The Women in Refrigerators Trope, Explained

Now I'm a severed head in the refrigerator It sucks to be me Jerry Why do so many stories still put

women

inside

refrigerators

? The woman in a refrigerator

trope

is when a female character is killed or injured to motivate the story of a male character. The name was coined by writer Gail Simone, inspired by the Green Lantern comic number 54 from 1994, where the girlfriend of the hero, Alexandra Dewitt, is indeed murdered and stuffed inside her refrigerator. By looking at the many examples in movies, television, and comics, we can detect some recurring patterns in the refrigerated woman. she is often killed near the beginning of the story and this heartbreaking event is the incident that motivates a male hero to embark on a narrative journey from husband to murdered wife and I will have my places in this life for the next she too can arrive before fridge die before the story begins and drive it without having to be physically present my wife deserves revenge if she is not killed the fridge woman can be a victim of severe violence which often includes sexual assault the fridge event can be presented as a result straight from the The hero's failure to protect her is framed as a kind of failure of masculinity.

Should she bring him this? In many cases, her death or suffering will be the price to unlock our hero's God Mode, allowing him to become a full, more powerful version of himself. I know little or nothing about the refrigerated woman as an individual in the classic form of her. She is only there to be a symbol often of lost innocence. Purity or all the good that has been taken away from the male character. What was she like in real life? She was charming. The fundamental problem. The thing about putting

women

in

refrigerators

is that it is a way of leaving aside female characters, reducing them to one-dimensional objects in a story that revolves exclusively around men.

The question of what exactly constitutes a refrigerator can get complicated. Does it still count if the woman is well drawn? before dying, whether male characters are also injured or killed, or whether there are other complex female characters in the story, these answers are not always ultimately clear, although the refrigerated woman

trope

is most useful not as a way to condemn individual stories but as a touchstone to open important debates about how women are represented on screen, whatever you do, he doesn't scream, she will scream and you will die knowing it's all your fault. Here's our take on why this trope is still so common and how I can get this glib woman out of the kitchen refrigerator for good.

What is the last thing you remember? My wife, how sweet she is dying. If you're new here, be sure to subscribe and click the bell to get notified about all our new videos. This video is. brought to you by Skillshare, an online learning community where millions of people come together to take classes that fuel their creative journey. If you're one of the first 1,000 people to click the link in the description below, you'll get two free months of Skillshare. premium so become a member today and start exploring your creativity for less than ten dollars a month your female characters are horrible none of them have anything to say for themselves most of them are shot or stabbed to death within five minutes the girlfriend of Green Lantern in the refrigerator may seem like an incredibly specific incident to turn into a whole trope, but Gail Simone was quick to point out that the general tendency to use the gruesome deaths of female characters to motivate a hero is strangely ubiquitous in comics.

Simone and her colleagues created a Women in Refrigerators website that features an extensive list of these incidents to shed light on the fact that being a superhero inevitably meant being killed, maimed, or stripped of her powers. More than 20 years later, countless superhero stories on the big screen they still feature spandex-clad men grieving the loss of a beloved woman. There's only one person in this world I care about and she was gone long before the trope had a name. It was common practice in all kinds of movies. story genres They Killed My Wife epics like Braveheart and Gladiator derive much of their emotional impact from the release of the hero's story with a savagely murdered wife, They Killed Her to Get to Me, the James Bond franchise not only contains a number of disposable Bond girls, but also uses the death of Bond's wife, Tracy, to justify his subsequent womanizing with many female friends, but only married ones. once the wife killed well you made your point clear you are sensitive mr bond about certain things yes knowing about the loss in bond's initial story the audience could excuse him sleeping with so many women without forming a emotional bond like the behavior of a man who is still heartbroken deep down, what would happen if you found forgiveness in the arms of all those women ready for all the dead that you could not protect?

Director Christopher Nolan's main protagonists range from billionaire vigilantes and dream thieves to old-time magicians and amnesiac detectives, but what links? many of them together is that behind this hero lies a very dead woman, she could be dead from the beginning and represents the driving mystery at the center of the narrative, you told me you were looking for the guy who killed your wife, his Tragic death could be the inciting incident of the story or the formative moment in which the hero realizes who he is. Rachel believed in what you represented and what we represented or the memory of her could still appear to haunt the hero's subconscious.

You are just a shadow of my real wife. Sorry, you're just not good enough. Television tropes called this variation of the refrigerated woman who appears in the story as a literal or figurative ghost visiting the hero through visions or dying flashbacks. The lost Lenore after the woman cried at Edgar. allan poe is the raven i'm asking you to take your claim to fame it's easy to see why a filmmaker like nolan finds the cooling device such efficient and effective emotional shorthand killing a loved one is a quick way to advance in The story adds gravity to the events we are seeing and presents the hero as a tortured soul worthy of the audience's sympathy in some way, just know that she will never go back to bed, as George Lucas once said, emotionally involving the hearing is easy, anyone can do it. blindfolded he gets a kitten and has a guy hold its neck the john wick series shows this literally by starting his story by rubbing an innocent animal, even if it's a puppy instead of a kitten, the effectiveness of using death of his dog to motivate John Wick's story reveals a There is a lot about how the fridging technique works when Helen died.

I lost everything until that dog came to my door for a revenge narrative like this. Death acts as our moment of acceptance. It establishes our desire for a biblical eye for eye-style justice. the visceral satisfaction of seeing someone probably violently punished for their transgression, but it's worth noting that the death of a human character should work differently than that of an animal, such as the notable books Robert Wood writes noting that Wick is also motivated because her car was taken away, I quote when a role traditionally assumed by a woman can be played by a car or a pet, that woman was not actually being treated like a human being, as Wood points out, many times the refrigerated woman is used Like a mcguffin, an object that motivates the character, but whose specific nature doesn't matter, the refrigerated woman trope often seems to operate according to the logic that the less we know about her the better, so this person is reduced to an object, it may even seem that the refrigerator incident is damage done in words of the forest.

To his property, the John Wick series gives additional meaning to the dog's death by having the animal be a gift from Jon's dead wife and by taking the time to build a meaningful relationship between Jon and the animal, but The sad truth is that some screwed women don't even understand the same level of development as john wick's puppy, so essentially most of the time the biggest problem with refrigerated woman is bad writing. I can't believe Vanessa my girlfriend was a fembot in a comedy revolving around the trope of how I met your mother used its mysterious titular mother as motivation for Ted's long, confusing story about finding love in the modern world kids , I'm going to tell you an incredible story, the story of how I met your mother, but after waiting until the last season to introduce the mother. as a real character rather than an idealized specter, the show quickly killed her off with cancer in the finale, so all of Ted's musings about his dead wife ultimately turned out to be just a narrative ploy to build up to his grand final gesture toward someone else. who you should sit with and hear the story about how you met mom, but mom barely appears in the story and the vocal outcry from fans over this choice highlighted how the public often feels let down by the cheap and cliched gimmick of using a woman. dead simply as a plot device.

Not only did John Wick audiences find the puppy's death an emotionally effective motivator, many also, on some level, seemed to simply appreciate that for once it wasn't a woman who was killed, sure frigging works, but if Avoid the cliché choice of objectifying a woman in the process, they can actually work better naturally. The debate over women in refrigerators was soon met with the response that it's not just female characters who meet unpleasant ends or endure brutal violence, especially in superhero comics and other action-packed stories that thrive in comics. of exaggerated conflicts. Critic Heidi McDonald stated that if a list were composed of male superheroes who had been killed, maimed, or otherwise dispossessed, it would be just as long, so simple that even a blind man could see it, but in response to critics citing Cursed men, they suffer too, editor John Bartol. and the women in refrigerators team created a second list for a counter they called dead men defrosting bartol argued that while it is true that male heroes are frequently attacked, injured or maimed, the effects are rarely permanent or irrevocably disempowering superman dies but resurrected returns thor loses an eye, luke skywalker loses a hand and tony stark takes a chest full of shrapnel, but each of them returns at least as powerful as before and, more importantly, their pain is not designed to motivate to no one else, but to provide the kind of adversity that the hero himself must overcome to be worthy of his goal, why do we tell lies so we can learn to pick ourselves up in the rare case where a male hero actually dies? his agency tends to remain completely intact when he manages to make his death count and achieve a final victory for his beliefs iron man the batman universe offers a clear example of how these differences play out both bruce wayne and barbara gordon suffer spinal damage in the dark knight rises and the kill joke respectively however while batman is able to make a full recovery thanks to a little improvised chiropractic treatment batgirl is left permanently paralyzed it really is a shame that she misses her father's debut miss gordon our place was not built with in the disabled the most important thing is that batman's injury occurs so that he can overcome it to get up and save the day you no longer owe these people you have given them everything, not everything yet, but Batgirl's suffering is inflicted by the joker in a attempt to drive his father crazy.

I spoke to Commissioner Gordon before entering. here he told me that he wanted this to be done by the rules despite all your sick, cruel and vicious little games, he is as sane as ever. There is also a fundamental difference in the nature of the violence inflicted on the female characters and your wife whimpers like when she was devastated. Over and over again, as comics editor Joan Hilty pointed out, it's not just about how often it's done, but how it's done and to whom certain things are done, the sexually violent visual language of how they kill these Women is remarkably consistent in using sexual violence against women or the threat of motivating male characters.

The stories reinforce the regressive idea that a woman's worth is tied to sexual purity, while a man's is made up of her ability to violently protect that purity. Where is my daughter? You still stay. You sell them. You sold my daughter. Definitely. The scene where someone innocent comes to harm provokes a strong feeling in the viewer, but John Wick shows that using an animal for this purpose actually makes a lot more sense becausecan't let the animals die in the movie, only women group women with animals. and children in this way implicitly goes back to a view of women as simply helpless virtuous creatures and of children, in fact, the woman in the refrigerator can be seen as evolving from a damsel in distress, a woman stripped of his agency and endangerment as a prize for the hero to rescue through his bravery and skill the series taken demonstrates how intertwined these two tropes are by using them relatively interchangeably the first film sees brian mills chasing a damsel in predicament when his daughter is kidnapped after the series basically repeats this Premise In the sequel, the third entry kills his ex-wife while on some level implying that she ends up dead for making the mistake of being with another man instead of the hero, but either they are dead or the female characters have been taken.

It functions as little more than a pretext for Brian to begin his latest attack, but what I do have is a very particular set of skills. The problems with the refrigerated woman also apply to similar tropes like the black guy dies first and bury your eyes, which treat people of color or lgbtq characters as expendable in stories starring straight white protagonists. I saw this movie, the black guy dies first and possibly some of the most hated cold shoulder moments in recent years focus on race or sexuality as much or more than gender, ultimately the calling point.

Finding Women in Refrigerators is not about being offended by particular stories in which bad things happen to women, but rather about drawing attention to the large number of stories in which women exist only to have bad things happen to them, so very similar to the Bechdel test which asks if a story includes at least two women talking to each other about something other than a man. The refrigerated woman trope was not designed to be a comprehensive measure of a story's feminist credentials. It's there to start a conversation about how female characters tend to be written later.

Deadpool 2 Got Backlash for Possibly Frigging Deadpool's girlfriend Vanessa Gayle, Simone herself considered it not frigging in her opinion because Vanessa was a full character in the first film and continues to appear in Deadpool 2 as a missing figure. by Lenore. okay, there's a time for us, it's just not now, others respond, it's a textbook example of reducing the woman to a marginalized symbol of lost goodness to motivate Deadpool, while the fact that she is magically resurrected in a mid-credits scene after the film has ended only What makes it worse is the fact that she was written out of the entire story for no real purpose, but the debate around this example illuminates that there are many more cases in which the question of what frigging actually is gets very murky, for example what if there were also a lot of men dying as motivation so the hero can emerge as a deeper and more complete version of himself here uncle ben at play of thrones the death of an egret motivates the male character jon snow, but the death of the male character named drogo is used in exactly the same way to motivate a female daenerys or what happens if a woman is killed in a story where there is a heroine or many other well-drawn female characters in the mix, jen garner and aka her fiancé was frozen to me, what that says is not um why are you killing off that main character's loved one?

There aren't enough female protagonists in the narrative, that's what it comes down to, what if the murdered woman has agency in the Avengers finale? The black widow dies to save a man, but she chooses to sacrifice herself, tell me. family, I love him, so is his death of her fundamentally different from Tony Stark's heroic self-sacrifice? Furthermore, it is a female death that motivates a man to remain a refrigerator if given enough screen time before the refrigerator and the characterization in seven Gwyneth Paltrow's Tracy dies explicitly in Brad Pitt's To Test David, I I took a souvenir of her pretty head, but this is the climax near the end of the movie when we have very little time left with any of the characters when Avengers Infinity Wars Gamora is killed by her adoptive father Thanos, this doesn't sit well with many viewers because it is clearly sacrificing her to serve her story.

I ignored my fate once that I can't do it again even for you, but of course her character has developed over multiple films and due to the magic of time travel and alternate travel. Timelines, she will eventually return in another form in Breaking Bad. Both Jane and Andrea die in terrible ways to shape Jessie and Walt's character arcs, but especially with Jane, the fact that we've gotten to know her well and seen her special relationship with Jessie. It is precisely what makes her death heartbreaking. Have you been to the Georgio Cave Museum? Is one of the bombs so contrary to the refrigerated woman cliché that the less we know, the better examples like these illustrate how to kill a three-dimensional character?

It resonates all the more because we get the sense that a fully formed person we care about has been destroyed, it's surprising that when movies or shows go out of their way to subvert or complicate the geek trope: you thought I loved Rebecca, you thought I hated her. The result is usually better drama and greater emotional impact. The Lannisters and their greetings. We may never stop using character deaths to shock the audience and drive stories. It's too effective, but we can hope to leave behind lazy derivative versions of this that assume women. or other marginalized groups are just there as props to a white male story what really keeps us watching is a new twist on the same old story something we haven't seen before can you tell a story bob? can you make us laugh? can you make us?

Cry, can you make us want to burst? enjoy a song hello everyone, I'm susanna, I'm deborah and we're the creators of the shot, subscribe and tell us what you want us to do next, this video is brought to you by Skillshare, an online learning community offering affordable classes designed for adapt to your schedule and skill level. When you join Skillshare, you'll have access to thousands of workshops taught by incredible professionals and receive feedback and encouragement from your fellow creatives. An original Skillshare for you. You can check out Robert Generate III's class on how to create your own coloring book right now, the award-winning illustrator will guide you step by step on how to improve your design and line work using your iPad right now. offering our viewers two months of access to all of their classes for free, but that's only if you're one of the first 1,000 people to click the link in the description below, so join today and start your creative journey.