This blog is not a critic's corner. I'm not here to cast aspersions. It's really really hard to make television of any kind, and every show has at least a few episodes that limp, and usually way more.
But you can learn a lot from things that don't work. And in the remainder of this week I thought I might point to a couple common story problems, tricks that seem to work but which we've come to realize are really not great for a whole lot of reasons.
Today's example is Fridging, a term coined by comic book writer Gail Simone to describe the act of killing or doing violence to a female character in order to move the male protagonist's story along, i.e. to motivate them to act or to free them up in order to do something or be with someone new.
The term comes from a truly horrendous moment in Ron Marz's Green Lantern run, in which Green Lantern Kyle Rayner discovered his girlfriend Alexandra hacked to death in his refrigerator by an enemy. Simone and others compiled a list of every time this trope has been used just in comics, and it's pretty horrendous.
While modern storytelling has gotten at least slightly more self-aware, these tropes still recur, with women and others as the victims. So for example in episode 103 of THE BOOK OF BOBA FETT, after spending a tremendous amount of time transforming the Sand People from horror movie villains into the richly cultured indigenous people of Tatooine, episode 3 has Boba's tribe seemingly murdered offscreen. One hopes that future episodes will reveal that it wasn't the whole tribe, but that was certainly the implication of episode three. And it serves no purpose but to move Fett's story forward.
The victims are not women in this case, but the trope is the same. It's just replaced one marginalized group for another.
The point here is not that women and characters of other marginalized groups should never die or suffer violent crimes in TV shows (although you know, wouldn't it be nice?). It's to say that these characters should not be treated simply as objects to move along the stories of others. That's not a magic trick, it's a crutch to prop up a bad story and a really fucked up one at that.
