On women, fridging, and video games.
Recently, I’ve seen a couple pieces refer to women in video games being “fridged,” specifically, this piece from Stop Caring and this one from Mothership. I disagree in both instances, and rather than responding on social media or being snarky about it, I’ve decided to do what Autumn Wright wisely recommended a while ago and write a blog.
I’m aware I’m entering fraught territory here; it seems lately we (those in games media and those who write about games but may not be employed in games media itself) only read each other’s work (or just the headline, or just the social media posts promoting the work) so we can windmill dunk on the writer on social media for likes and shares. Everything that can be taken out of context to farm clout is. The subtweet reigns. Instead of approaching our peers with generosity and grace, we seem to luxuriate in taking them down. I get it; everything sucks and we’re all tired, and the voices of what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature” grow faint under so much noise. It’s the fascism, boss. But I think we owe it to each other to try anyway.
With that in mind, I want to lay some things out from the jump. People are inevitably going to misinterpret what I say here, but maybe I can limit the fallout to mean social media posts and not death threats. I’ve had enough of those this year, thanks, and I think several have been rolled into next year for tax purposes. So let’s get some things straight: I have no beef with the writers who wrote these pieces, and I am not trying to dunk on them. I also have no beef with Stop Caring or Mothership. Stop Caring’s Big Boss, Artemis, is a friend (and read this piece and gave it her blessing before publication), and I have admired the editors at Mothership and their work for years. Many of my friends have written at both outlets. I read them regularly. I am not trying to start a fight or pick on anyone or devalue their work. I think the pieces in question are good and both outlets deserve your support.
I am also aware that I’m in a tricky spot here in regards to subject matter: no matter what I write, some people will read this as a dude trying to mansplain what fridging is to his peers… who are women. I’m not trying to do that, either. But I do disagree with the use of the term in both pieces, and I feel the need to write about why. I think criticism is a dialogue, and if we’re going to advance the form, we have to be able to both respond to each other and disagree in good faith. That’s the work. This essay is an attempt at the thing. I hope I get it right.
To do this proper, we have to talk about what fridging is, and crucially, what it isn’t. The term comes from a 1999 list created by Gail Simone cataloguing female characters who had been “depowered, raped, or cut up and stuck in the refrigerator.” Simone mailed the list to several comics pros asking for their opinions. At the time, Simone was a fan. She is now an incredibly successful comics writer (full disclosure: I’ve been reading Simone’s work since I was a kid, and I had the pleasure of meeting her at a con once. She was incredibly kind, and signed one of her Batgirl scripts for me. I’m a fan). You can read the site here, Simone’s history of how things came together here, and view the list here. I recommend you do so, in that order.
Back with me? Great. To Simone’s point, being a superpowered woman in comics (or just a woman in comics in general) is bad for your health, but Simone herself noted that there’s layers here: some characters were “improved” by what happened to them. Most folks think of Barbara Gordon as Oracle rather than Batgirl, and some of these stories provided those characters’ “finest moments.” Not every death is a fridging. To understand what it is (and why I disagree with the use of the term in the pieces I mentioned), we have to go back to 1994.
The origin of the term comes from a Green Lantern comic of all things; specifically the story “Forced Entry” in 1994’s Green Lantern (Vol. 3) #54, written by Ron Marz. Kyle Rayner, the Green Lantern of the age (Hal Jordan was the villain Parallax at the time), comes home to find his girlfriend, Alexandra DeWitt (who first appeared in Green Lantern #48), murdered by Major Force and stuffed into a refrigerator, largely to get Kyle’s attention. Marz disputes, however, that she was cut up. The original artwork, which showed the refrigerator door open and Alex’s entire body wedged inside, was censored by the Comics Code, and DC was forced to redo the art with the fridge door mostly shut. Readers’ imaginations did the rest.
Regardless, “Forced Entry” isn’t what you might picture when you think of something that created an image (and trope) so infamous. Most people don’t know Hal Jordan was ever Parallax, or what a Parallax is. They probably also don’t know who Kyle Rayner is, because to most folks the Green Lantern is Hal Jordan. Major Force is a fairly minor villain whose origin dates back to Captain Atom, not Green Lantern, and most people have probably never heard of him. And while many folks are familiar with the “women in refrigerators” trope, I reckon most of them couldn’t tell you Alexandra DeWitt’s name or how she died (she was strangled).
But the story does lay out what I’d consider the three rules for the trope:
- A woman is brutally killed, sexually assaulted, stripped of her powers, or maimed, often (but not always) off-screen.
- The villain responsible does this to pick a fight with or motivate the hero in some way, which usually works.
- The woman in question has little to no agency in what happens to her.
Alex is killed because she’s Kyle’s girlfriend, not because she makes a conscious choice that leads to her death. She is killed (off-screen) solely to goad Kyle into going after Major Force. All of these points matter, but the third one is the most crucial to me: supporting characters die all the time in fiction, and those deaths often make the main characters do things in response. It’s a trick as old as storytelling. But there’s a difference between that and being fridged.
Take Elektra, for example. Frank Miller first introduced her in Daredevil #168 and she dies in #181. Matt Murdock’s former girlfriend, she is assigned by Kingpin to kill Foggy Nelson, Matt’s partner, and chooses not to for Matt’s sake. Seeing an opportunity to make sure he remains Kingpin’s #1 guy, Bullseye attacks her, and while Elektra fights back, Bullseye mortally wounds her. She crawls to Matt’s front door and dies in his arms.
Does that cause him to go after Bullseye? Absolutely. Did Miller write it that way on purpose? Yeah. Is she fridged? No more than Ned Stark is when he makes the decisions that lead to his death in A Game of Thrones. Elektra makes a choice, one that is in-character and born out of love for someone she cares about. Bullseye isn’t thinking about Matt when he kills her. He’s thinking about himself. It is an organic, in-character decision that also puts Matt on his trail. That’s how storytelling works.
But when Scott Free, aka Mister Miracle, finds his wife Big Barda, one of the most powerful women in the DCU, murdered in their kitchen by Infinity Man solely to provoke him? That’s absolutely a fridging.
I want to touch on two more comics examples before I move on to video games. The first is probably the most famous example of fridging in comics outside of “Forced Entry”: Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke.
You know the story: the Joker shows up at Jim Gordon’s place. When his daughter Barbara opens the door, he shoots her. The bullet leaves her paralyzed, and as she lies there, unable to move, he strips her naked and takes pictures of her. He doesn’t do this because Barbara Gordon is Batgirl because he doesn’t know she’s Batgirl. He’s not even expecting her to be there. He does it because she’s Commissioner Gordon’s daughter, and he’s trying to prove that “all it takes is one bad day” to make a good man like Gordon just like him. Gordon ultimately doesn’t break, telling Batman he wants the Joker brought in by the book, but Barbara gets shot and stripped naked and photographed in the first place so the Joker can use her to get to Gordon. The “all it takes is one bad day” idea would become a defining element of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, just aimed at Harvey Dent instead.
If “Forced Entry” wasn’t the starting point for women in refrigerators as a trope, The Killing Joke would be. We’d just call it something else. When Moore asked if DC was all right with the story and specifically his treatment of Barbara, a major character in DC canon, editor Len Wein (who died in 2017) reportedly responded, “Yeah, okay, cripple the bitch.” You can interpret that quote however you want, but Barbara herself is never more than a prop in The Killing Joke. What happens to her only happens because the Joker wants to drive her father insane.
I’m one of the people who believe that Barbara Gordon’s best moments came after she was paralyzed and became Oracle. But that is not because of what Alan Moore did to her in The Killing Joke. It is because of what several writers (including Simone herself) did with her later. To his credit, Moore has since disowned The Killing Joke, saying “I thought it was far too violent and sexualised a treatment for a simplistic comic book character like Batman and a regrettable misstep on my part.”
The last example I want to highlight is probably the most well-known death of a female character in comics: the death of Supergirl, Kara Zor-El, in Crisis on Infinite Earths #7.
Exploring Crisis on Infinite Earths (and its impact on comics) would take its own essay, but the long and short of it is that the DC multiverse is being destroyed by the Anti-Monitor, a titanic being of incredible power, one universe at a time, and the heroes of the multiverse unite to stop him.
At one point in the story, Superman comes face-to-face with the Anti-Monitor and is knocked unconscious. Kara rushes to save him, and fights the Anti-Monitor off long enough that Doctor Light can carry Clark to safety. Then, the Anti-Monitor kills her when she is briefly distracted by Hoshi. George Perez’s cover of issue #7, which shows a distraught, sobbing Superman holding Supergirl’s body, is likely the most iconic the medium has ever produced.
This isn’t a fridging, at least not initially. Clark and the other heroes need no additional motivation to fight the Anti-Monitor, and Kara’s fate is not unique. Most of the DC multiverse dies in Crisis on Infinite Earths. Supergirl’s death is prominent, but she makes the choice to save the life of someone she loves. Like Barry Allen, who later dies saving everyone left in the multiverse, she dies a hero. Unfortunately, Kara was wiped from DC’s canon (the publisher wanted Clark to be the actual, no-foolin’ Last Son of Krypton), while Barry Allen became a hero even Superman could look up to. So while Kara’s death might not have been a fridging, there’s a good argument that erasing her from existence might cross that line. Many characters would be called Supergirl in the years that followed, but none of them ever replaced Kara Zor-El, and DC formally restored her to the canon in 2006, 20 years later.
Which brings me to video games, and specifically the two pieces that prompted me to write this.
In “Like a Hero(ine),” Niki Fakhoori presents a compelling argument for the different ways Yakuza as a series has integrated elements of The Hero’s Journey and The Heroine’s Journey. Where she and I disagree is that Makoto is “temporarily fridged.” Fridging is rarely temporary, and while Makoto is shot and slips into a coma, she isn’t permanently maimed. In fact, her story gets a happy ending in Yakuza 0 and again in Kiwami 2.
It’s also worth noting that what happens to her is a direct result of her own actions, something Fakhoori also acknowledges. Makoto deceives Majima so she can go to the Sebastian Building alone and try to negotiate what happens to the Empty Lot herself. It’s an incredibly brave thing to do. When Sohei Dojima has her shot, it has nothing to do with Majima or Kiryu. It’s to get her out of the way so he can get what he wants.
What happens to Makoto doesn’t happen to her because she is a woman: it happens to her because she’s startlingly out of her depth, because she is not and has never been a fighter, and because, as Fakhoori rightly points out in her piece, she pursues vengeance despite Majima warning her not to. This isn’t a fridging; it’s the consequences of her actions. While there is certainly something to be said for interrogating the way Yakuza treats its men and women, nothing that happens to Makoto is even remotely comparable to what happens to Alexandra DeWitt.
Then there’s Aerith. In “Unlearning misogyny to truly appreciate the women and girls of Kingdom Hearts,” Caelus McKeel writes “Square Enix unfortunately springs to mind whenever fridging is discussed, with Final Fantasy 7’s most famous character death being a prime example.”
Like Fakhoori, McKeel is largely right. There are many examples of Square treating women poorly; she points to numerous examples from Kingdom Hearts I wholeheartedly agree with, and I am still shocked by how badly Final Fantasy XVI treats Jill and Benedikta. But Aerith is not a victim of fridging.
Yes, Sephiroth kills her. But she dies saving the world. Aerith leaves the party of her own accord to find a way to stop Sephiroth from using the Black Materia. Sephiroth doesn’t kill her when she’s praying to the planet at that altar (to summon Holy, which does work) to mess with Cloud. He burned down Cloud and Tifa’s hometown of Nibelheim and killed their friends and family; they don’t need any additional motivation to want to take him down. Nor does the rest of the party, who by now knows that learning who his momma was made Sephiroth cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs and hellbent on summoning Meteor to wipe out the world. They’re already trying to stop him: Aerith’s death doesn’t change that. It just means they’ve lost someone they cared about. Many players had, too.
Sephiroth kills Aerith because, as one of the last Cetra (Ancients), she is one of the few people on the planet who can actually stop him. Getting to rub Cloud’s nose in it is just a bonus. But here’s the thing: Aerith’s actions do help defeat Sephiroth. Her plan works. Aerith’s death isn’t a fridging; it’s a sacrifice, and there is no victory without it. And unlike Supergirl, she continues to be a major force in Final Fantasy VII’s world after her death.
I’m not saying video games or comics or media in general don’t have an issue with fridging, or that women don’t often get the short end of the stick. We need to do better. But we can’t use fridging to describe what happens to every female character who is hurt, killed, or otherwise has something bad happen to them. Women and girls in fiction need to be just as vulnerable to bad luck, poor circumstances, and the consequences of their actions (both good and bad) as anyone else if they’re going to be great characters who stick with us after the story ends. The trick is making it so those moments don’t happen to motivate the men in their lives.
As Ron Marz pointed out in a letter responding to Simone, the stuff happens less because these characters are women and more that main characters – the leads, the ones who get their own books or drive the plots in most media – tend to be men. And because they’re the main characters, they’re largely immune to having those kinds of things happen to them:
“So if “main” characters, including Wonder Woman, are generally sacrosanct, the supporting characters are the ones who suffer the more permanent and shattering tragedies. And a lot of supporting characters are female.”
That’s gotten better in the years since Marz wrote that letter, but the hard truth is there’s still more work to do. We need more stories that center women and treat them as people whose hopes and dreams and desires and problems and fears and tragedies matter just as men’s do. We need more women to write those stories, more diverse stories in general, and more people to support them when they do get told. We are all better off when our stories encompass the entire human experience, not just certain privileged groups.
But as we work to build that future, I think it behooves us as critics to be able to speak honestly and with knowledge of the tropes we see and the stories in which they appear. Fridging is a very specific thing, and it’s wrong to apply it whenever bad things happen to women in media because it robs us of its meaning when we need it, and we run the risk of making our readers think it’s something it’s not. We can and should hold games (and everything else) accountable for how they treat women, and women’s voices should lead that charge. But we have to get it right, too.
I’ll let the last paragraph of Marz’s response to Simone, and then Simone herself, send us off. I think Marz’s words are still relevant more than 20 years later, and apply to far more than just comics:
“Comics have a long history as a male-oriented and male-dominated industry. That’s not a statement of judgment, simply one of fact. I do think comics can and should be more sensitive to female characters. But these are times in which the general editorial mindset is “cut to the fight scene,” in which half-naked women on covers spike sales. Publishers are unfortunately more concerned with survival than with sensitivity to women. And that’s a shame. If we want to save our industry, maybe we should stop ignoring half the population as possible readers.”
Or, as Simone put it when she was musing on the future:
“I still think women are pretty unevenly portrayed in comics, but so are men, really. Ultimately, we speak most loudly with the choices we make at the cash register. And to future creators – we ARE out there reading.”
Skybox is worker-owned and reader-supported! If you like pieces like this, support us at www.patreon.com/skyboxcritics or ko-fi.com/skyboxcritics and help us elevate games media.
