“It’s not a fucking woman’s job to be consumed and invaded and spat out so that some fucking man can evolve.”

– The much-hated Jenny Schecter from The L Word had a good point, just this once.

I’ve been thinking about writing this for a while, but was struggling to find my hook. Then I watched Deadpool 2. The film’s been out for months now, so I don’t feel the least bit bad for spoiling you about it. If you’d wanted to see it, you would have. The first Deadpool film was surprisingly enjoyable, and had great rewatchability for my husband and I; we even adopted Ryan Reynolds’ Wade ‘Deadpool’ Wilson’s and Morena (eternally Inara Serra) Baccarin’s Vanessa’s “your crazy matches my crazy” as an expression of affection between us. (What, like you’re not a pop culture nerd?) Those two were a surprisingly touching pair, and the biggest hiccup in their relationship in the first movie is Wade’s fear that Vanessa won’t be okay with his disfigurement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNptC7LDUOE

Fast-forward to the sequel. Wade is late for their anniversary dinner and Vanessa chides him fondly. They exchange gifts: Chekov’s Skee-Ball token and her IUD. They’re so happy together, so much each other’s family, that they’re both going to move on together from the crappy childhoods they’d joked about in the first film to try and start a family. Then, in the most egregious fridging since Mako Mori earlier this summer, Vanessa is killed before the opening credits.

Screenrants points out part of why this particular fridging feels extra bullshit,

“Due to Deadpool 2‘s self-awareness and references to the larger landscape of popular culture, it was uniquely positioned to comment on Women in Refrigerators. So that fact that it played directly into the trope, rather than offered commentary on the trope, is especially glaring.”

(Yes, there’s a mid-credits sequence in which Wade goes back in time to avert Vanessa’s murder, don’t @ me, so the death that motivates him for the entire movie is erased. This doesn’t make it easier to swallow. No, you cried harder than you did at Infinity War, shut up.)

Fridging is one of those tropes that you know, even if you didn’t know that it’s called that. All of the times that a love interest (almost always; occasionally family members, friends, sidekicks) is murdered (or raped) just to cause Man Pain™ and trigger a Revenge Rampage Plot? That’s not just the premise of the Taken movies (kidnapping counts), that’s fridging. (There’s also the ‘lazy asshole writer’ variant in which the death is some natural forces, act of God bullshit, done just to wrench cheap emotion from the protagonist and audience.)

The trope of ‘Women in Refrigerators’/fridging was named for an event in 1994’s Green Lantern Vol. 3, issue 54. (Yes, the comic that became Ryan Reynolds’ other attempt at playing a comic book movie hero. Ironic, eh? Especially since Deadpool 2‘s writers feign ignorance of fridging while cramming the movie full of some deliciously obscure comics references.) The villain, Major Force, kills the Green Lantern’s girlfriend and, instead of being prosaic about how he leaves her body for him to find, Major Force literally stuffs the corpse into a fucking fridge. (Tell me again that comic books are for kids.)

Gail Simone, who would later go on to become a Renaissance woman comics author with famous runs across the Marvel/DC divide, including both Wonder Woman and Deadpool, started the website Women in Refrigerators as a frustrated fan. In her own words:

“I found that I most enjoyed reading about the girl heroes, or Superchicks. And it had been nagging me for a while that in mainstream comics, being a girl superhero meant inevitably being killed, maimed or depowered, it seemed.[….]

“I can’t quite shake the feeling that male characters tend to die differently than female ones. The male characters seem to die nobly, as heroes, most often […] but shock value seems to be a major motivator in the superchick deaths more often than not.”

This website was probably the first time the trope was named, in honour of Alexandra DeWitt from Green Lantern, but it was hardly the first occurrence. Before 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man cast Emma Stone in the role, Gwen Stacy was best known as Spider-Man’s dead girlfriend (who he couldn’t save) from the Sixties; she’s probably the first mainstream nerd-dom character we can point to, but she’s hardly the last. Literally half of all Bond girls end up dead after shagging 007, serving his plot. You can probably think of many examples from whatever your media of choice is, but here’s a few that stuck out to me:

• Barbara ‘Batgirl’ Gordon was tortured and crippled by the Joker in The Killing Joke to punish her father, Jim Gordon. The fact that she survived this and became Oracle, repping for disabled badasses everywhere, doesn’t diminish the fridging.
• Anakin Skywalker’s mother Shmi basically existed to die to fuel his fall to the Dark Side.
• Mary Winchester in Supernatural before the show’s timeline even began, because Dead Moms are also a thing.
• Tara in Buffy the Vampire Slayer setting off the whole Dark Willow arc.
• Elementary‘s version of Moriarty invents an entire alter-ego for the purposes of fridging her and fucking up Sherlock Holmes — that’s weaponised fridging, and it works.
• Khal Drogo of Game of Thrones is a rare case of a male love interest’s death setting the female protagonist on her path.
• In the short-lived and profoundly missed TV show Agent Carter, MCU’s Steve Rogers is survived by Peggy Carter and so his death is essentially a fridging for her. The favour is returned in Civil War, when Peggy’s death is used to drive Steve to be more determined to save Bucky and her eulogy offers him words of wisdom from beyond the grave. (Don’t let me get started on this.)
• Speaking of Steves, Wonder Woman‘s Steve Trevor’s heroic sacrifice can be read either as a fridging (his loss devastates and motivates Diana) or not (she swiftly turns from revenge to save the undeserving world he sought to protect). It’s another one with a twist, since Chris Pine has been photographed wearing a bum bag on the set of Wonder Woman 1984.

Fridging, ultimately, is the intolerable intersection between sexism and lazy writing. It’s time to put the trope on ice.