I got one of my very favorite reviews ever for What Is Cannot Be Unwritten. The reviewer gave it four stars and brought up some incredibly valid points.
This review is precious, worth its weight in gold. I didn’t reach out to the reviewer personally because that seems weird, but if you are reading this: thank you.
No, it’s not because of the compliments. I don’t care about those. That’s marketing stuff.
But there was a beautiful treat for me, personally, in there. See, the reader expressed some dissatisfaction with a character being, as they put it, “fridged.”
Which one? You’ll have to read the book and see.
Let’s get on the same page first: I am not here to defend myself. People can disagree with my plot decisions or give critique – fair and unfair. I’m not entitled to your unwavering praise, nor do I really want it. I write books to spark conversation and provide entertainment, not to stoke my ego.
It’s entirely possible that I was guilty of this sin – or maybe even multiple sins. There are three named characters who die either before or after the story begins, all of whom are women.
Like anyone else, I am a product of my culture. Unfortunately, that culture is misognyistic.
So the review sparked some intense curiosity in me. Did I fridge a character (or multiple)? Why wouldn’t I have recognized this during the writing process? Did the necessity of those deaths not come across well enough? Is there something I can do better?
I have been thinking about this review for a long time, turning it over in my head. Each time I come back, I get more intrigued.
Let’s do a magical deep dive into fridging: what it is, some important caveats, and how to avoid it from what I have learned.
I will primarily use the book in question – What Is Cannot Be Unwritten – to explore the concept and consider whether my reasoning aligns with best practices of avoiding fridging.
Of course, this blog post will contain some spoilers, much as I try to keep it vague.
If you haven’t read the book and don’t want to know, then you may want to skip this article and go check it out first.
By the end, you can decide for yourself whether I did indeed fridge a certain someone or what I could have done instead.
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What is fridging?
Fridging, in short terms, is when a character is killed off entirely to motivate the main character (usually a man). It was coined by Gail Simone on the website “Women in Refrigerators” and inspired by a 1994 Green Lantern comic.
In the comic, Green Lantern comes back to his apartment to find that his nemesis, Major Force, has killed his girlfriend, Alexandra DeWitt. Major Force then followed the Standard Operating Procedure one does after killing a lady: he stuffed Alexandra’s body into the apartment’s refrigerator and peaced out.
This, predictably, enrages Green Lantern, giving him the Super Testerone necessary to finally defeat Major Force.
The problem here is that Alexandra’s death was only to motivate Green Lantern. It had no further implications and came out of nowhere. Readers were angry that a sympathetic character didn’t even get the decency of being killed on-screen.
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Why is fridging bad?
I hope it is obvious why fridging is lazy and dumb writing, but we’ll unpack it a little further.
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The dead character has no agency.
Death is the ultimate loss of agency, of course. We release all our values, motives, and desires at death; we’re no longer in control of our narratives because we don’t have one anymore. Our lives and actions can be reinpreted by whomever wants to.
But, in fiction, we are able to give our characters agency until that very last moment.
Think about the triumphant death scene of Boromir walking into the arrows, taking hit after hit, in Lord of The Rings. He was fully empowered, sacrificing himself to save the rest of the Fellowship. It’s such a touching moment because we understand why he would do this, what it means for him as a character, and what it represents about the world’s values.
It was a noble death. Fridging deaths are ignoble deaths.
In the Green Lantern comic, Alexandra is just … found stuffed into a fridge. She didn’t choose her death; it was chosen for her by outside forces. We don’t know whether she fought but assume she didn’t.
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The specific person’s death doesn’t seem to matter for the overall plot.
Part of the reason fridging is so annoying is because the dead character themselves is interchangable with any other character. You could have killed the family pet, and the MC would have the same impetus.
(Please don’t kill the family pet. I don’t like that.)
We see this in the fact that the character is often forgotten quite quickly; they don’t haunt the narrative. Once they have served their plot purpose, they are discarded and never brought up again.
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It is primarily written for shock value.
Fridging is as such because it seems to come out of nowhere. There isn’t setup or foreshadowing. The thing just happens to startle readers and upset them so they stay invested.
In my post about writing high-stakes stories, I discussed how important it is not to have random plot twists because you couldn’t think of another way to build tension. As I said there, it’s the literary equivalent of jingling keys at a baby. You’re distracting readers from a slow pace or stagnant plot by injecting adrenaline rather than deeping the conflict.
This makes your book far more vulnerable to melodrama that turns readers off.
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Fridging reveals the invisible hand.
Another problem with fridging is that it is entirely done as a plot device. We get the sense that the author ran out of ideas and threw a death in there to spice things up.
Readers don’t want to think about the author while reading fiction. That might come later, after the book is done, or it might not. However, when they’re in the thick of it, they should be wholly immersed, oblivious to the reality that this isn’t real life.
Doing something dumb snaps us out of the reading trance and makes us wonder if you were on drugs while drafting that part. Boo. Bad. No like.
Hopefully we’re caught up now, so let’s go further.
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Not all character deaths are fridging.
Alright, I’ve got to say this part, too.
In Ye Olden Writing Times, it was perfectly acceptable to kill off female characters just ’cause. Who cares? They’re a simple, inert extension of the big manly main male character, and their feelings don’t matter.
One major example, written by a woman no less, is Bertha Mason from Jane Eyre. This poor woman is locked in an attic, called insane for going mad from being locked in an attic, and then vilified for burning the house down to escape said attic. She has no agency, and her death is actually seen as annoying to the MC. There’s no concern for her or consideration of why she would do that, nor what might that suggest about Eyre’s beau.
There are plenty of other examples from both classic and contemporary media. Women die in childbirth to make MC sad. They get killed by villains to make MC seek revenge. And so on and so on.
In modern feminism, this is seen, rightly so, as Bad and Misogynistic Writing. But alas. Black-and-white thinking, my old nemesis, comes up in literary critique, too.
Nowadays, someone sees a female character die and they go, “Fridging! You fridged her!”
The original meaning – a popular female character spontaneously dying for no reason beyond MC Angst – has been lost along the way.
(This is not saying my reviewer did that, by the way. Just a general observation.)
Like real live humans, female characters are not immune to death. To act otherwise is to turn women into Noble Savages: they are too magical, too special, too untouchable to suffer. Women are hence elevated beyond mere humanity – and, in a way, dehumanized.
It is entirely possible to write a touching or even disgusting female character death without fridging them. Doing so requires foresight, planning, and characterization.
And sometimes, despite our best intentions, we may still be accused of fridging. Which could be a completely fair critique; I don’t know what you’re writing or how you’re writing it.
But we can do our best to avoid this pillorying through some simple tips.
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The character has to mean something, both before and after death.
I don’t watch a lot of movies, but one of my favorite movie franchises – surprisingly enough – is John Wick.
Some could argue that Wick’s wife is fridged; it does match some of the patterns. She dies off-screen and is primarily defined by her relationship to the MC.
However, I would argue against that interpretation. Her death is deeply, irrevocably meaningful to the entire series. Wick’s assassin revival is motivated by some punks killing his beagle, Daisy, but Daisy is important because the puppo was a posthumous gift from his late wife.
Daisy’s murder is an abrupt and total severance from his wife. He essentially has to mourn her all over again, which he does through vengeance. We see Wick do a twisted version of grieving: denial, fury, acceptance, new meaning.
This is symbolized best by him picking up another dog (who I like better because he’s a pit bull). We can speculate that he took the dog because it offers him a new connection to his wife and Daisy; Wick doesn’t seem the nurturing type, after all. He comes full circle and finds a fragile peace through this reintepretation of the enduring romance.
In other words, the entire series would not have existed if his wife had lived. She is the thread that generates and haunts the entire narrative. That’s some of the most powerful meaning given to a dead female character; it’s beautiful. You can see why I like the series so much.
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This character must be differentiated beyond the MC.
Let’s look at Boromir again for a second. He was marked safe from fridging accusations for two main reasons: 1) he was generated decades before the term came into use; and 2) he’s a man.
Not to say that fridging never happens to men, but it’s rarer.
The other reason, though, is that Boromir didn’t really have a strong connection to Frodo, the MC. He was part of the Fellowship, sure, but he was also kind of a dick to Frodo and the two didn’t seem to have a powerful attachment. Not only were they of entirely different races, but they came from different backgrounds and had contrasting opinions about what to do with the ring.
In other words, his contrarian perspective meant he was obviously, demonstrably not just there to fluff up the MC.
Now, my book has a weaker defense to this, and I freely admit that. But the dead (perhaps fridged) character does have things beyond Mordrek: she’s Bremish, for one, and she stands as an obstacle to Mordrek’s ultimate goals. There is a bit of tension about their nationalities that both seek to overcome, but we get the sense that said character sees Mordrek as somewhat alien to her, impossible to fully understand.
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The character’s death doesn’t just reinvigorate the MC’s goal, but reinvents them.
In What Is Cannot Be Unwritten, we see that Mordrek is uneasy about his role as a Sinan spy well before the death that ultimately leads him to make a career-changing decision. He never liked his employer, Queen Susuma, and doesn’t agree with the Sinan penal system.
While he is in Breme to get intel, we see him pausing to reflect about why he should bother gathering any information for his terrible boss in the first place. There’s discomfort every time he finds a new detail, or stops to look at stained glass windows depicting Bremish people getting crushed by a Sinan-triggered avalanche.
The character who died had given him a potential out: stay in Breme, run away from the queen. Her death closes this avenue and forces him to make a different choice.
In other words, the seeds of his ultimate actions were already there long before said character made the tragic (and stupid) decision that led to her death. Watching her die only pushes Mordrek to revise his plans, selecting a more ambitious and rebellious plot.
This goes along with the fact that a good character death feels necessary and inevitable. There is simply no way for this character to continue living without ruining the future; they are out of time.
The character becomes a beloved roadblock whose ultimate end pushes things forward – not because it gives the MC a burst of energy, but because it forces them to take action for their own survival, too.
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A satisfying death is one doomed by the narrative.
I say right away in the blurb for What Is Cannot Be Unwritten that there is a doomed romance. I’m not hiding the fact that the MCs aren’t going to get together forever. Why?
Firstly, I don’t lie to readers, even if I don’t infantilize them through trigger warnings. Clickbait isn’t my thing: what you see is what you get.
Secondly, because a lot of people like doomed romance. If I didn’t say that, then they wouldn’t want to pick up the book.
I always knew that this character was going to die. The death is the centerpiece of the book; everything works up to it. This wasn’t a random decision I made because I was bored or wanted some extra drama.
In fact, I knew to write it this way because that character is mentioned again in the sixth book, Poesy, which I wrote first of all the books. Even before I had started drafting What Is Cannot Be Unwritten, said character was doomed.
The distinction is important because it means I shaped the plot around the death. It had to happen so I could tell the story I wanted – and it had to happen to her, specifically. No one else could suffice.
We see the push-pull throughout the story before the death scene. Much as Mordrek wants to be with her, he can’t; political, cultural, and personal forces all align against this. Every time they talk about a future, it seems halfhearted, impossible. There are layers of barricades between that happy potentiality, too much to prevail against.
Mordrek even calls the doomed character an “angel” the very first time they meet.
Who is generally an angel? Not living people, that’s for sure.
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Now, did I fridge the character, as the reviewer said?
I don’t know. It’s up to you.
Ultimately, my interpretation doesn’t matter. I can justify all I want, explain my reasoning, but that has no impact on how a reader felt or what they thought.
A writer doesn’t get to say whether or not they fridged someone, even if that wasn’t their intention. Only readers can make that decision. If a writer is accused of fridging despite doing their best not to do so, then that signifies a plot failure.
I will keep this reviewer’s opinion in mind as I move forward, and I appreciate their willingness to bring up such an argument. That type of critique is invaluable for my writing process and will deeply influence my next works.
