I have more to say about the Dark Crystal TV show. Once again, I'm going to spoil things, so if the show sounds like your thing, go watch it and then come back. And if it's not your thing, then join me as I talk about fridging.
You're probably familiar with the concept of fridging. Basically, "fridging" refers to when a female character is killed for the sake of progressing a man's story. A girlfriend is killed, setting the hero on a quest for vengeance. The girlfriend wasn't really a character so much as she's an inciting incident. The term was coined by Gail Simone, and refers to an event in Green Lantern when he comes home to find that a big bad has killed his girlfriend and stuffed her into a refrigerator for him to find and grieve over. Sometimes the woman can be a mother or a sister or a daughter (but it's usually a girlfriend or wife) and sometimes she's not killed but assaulted or de-powered or put into cryo-stasis (talk about putting her in a refrigerator!). But is it always a woman? Yes! I suppose there could be a boyfriend who is killed off to progress a woman's story, and that would say something about how the boyfriend was characterized, but that happens so infrequently that pointing out examples proves the rule, and women in refrigerators happens so often that it says a lot about 1. how female characters are treated like non-entities in fiction and 2. how male characters in fiction are driven by the ideas of women in their lives and how them taking vengeance for things that happened to their girlfriends is seen as perfectly reasonable motivation.
In the first episode of The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, Rian's girlfriend is fridged. "I knew that was coming," my husband said, "because her puppet wasn't as good as the other ones." It's a big deal in the story because it's the first moment when the Skekses are outright violent against the Gelfling. Before, they'd done things to negatively affect the environment, and cause problems for the animals of the planet, and as an indirect result affected the Gelfling, but in this instance, they suck the life force out of Rian's girlfriend. It's also a big deal because it shows that this show is going to be dark. Characters are going to die. Rian's girlfriend's death becomes a rallying point for the Gelfling as they turn against the Skekses. Hey, the Skekses are literally sucking our souls out of our bodies and then eating it. That's BAD. Let's not be confused by how bad the Skekses are. Remember Rian's girlfriend!
Other women die on this show, and I'm not side-eyeing their deaths. But the fridging in the first episode was an unfortunate choice. I think that's mainly because in the first episode, we don't know yet that there are loads of strong female characters who I'm going to love and who won't be treated as plot devices but as fully formed, flawed characters. There are three main characters and two of them are ladies. The Gelfling are a matriarchal society, meaning most of their leaders (and therefore most of the secondary characters) are women. There are fantastic moments between the royal family of three sisters who love each other and are irritated by each other, and don't know how to react to each other and they're just trying so hard! This show has great female representation. But in the first episode, I don't know them yet, and I'm presented with the possibility that they're going to get fridged too. In the first episode, I'm presented with "This is a show that will kill women to forward the plot." Are all these ladies just going to end up serving Rian's story? I don't know. It's the first episode, and they haven't given me any evidence that that's not where this is heading.
Rian then sets out to convince the rest of the Gelfling that the Skekses murdered his girlfriend, and they need to rethink their relationship with the Skekses and take steps to protect themselves. But instead of framing her death as a rallying point for an entire society (which is what it is), her death is framed as a personal trauma of Rian's. She's not fridged so that the whole of the Gelfling can change the fabric of their society, she's fridged so Rian can go on an adventure. By the time the rest of the Gelfling come around on this, other Gelfling have had their essences sucked out and it stops being about her at all.
And, honesty, one of my least favorite aspects of fridging is that the guy is so set on his vengeance, but the love he carries for his lady friend tends to wane the farther he gets from the incident. He moves along from his girlfriend's death and starts making eyes at other characters, which is weird considering, "Remember Rian's girlfriend!" is supposed to be a rallying cry. Add to that that later in the series, Rian's dad dies and Rian seems to carry that grief much more deeply. (Which makes sense that he would grieve different relationships differently, but the differences are stark.) They have a funeral service for his father. Rian talks about his complicated relationship with his father. The loving handling of it just compounds how lazy his girlfriend's death was.
So what I've been wondering lately is "Was there a way to have her die and have it not be fridging?" And I think what would have made it better for me is if she wasn't Rian's girlfriend. What if they were colleagues who worked in the guard together? Then the way he moves on wouldn't be so strange, and his adventure to go and spread the word that the Skekses are awful wouldn't have the bitter after-taste that he's in action because the Skekses messed with his stuff. As weird as it is, I think if it tried to be more impersonal, it would have worked better, because it felt impersonal.
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