RWBY has no Women in Refrigerators

Hello again,

I'm back today to discuss the justly hated trope of fridging and how RWBY avoids, subverts and deconstructs it!

Thanks as always to my wonderful patrons for making these episodes possible, links below.

So, first.

What is fridging?

Fridging comes from Women in Refrigerators (WiR) which was coined in response to the Green Lantern vol. 3 #54 (1994), written by Ron Marz.

In which Alexandra DeWitt, all around cool lady and girlfriend of protagonist Kyle Rayner, is killed by the villain Major Force and stuffed in a refrigerator.

This was was specifically done to enrage Kyle rather than because of anything Alexandra had to do with the story.

Another famous example of fridging would be the Death of Gwen Stacy in "The Amazing Spider-Man" #121.

Gwen is thrown to her death by Green Goblin and psychichs briefly decides to work as it does in our reality, leading to her neck to snap when Spiderman catches her with his web.

As with Alexandra, Gwen was killed solely for Peter's pain which has generally defined fridging for much of its existance. IE, a woman is killed in order to elicit anger and grief in a male character, while herself having little inner life or agency.

In essence, its the most intense form of objectification, a living person rendered into a lifeless tool solely to evoke a reaction in someone else.

The definition of the trope has been somewhat expanded to include any character killed so carelessly, but its primarily still utilized with women.

Its a well hated trope and for good reason, but like with say, Damsel in Distress it can be misapplied.

OSP has a great video discussing the Damsel in Distress trope. Noting that in their eyes for someone, anyone, to qualify a a damsel in distress they need to meet a lot of criteria ranging from:

Having little to no personality

Having no agency in the story, not their kidnapping, but the story overall -

Having no agency once captured -

Said character may be in distress, but they could not be replaced with a shiny object and keep the story largely the same.

A similar criteria can apply to fridging to determine whether they were a character that died or a character that existed and killed off solely for someone else's manpain/a cheap emotional reaction.

Did the character have an any agency or an active role in the story?

Did the character die for reasons other than to evoke a reaction in another character?

Did the characters death have actual dramatic and narrative weight outside this visceral moment?

If the answer to these is yes, then that's not fridging, its merely a character death. Id the character lacked these, or lose these through their death then it becomes fridging.

Also noted above, a character can go from fully fleshed out to fridged.

Jason Todd would be an example of this given what motivated his death, the spectacle made of it and how it was used after the fact. Rendering a once lively character full of agency and depth into a voiceless corpse, only existing as a prop for dramatic effect and Bruce angst.

So, we have established what fridging is and how it works, so why do some people erroneously apply it to RWBY?

Well, some folks are likely just misguided.

Its like how in a show dominated by entirely queer characters some may die and how this is different to the bury your gays trope engaged in by say, the 100, which had very few gay people and killed off half its flagship gay pairing the moment it became canon.

IE, in regards to RWBY, there's a ton of plot centric and important women which means some are going to die and someone may then misapply fridging based on merely thinking it means, women die in media.

This video is for these people.

I will now go through a list of pseudo fridgings people have complained about and breakdown why this doe snot apply:

Off the cuff, I am going to cover figures like Amber, Tock, Gretchen Rainart, Summer (assuming she's dead) and An Ren, as one group.

This is because these characters all exist as backstory rather than characters within the story as it stands.

Meanwhile Amber, Tock, Gretchen, Summer & An are in essence, backstory in the same way Salem's dad is. They exist to give context to the main characters, not be as actual agents within the story itself.

Next up is another fish in a barrel, Fria. Off the cuff, her life on screen while brief was given a lot of weight and depth. Her death was given a great deal of dignity and she had clear agency in her final moments and while her death did further the story she was not killed to evoke a reaction in someone else. She is an example of minor role big impact and a sort of transitionary character by her nature, think Kami from Drago Ball if you need a lighter example.

Moving on to, let's touch on Alyx, a child who was lost in the Ever After with her brother and the star of a book based on her time there. Only the book was misrepresentative of the situation, as her brother was there and she was not having a good time to say the least.

Jaune, lost in the same location and displaced in time tried to lead her down the path of the books. Failing to realize that some scraggly stranger knowing way more than he should about a child and trying to control her every action would only foster paranoia and fear.

A fact that led her to poison him and make for an escape with her brother, only to begin reflecting on her actions in the Ever After and deciding to fix what she'd broken in her desperation to escape.

Only to be killed by the Curious Cat in a rage at this perceived betrayal.

So, off the cuff, Alyx was not killed with the intention of impacting Jaune and more to the point.

No one even knew Alyx was dead until the end of V9 and after it was revealed it was given a resolution. One that did benefit Jaune, but that also thematically tied into her own desire to fix the things she had broken.

Adding to that, like the first group, Alyx is not strictly speaking a character so much as she is backstory, much the same as her brother. They exist to flesh out the setting and cast, but they are not in of themselves agent within the story.

Next up, Vernal!

Now, on its surface this might look a bit like fridging given she was a literal body double in universe and both lived and died for Raven's continued existence.

However, she was not killed to evoke a reaction in Raven, she did have agency in her life and death however screwed her circumstances and the narrative is well aware of the tragedy of her existence as a body double and what it says about Raven as a character that she'd use someone like this.

In essence, while she did have a small death in many ways, she was also a minor character, so it was reflective of her position in the overall story over a disregard for her character in general.

Next up we have one that even I complained about, as you can see if you go back to my reviews of V5 on Tumblr and various forums.

Namely, Weiss be run through with a spear by Cinder; she survives of course but it did rankle myself and many others. But upon reflection, while I think the effort was a bit clumsy, I think it was actually an attempt to deconstruct fridging, hear me out:

Our heroes are ambushed at Haven Academy by the villains, senior Huntsment Qrow is trying to keep them all together but Jaune's temper gets the better of him and he charges Cinder for revenge.

It becomes clear in the fight that he's basically just an angry kid with a death wish andwhen he affirms he's fine with dying if it means even inconveniencing her Cinder decides to punish that attitude.

Namely, she hurls a spear through an already injured Weiss.

This act brings out Jaune's Semblance, and thus develops his character and was done specifically to get to him.

However:

The Semblance Jaune develops is a support one, rather than being angry he's scared and guilty and ends up helping heal Weiss with this new power.

Weiss herself does not die, but instead is healed and comes back swinging, getting a badass return to the battle by skewering Salem's strongest fighter.

Meanwhile Jaune is left exhausted on the ground, his anger only served to enable the villains, while developing a more passive ability helped his allies.

What's more, while Cinder did do this to mess with Jaune she doesn't actually have any personal beef with him so much as she was just annoyed at him in that moment and decided to be cruel.

In this regard, compare it to Frieza taking out Dende, its a cruel display done to show villainy but its not really about trying to force some kind of growth or change in attitude, its just being a dick.

In essence, I think this was an effort to deconstruct fridging that didn't quite work, even with this context it still doesn't jive with me but I can appreciate the spirit of it.

We're racing to the end zone with our three finalists!

Sienna Khan, Penny Polendina and Pyrrha Nikos!

Firstly, we have, Sienna, the hero queen Khan, we have another plot point I visceral objected to and critiqued and still do.

Please bring her back!

But, while she did die in a rather unpleasant way, it was not exploitative like being stuffed in a fridge would be. It was not done to further the angst or rage of any other character, but to further Adam's geo political machinations.

Sienna herself, while only appearing for a short time had a lot of meta weight thanks to her role in changing the White Fang and she had personality to spare.

So while it was certainly a waste of a character and one that damaged the rather fraught Faunus/White Fang storyline, it was not fridging.

Now we reach Penny, a much beloved member of the cast by the fandom, and a character tragically killed by Jaune to ensure her magic did not get stolen by Cinder after taking a fatal injury.

Many have issues with this death, and it is certainly a contentious topic in FNDM to this day, but I do not believe it was fridging.

For one, while Jaune was impacted by her death she wasn't injured to get to him and Penny's character was much broader than her impact on one specific character.

her death has impact that's felt by more than one character and that impact is present well after she's gone and she is granted a great deal of dignity and weight by the cast, especially Ruby.

She was essentially another one of the protagonists throughout V7 and 8, this was a major character death and a tragedy and was treated as such.

Penny's first and second deaths were tragedies that tied back to Atlas' dehumanization and her own lack of agency, as well as her own tendency to not value her own life even when it was clear that she was worthwhile because of Atlesian culture.

What's more, the circumstances surrounding her death were tied to the loss of her mechanical body, exchanged for one seemingly born of her soul to escape what was functionally a deadly disease.

Penny had little time to get used to this body or recover from the experience before Cinder's attack and decided, rather than evacuating, to fling herself into battle, even as she struggled to fight with her new body.

If you want a comparison for Penny's narrative weight and tragedy, think Boromir or Maghe Hughes and you have Penny Polendina, not identical, but similar.

Finally we have Pyrrha Nikos.

Some people frame her death as being solely for Jaune's character, but in reality he was only one of many characters who was negatively affected, with her death being more about exposing the hypocrisy and horrible nature of Ozpin's martyrdom-based ideals, Ruby unlocking her silver eyes, and importantly, Pyrrha's own mental breakdown due to outside stressors and her own inability to come to terms with her self-sacrificing tendencies and hero complex.

While Pyrrha did satellite Jaune too much for my tastes in volumes 1 and 2, she very much came into her own in volume 3 and was a major player. What's more even before that she certainly had her moments in the sun without him such as defeating CDRL or leading JNPR during the Breach.

What's more, even if we ignore that Pyrrha was based on Achiles and thus her tragic death has meta weight. The fact its she was the brightest of the generation, star pupil, false hero/maiden within the narrative. Her death was the final turning point on happy school adventures and heralded the shift into the main story arc.

Adding to that, while Jaune did get some focus around her death, Pyrrha's death was built entirely on her own tragic agency and heroism. Adding to that, Pyrrha was not just Jaune's nominal love interest but his teacher and mentor whose lessons he still uses in the next volume to guide his training.

Pyrrha was in essence, the mentor who died heroically holding off a major villain.

Think Obi-Wan Kenobi, wow not wonder she was so popular, everyone loves Obi-Wan.

So there you have it, a complete breakdown on every main series death, its thematic and narrative role and why it was definitely never fridging.

Thanks to my Editor Enigma for helping expand on this script and editing and thanks to you all for stopping by.

https://lby3.com/wir/