#it’s also an example of unfridging your women

[sophieakatz]

Thursday Thoughts: The Unfridged Woman

So there’s this awful story trope I’ve blogged about before, called fridging. Fridging is when a character – usually a female character – is killed off for the sake of a usually-male hero’s angst. The fridged character isn’t really a character in her own right. She is another character’s motivation.

Today, I’d like to point out a new trope I’ve noticed: unfridging. Unfridging is when a female character who originally had the sole purpose of dying to provide sadness and motivation for a male character, and lacked any story or motivations of her own, is brought back in a sequel as a complex character, vital to the plot and with her own motivations.

I can give you three examples off the top of my head, two of which I’ve already written about in Thursday Thoughts posts.

Here there be spoilers for the following film franchises: How To Train Your Dragon, Ant-Man, and Toy Story.

1. Valka

The first How To Train Your Dragon film focuses on Hiccup’s relationship with his father just as much as his relationship with the titular dragon. Hiccup’s mother is nowhere to be seen, and only mentioned once. When his father, Stoick, gives Hiccup a horned Viking helmet, he says, “Your mother would have wanted you to have it. It's half her breastplate,” he adds, pointing to his own helmet. “Matching set. Keeps her close, you know.”

The moment is played for laughs, but the implication is that Hiccup’s mother is dead, and the viewer is left to assume that this loss is part of why Stoick is so harsh on his son. But the mother has no name, no personality, no traits at all. Just a boob joke.

In the sequel, Hiccup follows a mysterious masked dragon rider into a cave to discover – surprise – it’s his mother! Valka is not only alive (and, at long last, named!), but she very much has a story outside of Hiccup and Stoick. We learn that she always believed that humans and dragons could get along, and she was taken from the village by a dragon who saw her as a potential friend. While everyone thought she was dead, she decided to stay with the dragons, and she resists the idea of returning to the Viking lifestyle she left behind.

While Valka barely existed at all in the first film, in the second, she is an essential part of the world. She’s an integral part of dragon society, proof that humans and dragons can coexist, and the reason why the viewer learns what we need to know about dragon alphas for the plot. Also, her agenda runs counter to that of the men in the film, but is portrayed as just as important and justified as anyone else’s goals – which is something I always love to see.

2. Janet van Dyne

I’ve blogged at length about Ant-Man and the Wasp before, but here’s the short version. In the original Ant-Man, we see in a flashback that Hank Pym’s wife sacrificed herself to stop a bomb, shrinking herself between the atoms and becoming lost to the quantum realm. As a result, Hank is incredibly protective of his daughter Hope to the point of keeping her from reaching her full potential and overall straining their relationship. It’s why he brings in Scott to be Ant-Man in the first place, rather than letting Hope do it.

In this film, we don’t learn Hank’s wife’s name. We don’t even see her face; she has the mask of her suit down the whole time. She only exists to have died in order to make Hank sad enough to make the decisions he does in the film.

In Ant-Man and the Wasp, Scott, Hank, and Hope realize that Hank’s wife – who is finally named Janet – is still alive in the quantum realm. Rescuing Janet is one of the film’s two main plotlines. What’s more, Janet is not simply a damsel waiting to be saved. She has an active hand in her own rescue, planting messages in Scott’s head to start the plot, and at one point even taking control of Scott’s body to correct her family’s equations to make sure that they can come get her.

And when Janet is finally brought back to the full-size world, she steps in to solve the film’s other main problem: she is able to heal Ghost when no one else could. Janet van Dyne goes from existing only as motivation for her husband to being an essential character in both plotlines of Ant-Man and the Wasp. The sequel film literally would not be the same without her.

3. Bo Peep

In Toy Story and Toy Story 2, Bo Peep doesn’t do much. She’s established as Woody’s love interest, and she has a few cheeky quotes, but that’s about it for her role in the films. Then, in Toy Story 3, she’s fridged. Rex mentions her as a part of a list of toys who have been given away over the years, and Woody has a moment of sadness. She may not be dead, technically – if it’s even possible for toys to die – but she’s gone, with very little fanfare and no indication of what she herself wanted out of life.

Toy Story 4 blows the three previous films out of the park in regards to Bo. Again, I’ve blogged about this before, but here’s the short version. Toy Story 4 establishes Bo as a leader in her own right, both in Molly’s room in a flashback and among the Lost Toys in the present. While Woody is frequently a purposeless fish out of water in this film, Bo is the one who knows how the world works, making her essential to the plot. She also has her own agenda – she doesn’t want a kid to own her; she wants to be free, and for Woody to come with her. Best of all, in the end, Bo gets everything she wants. She goes from being a nobody to being one of the most important people in the movie.

Why Does This Matter?

It’s not enough for women to merely exist in films. As I’ve said before, it matters that female characters matter. It’s important that they have motivations which the film treats as important, and it’s important that they exist as more than just a small part of a male character’s life. If the vast majority of films we see show us that men have important adventures and women only exist to motivate men, we internalize that message. Girls learn that they don’t go on adventures, and boys learn that what they want matters more than what girls want.

It’s very interesting to see film franchises apparently realizing in hindsight that their female characters need to matter and developing women more in sequel films. Once is an exception, and twice is a coincidence, but three times is an intriguing trend.

I hope to see more sequels which correct their prequels’ fridging, and fewer films in which women are fridged at all. (Remind me to rant at some point about L3-37 in Solo: A Star Wars Story – an example of a prequel going out of its way to insert a fridged woman to the franchise.) Or, hey, maybe we could fridge a few men for a change.

Have you noticed any other unfridged women in films? Can you think of any female characters who deserve more development than the original film gave them? Retweet, reply, or reblog with your thoughts!

[team5ds]

something really mean about me going “keket killed herself to save the world specifically so atem won’t have to do it but then he died anyway”