WIR? (Spoilers)

I'll be honest, here. The idea of a woman being murdered bothers me more than the idea of a guy being murdered. Don't misread that. I think the idea of anyone being murdered is terrible. Anyone's death ends all their goals an aspirations, and it deprives all their friends, loved ones and family of that person's place in their lives. (Clearly I'm assuming here that the person lost wasn't themselves some monster people would be glad to be rid of.) But given that anyone's murder bothers me a lot, assuming people I don't know personally, the idea of the murder of a even a woman I don't know bothers me more than the murder of a man that I don't know.

Hopefully unsurprisingly, given my forum handle, I'm a guy. I'm a heterosexual guy; if I want a relationship, it's going to be with a woman. I'm also pretty into the idea of monogamy. Every relationship with a woman isn't a serious, deep commitment, but if I do enter a serious relationship with a woman, I don't plan to get a replacement somewhere. Therefore I aim to invest deeply in that. The idea of doing that and having it stripped from me by the death (by any means) of that partner is an awful prospect, but the idea that they could be taken from me by another person's deliberate acts is a situation I can barely put my mind around, and that's not even considering the dark details this could entail of how the murder happened.

I believe that I project that onto others. I know that if any woman is murdered, somewhere out there she might have had a guy like me in her life, who now is left feeling like I would.

Therefore, if I were a writer, because of my feelings, outlined above, one of the most horrible pains I could imagine inflicting on a male characters is the murder of their female loved one. I read the eponymous comic, Green Lantern #54, back when it came out. I definitely wanted Kyle to kill Major Force.

Let's face it, right now the majority of our iconic comic heroes are male. There are plenty of female characters out there, but especially the golden and silver age icons that form something of a backbone of our current "mainstream" superhero comics culture are dominated by male figures. Completely aside from the question of whether our stable of comic book icons should be predominantly male, given that they are predominantly male, and given that the are predominantly portrayed as heterosexual, I think this then leads naturally to the seeming prevalence of this purported meme.

I don't think it's creepy. I think it's actually an outgrowth of a variation on chivalrous views - that good men think the idea of bad things happening to women is heinous. Depicting bad things happening to women is then a way to depict a heinous foe.

It becomes weird if it's nonsensically applied outside the boundaries I've given. If our protagonist is a heterosexual female, does it make sense for one of her female friends to end up in a fridge? Unfortunately, I could see it being done solely because the writers/publishers might think their readers are mostly male, since it could still tap into those male readers' potential loathing for this outcome and thus of the murderer. That's not creating empathy with the protagonist in this case, though. Were I to come to know that was done, though, I would think less of the author, because that comes across to me targeted advertising more than good writing, and while the two can be related, I view them as separate.

If anything about this deserves discussion, I think it might be to wonder why men like me are less bothered (even if certainly bothered) by the idea of the murder of their fellow males.

Liberty was marked from the get-go. She has basically the same name as another character, leading to them being easily confused (strike 1), is a member of a do-gooder family spanning multiple generations (strike 2), and is more of a supporting character than a main one (strike 3). She was straight-up walking death-bait. Especially due to issue #1. Literally the only thing I now know about this character is she is the younger Liberty's mom and now she is dead.

Personally I'm a bit skeptical of the WIR theory. The death of any supporting character occurs in order to give the main characters something to react to, whether that supporting character is a girlfriend, mentor, side kick, little brother, father figure, best friend, lover, or pet. That is why these are supporting characters and not main ones. They are there to support. Knocking off supporting characters to build drama and push the lead characters into deeper, inevitable, and constantly building conflict is an age-old technique. Just look at some of Shakespeare's plays for classical examples.

This reminds me, Samuel Tow's suggestions to the devs about future plotting covered this development (#2 and, arguably, #4).

Quote:

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow The more I think about the game's story, the more I have a few things to kindly ask the writers to please stop doing: 1. Please stop trying to surprise us with plot twists. I know that a story which doesn't go exactly as the audience predicted makes for a good experience, but when you start adding plot twists to the plot twists that negated previous plot twists, you are officially trying too hard. 2. Please stop trying to shock us. A shock death is a powerful tool. Ten shock deaths in a row is boring. It's the difference between Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2. A shock revelation can surprise. Shock revelation after shock revelation just makes us stop caring to keep track. You don't have to try so hard. 3. Please Stop making your stories such a tangled mess of complexity. Contrary to popular belief, you don't have to have an impenetrably complex story that reinvents the wheel three times over to have a compelling plot. In fact, the simpler the base story is, the more freedom the storyteller has in HOW he tells it. Pick a simple story and just stick to telling it well. You don't have to keep adding plot threads. 4. Please stop invalidating your old stories. I get that writers leave and new ones join, wanting to tell their own story, but please make sure that those writers are well educated on the game's background, so that they don't contradict what's already been said or massively misrepresent established concepts. You don't have to defile an old story to make a new one.

Number 5 could be "Avoid tropes with a misogynistic bias."

Who put the link to TV tropes?

Whenever I enter that site, I can't find my way out.

How about just killing her because it's the natural, if emotional, resolution to this story?

Or just not making a "We killed a main character's brother's sister's dog's owner's sister's uncle's dad's cousin's father's brother's robot! Look how edgy we are!" plot.

Yeah, zero problems here with anyone of either gender dying for any reason if it's consistent with the story that's been told prior and it's tone.

This was so clumsy, though, I'm not even sure there was any gender bias involved...