This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
SuperBoro: OP example doesn't really fit this trope. Removing.
Scientivore: I just fixed some grammar and added a couple of links, no big deal. The article is good, but it could use some more examples.
arromdee: If you look at the women in refrigerators list, it's seriously bogus. For instance, there are several instances where a man and a woman were killed in the same time, in the same way, as part of the same incident and it's still considered an example of women in refrigerators. If the list is supposed to show that female characters are mistreated compared to men, these are pretty bad examples.
And those are just the most blatant examples. For instance, Candy Southern was killed, but Candy Southern's father was killed many years earlier. Since the two deaths aren't exactly the same, it's easy to "explain away" why one was much worse than the other, but really, there's no difference.
The biggest problem, of course, is that comics routinely kill of, depower, replace, or otherwise degrade characters of both sexes. There's a difference between "this happens to a lot of women," and "this happens to a lot of women compared to men".
Morgan Wick: I think Gail's point was more along the lines of The Smurfette Principle anyway; TSP + comics' predilection to kill off characters left and right = a lot of dead females. { osh: Yeah, I've tried to add to the article that aside from the instances where the badness is tied to the character's femininity, killing off female characters is more noticable because there less and thus easy to keep track off, plus they often get put into supporting roles which are always fodder regardless.
arromdee: "A lot of dead females" is utterly unimportant on its own the same way that "a lot of dead brunettes" is. It only becomes important if it is trying to imply that there are a lot of dead females compared to males.
Just because the list doesn't start out by saying "this doesn't happen to men" doesn't mean that that's not what it's implying; if the list wasn't trying to compare dead women to dead men there'd be no point in making a list at all. And the list, in doing this, cheats.
Erid DVH:Would the scouring of the shire at the end of The Lord Of The Rings count? It happens long after the call has been heard, refused, answered, and heeded, so I don't think this would qualify as a Doomed Hometown. It also features the random, personal nastiness typical of Stuffed in the Fridge.
osh: I don't think so. That's more to show the pettiness of fallen enemies, and how the hobbits have become more worldly. At the very least there's a real point to it.
Meiriona: Do we really need a TEN LINE spoiler? It looks ridiculus.
Dr Dedman: The Eva example should be ditched. One of the characteristics of being "fridged" is that it's done mostly offscreen or at least offhandedly. Asuka's been center stage for the preceeding 10-15 minutes of the show. Also her "last stand" was part of "her" character arc, much more than Shinji's. To the extent it was part of his, is because he "could" have prevented it (or at least gotten there sooner). Fridge stuffing is showing how baddass your villain is in a cheap shorthand way. The essence of Shinji's suffering is that if he does nothing he may hurt people, and if he does something he may hurt people. There is a reason he's so mopey.
Salagir: In "Space Adventure Cobra", the character Dominique (the last of the 3 sisters with a tattoo on their back) is killed in the Salamandar saga, and her skin put on the wall of the appartement for Cobra to find her. That's a kind of horrible scene, plus the killer wasn't even a main bad guy. In the manga she's definitely dead. In the anime version, she is brainwashed and Cobra finds her later, with amnesia. This is quite incoherent because... where did the skin (with the tattoo and all) came from ?
Bring The Noise: Is there any evidence that Joss Whedon stuff women into fridges regularly (as claimed)? I can only think of two: Tara and Jenny, and both of those are arguable, IMO. Not exactly a pattern, so I'll delete the comment tomorrow in the absence of any objections.
Bring The Noise: Deleted "and thinks Whedon has a disquieting tendency to stuff women into refrigerators (especially while calling himself a feminist),"
Anonymous: Is there a good reason why there are two links to the Super Stupor comic with the girlfriend turning the tables on the villain? Especially since each of the duplicate pair references the other for some reason? (And seems unaware that Super Stupor is also drawn by the artist of Something Positive and is not a guest comic at all?)
Neophos: This example:
- While she's never actually killed outright (because hey, the show wouldn't be the same without her), Amelia of The Slayers has a tendency to be badly injured by a given villain in order to establish that villain as dangerous. This is done, of course, because she's incredibly cute and likable as well as stubborn enough to not give up anyway and seeing her get hurt invokes a certain feeling in people. It's still a little off-putting once you realize just how often she loses half her blood or has something try to rip her soul from her body, though.
Isn't this just The Worf Effect?
Bob: Looks like. Cutting it.
Chuckg: As regards Hinata of Naruto, what is with this 'she's alive until proven dead!' meme? She just got Shinra Tensei'ed and then impaled by a guy who has massacred his way through the entire Konoha Village and half a dozen other cast members. The only way she can still be alive under the circumstances is if Pain deliberately chooses to make his shot non-lethal, which would be so absolutely OOC that it beggars the imagination. Let alone the fact that Naruto has just finished immolating the entire surrounding area, so even if she was alive after taking that hit from Pain, he might very well have incinerated her. I can entirely understanding not wanting Hinata to be dead, believe me: but even with Kishimoto's past history of being the king of the fakeout death scene, it just takes too much Fridge Logic to have Hinata surviving this.
Not that I won't feel embarassed if I'm wrong.
Rogue 7: Speaking as someone who's still hoping she's alive, it's a combination of denial and a mental block: If I don't admit she's dead, maybe she's not.
Chuckg: I sympathize deeply, believe me. But I've learned the hard way in prior fandoms that this only hurts more in the long run. I personally believe its much better to mourn a fictional character as lost and then be joyously surprised that they're alive, than to keep clinging to the hope that they're alive only to be eventually crushed when they are finally confirmed dead. Your Mileage May Vary.
Danel: I'm not that familiar with the series, but I'm not sure that this is an example of this trope, however unpopular it may be with the character's fans; the trope description emphasises the lack of aftermath, and the story hasn't actually reached that point yet.
Aquillion: Either way, it was clearly a Heroic Sacrifice. I don't think it would fit this trope even if she stays dead (which I don't think is very likely, either — we've seen already that Death Is Cheap when it comes to the younger generation.)
Chuckg: Well, unless Sakura pronounces the patient dead next issue, it looks like Hinata's going to live. So yes, I'm embarassed. I'm also a little annoyed, given that Pain's badass villain cred has entirely evaporated here... seriously, dude, if you can't coup-de-grace a teenaged girl with an entirely unopposed full-round action, then damn, you suck.
Guillaume HJ: As already mentionned on the Gundam00 thread, Nena Trinity seriously is...very far removed from an example of this: She was in no way (except maybe her dreams) close to any character defined as "hero". In fact nobody AT ALL in the series even had any particular emotion about her, except Setsuna (who disliked her) and Louise (who REALLY disliked her). Moreover, she had no hanging plot point. Her death didn't cut anything short in terms of plot. In fact, it resolved hanging plot points (Louise's quest to avenge her family). And by the strict definition, her body wasn't left for anyone who cared about her (an inexistant entity) to find, her death didn't motivate anyone to do anything, etc.
Antheia: Pulled the Pan's Labyrinth example. This trope is about people being killed offscreen for the hero to find. Ofelia's stepfather kills people onscreen. I get that it's not about the hero's (Ofelia's) reaction but the audience's, but that's a different trope: Kick the Dog or Moral Event Horizon.
sessile: Pulled this from the main page:
- Rome not only killed off Niobe to further Vorenus's character arc, she was killed by Vorenus upon his discovery of her infidelity. And then we were supposed to feel sorry for him because his children refused to forgive him. So Yeah . . .
I'm not sure this counts as fridging: not only was there a huge build-up throughout the season concerning what would happen if Vorenus found out about Niobe's "infidelity" (she thought he was dead, so we didn't know if it would make a difference), but they dealt with the aftermath in the entirety of the following season. (He dreams about her, he hunts down his kids once he finds out they're alive, etc.) It was unfortunate that Niobe killed herself (Vorenus didn't kill her, but Niobe thought he would, and considering his grief at her death, it could be argued that he wouldn't have), but it wasn't gratuitous. Also, it didn't happen off-screen, but very much in our faces.
Dead E. Merrcury: Why is this not called something along the lines of "Dropped A Fridge On Him?"
Ronnie: Does anyone object to changing the image to this
◊ more direct reference to the trope-namer from Pass Fail Comics?
sessile: That image has got to change to something else, 'cause it's the same as the one at Women In Refrigerators.
Medinoc: Not anymore, courtesy of Eight Bit Theater.
The Nifty; Isn't this pretty much identical to Women In Refrigerators? do we really need both tropes?
Semiapies: Women In Refrigerators was about a specific criticism of sexism in superhero story writing, while this one seems to be expanding out to Complaining About Character Deaths We Dont Like.
Removed:
Most recently during the Planet Hulk storyline the Hulk again fell in love, this time with Grey Skinned Space Babe, Caiera the Oldstrong who ended up marrying the Hulk when he took over the planet Sakaar and became pregnant with his child, only to die when the ship that brought Hulk to the planet exploded and ravaged the planet.
because I'm pretty sure that when almost everybody on the planet dies in a disaster, you can't really single her out as being fridged. She'd have died whether she loved the Hulk or not.
J Random User: Jenny's appearance as the First Evil was 'disrespectful'? Seriously, what? Now if that was actually Jenny's ghost being evil, sure. But it wasn't. It was a monster of literally pure Evil masquerading as Jenny specifically because it knew that was the single best way to play off of Angel's guilt. I think this complaint speaks to the problem with this trope. Villains do villainous things and torment the heroes. That's good storytelling—after all, this is ostensibly why superheroes have secret identities in the first place. Death is sometimes senseless, and it can be good to show that. The trope is not without a kernel of truth—there's certainly a point at which this becomes overdone, too brutal, or some other flavor of Unfortunate...but many examples, particularly the complaint about the First Evil pretending to be Jenny, deem any bad thing that happens to the character as exploitative.
