I'm going to politely but firmly disagree with the use of the "fridge" label here, at least as regards Alice. I think it's wrongly applied, and it actually takes from what she did.
The label goes back to comic books I read as they came out. Green Lantern (Kyle Rayner at the time) found his girlfriend killed by a villain (Major Force) and put into small pieces in a fridge in order to provoke Kyle. This was in DC Comics, written by Ron Marz, and a future writer (Geoff Johns) would spend the next decade rebuilding the Green Lantern mythos from everything that ruined it. Sometime after that comic, a blog was assembled, compiling all the deaths of women who died for the sake of motivating a male character. (Ok, that sentence is not quite right.)
Basically, the blog showed how many more female characters than men were killed in horrible ways just because a writer needed cheap, lazy motivation. Old story: "Bad guy murders a woman! Hero must now revenge her." The blog showed that female characters were easily treated as disposable, plot point, push buttons.
That is in no way how I read Alice in "The Magicians." What she did at the end to X, knowing what it would probably in turn do to her, makes her not just valiant, heroic, and hyper-competent, it also makes her a willing sacrifice. What she did is probably the only way X could have been beaten at that point. To say she was a helpless victim is not just wrong, but it takes away from what she did.
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Re: Rose Fox's comment -
Date: 2014-09-13 09:20 am (UTC)The label goes back to comic books I read as they came out. Green Lantern (Kyle Rayner at the time) found his girlfriend killed by a villain (Major Force) and put into small pieces in a fridge in order to provoke Kyle. This was in DC Comics, written by Ron Marz, and a future writer (Geoff Johns) would spend the next decade rebuilding the Green Lantern mythos from everything that ruined it. Sometime after that comic, a blog was assembled, compiling all the deaths of women who died for the sake of motivating a male character. (Ok, that sentence is not quite right.)
Basically, the blog showed how many more female characters than men were killed in horrible ways just because a writer needed cheap, lazy motivation. Old story: "Bad guy murders a woman! Hero must now revenge her." The blog showed that female characters were easily treated as disposable, plot point, push buttons.
That is in no way how I read Alice in "The Magicians." What she did at the end to X,
knowing what it would probably in turn do to her, makes her not just valiant, heroic, and hyper-competent, it also makes her a willing sacrifice. What she did is probably the only way X could have been beaten at that point. To say she was a helpless victim
is not just wrong, but it takes away from what she did.
Mack