The challenge of balancing detail (see: anything by George R. R. Martin and descriptions therein of meal time.) Though I always thought thrillers did it as a way to throw out an entire school of red herrings, if every character is superbly detailed you can't easily pick out the ones that will be surprisingly important later. But it might also be a bit of Dickensian motivation.

>But because they're inevitably a sort of shortcut, it can feel
>very cheap and nasty to use them. You mention D&D, but my go-to
>lookup for that kind of character has long been Thomas and Martha
>Wayne. In 99 out of 100 retellings of the Batman story, do we know
>anything about them, other than that he was a doctor, they were
>rich, and they were killed in front of their son? Nah. It's not
>important! They're not important; only the fact that they're
>dead is.* I didn't want Remi and Flan's parents to be that kind of
>cardboard cutout; I wanted them to be as alive as I could make
>them, given that they're already long dead when the story starts.
>

See also: Peter Parker's uncle Ben. Though he at least gets to deliver a line or three before being shuffled off stage. Anyway, you'll get no complaints from me about bringing them to life, so to speak. I've always been annoyed with obvious fridge-job characters.

>Fortunately, they pretty much took care of that for me, developing
>into actual characters I have a real fondness for more or less
>spontaneously. I knew they were going to work out when I finished the
>flashback scene in TTW Act IV, and A Name to Call Her Own
>cemented it for me. (And there's more coming, which is nice—one of
>the things that I find goes a long way toward mitigating the "created
>to be dead" problem is if the characters in question have a continuing
>impact on the story's world beyond just the effect that their being
>gone has on the characters who are left, if that makes any sense.)
>

Not the first members of the cast to do so, and probably not the last. There's comfort in that consistency, even if it does make things a bit crowded now and then.

Part of me wants to make a clever comment about defrosting 'fridged' characters, but even just talking about that thought is awkward and no suitable comment has been forthcoming.

>Heh, I do enjoy that type of character, the big, hearty,
>cheerful-in-adversity type. (Also, the type who's not as dumb as a
>lot of people think she is.) When G first met Meiling in TTW Act VI,
>his first thought was of Kanna from the Teikokukagekidan, but
>upon reflection, my take on her also has more than a little of Gudrun
>Truemace in her—gentler than Kanna, not as boisterous, but still
>perfectly prepared to pick up a Buick and fuck up a baddie's day with
>it if the need is there. :)
>
>(I've also got some more backstory coming for her in the next one, I
>hope. Like the others, she has some mileage on her, and it's odd that
>we know more about Sakuya's background than hers at the moment, given
>how insular Sakuya is vs. how much of an open book is Meiling.)
>

It's an interesting thing, I'm curious about her story, but Meiling doesn't inspire the same intensity there as a lot of the other cast, because she's so open. There's less 'why are you this way/what did this to you?' and you just figure it will flow out in general conversation easily because she has nothing to hide. Feels almost unfair to her, now that I type it out.

>* for bonus DC Comics content, contrast this with Ma
>and Pa Kent, who are hugely important to Superman's story even
>in the versions where one or both have died before the narrative
>begins

DC did give us the story that named the general trope, the practice of 'fridging' a character. The Kents are just outliers, probably because in many stories they aren't actually dead, so even in ones where they are we all sort of know their deal anyway.

	-={(Astynax)}=- "At this point I've sworn off just about anything DC that isn't their old animated universe though, so my opinions may no longer be applicable."