Is the dead character a woman because it is expected that the death of a woman will evoke a stronger emotional reaction out of the reader than a male character's death would?

Example:
As loathe as I am to suggest re-reading War Games, I have to say that I think that the point wasn't to kill Spoiler. I suspect that the point was to kill Robin. And, I suspect that editors said, "no" so Tim was written out of the suit, someone else was put in, and that someone else was killed.

Tim left the suit for dubious reasons, Spoiler took over, and as soon as she was dead, Tim put it back on again. It was a one-storyline replacement. I believe that Spoiler was chosen to die based solely on the fact that she was a Chuck Dixon character, and apparantly every time a CD created Bat character dies an angel gets his wings or somesuch. (Granted, I think that everything after her death has been as mis-managed as the storytelling of War Games was, but I'm not talking about story quality.)

Let's look at Pantha. Here is a female character who is established, has little to nothing to do with the overall plot of SBP, and dies to demonstrate a change in SBP's personality.

But, isn't it also a bit of: "here is a woman in a man's fight. If she hadn't been trying to play hero, maybe she wouldn't have died" involved? Despite how strong and capable the character is, wouldn't killing Red Star have been more of a "He knew the job was dangerous when he took it" blasse? I think that it was probably deemed necessary that SBP's turning-point murder be not only a hero, not only a Titan, but probably also a woman, to demonstrate how evil he was that he would not only kill a hero, not only kill a Titan, but would stoop so low as to kill a woman.

I guess I have a question. Is WiR a list of women disrespected by comics, or is it a list of women demeaned by comics? There is a difference. I think that Spoiler was, and is disrespected. But, Pantha was demeaned.

Theno

@08: No, just Hal Jordan.

@09: But it didn't have to be a female character. They could have killed off any character in that scene, and the rest of the Titans, with their famous Togetherness, would have been incensed. The death of Duela Dent, on the other hand, has a lot more WiR to it. Of course, I prefer to think of it as a case of "Pointless Characters With Convoluted Continuity And Not Much Reason to Exist In This Day And Age Who Also Happen to Be Women in Refrigerators."

@13: No, The Initiative, like everything else related to Civil War except the Captain America tie-ins, was the anti-good.

@16: From now on, all comics must be reviewed by an impartial regulatory commission, which will determine cases of WiR. If this occurs, Ambush Bug must jump out from off-panel at the time of the death, and scream "FRIDGED!"

@22: Unethical psychiatrists? I'm shocked at the suggestion that such things could exist. All sarcasm aside, I think we need look no further than the modern Hugo Strange (as reintroduced in Legends of the Dark Knight) and the origin of Harley Quinn, to see that there is certainly a precedent for unethical psychiatry in comics.

@23: I think that bit of information actually supports the original claim that Pantha's death is not WiR. Because the emphasis is NOT supposed to be on who died, but rather what SBP did, this further suggests that not only did it not have to be Pantha, it didn't even have to be a woman at all. It just had to be a Titan. I think in the original script draft he actually had it being someone completely different who ended up like not even being in the scene.

@24: E2 Lois Lane comes close, but I personally find that it was a development well supported by the story, and not just a shock tactic. I may be extrapolating the definition of WiR, but still. It's not like E2 Supes snapped because of that and that alone. He was going wrong long before that.

@30: Which is surely a symptom of a larger trend in comics to have nonplanet protagonists, rather than planet protagonists. We're seeing such hostility toward planets in comics right now, it's a wonder that the National Organization of Planets hasn't been more vocal. It's a shame, really.

@31: OK, not a reversed WiR, but another example of a character being killed off to elicit a drastic change in another character: David Knight's death in Starman 00.

@33: I believe we were talking about comics, but apparently I was wrong.

@36: Yeah, Hawkman's around. PeeGee was gettin' randy with him over on Rannagar, or Thann, or whatever it is now, during the 52 year. We just found out about that in The Lightning Saga, I think it was. Speaking of which, Hawkman was also present for the Lightning Saga, wasn't he? And he's been stealing the spotlight from Hawkgirl in her own title for a few issues now. Not that stealing the spotlight from Hawkgirl would be hard, because that dude just can't write Hawkgirl. He just can't. He can write Hawkman. But he can't write Hawkgirl.

"the fact remains that with those deaths, there are less female characters around now."--Dude, after Infinite Crisis and Civil War, there are just plain less characters around. Period. More books, maybe, but less characters. Technocrat is just as dead as Looker. And didn't Airwave die? Too bad about Airwave. I liked Airwave. I mean, here was a guy who REALLY never got a chance to shine.

"Pantha COULD have been Bouncing Boy OR The Thing OR been Optimus Prime."--Not really. The Thing is a Marvel character, and Optimus Prime is a Stupid character.

"Isis is the same thing. You can conjecture that Isis COULD have been a purple meteor instead of a beautiful arab woman. The fact is, she is a she, and she was created to add more femicide to the DCU."--Given that Osiris died first, I don't see how your math is working. These days, it's just pretty dangerous to be alive in the DC and Marvel Universes.

"Anyway, since the beginning of it, the closest thing I ever saw to a point of WiR when it was made almost (but not quite yet) a decade ago was that there were a lot of female characters who had been raped/depowered/maimed/killed and that the effect of this was to have less female characters with which women could identify."--The term was coined in reference to the death of a one-dimensional, plastic, throwaway background character that got killed and stuffed in a fridge. Any woman who identified with Alex was either missing the point of a superhero comic book, or had only been alive for three or four months.

@49: Was anyone really waiting with baited breath for the big reveal about Pantha's origin?

@51: I'd say the poster girl for Women in Refrigerators is the one that actually got shoved in a refrigerator.

"The thing is, even if WiR is simply an artifact of comics being overwhelmingly dominated by male characters, well, that’s a big part of the point to begin with."

And I just wanted to QFT that, because that's a major part of what I'm trying to say--when I made my point above, I intended it only as a clarification of what I thought the issue was in terms of sexism in comics, not to defend it as not being sexist. This is not a "Hey, guys suffer and die too!" lament, this is just me being a pedant.

Well it’s not considered WiR, by Brian’s definition, because it wasn’t just the death of Pantha that caused the new layer of character development in Red Star. The guy saw his whole “family” slaughtered, not just Pantha.

But what's important to note is that, unlike BW, Pantha had a whole open storyline about her unresolved origin. And that was junked so she could be shoved into the maternal figure of that lost family, lumped in with Red Star's "stuff" that got f'd up by Superboy Prime. It kinda is a stereotype to lump the mother and child together, and a cliche to have the patriarch burning with vengeance over their deaths.

And I think it's still important to note BW was with Red Star in attacking, spurred by seeing Pantha die. It was Pantha's death that was used as the big turning point for SBP and IC, which is why BW isn't mentioned much. BW's death is still a lousy, bothersome, stupid one, though.

Except this was after Pantha was killed right in front of them, eliciting the response for RS and BW to vow vengeance and recklessly bumrush a panicking SBP.

And Red Star did survive, with a fresh new layer of character development, so I don’t know how that one disproves things.

Well it's not considered WiR, by Brian's definition, because it wasn't just the death of Pantha that caused the new layer of character development in Red Star. The guy saw his whole "family" slaughtered, not just Pantha.

Something everyone in the thread had appeared to have forgotten in the focus on Pantha's death. Heck everyone was talking about Baby Wildebeest as if it was still alive, as evidenced by Brian's remarks.

We had a different term for pheromone fights in grade school. It rhymed with "bart bombrest!"

Sorry.

I don’t see how creating a woman to die just so the man can get REAL MAD is any better than killing an already-existing woman just so the man can get REAL MAD.

Because presumably the woman who was created to be a plot point wouldn't exist if not for the plot necessity, whereas the other character already had an independent existence.

It's like, Martha Wayne and Lara Lor-Van and Mary Parker and a dozen other female characters were created in order to die and provide the character with some sort of plot-necessitated motivation. It's not like they existed prior to the stories which necessitated their deaths, and I can't imagine anyone getting worked up over the fact that Martha Wayne had to die so Bruce could get REAL MAD.

Well there is also the fact that Baby wildebeest had a hole punched through his chest and Red Star did get blasted, (Though it was shown he survived being blasted in Teen Titans), to back up that last statement.

Except this was after Pantha was killed right in front of them, eliciting the response for RS and BW to vow vengeance and recklessly bumrush a panicking SBP.

And Red Star did survive, with a fresh new layer of character development, so I don't know how that one disproves things.

I don’t use WiR specifically to refer to all of those, but the basic vibe of “Powerful Female…KILL HER/DEPOWER HER/MAKE HER EVIL/KILL HER WITH RADIOACTIVE SPERM” running though comicdom lately is really pissing me off.

But that sort of thing happens to every comic character sooner or later - male or female.

If may be more common with female characters (or not - I'm not aware of any good stats on this) but if that is the case then it's damn near impossible to tell whether any given case is one that would have happened if it wasn't more common with female characters.

Leaving aside that the whole "in Refrigerators" part is meant to indicate that women are often brutally and _personally_ assaulted or disposed of to get a bigger reaction out of the hero in question--Rayner's girlfriend and Sue Dibny are the best examples, a random decapitating head punch, not so much.

If you're a chick and you like your underwear pervert stories, sooner or later you're going to notice that you better not get attached to a female character (Wonder Woman is maybe the only safe one) because she might as well be wearing a red shirt on Star Trek. And that, kind of ruins the whole power fantasy foundation upon which the genre is built.

IMO, Blue Beetle is the best example of the similar kind of thing happening to a male character, and people sure did raise a stink about that. And rightly so--it was cheap, dumb, and didn't generate decent dividends.

I don't use WiR specifically to refer to all of those, but the basic vibe of "Powerful Female...KILL HER/DEPOWER HER/MAKE HER EVIL/KILL HER WITH RADIOACTIVE SPERM" running though comicdom lately is really pissing me off.

Amen to that. Not only was Laurie a flat character, but the story you mentioned was not going to be good. Between the super-slow build-up to what's bound to be not very interesting (pheromone fight! woo!) and the fact that the teachers/headmasters had to act pretty stupidly out of character around her father (like Emma wouldn't nose around his head & figure out why she's suddenly so trusting around him), it was going to suck hard.

Her death is a textbook WiR example, but I'm glad to hear other people who were actually happy to see her go, too.

He just as easily could have had Baby Wildebeest be the one who got his head punched off, and Pantha reacted poorly. Or Red Star get blasted, leading to Baby Wildebeest freaking out.

The scene was written as just an attempt to show how badass Superboy Prime was by having him slaughter a bunch of Titans.

Well there is also the fact that Baby wildebeest had a hole punched through his chest and Red Star did get blasted, (Though it was shown he survived being blasted in Teen Titans), to back up that last statement.

That's not true, she started dressing in the peekaboo spandex outfit either during or right after the Infinity War, after she absorbed her doppelganger "Malice" during a fight. Reed didn't "die" for almost a year after that (I believe that, by that point, she had taken to wearing a jacket most of the time to de-emphasize the peekaboo a little bit).

And more to the point, you can make up any sort of imaginary scenario of, "Well, if the character was X instead of Y, they still would be dead, so therefore X and Y don't matter." That doesn't change the fact that Pantha is a female character who had her head punched off in a comic by a crazy adolescent male. And that with Pantha getting her head punched off, there's one less female character in the DC Comics pantheon. Pantha COULD have been Bouncing Boy OR The Thing OR been Optimus Prime. But she wasn't any of those thing. On the page, she was a she and she got her head punched off.

On top of that, Pantha getting her head punched off DID serve to motivate an emotional change in a male character. Namely, the psychotic Superboy character.

Isis is the same thing. You can conjecture that Isis COULD have been a purple meteor instead of a beautiful arab woman. The fact is, she is a she, and she was created to add more femicide to the DCU.

Anyway, since the beginning of it, the closest thing I ever saw to a point of WiR when it was made almost (but not quite yet) a decade ago was that there were a lot of female characters who had been raped/depowered/maimed/killed and that the effect of this was to have less female characters with which women could identify. So, regardless of whether or not these women fit the new definition, they're still dead characters that some other girl can't enjoy.

Meanwhile, Judd Winnick gets Jason Todd back but none of the girls get Spoiler. *shrugs*

The Vision died, and was rebuilt as a personality-free android solely to begin Byrne's "Scarlet Witch goes crazy" storyline. Took years to make the character workable again.

Hawkman is currently missing in DC continuity (unless they found him very recently) in order to force Hawkgirl to be a more proactive superhero.

Again, I'll agree that the examples are rarer when the genders are reversed, but they're there when you start looking for them, and I do think they'd be less rare if there were more female characters headlining their own comics. And again, this isn't to say "There's nothing wrong with the 'women in refrigerators' issue," just to point out that it's an effect of having so few female leads in comics (which is, in and of itself, sexist.)

At least when you're talking about serialized storytelling that never ends.

I doubt Nick and Nora Charles would still be together if Hammond had to write about them monthly for decades in a story that just kept going.

But then maybe he was good enough of a writer to pull it off.