How to Kill Off a Female Character Without it Being Gratuitous?

I think that the distinction here is between the woman being important because the man knows/likes/loves her, and the woman being important because she's an important character.

Let's leap to, say, Star Trek, because it comes to mind. We don't care about McCoy purely because Kirk is fond of McCoy. We don't see him solely through Kirk's eyes. When he got in trouble, in, say, The City at the Edge of Forever, we weren't saying, "Poor Kirk! How is he going to deal with his fear about McCoy? How will Kirk cope if McCoy dies? If that happens, will Kirk avenge McCoy?"

We cared about McCoy. He was a full fledged character.

On the other hand, Kirk's son...what's-his-name...existed almost purely as a prop to manipulate Kirk's emotions. We didn't really care much about him. He existed to make Kirk think about his past, to make Kirk care about him, to make Kirk go into full-tilt revenge mode against Khan. He didn't really matter as a character, he mattered as a device.

If I understand correctly, I think that the OP's goal is for this female character to be important, like McCoy, rather than almost purely a device, like what's-his-name.

 

If the OP wants that, that's fine. Personally speaking, I don't have any issues with characters being basically plot devices. For instance, the father's death in the film Backdraft. Or the death/disappearance of the son in Minority Report. Or William Wallace's wife's death in Braveheart. Or Batman's parents. Etc.

 

@Bone2pick

No but see, all those characters were MALE.

Like we can all pussyfoot around it saying "I'm not thinking about this from a Feminist viewpoint" but this entire issue, the very CONCEPT of "friding", is based on a Feminist talking point. That it's "dehumanizing". But as you have CORRECTLY AND LOGICALLY pointed out, if that were the case people would be just as shocked and blown away by Bruce Wayne's parents or by the father in Backdraft or by Ned Stark's death in Game of Thrones, etc.

The problem isn't that they died, the problem is their gender conflicts with the narrative. I mentioned this earlier but it's the same claptrap with Black Dude Dies First, it's complaining about a subject which by all logic shouldn't be relevant to the events as they unfold, like gender or race. Because the events show DOZENS of people die, so the fact one or two may, theoretically, be Black is relevant...why exactly?

That's why I said, develop the character, irrespective of race, gender etc and then decide their fate and death or life or whatever. EVERYTHING will offend everyone now so it's impossible to not be offensive, just write the story and move on.

 

Dude, I was totally thrown by that. I only read the books, so I don't know how they treated it in the show, but Ned Stark is in my top 5 favourite characters for the series. Also, Ned was given crap loads of humanizing elements. His death was not dehumanizing, not because he was male, but because he was well developed.

 

How the story handles the character is vastly more important than the sex of the character.
This is one of the reasons I don't read "How To Write" articles or books. Lots of so-called experts out there who talk endlessly about tropes and frighten writers into trying to avoid things that may very well be unavoidable.

We have a screenplay. The MC is male. A murder victim provides motivation for him to do whatever the story needs him to (revenge, retribution, justice). The victim could be a male or a female. It really doesn't matter. In this case it happens to be a female. It may have to be handled somewhat differently if it is a romantic interest, a close friend, a family member and so on. Hell, the victim could be a gay man and the MC could be gay and you might still treat it exactly the same as the man/woman scenario.

Worry more about writing a good, riveting story and less about what some 'expert' says.

 

We're talking about Gail Simone, yes? Considering her runs on Birds of Prey and the New 52 Batgirl are considered modern classics and she sold pretty well, I don't think it's fair to dismiss her a "pompous writer more concerned with politics than story" whose work is "not something you want to aspire to."

It's important to remember that from the tail end of the Silver Age, through the Bronze Age, and into the Dark Age of comic books, killing off a female character for shock value and cheap motivation--sometimes in the issue she debuted in--had become a stock device. Tired. Cliche. Boring.

The point about the nature of stories is a fine one, but it doesn't apply as well to the shared universes of the likes of DC, where one character may be part of the supporting cast for another while at the same time having their own series.

The classic example, other than the trope namer, is what happens to Barbara Gordon in The Killing Joke. Shot, crippled, stripped naked, and photographed as part of Joker's plot to drive her father insane and prove to Batman that one bad day can make anybody a madman just like him. She survives, but the story only engages what happened to her as far as how it made Jim Gordon and Batman feel.

Worse is what was going on behind the scenes at DC surrounding this. Looking at The Killing Joke on its own, it's clear it was supposed to be a standalone elseworlds type story. The ending literally doesn't make sense otherwise.

But corporate was obviously angling to make it part of the main timeline before it released. They had Barbara retire from being Batgirl, and when Alan Moore asked editorial for permission for his plot, the editor told him over the phone to "Cripple the bitch." Then, after the book was released, they didn't bother to address how Barbara herself was impacted by all this. She would've fallen into obscurity if Kim Yale and John Ostrander hadn't decided to turn her into Oracle.

So, to summarize, DC:

1) retired a popular female character
2) crippled her
3) were ready to leave her to rot

All for questionable shock value and cheap angst. That's what's wrong with fridging in a nutshell.

Alan Moore himself expressed regret over the handling of it back in 2006, well before anybody got on the "any female character who's killed or injured has been fridged" bandwagon. And Gail Simone herself pushed back on that view of the trope. I think Bayview's post shows the differences between fridging and a well handled tragedy:

In fridging, the actual victim is an afterthought.

It's worth pointing out that while the incident in The Killing Joke is unquestionably fridging, later writers have given a lot of focus to how Barbara dealt with it. Both in terms of being paraplegic and, after regaining the use of her legs, coping with PTSD and self-doubt as she suits up as Batgirl again.

 

Yes--Ned Stark is absolutely not a valid example of the dehumanizing/fridging phenomenon. Even after his death, he remained one of the most important influences in the story world.

 

Seeing as how The Killing Joke makes nearly every top ten greatest DC Comics trades of all time list, I would think that's evidence against your point.

 

I for one am not following what you mean by this.

 

How terrible can the narrative offense be if TKJ is widely considered to be on the Mount Rushmore of its genre, and the act in question, is central to its plot?

 

Hemingway is one of the best authors in recent history, but he can be greatly offensive. He uses the N-word a lot in some of his books, different times and all. Just because it's good doesn't mean it can't be offensive.

 

Well, you've said that you don't mind characters being used essentially as plot devices. A large number of readers may feel the same way.

 

Yes, I imagine they do.

 

Just so we're clear though, do you object to any character being used as a plot device, for any purpose?

 

I think it depends, in part on how important the plot element is. If someone's wallet is stolen and that provides the clue to finding a crime ring, I don't care much about the original crime victim. But a death that has the protagonist raging all over the story? I'd like that character to have some development.

The plot with Kirk's son felt bland and obvious. I could see the links and gears, barely clothed in a half-hearted veil of kinda-character-development. The same is true of most of the examples you gave--the son in Minority Report, the wife in Braveheart, Batman's parents being so thinly drawn in most tellings of his story.

You can't paint every aspect of a story down to the last detail, but when a character's fate drives the whole story, I think the character deserves more attention than most of those examples got. I don't like to see those largely unclothed story gears. It's like I'm watching a play where a bunch of live actors are performing around a mannequin, because the mannequin's role is so unimportant that they don't really need an actor for them.

 

Hey, you can like whatever you like. That's fine by me. But do you not think it's perfectly reasonable for other people to not need or desire, for example, more character development from John Anderton's son in Minority Report? It's his child. Losing a child is soul crushing—we instantly get it.

 

What people like is what people like--they don't need me to tell them what's reasonable.

But I'd like better character development--not necessarily more, but better--for the son. Maybe the decision was made to make him Generic Cute Child, so that people could overlay their own children on him. But generics rarely work for me.

 

So long as you don't claim what they like is unreasonable. Not that you have.

Sure, but now we're completely in the realm of preference, and not the realm of argument. And that's fine, that's just not how much of this thread reads imo.

 

I completely forgot he even had a son. Maybe a little more characterization wouldn't have hurt.

 

Or maybe it would have?

 

And it seems clear that the original poster of this thread has a preference for a fully developed character, not a plot device.

 

I honestly don't think Anderton had a kid in the book. Just starting the movie up, I get the feeling that the whole kid subplot could be removed without actually affecting the story.

 

I agree. And I wish them the best with that endeavor. I only entered this thread once the logic of the trope was being discussed.

 

Oh, I totally think that the trope is an issue, but I don't see any hope of discussing that without a shift to the Debate Room.

 

Eh, I try and stay out of there. But a trope does tie into writing theory, so if you're passionate about all this, you could probably open a thread for it somewhere in the main forums.