He’s Everybody’s Problem Now: The Refrigerator Goes Creative Commons

Dr. Andreas Gelé by Eugene Jaworski Back in 2014, I had some ideas for a superhero game. I needed a bad guy, something that would make the disparate group of supers I had want to work together for a common goal. That bad guy was the misanthropic mad scientist known as the Refrigerator. Named for the obvious cold-based reasons, but also from Gail Simone's 1999 landmark essay "Women in Refrigerators." While the game never went as far as I wanted, The Refrigerator lived on and found his way into other games of mine as a semi-recurring bad guy. I say "semi" since he usually never appeared in the same game or campaign twice, but over many games and many campaigns. It turns out his particular flavor of evil is useful in a lot of places. The Refrigerator began life with enough psychosexual baggage to make Freud sit up in his grave. His earliest incarnation was much more specifically obsessed with preserving beautiful women. That remains a perfectly valid version of him, but for this open…