Comments on: A woman’s place is not in the refrigerator

By: Marie Brennan

Marie Brennan — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 19:11:59 +0000

Belated replies to several people . . .

Daemon: the difference is patterning. Killing off a village full of people doesn’t systematically single out a particular gender or ethnicity as the target of violence. It also doesn’t slot into the larger pattern of voyeuristic exploitation of women in pain (see: Captivity and other such movies). Nor the larger pattern of women not having agency, and being treated as adjuncts to a male character’s story. Yes, the mentor gacked by the rival ninja clan is probably a man, but he probably goes out like a badass, and there’s hardly a shortage of other men in the story who get to do other interesting things.

Ted: good example; that’s definitely a case of trope inversion.

Tom: haven’t seen Damages, so I can’t say.

By: Tom

Tom — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 06:10:25 +0000

Eh.

Something i wholeheartedly agree with, i hate this trope, amongst others (like i hate how a fandom can try to use this trope a lot in order to ‘shaft’ women that ‘goes beyond their places’).

Btw, what’s you people’s take on a series like Damages?

By: Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 01:14:26 +0000

Just wanted to mention the first episode of the TV series Alias, in which the murder of Sydney Bristow’s fiance motivates her to become a double agent and take down her evil boss. I found it quite effective, and I’m not sure if that was entirely because of the gender reversal. The fiance has a handful of scenes before he’s killed, but not enough to really flesh him out as a character; his murder is also not the result of his own agency, but is explicitly a consequence of Sydney Bristow’s actions. My reaction may have had something to do with Jennifer Garner’s ability to effectively portray grief, which is not something you typically see in male action heroes.

By: Fathers and Masculinity at SF Novelists

Fathers and Masculinity at SF Novelists — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:01:01 +0000

[...] right, I’m going to go out on a bit of a limb here, and pick up on Marie Brennan’s post and Kate Elliott’s post, to write about fathers and how we are portrayed in books and [...]

By: Jed

Jed — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 20:47:04 +0000

Marie: total agreement on Penny not being a send-up in Dr. Horrible. I was loving Dr. Horrible until Penny’s fridging, which ruined the rest of the show for me. And which got me thinking about all the other times and ways that Whedon has fallen down on this kind of thing.

By: Daemon

Daemon — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 01:06:24 +0000

Sure, you have plenty of cases of the girlfriend getting fridged, and very few of the boyfriend of a female protagonist, but there’s so very many cases where other random friends, family members, pets or entire villages get whacked to get the story rolling.

Seriously, I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen “farmer goes on to become a hero(ine) because their village was destroyed in chapter one” as a fantasy plot.

Just to give one very typical woman-free fridging from a very well known fantasy series: The death of Garkin in Robert Apsrin’s MYTH series. Narratively speaking Garkin dies to force the main characters to team up and get on with the adventuring.

How is “you killed my father/master” significantly different, other than the gender of the victim?

But we treat violence differently depending on the gender of the victim. It’s seen as “worse” when the victim is a woman. Make a video game in which you kill a few hundred men gratuitiously, or mixed-gendre crowds, and nobody will blink an eye. Make it so that you kill a few hundred women, and you’ll have a firestorm of controversy. Men’s lives are apparently expandable and unworthy of notice.

I believe the “women in regerigerators” name has been pretty much been replaced by “stuffed in a fridge” since people realized that a lot more guys were being fridged than was intitially noticed.

By: Marie Brennan

Marie Brennan — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:19:59 +0000

Becky — the problem is that I didn’t see any “sending up” in Penny’s death. It felt just like an uncritical replication of the standard comic-book trope, without any particular commentary added. Which saddened me, both because I’d been enjoying the way the rest of the story skewered various tropes, and because I thought it was a missed opportunity to do something more interesting. I’d been rooting for her to turn out to be a supervillainess herself, or a superheroine, or something that made her more than a playing piece and symbolic representation of various issues in Dr. Horrible’s narrative. Or Whedon could have left her as a symbol, but critiqued the way in which the characters around Penny put her into that role. All on my own, I can think of half a dozen other approaches that would have been more original and meaningful; instead Whedon gave me the most boring and unoriginal of them all.

By: Elias McClellan

Elias McClellan — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:26:42 +0000

Considering the comment on my statements of accord, I can’t wait to read the response to BeckyZoole @ 36.

By: BeckyZoole

BeckyZoole — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:05:07 +0000

I think that the woman-in-the-refrigerator death in “Dr. Horrible” was not Whedon tripping into a cliche.

I think it was Whedon deliberately diving into a cliche, as part of his whole send-up of super-heroes.

By: Katharine Kerr

Katharine Kerr — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:49:50 +0000

Thanks for a thoughtful post!

There’s a similiar motif that occurs at the end of episodic ficitons: woman dies so hero can be free to go on and seduce someone else in the next episode. The original STAR TREK had several of these, for example.