Amber, Kanan, and the women in the fridge
Spoilers for House several seasons ago and Gensomaden Saiyuki volume 4. Cutting for length and interest rather than spoilers, because, well, I am behind the curve.
You might've noticed that I flirted with House and then stopped watching. This is partly because TV isn't something that fits easily into my life, especially since I don't own a TV set but mostly because the season 4 finale left me feeling like I might need to think twice about investing fannishly in the show. So House jerks me around when it comes to characterization, continuity, and consistency, so, okay, that's life with a committee-written serial medium, and by season 4 I should have known what to expect. But in season 4 the show's steadily accumulating gender issues went from skeevy to truly ugly, and when the writers wrapped up the season by killing Amber, something in my relationship with the show seems to have broken.
Amber's death was a classic incidence of a woman-in-the-fridge: a nominally strong and independent female character who is killed (or permanently disabled) in order to foster drama for male characters. This is usually done because the writers consider the resulting plot lines for the male characters much more interesting than anything which could have been done with a mere woman. It is a trope which recurs with terrifying frequency, in pop media in particular, and I detest it with a cold and burning hatred.
At the same time, though, I went and fell madly in love with Saiyuki -- as you might've noticed *cough* -- despite the fact that Saiyuki has its own absolutely classic instance of the Woman in the Fridge in Hakkai's backstory. To wit: Man has a woman! Woman is kidnapped, raped, abused, and impregnated! Man comes to wreak vengeance and rescue woman but arrives too late! Man takes (very gory) revenge! Man gets superpowers with bonus angst! I don't think there's a single tickybox on the Fridge Syndrome checklist left out. But, oddly enough, Kanan's death didn't bother me anywhere near as much as Amber's did, and usually nothing will make me disengage from a story faster than a fridged woman.
Amber is a more fully realized character than Kanan. She got a whole season of screen time and even some character development before the writers snuffed her. Kanan appears only in flashback, has almost no lines, and plays absolutely no role in the story except to die in as ghastly a fashion as possible in order to endow Hakkai with his pretty, tortured angst. So why does Amber's death make me want to choke the screenwriters, when she got much more of an independent existence as a character than Kanan ever did?
It comes down to agency.
Amber lost whatever independent existence she had as a character when the show brought her back for her second role as Wilson's girlfriend. (Warning sign number one: a character who started out with an independent professional identity is repurposed as The Girlfriend.) Nowhere is this made more blatantly obvious than in Amber's death scenes. She spends a painfully protracted amount of time in a hospital bed, giving her doctors plenty of opportunity to call her family and friends, but apparently nobody thinks that's at all important, because the only people at her bedside are House and Wilson. Nor does Amber, ambitious, self-centered, ruthless Amber, take any time to grieve for all her dreams that will now go unfulfilled, for all the plans that she had made for her life. We are to believe that the only loose end of her life she feels the need to tie up is the loss of her future with Wilson. That's what the story is really about, in the end: how Amber's Girlfriend status and her death affect the relationship between House and Wilson. The writers wanted to set up tension between House and Wilson, so they shoved a woman between them and killed her. All the character development that Amber got in the second half of season four turned out to be a quiet and methodical declawing of her character so that the one-time Cutthroat Bitch was positioned to step into the role of sainted lost love. Amber went from a thorny and interesting character to a beatific sacrifice to the House/Wilson melodrama. Her death, like her story, was never about her.
But Kanan, apparently the passive sufferer, makes her own choices. She does not allow Hakkai to rescue her; she chooses her own, desperate way out. Her point of view is made integral to the tragedy. What happens in the castle of Hyakugan Maoh is her experience as much as Hakkai's, and not only does the narrative acknowledge that, it's arguably Kanan's own choices that damage Hakkai the most. There's a real difference between the writers who took a character with her own independent plot line and flattened her, taking first her life and then her death away from her, and the writer who took the time while developing her protagonist's back story to add the grace notes that make it clear that the story belonged also and intrinsically to the woman who did not make it out alive.
On a similar note, Kanan is never used as a motivation ticket for Hakkai. To the contrary, what haunts Hakkai are his own actions, his own capacity for darkness. And indeed the greatest part of his character arc in Saiyuki is about learning to accept himself, live for himself, and leave his past behind. Whereas the House season 5 opener begins with Wilson declaring that after Amber's death he needs to make a drastic break from his life, from House, because his girlfriend is dead and he just can't handle it anymore.
That's where I stopped watching.
I think this why the Fridgedame phenomenon keeps persisting: the externalization of emotion, and therefore of responsibility.
There are so many reasons why Wilson should have snapped. House has been walking all over him for years, long before Amber ever entered the picture. If Wilson were going to snap, it should've been about him, and about House; I could have swallowed Amber as a catalyst, but never as a cause.
What makes a man a man? What is a manly (or at least Cool) motivation for action? Vengeance is great, personal conflicts are great (as all storytellers know), but if you're invested in masculinity -- excuse me, "Masculinity" -- they're also problematic. Men, or at least real men, cannot be anything but stoic. Deep-rooted personal pain can't be about the man himself -- that would be either selfish or weak. Protection is a much safer and more acceptable motivation. So you have to invoke a woman to damage in order to give the man his motive, to show that the man is acceptably rooted in society, and to dress up his badassery in the name of justice. The woman is not there for any reason except to be a motivation ticket. What she thinks about the whole deal is entirely irrelevant.
If a man is not allowed to be vulnerable and traumatized, then you need a way to make it personal without making it weak. Women are the safe and acceptable answer. Men are supposed to protect them: this is both sanctioned and required.
It is also horrifically irresponsible. It makes men cauterized and women into symbols instead of people.
And this is why I love Saiyuki, even when it can barely scrape a Bechdel pass. Saiyuki problematizes acting for someone else. It is about owning one's own actions; it is about responsibility; it is about acknowledging your connections, whether parental or romantic or the strange discovered family of your heart, even if the only language you can manage is stumbling and inarticulate.
It is about being human.
The real problem at the heart of the woman in the fridge trope is the externalization of responsibility. I had much rather have characters -- male or female -- who come to face themselves and their pasts, and their actions, and their pain. Someone acting from a fridge -- I can't care. It's both hollow and dishonest. I can't forgive characters whose narrative can't give them responsibility.
And I had much rather that half of my heroes be female, and living. But that -- alas -- is another story.
You might've noticed that I flirted with House and then stopped watching. This is partly because TV isn't something that fits easily into my life, especially since I don't own a TV set but mostly because the season 4 finale left me feeling like I might need to think twice about investing fannishly in the show. So House jerks me around when it comes to characterization, continuity, and consistency, so, okay, that's life with a committee-written serial medium, and by season 4 I should have known what to expect. But in season 4 the show's steadily accumulating gender issues went from skeevy to truly ugly, and when the writers wrapped up the season by killing Amber, something in my relationship with the show seems to have broken.
Amber's death was a classic incidence of a woman-in-the-fridge: a nominally strong and independent female character who is killed (or permanently disabled) in order to foster drama for male characters. This is usually done because the writers consider the resulting plot lines for the male characters much more interesting than anything which could have been done with a mere woman. It is a trope which recurs with terrifying frequency, in pop media in particular, and I detest it with a cold and burning hatred.
At the same time, though, I went and fell madly in love with Saiyuki -- as you might've noticed *cough* -- despite the fact that Saiyuki has its own absolutely classic instance of the Woman in the Fridge in Hakkai's backstory. To wit: Man has a woman! Woman is kidnapped, raped, abused, and impregnated! Man comes to wreak vengeance and rescue woman but arrives too late! Man takes (very gory) revenge! Man gets superpowers with bonus angst! I don't think there's a single tickybox on the Fridge Syndrome checklist left out. But, oddly enough, Kanan's death didn't bother me anywhere near as much as Amber's did, and usually nothing will make me disengage from a story faster than a fridged woman.
Amber is a more fully realized character than Kanan. She got a whole season of screen time and even some character development before the writers snuffed her. Kanan appears only in flashback, has almost no lines, and plays absolutely no role in the story except to die in as ghastly a fashion as possible in order to endow Hakkai with his pretty, tortured angst. So why does Amber's death make me want to choke the screenwriters, when she got much more of an independent existence as a character than Kanan ever did?
It comes down to agency.
Amber lost whatever independent existence she had as a character when the show brought her back for her second role as Wilson's girlfriend. (Warning sign number one: a character who started out with an independent professional identity is repurposed as The Girlfriend.) Nowhere is this made more blatantly obvious than in Amber's death scenes. She spends a painfully protracted amount of time in a hospital bed, giving her doctors plenty of opportunity to call her family and friends, but apparently nobody thinks that's at all important, because the only people at her bedside are House and Wilson. Nor does Amber, ambitious, self-centered, ruthless Amber, take any time to grieve for all her dreams that will now go unfulfilled, for all the plans that she had made for her life. We are to believe that the only loose end of her life she feels the need to tie up is the loss of her future with Wilson. That's what the story is really about, in the end: how Amber's Girlfriend status and her death affect the relationship between House and Wilson. The writers wanted to set up tension between House and Wilson, so they shoved a woman between them and killed her. All the character development that Amber got in the second half of season four turned out to be a quiet and methodical declawing of her character so that the one-time Cutthroat Bitch was positioned to step into the role of sainted lost love. Amber went from a thorny and interesting character to a beatific sacrifice to the House/Wilson melodrama. Her death, like her story, was never about her.
But Kanan, apparently the passive sufferer, makes her own choices. She does not allow Hakkai to rescue her; she chooses her own, desperate way out. Her point of view is made integral to the tragedy. What happens in the castle of Hyakugan Maoh is her experience as much as Hakkai's, and not only does the narrative acknowledge that, it's arguably Kanan's own choices that damage Hakkai the most. There's a real difference between the writers who took a character with her own independent plot line and flattened her, taking first her life and then her death away from her, and the writer who took the time while developing her protagonist's back story to add the grace notes that make it clear that the story belonged also and intrinsically to the woman who did not make it out alive.
On a similar note, Kanan is never used as a motivation ticket for Hakkai. To the contrary, what haunts Hakkai are his own actions, his own capacity for darkness. And indeed the greatest part of his character arc in Saiyuki is about learning to accept himself, live for himself, and leave his past behind. Whereas the House season 5 opener begins with Wilson declaring that after Amber's death he needs to make a drastic break from his life, from House, because his girlfriend is dead and he just can't handle it anymore.
That's where I stopped watching.
I think this why the Fridgedame phenomenon keeps persisting: the externalization of emotion, and therefore of responsibility.
There are so many reasons why Wilson should have snapped. House has been walking all over him for years, long before Amber ever entered the picture. If Wilson were going to snap, it should've been about him, and about House; I could have swallowed Amber as a catalyst, but never as a cause.
What makes a man a man? What is a manly (or at least Cool) motivation for action? Vengeance is great, personal conflicts are great (as all storytellers know), but if you're invested in masculinity -- excuse me, "Masculinity" -- they're also problematic. Men, or at least real men, cannot be anything but stoic. Deep-rooted personal pain can't be about the man himself -- that would be either selfish or weak. Protection is a much safer and more acceptable motivation. So you have to invoke a woman to damage in order to give the man his motive, to show that the man is acceptably rooted in society, and to dress up his badassery in the name of justice. The woman is not there for any reason except to be a motivation ticket. What she thinks about the whole deal is entirely irrelevant.
If a man is not allowed to be vulnerable and traumatized, then you need a way to make it personal without making it weak. Women are the safe and acceptable answer. Men are supposed to protect them: this is both sanctioned and required.
It is also horrifically irresponsible. It makes men cauterized and women into symbols instead of people.
And this is why I love Saiyuki, even when it can barely scrape a Bechdel pass. Saiyuki problematizes acting for someone else. It is about owning one's own actions; it is about responsibility; it is about acknowledging your connections, whether parental or romantic or the strange discovered family of your heart, even if the only language you can manage is stumbling and inarticulate.
It is about being human.
The real problem at the heart of the woman in the fridge trope is the externalization of responsibility. I had much rather have characters -- male or female -- who come to face themselves and their pasts, and their actions, and their pain. Someone acting from a fridge -- I can't care. It's both hollow and dishonest. I can't forgive characters whose narrative can't give them responsibility.
And I had much rather that half of my heroes be female, and living. But that -- alas -- is another story.