The Kid in the Fridge

Over a third of the named NPC child-characters in my dataset were murder victims, their brief lives cut short by drownings, shootings, stabbings, hangings, intentional traffic collisions, cannibalism, murderous religious rituals, and giant spider attacks. In this chapter, I use two games from the Assassin’s Creed series as case studies to look at the points of overlap between the Child Sacrifice archetype and the woman-in-the-refrigerator trope. I argue that the blood of digital children is spilled so that videogames can continue to reproduce some of the most troubling aspects of patriarchy. Since the death of the child is figured as an assault upon the player character’s identity as a paternal protector, the consequent revenge quest can be understood as a mission to restore the hero’s masculinity through the violent domination of others. In this way, the child sacrifice archetype permits a return to extreme, aggressive forms of masculinity while side-stepping questions about the ethics of violence: ridding the world of child-killers cannot be wrong, and retaliatory violence is not only necessary but heroic.