_:n6f500b0afc0b4d65a05cbcd9bab7b5a2xb26
<http://schema.org/text>
"A little media literacy and trope-savviness is a dangerous thing. Not that I'm accusing you of this, Phil, but the term \"fridging\" is about as over-deployed and meaning-deprived as \"manic pixie dream girl\" and \"Mary Sue\" (each of which have been transformed from a specific kind of poorly-writted female character to \"female character I don't like\"). A fridging is not any death of any female character for any reason, yet that's become its connotation. Yet you note here that Clara's death is entirely on her terms, in a manner of her choosing.\n\nPoor writers fridge female characters because violence against women is the laziest way to convey \"edginess\" and \"seriousness\" in fiction (are you listening, GRRM? Listening, every TV police procedural with a cold open focusing on a beautiful dead woman?) But here, a character took her own death into her own hands, and gave a beautiful speech against precisely the sort of thing a bad writer would follow the death with: using the death as a motivation for vengeance (and the worst direction this show could possibly go in would be \"badass\" Doctor, the Doctor turned Punisher).\n\nIf we're writing good, whole, round female characters (and not \"Strong Female Characters\" in the Kate Beaton sense), and we're including lots of them so a show isn't a sausage fest with a token \"chick,\" (and Doctor Who is better at this than it used to be, though it can always improve) then, sometimes, those characters might die. And good writing will lend meaning to those deaths that has nothing to do with cheap shock (and that scene was as far from cheap as any death scene I've ever witnessed).\n\nThis episode is an instruction manual in how not to fridge. Thank you, Sarah Dollard."
<https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/face-the-raven-review>