Villain who hates another villain
1 Like
Okay… when they’re talking about how Ermine responds to the hit attempt, I had an image in my head of Bugs Bunny saying “of course you realize, this means war.”
Overall, I liked this story. It actually shows Ermine being competent, not just some kind of joke character, which a lot of her interactions have done.
Okay, want to say this. Adam is just plain wrong about fridging. It’s a thing, it’s systemic, and it unevenly targets female characters, where they are killed off with no effect but the what emotional effect happens to the male character they’re associated with. That said, I don’t think Professor Pollution fits the category.
5 Likes
I’d also say Adam’s logic wasn’t fully followed through - if he is correct in saying that there are more women in supporting roles in comic books than men, and fridging is a thing specific to supporting roles, then his statement that he could find more examples of it happening to men in supporting roles seems very erroneous. At least to me.
2 Likes
Absolutely true. Also note that he did not (and cannot) provide “double” the male counterexamples to the litany of actual fridging incidents over the decades, and casually claims there are fewer male supporting characters than female when anyone familiar with comics knows better. There are fewer male romantic interests, sure - but that’s because comics as a medium has (voluntarily or otherwise) leaned hard into heteronormative standards for the vast majority of its history and there are far fewer female lead characters than male ones even today. And let’s be honest here, “classic” fridging almost always happens to a romantic interest because it’s easy for writers to tug on that string - and when it isn’t a wife or girlfriend, it’s much more likely to be a female relative than male. The line he’s taking is one I’ve seen far too often in comics fan base, and it’s long past time we stopped letting it slide.
I wouldn’t put Miss Information in that category either. Neither is what I think of as “classic” fridging, but the origins of female villains do skew toward their turn to villainy being involuntary rather than voluntary more often than it does for male ones. Unlike romantic interests, there are far more male baddies in comics over time than female ones, so why aren’t both the percentages and raw numbers of hapless male villains higher than they are?
It’s also simply untrue. The historical skew is for there to be far more male supporting characters than female ones, not less - but as I said, classic fridging doesn’t happen to just any supporting cast. It happens to romantic interests more often than not, and (in older comics) frequently to “expendable girlfriend” types that are introduced in the same story they’re killed off in. The Silver Age has way too many examples of that, and despite the valiant efforts of the writers of Lois Lane to provide her with a massive roster of deceased or departed one-shot husbandos the bulk of the victims are still female.
3 Likes
I’d argue this is one of those weird “sexism begets sexism” deals.
Where men are seen as inherently less sympathetic/less provoking protective feelings than women. So you get writers choosing to kill off female supporting characters because they think it’ll engender more easy sympathy than a killed off male supporting character would.
Goes for the whole “why are more female villains accidental ones than male villains”, too. An accidental villain is more sympathetic, and you want/need your female characters to be sympathetic all the time in the way male characters are not thought of as needing/deserving sympathy.
And yes I am well aware that Draco in Leather Pants and similar fan reactions exist that would put paid to this if they were actually considered, but that’s the rub, that it is even more “sexism begets sexism” in that fangirls’ reactions and opinions on anything typically are not really considered or taken seriously in these discussions versus the focus being solely on male fan reactions.
2 Likes
I will reiterate: Being 40 again made something pop in my foot XD I had to hobble a city block to find someplace to sit down and fix it!
Poor Adam, though, he’s really taken this one hard. And I get it, I totally do! He has 3-6 months before something goes horrifically wrong with his body! :’)
Gee, why do you have one really beefy arm? “I was just in the high-gravity art training chamber for a year, I swear!”
“Do I look like someone who dies?” -Ermine, probably
Man, wouldn’t that be an insult XD
80’s Parse has some weird dialogue, she says “myehhhh” a lot.
I love the watch-stealing thing 
The Chairman, the man who walks like a chair!
“Fleshy greetings”? Oh god no XD
Oh boy, another unpleasant argument about a contentious topic, my favorite -_-
Darn, no more Toxlution ship D: unless…
Wow, guys, spoilers! D:
I love the announcer effects still being in place over the laughter and gaffs. XD
Ermbagerd!
“Trickster of the Void” has such a fantastic ring to it though!
C’mon, “Absolute Knyfe” is awesome! XD It’s on the same level as a silver head flying through space!
Whoever wrote this letter is a genius.
2 Likes
I for one am enjoying the return to schtick that we’ve seen in letters over the past few weeks.
3 Likes
So, the Discord was discussing Women in Refrigerators, and I definitely think that Adam doesn’t understand the dialogue that’s going on.
Women in Refrigerators is fundamentally about three core things:
- A character gets brutalized or killed, not to advance their own story or arc, but to motivate another character.
- The character who is brutalized or killed is a woman, and the character who is motivated is a man.
- The damage is either permanent or extremely long-term.
The reason that it matters that it’s women is that it’s far more common in comics for women to get hurt to advance a man’s plot than vice versa. It’s not that any single example is inherently a problem, it’s that the tapestry as a whole is an issue.
And with all of that said… I don’t think that it really applies to Miss Information, and definitely doesn’t to Professor Pollution. In the first case, Miss Information’s transformation was a shock, but it wasn’t really a shock meant to advance the Freedom Five’s personal stories or to motivate them, it was a shock meant to create a new and compelling villain with emotional ties to her enemies. She’s probably the closer of the two, but she’s still a different thing.
In the second case, I would argue that Professor Pollution’s end point, while it hurts Naturalist, both doesn’t exist to motivate him and is a very reasonable end point to Nina Arbour’s story. It’s the flip version of Tony Taurus becoming Heartbreaker; she puts her life on the line to sabotage dangerous chemicals, it catches up with her, she becomes the thing she hates. That’s a compelling internal story even if the Naturalist doesn’t exist at all.
3 Likes
Wracking my brain for the list of “Sentinels supporting characters who die for the sole purpose of motivating a hero”, I feel like it maybe consists of:
Christine for AZ and Trevor for Wraith are probably the two main ones, Wraith also gets Sara, Eduardo, and her dad, then more vaguely Archie for Fanatic, and my brain is blanking on others.
The list of accidental villains is a bit larger, but I think Benji/Necrosis is the one that comes most strongly to mind as meant to be an actual motivator versus just “unlucky bystander”.
As for the full episode now that I’ve had a chance to digest it: I really love making Ermine an actual competent villain versus just sort of a ditzy vain foil. I do unironically like “ineffectual harmless villains”, but a comic relief villain who can pull their own weight when push comes to shove is even more entertaining for me.
I n+1 loving the “hybrid character mashup” letter. I have a webcomic I follow where the author regularly does mashup character things, and it’s fun hearing that same concept come to Sentinels characters.
4 Likes
Under a very technical definition, Felicia’s death in the Iron Legacy timeline would be a perfect example… except that it doesn’t affect the real Felicia, and also Iron Legacy’s own pain serves as a motivating factor for Legacy and Young Legacy, which makes Young Legacy’s a major motivational event for… Young Legacy.
Also, for the Mashup characters: it was great, but a small bit of me is sad they didn’t stick with the gimmick. We could have had Rose Griggs/Kismet the Ultimate Chaos Witch and the deadly Gloomwager!
2 Likes
I’ll be nice to myself this time and say I think the main reason it didn’t occur to me is because it doesn’t come off for me as “done solely to motivate a hero” when “what happens if Baron Blade goes after Felicia instead of Paul” feels like it belongs on The Top Ten List of What Ifs for Sentinels.
(Kind of like how Ra’s death deeply affects Fanatic but it clearly happened for primary reasons other than that alone.)
2 Likes
Another part of Fridging is the trope namer. Kyle Rainer’s girlfriend Alex was created just so that Major Force could murder her. also, all the tv shows where the hero gets a new girlfriend, but the actress was only hired for one episode because she has to die so the hero feels bad and lonely until the next dead girl walking enters his life.
5 Likes
Supernatural just called about being an example for your case, shall I tell them you’re available or ask them to leave a message?
3 Likes
Heck, I was thinking about detective and cowboy shows that were syndicated reruns for as long as I could change the channel.
Not to mention all the heroes whose mothers died in childbirth.
I learned a lot from dad, but “mom” is just an idea to make dad cry at night
5 Likes
I think it applies more to Professor Pollution because she was Naturalist supporting cast that he specifically cared for a lot, and became a Naturalist villain, with a motivation specifically opposite to his. Her corruption and heel turn were written to provide him with emotional development.
Miss Information’s fall was done to create Miss Information, as an interesting character in and of herself; she was a Freedom Five villain to begin with, but also was quickly a nemesis for Parse, and interacted with other heroes (and villains) before long. And she didn’t really do anything for the character development of any heroes. They seem to have shrugged off losing Aminia fairly easily, all things considered.
3 Likes
I was the writer of the SwornBlood letter. So, thanks! I’m glad people enjoyed it!
The “Faye King” pun was actually originally accidental. I just wanted to merge Guise with one of the most popular / powerful characters, and NightMist seemed to fit that bill. It was only when I tried to put their names together that I realised the glorious wordplay. (The other combination, coincidentally enough, would have been “Joe Diamond.”)
That is a good point. In all honesty I hadn’t really put much thought towards trying to make all of the matches between nemesises. (Though it did seem that Adam also expected it.) I used that criteria to decide on some of them, obviously, but I wasn’t paying attention to it for all of them.
Also, I’m thinking about sending in a sequel letter along the same lines as this one. Does anybody have any suggestions for which mashups I should use?
7 Likes
Oh, man, that’s an open question. But my thoughts mainly go to characters we don’t know a lot about to try to make C&A divulge more about their abilities. Rose Griggs is a good choice for that reason (probably Unity as her “nemesis,” if you’re doing that). So are Rambler, the Princes of AEternus, and maybe Pristine? I kind of like Chaos Witch+Pristine vs. Unity+Fashion.
2 Likes