TrueGentleman

Or, conceivably, the art director wanted to separate Fury visually from the others to emphasize that he's apart from their superheroes-vs-villains world. As Joss Whedon explains about Sam Jackson's Fury in a recent interview, "{...}Marvel actually mandated — they were very interested in keeping him, not just in the sort of a mystery of how the organization operates, but a real moral gray area where you really have to decide, 'Is Nick Fury the most manipulative guy in the world? Is he a good guy? Is he completely Machiavellian or is it a bit of both?'"

I'm probably looking forward to Jackson's performance as much as, if not more than any of the other actors', which is saying something.

Anyone who's dealt professionally with writers would say that if the argument were reduced to two options, it would be "The writer is sloppy" vs. "The writer is careful". I myself have no patience with binary choices, whether from Structuralists or Internet surveys. At this point, I will now leave it to the CoH writers to speak for themselves.

You've certainly seen through Cronin's attempt to articulate a useable definition from the contentious reaction that immediately greeted Simone's original letter on Internet comics fan boards everywhere.

Except that we've tried to avoid assigning meaning by leaving out authorial intent in this discussion. When Dave Sim does something wretched to a female character, it's not a stretch to raise misogyny as an issue since he's accumulated a lengthy record of not only saying horrible things about women but also patching together a homemade philosophy about living under fascist feminism. When Grant Morrison cited Brad Meltzer for fridging Sue Dibny, he refrained from attributing motives for it. Likewise, nobody's attributing direct motives to the devs over Miss Liberty's death, particularly since no red names have posted in this thread.

The WIR Syndrome exists as a phenomenon in mainstream superhero comics, but the factors contributing to this are numerous (and probably best left for a more detailed discussion in the Comic and Hero/Villain Culture forum). The plain fact is that too often female characters' deaths are treated differently from male ones', e.g. for shock value.

Who's brought any flavor of feminist theory into this discussion? Is anyone quoting Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick or Andrea Dworkin? Does Simone somehow count because she's a woman in addition to being a comics writer?

Simone was clear about what common features she noted in her list, and we've narrowed the criteria even further for the purposes of this thread, e.g. not including maiming or sexual assault (to say nothing of shifting goal posts).

If you think that "I do not believe that the same death/maiming/torture/r*pe would have occurred had the female character been a male." means simply 'would not have occurred' rather than 'occurred the same way', then that's your interpretation. The issue has emphasized the latter from Simone to the present, however, whenever it's been discussed at length or in any depth. It really isn't controversial.

Well, I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt that you'd missed those posts rather than rejected them out of hand.

The double standard at work in WIR Syndrome is accepted by numerous comics critics. Wikipedia merely needs to be edited - and no doubt anyone with an agenda in the other direction will edit it again. That's why it's a fascinating resource, but not an authority.

If you won't accept Simone's original criteria, perhaps you'll give some credit to the well-regarded comics critic Brian Cronin of Comic Book Resources:

While "the same death/maiming/torture/r*pe would have occurred had the female character been a male" is fairly broad, it covers the double standard at work. That double standard also applies to why female deaths in cases of fridging are always that much less heroic.

If anything, narrowing the criteria for the purposes of this discussion should focus the issue on how Miss Liberty is treated in-game by the devs, which was the OP's intent when he contrasted her arbitrary death with Praetorian Vanessa's heroic one.

One would think that a veteran heroine with several decades of experience wouldn't set herself up to be sucker-punched by an up-and-coming Anarchnos goon. What was Miss Liberty doing all those years, fighting grey-conned mobs in Atlas Park?

The real problem with determining what's in or out of character for Miss Liberty is that she doesn't have much of one established in the game. As Mr. Grey points out, her in-game appearances are few and do not sync with her reputation as a great heroine:
Her importance in the game is mainly defined by her relationships, i.e. Statesman's daughter and Ms. Liberty's mother. That makes her a great motivator for those NPCs but not much in her own right.

Ah, Wikipedia, not necessarily a bad place to start researching, but not a substitute for primary documents. Too often it's just used as Cliff Notes for the Internet's hive mind.

As discussed earlier in this thread, here's how Gail Simone came to view the WIR Syndrome:

To recapitulate, from her examples and others, several criteria emerge for a female character's death to count as getting fridged:

(A) The female character goes down like a chump, because she's ambushed, outclassed, depowered, or otherwise behaving out of character;
(B) The death* is "shocking", because of extreme violence or from-out-of-nowhere unpredictability, if not both;
(C) Another character, typically but not exclusively male, "benefits" in terms of development, from the hero receiving additional motivation or undergoing "growth" to the villain confirming evil nature and/or dangerous threat status; and
(D) Male characters rarely if ever receive the same treatment under similar circumstances (their deaths are more often heroic sacrifices, constantly mourned, or only temporary setbacks).

* In the original definition of the WIR Syndrome, sexual assault, torture, maiming, depowering, etc. also counted for qualification, but those are not applicable to this discussion about Miss Liberty's killing.

The heroic deaths of Supergirl, Elektra, Elasti-Girl, and Phoenix do not count as examples of Women in Refrigerators. I wish I could provide additional notable examples, but those are the only A-List ones I could think of off the top of my head.

Doing each other the courtesy of reading the posts in a thread before commenting in turn is the only way to prevent threads from turning into merry-go-rounds of repeated quotes.

Precisely - and that's the difference between a hero's death and getting fridged.

Since there have been so many WIR cases in this thread, here are some counter-examples:

• Supergirl: Died fighting Anti-Monitor in Crisis on Infinite Earths, sacrificing herself and forcing the supervillain to withdraw.
• Elektra: Killed by Bullseye, against whom she's evenly matched, in one of Frank Miller's old-school martial arts duels.
• Elasti-Girl: Died with her fellow Doom Patrol members in an explosion in order to save a town rather than give in to the supervillain General Zahl.
• Phoenix (Jean Grey): After beating back the Shi'ar Imperial Guard on her own, sacrifices herself rather than let her identity be consumed by the Dark Phoenix power.

Although these cases have some problematic elements (why was Elasti-Girl the last member of the original Doom Patrol to be resurrected?), they're all heroic deaths.

Perhaps, but Booster Gold and Martin Manhunter are more popular heroes and less likely to be killed unless it's a big deal. Ice, on the other hand, went down in classic fridging fashion: While mind-controlled by the big bad Overmaster, she turns on her former JLA allies, and once she's broken free, Overmaster incinerates her to a crisp in front of them, which gives her boyfriend Guy Gardener something to angst about to deepen his character. No wonder Waid apologized.

Simone isn't just a writer of comics, she's a fan of comics. For those two reasons, her observations carry more weight than if she were a professional critic (who, as a class, are by vocation looking for something to criticize).

EDIT: She's not exaggerating about the pressure to kill female characters. Marv Wolfman recounts, "Kole was, in retrospect, a mistake which I did because other writers complained we weren't killing off any of my characters in Crisis, and if I wanted their characters to die I had to kill one of mine." And Mark Waid apologizes, "I'm responsible for the death of Ice. My call, my worst mistake in comics, my biggest regret. I remember hearing myself ask the editor, 'Who's the JLAer whose death would evoke the most fierce gut reaction from readers?' What a dope. Mea culpa."

Mr. Wayne should come clean and explain that one of his girlfriends is into whips, and their nightly liaisons typically involve their dressing up in animal costumes.

They also recently released a pet for $10 that was tradeable, as a hedge against gold farmers. No doubt everyone else in the industry, including Paragon Studies, is closely watching to see how that turns out.

As for the German shepherd, it's a nicely animated rig, but none of my characters are dog persons. (We all know a cat isn't far behind.)

That at least is unlikely. Yates said this film project would be "two to three years"in development, and since they haven't announced even a writer or cast, it's improbable they'll have anything in time for the anniversary on November 2013.

Moffat may be keeping his plans for the anniversary close to his chest, but he's continued to mention the topic in recent interviews.

Nobody's playing deconstructionist with the WIR Syndrome - nobody's quoting Derrida, applying post-structuralist philosophy, or engaging in etymological shenanigans with close readings. Nor is anyone dragging in feminist theory or gender studies into this discussion. This is just by-the-book literary criticism.

Comics writer Gail Simone put a name to the trend she observed, and her industry colleagues, including such veterans Marv Wolfman, Mark Waid, and Steve Englehart, have agreed by and large with her thesis, particularly since they'd seen it for themselves or wound up contributing to it. Clear criteria for qualification have been outlined, and numerous examples have been provided (far more than comparable lists for male characters).

The horror genre isn't germane to CoH, but if you want to explore that on your own, there's a ton of interesting criticism. The Final Girl phenomenon is a good place to start. Horror tropes don't have anything to do with Miss Liberty or the Who Will Die? arc (unless Statesman winds up stabbed to death in the shower by Lord Recluse dressed as his dead sister).

DC's top writer Grant Morrison has no problems calling sexism sexism at the company:
He also cites Brad Metzinger for fridging Sue Dibny, but without implying a misogynistic agenda to him. It's entirely possible to address sexism in literary (ok, comics) criticism without condemning writers as misogynists. The Dave Sims of comics are much fewer these days, fortunately. Brian Michael Bendis hasn't suddenly revealed himself as a covert patriarchal propaganda agent by fridging the Wasp, but it is disappointing to see him resort to this cliched plot twist after he'd created such fully realized heroines as Jessica Jones in Alias and Deena Pilgrim in Powers. Even after one egregious instance, he's a long way from Frank Miller territory.

The problem with fridging is that it's bad writing, period: Treating a female character's death worse than if she were male, the essence of WIR Syndrome, is never going to make a good story better, only poorer.

Sure, shock sells, but it's also an issue of what values are being bought into.

Whatever the motives of fridge-stuffing writers - and there are no doubt as many rationales as there are writers involved - the net result is that there's a particular trend for the way they treat the deaths of female characters differently than male ones.

Also, 99%? Do you have a comics author survey in mind for how you determined this figure that you could supply us with for this discussion?

Comics, specifically mainstream superhero comics, are under discussion, not movies, which, as a much larger and diverse industry, is a much more complicated subject. As the genre inspiration for City of Heroes - which was made into in a comic book series - they're as important to understand as anything in MMORPGs.

In the classic case of Bucky Barnes's death (yes, we all know he 'got better' recently), he was killed while attempting to defuse Baron Zemo's flying bomb, which at least explodes before it can hit its target, thanks to his triggering its self-destruct. In short, he died a self-sacrificing hero's death in a war.



Contrast this with the death of the Wasp in the climactic battle of the Secret Invasion series, which was mentioned above. A Skrull disguised as her once-estranged husband, Hank Pym, had secretly manipulated her size-changing powers so that she could be turned into an unwitting biological bomb. When she's rigged to blow during the final fight, she loses control of herself and threatens all her allies. Thor has to take her out, literally, because she's become a liability, not a hero. She dies without even the option of self-sacrifice.



Writer Brian Michael Bendis (who really should know better), sums up Wasp's death as "a very poignant moment, particularly for Hank Pym, Tony Stark and Thor", coincidentally all male characters. (Presumably, it was something more than "poignant" for Janet Van Dyne herself.) Hank Pym, comics' most famous unbalanced and abusive husband, later takes over her superhero name and costume in what's probably the creepiest tribute in superherodom:



Here we have a case of two superhero casualties of war, one receiving very different treatment in the death scene than another. Given that one is a super-powered heroine with over almost half a century's presence in comics and the other was a sidekick active for less than a decade, the former would be more likely go out on a higher heroic note, or at the very least, both ought to receive equally respectful treatment.

"It's not about time - it's about space."

There have been a lot of interviews with Doctor Who folks in which they've speculated about doing a movie eventually, but this is the first concrete news.

You're quite welcome - the variety of opinions from those writers was thought-provoking (there are more on Simone's site, and yes, she did receive feedback from women in comics). Although those writers had individual explanations for the WIR Syndrome, none of them argued against the essential merits of Simone's theisis or the extent of her list of examples.

From these examples and others, several criteria emerge for a female character's death to count as getting fridged:

(A) The female character goes down like a chump, because she's ambushed, outclassed, depowered, or otherwise behaving out of character;
(B) The death* is "shocking", because of extreme violence or from-out-of-nowhere unpredictability, if not both;
(C) Another character, typically but not exclusively male, "benefits" in terms of development, from the hero receiving additional motivation or undergoing "growth" to the villain confirming evil nature and/or dangerous threat status; and
(D) Male characters rarely if ever receive the same treatment under similar circumstances (their deaths are more often heroic sacrifices, constantly mourned, or only temporary setbacks).

* In the original definition of the WIR Syndrome, sexual assault, torture, maiming, depowering, etc. also counted for qualification, but those are not applicable to this discussion about Miss Liberty's killing.

This discussion is feedback, which is part of the purpose of these boards. It's one of CoH's merits that the devs do pay attention to what players are saying and make adjustments accordingly. And if Dr. Aeon would like to post here to give us some insight into the choices made when constructing this narrative or to respond to the points that we have made about it, then he could expect to be treated with the same consideration we give one another in these conversations.

At present, the SSA storyline is still in motion, so it would be premature to declare Miss Liberty's death to be a canonical WIR example for the CoH entry on TV Tropes, even though it already meets a couple of criteria. There's still time, one would hope, for this arc to make improvements.

Death is definitely overused for shock value in comics and certainly devalued when characters can't seem to stay dead. One notable aspect of the WIR Syndrome is that the killed off women tend to remain deceased, or at best take much longer to come back to life or get restored to normal than their male counterparts. When Batman's spine is broken, he's back in action after about a year's worth of issues; when Batgirl's is, she spends over two decades in a wheelchair.

Here's a further set of recent examples of fridged female characters, all of whom are still dead:

• Tana Moon, the girlfriend of new formula Superboy, was electrocuted in front of him with a boobytrapped necklace she'd unknowingly accepted as a gift from a villain. Her death did provide Superboy with an occasion for maturing, though. As Guardian helpfully observed in front of Moon's smouldering corpse, "Superboy just lost a big part of his youth, and it wasn't because he was transformed into a man."
  
• Teen Titan Pantha was accidentally decapitated by the far more powerful original flavor Superboy during his super-hissy fit so he could go past the moral point of no return.
  
• Batman's girlfriend Silver St. Cloud was killed in a sneak attack by a disguised Onomatopoeia, to make the new-ish villain as evil as the Batman's old school rogue's gallery.
  
• Dee Tyler, the second Phantom Lady, was slaughtered by Deathstroke, a supervillain well above her fighting bracket, to confirm his status as a "just business" badass mercernary.
  
• The Wasp was unsuspectingly turned into a potential bio-bomb by a disguised Skrull, who had been posing as her husband, and had to be teleported away from the battle by Thor before she was detonated. Her husband has since been inspired by her death to adopt her superhero title for himself.

Fun fact: The Wasp is the only founding member of the Avengers who hasn't come back to life after being killed.

Actually, the contrast couldn't be simpler: Two major Star Wars characters die as a result of confronting Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader, but while one heroically sacrifices himself and plays a significant role in later films, the other goes down like a chump and isn't inquired after by either her son or her daughter in the original trilogy. Guess which one shares the same chromosomal characteristics as George Lucas?

The problem of the WIR Syndrome in mainstream superhero comics isn't the killing of women per se, it's a combination of the circumstances in which they are killed and the portrayal of their characters in those circumstances - which is noticeably different from the way male characters are treated under similar conditions. The trope namer, Green Lantern Kyle Rayner's girlfriend, Alexandra DeWitt, has already been discussed in this thread - murdered by a supervillain who then dismembered her and stuffed her body parts into a refrigerator, for those tuning in late - but there are other notable examples.

• Big Barda, one of Apokolips's fiercest fighters, was killed in her kitchen in a sneak attack to kick off the Death of the New Gods. The other New Gods bumped off in this series got to put up more of a fight, but Scott Free needed extra motivation of his wife's sudden death to go after their killer.
  
• Green Lantern Katma Tui, John Stewart's wife, is killed while powerless by Hal Jordan's archetypal psycho ex, Star Sapphire. She remains the only Green Lantern to have died in her kitchen, whereas most members of the Corps tend to fall in a super-powered battle of some kind.
  
• The capable and independent wife of Elongated Man, Sue Dibny is killed accidentally while her guard is down at home by the Atom's estranged wife (yes, another psycho ex). Soon after, it's revealed she was sexually assaulted by Dr. Light, in order to make that erstwhile comic relief villain more evil.
  
• Although I've personally argued against including The Killing Joke for artistic reasons, there's no question that Batgirl is crippled in a shooting by the Joker when she lets her guard down at home, so Alan Moore nonetheless gets points deducted.
  
• While Jason Todd is bludgeoned to death by the Joker and becomes a ever-present source of guilt to the Batman, who constantly reminds himself of what happened, Stephanie Brown doesn't even merit a Bat Cave memorial of her Robin costume after being tortured to death by Black Mask, to make the new-ish villain as evil as the Batman's old school rogue's gallery. (Yes, they both "get better" and come back.)
  
• And let's not even get into the apparent automatic death sentence that's passed for being the girlfriend of Daredevil or the Savage Dragon.
  
• Also, to address a sci-fi example used earlier, Obi-Wan duels Darth Vader and sacrifices himself distract the villain from Luke and company's escape from the Death Star, but he comes back as a Force-ghost. The unarmed Padmé confronts Anakin, gets force-choked, dies of a broken heart, and is mentioned about as often as Mrs. Lear in the original Star Wars trilogy, but her death motivates Vader to become totally evil or whatever.

Not every superheroine or superhero's girlfriend dies in WIR fashion, nor do comics writers traditionally exclude male secondary characters from dying in plot twists to motivate heroes. When a certain set of criteria are fulfilled, however, that's when the 'fridged trope is invoked.

Here in CoH, the devs have taken an underdeveloped female character - who nonetheless possesses some significance as not only a relative of two of the game's most prominent NPC heroes but also a lengthy career as a crimefighter - and had her killed off with her guard down by an Arachnos agent who otherwise wouldn't be in her fighting bracket. We shall see how her death affects the other superheroes and plays out in the SSA's plot, but at this point, Miss Liberty looks like she's being stuffed into the metaphorical refrigerator.