A truly shocking moment in Daredevil: Born Again’s first episode was the murder of his best friend Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson). Originally, Marvel did not even intend for Netflix Daredevil characters Foggy and Karen Page to return for Born Again. However, the new showrunners realized Foggy’s death would form Charlie Cox’s character arc for the rest of the season. And as far as we’re concerned, they were right. We don’t think the story would have nearly as much impact without Foggy’s death. But it’s led fans online to ask, did Marvel just “Fridge Foggy??” If so, it begs the question, if creators kill a male supporting character in service to a male lead character’s story, is it still fridging? First, maybe we should properly explain what fridging even is for those unaware.
“Fridging,” The Tradition of Harming Women Characters to Service Male Character Story Arcs
The term fridging was coined in 1999 by comics creator Gail Simone, famous for writing Birds of Prey and Uncanny X-Men. It’s actually short for “Women in Refrigerators.” Simone used this term to describe a trope in fiction where female characters faced harm and death as a plot device to motivate the lead male characters. The refrigerators part of the term references a 1994 Green Lantern comic. In one infamous issue, the hero’s enemy murdered his girlfriend. He then stuffed her body in a refrigerator, left for him to find. This was a grisly iteration of a trope going back decades. Yet the term “fridging” stuck. Some believe it only counts as fridging if the woman killed was created only to die. But that’s not always the case. Stan Lee didn’t create Spider-Man’s girlfriend Gwen Stacy to die, for example. Other writers chose to kill her years later.
Once the term entered the popular consciousness, people took notice of how often stories used it. And not just in comics, but in other media as well. Buffy the Vampire Slayer did it, and Solo did it as well. Deadpool 2 did it with Wade’s girlfriend Vanessa (Morena Baccarin). Yet when that film was released in 2018, people were so aware of this trope as overused and problematic, they shot a new ending. In the new ending, Deadpool reverses Vanessa’s death via time travel. These days, creators are far more conscious of how tired this trope is. Credit to Marvel, they could have killed Karen (Deborah Ann Woll) instead of Foggy. In the comics, Karen was famously fridged when Bullseye killed her. So we’re glad that Marvel was wise enough to give the live-action version a different fate. But when it happens to a male character, is it still problematic?
Can a Male Character’s Death Like Daredevil’s Foggy Nelson Count as “Fridging?”
The main reason killing off a Foggy Nelson doesn’t qualify as fridging in the strictest sense is simply that most genre fiction centers around straight male characters. And thus, their loved ones who must suffer to further their stories are almost always women. If more female characters were the leads in more of these types of stories, then a lot more boyfriends and male mentors would die too. It’s really the imbalance in pop culture storytelling when it comes to gender that makes the concept even an issue. So as long as that’s the case, fridging as a term remains reserved for women characters.
The truth is, killing off loved ones for a main character in a story is a good plot device. There’s no denying it usually works, at least when done well. It’s why it’s a trope that writers keep using. One of the best Worf (Michael Dorn) storylines on Star Trek: The Next Generation was when his enemy killed his lover K’ehleyr. He then went AWOL and took revenge for her murder. The death of Rachel (Maggie Gyllenhall) in The Dark Knight? Crucial to both Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent’s arcs. But when most of your major narrative fiction, especially heroic genre fiction, centers on male characters, the motivational deaths invariably occur to women. The result is seeing interesting female characters suffer and die in disproportionate numbers to male ones. It’s just not cool and damaging to culture overall when used over and over again.
Killing Off Secondary Male Characters Is Rare, But Hardly Unheard Of
So is Foggy’s death as a male secondary character really that unusual? Yes, but it’s not without precedent. In Patty Jenkins’ 2017 Wonder Woman, love interest Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) dies in a way that properly motivates Diana (Gal Gadot) in the final act. No one argued it didn’t make the film work better. An example of male fridging that almost everyone disliked was Pa Kent (Kevin Costner) in Man of Steel. But even then, it was less that he died, it was that Clark (Henry Cavill) could have easily prevented it. It doesn’t qualify as genre fiction, but Carrie Bradshaw’s main love interest in Sex and the City, “Mr. Big,” was killed off in the first episode of “…And Just Like That.” Dealing with his death becomes the primary motivating factor for Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) throughout that series.
Ultimately, these kinds of stories will always kill off characters to motivate the lead. Death is just part of life, and you can’t remove the death of loved ones from storytelling tropes entirely. But until this happens to male characters as often as female ones, we can’t really call what happened to Foggy fridging. Killing off the male secondary characters should perhaps get its own term. But it happens so much less frequently, no one has bothered yet. Maybe Elden Henson’s contribution to pop culture will be creating the term “Getting Foggied” for male characters. Where not sure if that’s the kind of legacy he wants for his character, but it would be interesting if that’s what finally gives this trope a proper name.