Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against character deaths. It just gets old when seemingly the only way to motivate a male protagonist is to harm his wife.

The most recent one I saw, without giving spoilers, had a perfect wife character that absolutely everyone in town loved. She was opposed to the tyrannical government and its systems, and she brought up real good points that main character husband guy should have resonated with. Instead he only thought about how pretty and how good at dancing she was. Boom, she’s dead and he’s immediately inducted into the underground resistance.

Edit: This is a complaint about the women in refrigerators trope btw.

  • @200ok
    20•8 days ago

    Interesting:

    The term was coined by comic book fan (and later writer) Gail Simone in 1999, named after an incident in Green Lantern vol. 3 #54 (1994), written by Ron Marz.

    The story includes a scene in which the title hero, Kyle Rayner, comes home to his apartment to find that the villain Major Force had killed Rayner’s girlfriend, Alexandra DeWitt, and stuffed her into a refrigerator.

    It describes a trend that Simone had recognized in comic book stories where female characters would be killed, maimed, sexually assaulted, depowered, or would experience other “life-derailing tragedies” disproportionately more often than male characters.

    She also emphasized that while male superheroes typically experience noble deaths or resurrection, the violence against superheroines is most often for shock value and has permanent consequences.

    • @PM_Your_Nudes_Please
      0•7 days ago

      My favorite bit about fridging is that the term initially got coined due to Alexandra DeWitt being killed to get at the Green Lantern. She was later resurrected as a zombie during part of the Black Lantern story arc, and was always shown inside of a fridge even as a zombie. She was only shown a few times, so it was a subtle nod to the criticism the writers had received for fridging her in the first place.