro calms her down by reciting a lullaby that their mother used to sing to them. Nezuko remembers her mother, and breaks down crying. The infamous dead mom anime trope is used in this instance to remind both the characters and the audience of Nezuko's humanity.
Once Priestess' friends are removed from life, Goblin Slayer becomes all about her and an edgy medieval Doomguy. That's not an attack, by the way. I _love_ edgy characters. But Tanjiro's family are never treated as a simple plot device. Does Spider-Man still think about Gwen Stacy? Why would he, now that he's with Mary Jane? Does Miles Morales still think about his universe's Peter Parker? Why would he, now that the Ultimate Universe no longer exists? Does Superman still think about Krypton? Probably, but one day Earth will also die and he'll just have to find a new planet. Does Mark Grayson think about all those people that his father killed? He can't, he doesn't have time to mourn. This brings me to another great way to salvage the trope of using death as a plot device: Speedball, aka Robbie Baldwin.
The inciting incident of Marvel's Civil War event is the Stamford Incident. A team of young superheroes, led by Speedball, film themselves trying to take down the villain Nitro. Their inexperience and lack of preparation result in Nitro using his powers to detonate and kill everyone in the town, including Speedball's teammates. Speedball survives due to his powers, and is then blamed for the entire incident and thrown in prison. This is what leads to the Superhero Registration Act, requiring every superhero to disclose their true identity to the public. Speedball eventually recovers and decides to abide by this law, in an attempt to right his wrongs. The Marvel writers didn't _have_ to explore the consequences of the Stamford Incident. After all, it was just a plot device designed to give a reason for Iron Man and Captain America to fight. And Speedball's just some C-List superhero from the Silver Age, he's not that important to the grand scheme of Earth-616. But those deaths _were_ important. 612 people died in that explosion, 60 of whom were children. Robbie builds himself a new suit, fitted with spikes that impale his body. This was to activate his powers, as well as punish himself.
There were 612 spikes, with 60 of them being longer than the rest. Robbie gave himself a new name, Penance. Robbie's dead friends also aren't forgotten after their narrative purpose, dying in an incident that incites Civil War, was fulfilled. The people of Atlantis mourned the loss of Nimona, one of the heroes who died, and even prosecuted Nitro. Speaking of Nitro, Robbie eventually tracks him down, and beats the ever-living shit out of him while shouting the names of the people he killed. Hell fucking yeah! _This_ is in my opinion the most important means of avoiding fridging: Remind the readers that the killed off character was a person, with a name, an age, and a family. That's why we write down the names of the dead when we build memorials. Why we have funerals and graveyards and works dedicated to our departed. Someone doesn't cease to be a person after they die. In real life, you aren’t "written out of the story" after you die. The ripples outlast the splash that created them. That's how all the best character deaths avoided fridging. Peter Parker never forgot Uncle Ben. Bruce Wayne never forgot his parents. Naruto and Goku never knew their real parents, but you can still see how their actions outlasted their lives. And in the case of Goku, the memory of his adoptive grandfather Gohan lives on, when Goku named his son in his honor.
The problem with fridging is that the story often has no more use for that character once they're killed off and the death is used as a plot device. But it doesn't _have_ to be like that.
It’s probably important to remember that a character death shouldn’t feel like something that needs to be fixed.
I recently read a book that opened with a fridging incident (entire found family slaughtered like animals) and it was the first time I felt like I understood the significance of the dead characters to the main character more than the writer did. Like he did such a good job establishing what they meant to the hero in a short time frame only to basically call them dead irrelevant extras in the epilogue narration. Kinda soured my experience and made me feel stupid for caring.
What book? I’m trying to write the ‘lone survivor’ main character and really don’t want to screw it up like that lol.
@@Kingdomheatsox2 Oh, it was actually a Japanese light novel called Bungo Stray Dogs: Stormbringer, which doesn’t even have an official English translation yet, so I don’t think it would be much help.
But if I were to offer advice on not ‘screwing it up’, my problem was that the significance of the dead characters was well established and then decently reiterated throughout the novel from the mc’s pov, only to be undercut by an omniscient narrator in the epilogue waxing about them being unspecial and quickly forgotten, “a single line of names on a long list of victims”. Which would be true from the perspective of say, an uncaring god or whatever, but not the mc who lost the only people who ever loved him that he just spent 400 pages trying to avenge. I found it to be a counterintuitive 180. The change in perspective cheapened the emotional impact by straight up pointing out the fact that the characters we were meant to mourn at the beginning were just disposable props in an angsty backstory.
@@ninapina7727 that’s a strange decision on the author’s behalf. Maybe that was a translation error?
@@Kingdomheatsox2 Yeah, Japanese isn't my first language, so it's possible I misread that part as overly cynical/dismissive. The gist of it still stuck out to me because it was kind of the opposite of the general theme and the language surrounding the characters designed to last. It’s not a big deal though, more of a nitpick and really I’d chalk it down to a Freudian slip by an author with bigger fish to fry.
It was a good book and I liked it, just when focusing on the use of this trope alone it does kind of fizzle out when the author begins to forget about characters (who are admittedly forgettable out of universe) that should mean everything to the lead in-universe.
As someone who started watching Bungo Stray Dogs last week, that sounds like a bummer considering how things were handled in Season 2. Spoilers for anyone else, but
Even if the orphans were ultimately plot devices for Oda in the end, I still feel like they did a good job of establishing the impact of their death on Oda for the rest of his arc (at least, coming from my very inexperienced knowledge/taste in media lol)
Even the villains in FMA continue to acknowledge Hughes. While most just use him to taunt the rest of the cast, Wrath actually calls back to his funeral and how he thought everyone’s grief was insufferable
It’s so funny that I was just WAITING for you to talk about the killing joke
"Every man is a hero of his own story."
-Brandon Sanderson