[ SECRET POST #2460 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2460 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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[ ----- SPOILERY SECRETS AHEAD ----- ]























05. [SPOILERS for something but OP did not say what]



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06. [SPOILERS for Dark Lord of Derkholm]



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07. [SPOILERS for Catching Fire]



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08. [SPOILERS for Breaking Bad]



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09. [SPOILERS for A Touch of Cloth]



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10. [SPOILERS for Epic]



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[ ----- TRIGGERY SECRETS AHEAD ----- ]























11. [WARNING for suicide]



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12. [WARNING for depression, suicide]



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13. [WARNING for rape]



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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 000 secrets from Secret Submission Post #351.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 (warning for rape) - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[feotakahari]

It used to be "fridging" that a Strong Female Protagonist Protagonist got put in a wheelchair. Now everyone's angry that she's out of it.

[(Anonymous)]

I think it's what seemed to be a standard case of fridging got turned into something uncommonly awesome, since in most cases a heroine who went through what Barbara did would be sidelined from the fight as a civilian or a cheerleader. But instead, she became a more awesome hero than ever, out of Batman's shadow, and a great example of a disabled hero whose disability isn't a superpower itself, to boot.

And then they took that rare victory snatched from the jaws of defeat and threw it back into said jaws because...nobody knows why.

[intrigueing]

You said it a million times better and more concisely than I did :)

[(Anonymous)]

This. The Killing Joke was a fridging, absolutely, but the difference between Babs and most of the other characters that got shoved aside like that was that wasn't where it ended. What began as a story about Batman where her injury was merely a way for the author to affect the hero developed into a heroine's story.

She didn't need a magical healing to rescue her from the fridge at this point, she'd long since de-fridged herself.

[intrigueing]

It was fridging to put her in, but that doesn't mean taking her out was a good thing. Once you put her in and leave her in and build up such spectacular character development and creativity and unique ideas due to the fact that she's in, taking her out years later is no longer an improvement on her character, it's a cheap handwave. Plenty of awesome stories have come about due to initial blunders and dumb moves that had to be worked around creatively.

The thing is, fridging is terrible as a pattern, not in and of itself. This instance of fridging just so happened, by a stroke of pure luck due to having particularly good writers at the exact right time, to be an incredibly good thing in the specific case of Barbara Gordon. It's still a trope to be avoided like the plague, because we've had way more than enough of it, but that doesn't mean every fictional development that comes about due to fridging (or any other dumb trope) is bad as a result.

(and lol, "fridge" no longer looks like a word to me now...:D)

[(Anonymous)]

It's still fridging, because Barbara Gordon's being shot was all about causing Batman and Commissioner Gordon pain. But later writers took the idea of her being wheelchair-bound and showed that what happened to her hadn't destroyed her, that she still had a role to play aside from Joker Victim # eleventy-billion. They took what happened to her and wrote stories about her, not about how what happened to her galvanized Batman to try and finally off the Joker. Fridging isn't just about hurting female characters. It's hurting female characters in order to promote character development in male characters, because nothing promotes character growth like yet another revenge quest by a brooding hero.

So magically poofing her disability away also took away all the years when Barbara Gordon was awesome despite not kicking ass in a skintight leotard. And a lot of people who saw someone who faced the same challenges they did still being awesome had that taken away, because what's the use of a female comic character if not to kick ass in a skin tight costume and be nostalgia fap-fodder?