Comic Book Resources

People are unceremoniously killed in order to give a hero motivation all the time. Is it often lazy writing? Sure. Didio's DC, the central HQ for bad writing these days, resorts to it all the time. Look at how much cannon fodder was generated in the past few years alone...Tim Drake's dad, Spoiler, Blue Beetle, Sue Dibney. I don't think anyone is targeting women or singling them out, it's just that people notice it more when it comes to women and minorities because those are instances people tend to be extra sensitive about and are more likely to read more into.

I think it happens to women an inordinate amount.

I dunno, DC's had some big ones just recently. Blue Beetle and Superboy were both males killed specifically to spur the other heroes on. And depending on how things progress, Booster Gold and Bill Foster may be added to the list.

I wonder if the reason it seems to happen to women more often is just because there's more motivation when a "significant other" dies, as opposed to a sidekick or sibling or something. And since most super heroes are male, it only stands to reason their "significant other death" will be women.

it's not really "women" who are always dying, just Jean Grey.

I dunno, DC’s had some big ones just recently. Blue Beetle and Superboy were both males killed specifically to spur the other heroes on. And depending on how things progress, Booster Gold and Bill Foster may be added to the list.

I wonder if the reason it seems to happen to women more often is just because there’s more motivation when a “significant other” dies, as opposed to a sidekick or sibling or something. And since most super heroes are male, it only stands to reason their “significant other death” will be women.

Here's how I basically view Women in Refrigerators. I wrote this definition in April, well before Laurie was killed - "Something messed up (rape/death) happening to a female character that likely would not have happened to a male character, for the sole purpose of extracting emotion from a male character."

That's a very specific definition, so it's not like I'm trying to encompass a ton of deaths - and yet this specific instance happens over and over again.

Re-read Laurie's death. Then try to tell me that same scene would have occurred with it being, say, David who got shot.

Wouldn't have happened.

Deaths like Blue Beetle and Booster Gold and Bill Foster were not designed to extract emotion from a male character. And in all their deaths, you could easily see a writer replacinge them with a female character.

Laurie Collins and Sue Dibny you couldn't.

Blue Beetle's death was meant to extract emotion from Booster and has been used to extract emotion from Oracle, who felt guilt for letting him down. Superboy's death has been used to get emotion from a female character, Wonder Girl, who has had a big storyline in 52 as a result of it. Repercussions on how the male death affects her is still being felt in Teen Titans.

Don't you people ever get tired of that kind of crap?

WiR does happen, and often it's a clear dismissal of the female character entirely. Typically, though, a writer is going to go for the most tragic death.

Usually, this means a woman because most writers write women as more sympathetic characters that are valued more purely due to their gender. The fact is that despite misogyny, objectification, or ignorance, most writers--most people--view female characters as "better" in some way. More aware. Less angry. Even villainesses are made to seem approachable, accessible, desirable, and possibly redeemable.

I'm not saying anyone's wrong for viewing women as more sympathetic or "forces for good". In fact, I took a look around a training session at work last night and thought to myself, "I kinda wish I didn't need the guys here. How much better would my store be for both customers and staff? How much more comfortable would people feel?"

Ultimately in fiction, death is a tool. (And as the hecklers remind me, so am I.) It's meant to affect the reader and the other characters. There's a fine line between a meaningful death and WiR because no matter what, you're going to use the death to spur on whatever characters you deem more important to the story. (...unless the death is at the end of the story, I suppose. And that's just too damned depressing. The hell kind of twisted story are you writing, pervo?!)

I guess the trick is to be sure the death actually fits the character arc of the character being killed. (They always struggled with being too trusting, and so were killed by someone they trusted--someone they specifically tried to teach how to trust. Or they heroically fought to find answers no matter the cost, never realizing the cost would be their life--and even in death, they served to bring the truth to light. Et cetera. Just random off-the-cuff examples.) That way, it's hardly meaningless, even though it's still a tool for moving the rest of the story forward.

...Having said all that, I didn't read this issue cuz NXM sux! PeAcE oUt, BiTcHeZ!

Personally I think WiR grows out of the fact that it's easy to make a consistently top-selling male character, but rather difficult to make a consistently top-selling female character. And, let's face it: it's sales/merchandising that drives killability. People are dying by the droves in New X-Men because, for the most part, nobody gives a damn about those characters. Likewise, Blue Beetle and Superboy died because, for various reasons, DC couldn't license them.

Death in storytelling should be meaningful, but in ongoing superhero comics (as in soap operas), it's meaningless a good 95% of the time. It's either a way to get a "malfunctioning" character off-camera, a reversible gimmick, or something that a later writer is going to undo anyway. All told this has lead me to start preferring comic book storylines that aren't spurred on by so-and-so's death, but instead, by so-and-so's life. I'm stick of drama that's generated largely by chucking warm bodies into a meat grinder.

Good point, Lynxara. Not to turn this into a pro-Claremont rant or a pathetically wistful "back in the day" lament, but...

For all the grief the dude takes for his endless fake deaths, he at least understood that death rarely serves a pupose in storytelling. More often, the [i]threat[/i] of death is more useful in driving the [i]lives[/i] of the characters.

Death is useful when it's poetic or establishes realism. But how often can a writer really create a poetic death? How often can you use death to establish realism without just throwing away perfectly good characters?

What bothers me is that "death to establish realism" has now become a horrid cliche, such that writers believe that simply having someone die makes a story more realistic-- even if those deaths are in and of themselves completely ridiculous. Thunderbird's death had impact because, at the time, it simply involved violating one of the assumed rules of comics. It sent an "anything can happen" message that.

Over the years, people emulating Thunderbird's death somehow created a long-standing confusing of "people can die" with "realistic!" Now people die constantly in superhero stories, and in the most ridiculous and contrived ways. Lately death scenes mostly just prompt me to roll my eyes and skip past the inevitable pages of empty histrionics.

Identity/Infinite Crisis is a pretty good example of this syndrome, and you can find quite a few good examples embedded in Civil War, too. Someone really needs to shake DC and Marvel's editorial and try to remind them that you can't cash in bodycount for credibility at a 1:1 ratio, at least not if you're trying to appeal to readers of average intelligence. Thunderbird was over 20 years ago, guys. If you want to shock an audience now, have people not die.

Agreed again, Lynxara, and in fact, it was exactly Thunderbird's death I was thinking of.

The most obvious example of this rampant attempt to use meaningless death to create realism or credibility, of course, is Banshee. Plot-wise, I think it really could have been brilliant, but the execution fell apart.

There was almost no focus on him as a character even though the story could easily have spent some time on his ties to Moira and the "new" team's origins. Within the miniseries itself, there was almost no impact on anyone past a few oh-no's. Nobody had taken the time to think back to Tunderbird's death to draw comparisons to Banshee's eerily similar end, which could have been made especially eerie considering how intimately Sean experienced John's last moments. Really, it only served to tell us what an OMFG!!!1 badass Vulcan is, but without anyone truly outraged at the dude for killing their friend.

But I digress. Just a bit.

Blue Beetle’s death was meant to extract emotion from Booster and has been used to extract emotion from Oracle, who felt guilt for letting him down. Superboy’s death has been used to get emotion from a female character, Wonder Girl, who has had a big storyline in 52 as a result of it. Repercussions on how the male death affects her is still being felt in Teen Titans.

Again, the key to WiR is the following:

1. Done just to extract emotion from a male character
2. Wouldn't have happened to a male character
3. Non heroic death

Those are the three rules to WiR (others may have their own, but this is how I've always defined it).

Those deaths you mention just don't qualify, especially trying to sell Beetle's death as meant to effect change in Booster? Give me a break. Beetle was killed to kick off a crossover. Booster didn't even KNOW he died. To compare that to Josh Foley seeing his girlfriend shot by a sniper in front of him while they're just talking in the schoolyard - it isn't a good comparison.

Superboy had more direct effect on Superman! And his death was clearly in the Crisis on Infinite Earths "heroic death." And that includes Supergirl's death in Crisis, which wouldn't be a WiR.

Every woman's death is not WiR. It just so happens that a crapload of them ARE. An "inordinate amount."

And Lynxara is most likely correct as to why WiR is so prominent.