Nice to see they’re screwing up Victor and Nora AGAIN.

[Celgress]

Haven't bothered to keep up with Mr. Freeze and his marriage issues, but I always envisioned that Nora would end up dying when awoken from stasis. Then Freeze would exact icy vengeance on the world for taking away his one true love. Extra drama points if another villain/character gave Freeze a "cure" for her that ended up failing.

This would have been best and far better than the current status quo, IMO.

[Blue22]

I actually kinda like the Suicide Squad idea. Nora is cured of her illness (maybe even thanks to Batman) and, in order to make amends for his crimes and pay for the medical treatment she would likely still need, he becomes one of the only willing members of the Squad.

[Confuzzled]

Mr. Freeze is such a great, horribly limited character. Is it any wonder writers keep trying to change him? You can only do the whole 'my wife is dying so I need to steal things because my boss screwed me over' shtick before he loses any sympathy. And his entire character is dependant upon being tragically sympathetic. But he becomes less so the longer he's around. Especially since Bruce could just pay for all of Nora's treatment anyways which takes away any motivation for Freeze to be a villain. And then what do with him? Do you cure Nora and have her leave him (considering what he's done, no normal person would stay with him) like in the BTAS? Where he became a straight-up villain, everyone hated that. Do you make Nora into more of a delusional obsession of Freeze where he just wants someone he can love, as Snyder did? (everyone hated that as well.) Honestly, I'm willing to try anything anyone wants to do with Nora and Victor, because after his initial Heart of Ice introduction story I don't think there's much you can do with him afterward. He works as a character with a beginning and an ending (like in Batman Beyond) and that's it. His gimmick just isn't for a long-running medium like comics.

Like Ivy, they can make him an anti-corporate anti-hero, helping the little people who got screwed over by the machine. Ghosts of Batman and Robin notwithstanding, Ivy and Freeze would actually make a pretty cool tragic villains turned anti-heroes team.

[exile001]

I like Mr Freeze... sometimes, but his whole deal (since the superb BTAS origin) works a lot better with Nora dead.

My favourite Mr Freeze story was an old Batman Adventures special (Xmas, I guess), where Mr Freeze was doing his freezing the city bit and Batman tracks him down. After a surprisingly violent fight, Batman stops and asks Freeze why and he replied, pointing to Nora's grave, that she loved the snow. Ouch, right in the feels.

And that is the type of story that Mr Freeze should be used for if we're keeping the animated origin, and it is something unique. Something that relates to his internal struggle, but leads to his doing bad things. Conflict inside and out.

The problem, though, is that kind of story is hard to tell. Something with emotion and depth and character is much harder than the Mr Freeze story we see far more often; he is angry and has a super-suit and an ice gun and a dead wife and is angry.

And this is also one of the character's biggest flaws, he has been written inconsistently even since bringing his animated origin over to the comics. Heck, even with the revised origin, he was a violent brute in Batman who wanted to kill love or some such nonsense (with the god awful bulky suit redesign) and a whining non-entity in Dark Victory.

Add to this the status of Nora herself has been pretty inconsistent.

In Paul Dini's Mr Freeze one-shot that introduced the character's animated origin, Nora was frozen and Freeze was stealing what he needed to cure her. During the climactic battle with Batman, Freeze shot an ice blast at Batman, but hit Nora's cryo-pod which (for some reason) shattered her. However, over time writers tended to flip-flop between having her dead or still alive somewhere (often still frozen in Freeze's lair) and she was ultimately resurrected with fire powers because irony. It has always been a mess.

I know it's comics, but good people don't get cryogenically frozen and wake up evil. They don't immediately adjust to everything that has happened since they were frozen, and I don't accept but Lazerus Pit juice as an acceptable answer.

I'm no fortune teller, but I'll bet the end game to all this is that Nora is too evil and Freeze himself has to put her down, because the writer thinks that's a clever twist (it was done in Batgirl when she was a fire demon or whatever... and it sucked then, too). Or maybe she'll kill him. Which ever way this goes, Johns did it better with Cicada almost 20 years ago.

And yes, I do appreciate the irony of 'fridging' Victor's wife to give him purpose. It is an vastly overused trope, but that doesn't mean it should never be used. In Victor's case, it may the best thing for the character.

Or maybe twist it a bit that, after Batman and Freeze's first encounter, Bruce had Nora's frozen body transferred to a Wayne facility where his scientists did manage to revive and cure her. She hears of Victor's decent into madness and, wanting nothing to do with him, is taken into witness protection. This changes Freeze's purpose to either search for his wife (but again that has a shelf life), finding and killing her (either by choice or by accident) or he could even freeze other random women thinking they are his wife.

I am against the idea of turning Freeze (and wife) heroic, as I am with the majority of comic book villains, because a sudden face turn doesn't undo all the damage done previously and the heroic version rarely has the same value as the villain we lost. Just saying he's a hero now and chucking in the occasional angst over a criminal past doesn't make for a compelling protagonist.

Character is being lost by turning villains into anti-heroes, as they always tend to be pretty interchangeable. Red Hood is a shell of the character he was when he returned. I'm not knocking him (I love Jason) or his book (meh), but the fact is the character is stuck in a perpetual loop and probably will be until the Red Hood series of books are finally cancelled and the next Bat-writer wants him as a villain again. Poison Ivy benefited somewhat from the New 52 reboot but her re-tooling has never lead to any great swell in popularity for her, and Gotham City Sirens before it was managed to take three hot characters and dilute each of them to fit the loose team/buddy format of the book.

It worked for Catwoman overall, as she was portrayed as a much more complex character from her re-introduction in the 70's and she became a character pulled between two worlds. It worked with Doctor Octopus because Dan Slott wrote a long (and frankly excellent) story with twists and turns that ultimately lead to a level of redemption. I doubt anybody is asking for a year long Mr Freeze epic.

Exploring different avenues with a character can be great, interesting and even bring lasting change to a character. Face-turning them for the sake of it rarely works and should never be done without a well-defined arc and a definite end point.

Also, I am that one guy who liked Snyder's revised Freeze origin in that Victor and Nora had never actually met. It would have been better if Snyder hadn't used Bruce as Freeze's fixation (but in the New 52, a LOT of Batman's enemies now started at Wayne Enterprises), but it does give Freeze a big, un-killable entity to rail against and a figurehead in Bruce to direct his rage toward. I will admit that I didn't like the sleeveless suit (that makes no sense!) and actual ice powers, though.

You'll note the thing I least speak about is Nora herself, and there's a reason for that. She is the Waynes. She is Krypton. She is Uncle Ben. Nora was never intended to be a character, she was a device to motivate Mr Freeze and should have been left as such.

[Steven Caldwell]

I feel like Mr. Freeze's story has been told.
He should be allowed to melt at this point.

[Nero]

Yeah, I'm not feeling the Mr. and Mrs. Freeze angle.

Either Nora should have stayed dead or if by some chance she is revived, she wants nothing to do with Victor because that's not the Victor she fell in love with and he ends up putting her on ice because he comes to the conclusion that she didn't love him as much as he did with her. Nora has been the best and worst thing to happen to Mr. Freeze. Best, in that she's given Freeze depth and angst but worst in that she's pretty much Freeze's be all end all which consequently makes stories limited in scope that can feature him. At this point, Freeze is better off with Nora out of the picture completely.

[JBatmanFan05]

Freeze's tragic Nora origin is necessary. It doesn't limit him.

Writers limit Mr. Freeze by uncleverly feeling they have to keep bringing Nora up or that Freeze forever has to be motivated solely by Nora.

Failure of the writers & editors.

Nora is an easy well to go to, so they keep going to it.

[Gotham citizen]

I agree: it is all writers' fault because they see in him only the "ice monster" we know, without be able to became aware of the man behinnd the monster; but the character is great exactly thank to his tragic origins and his love for Nora.
I think the only thing we might change in his origins is the approach to the narration, adopting an approach similar to the one Todd Phillips had with Joker, in order to explain who was the man who became the monster we know and how became that monster. For example we could hypothesize Victor Fries was married with a younger wife, who was more interested to his money than him but he was too blind to see the truth about Nora and when she fell ill he became a criminal (maybe a trafficker) in order to pay the expensive cures for his wife and only after a slowly, tragic, inexorable descent in the grip of the Gotham's underworld it happened the accident which turned him in Mr. Freeze. In this way we could put the man behind the monster under the spotlight, we could explore his relationship with his wife, we could tell who was his wife before the illness and tell why and how a mild scientist, totally devote to his job and his wife can became one of the most dangerous criminals of Gotham.
Anyway Victor Fries needs Nora tragic story to become Mr. Freeze, like the Second World War needed the alliance among Nazism, Fascism and Japanese Empire to break out.

[Shockdingo]

I always have held the BTAS story in high regard and yes, while I believe he's been limited, I really do like some of the ideas brought up in this thread. Him, finally curing Nora then being an anti-hero/morally flexible guy who goes after douchey corporate parasites, or even a willing member of the Suicide Squad could work nicely. Ever since I read his Nu 52 origin I left him for dead. This development doesn't make me any eager to come back.