#fridged women

[fandomshatewomen]

Epiphany I just had...

I'm going through the archives like I'm supposed to add tags and such and it just occurred to me that so many of the original ladies of the MCU are dead now.

I was editing this posts tags

and like Jane Foster is dead, Frigga is dead Natasha Romanov is dead, Gamorra is dead. the only original MCU lady left standing is Pepper Potts.

like don't get me wrong I know some of the men are dead (ok tony stark is dead and steve rogers is written off now too but loki has his own show gdi) but its really not the same at all.

here's some reading further reading on women in refrigerators

mod ali

#mcu fandom misogyny #fridged women #women in refrigerators #jane foster #natasha romanoff

[qvincvnx]

i was just talking about this after being wrecked by the discovery that the little elf-goblin fellows my parents/family used to tell me warnings and stories about as a little kid are regionally specific, and that you can trace people's geographic origins by what word they use for "little spirit-fellows who live in your house". no matter what you call them (domovoi, kobolde, brownies, so on); for purposes of this post henceforth "little guys"

i think one of the things that i find frustrating about like, idk, modern animist revivalist movements is that very few of them ime spend a lot of time romanticising and spiritualizing human habitation. obviously, we as a culture need to think more about protecting and defending nature/the earth/so on, but like.

if you don't have room in your heart for making up a little guy who lives in the water heater, or who squats under your stove and makes it run 15 degrees off the programmed temperature, and thinking of him with the same kind of respect/affection as you do for the spirits (or whatever) of the wildlife you interact with like.

genuinely: what are you even doing. you are removing a source of richness and fun and whimsy from your life! like, pip @creekfiend made up the concept of "little guys who live in an airport (and are the reason it's so shitty to be in an airport)" and i already like airports like 30% more just knowing it's the little airport inconvenience guys doing that.

more importantly, like. genuinely: interrogate what parts of the world seem ~rich with spiritual meaning~ to you. what parts of the world are "wild"? what does that make the rest of the world - a chore? a burden? who has to carry that burden?

we're never going to like, "return to nature", because that's nothing and the concept of untouched nature is also nothing; we're always going to have some sort of human habitation and interaction and cultivation with nature. if you can't extend grace and whimsy and genuine and sincere meaning to human habitation, including its inconveniences and annoyances, you are making your own lived experience duller!

notably, most of these kinds of little-guy-spirits historically exist in the parts of human habitation that are partially abandoned, partially removed: haylofts, inside the walls, under the house, in the bathhouse, behind the furnace... i've been thinking a lot about urban wildlife lately, and the animals who make space for themselves in and around human habitation. the "natural" and the "wild" persist inside and around the edges of the "tame" and always, always have. if you have a crawlspace, there's a little spirit who lives there and he's the reason the dryer always eats your socks.

LIVE WHIMSICALLY.

#is this a crazy person post? maybe. but also i genuinely think this. #i would love a little guy who'd eat the food in the back of my fridge before it goes off. he's real. that little guy's name? is composting. #he's slimy. #also i love the mikveh spirit who inspires women to be rude after coming home from the mikveh. LET HER SPEAK #little guys #greatest hits

[stickstone]

#warrior cats #in order this is: #duskwater #ambermoon #flametail #willowshine #turtle tail #(and others) #gorsepaw #darkstripe #russetfur #(and some others) #countless fridged women #and like half the cast

[zombiegirldean]

being a woman in Supernatural world is so fucking horrifying. don't wear white, you will get fridged. don't be blonde, you will get fridged. Jessica Moore was forcibly stenciled into Mary Winchester's shape to turn the narrative engine of righteous violence. she's the inciting incident for the entire epic and we know literally nothing about her. bc why would we need to. the wife is the sister is the daughter is the mother and they're all dead, and they're all used as instruments to give men an excuse to cry. you can love a man and take him into your home for a year but you'll still never get close enough to touch him bc he's keeping you in a pristine little box of unsullied domesticity. he's keeping you SAFE and CLEAN. he's making arrangements for you. and when the narrative machine beckons he will set you gently back down and return to his real and important work. don't be a virgin, virgins get fridged. don't be a hellbitch, here comes the fridge. do NOT put on that white nightgown, that is the uniform of the fridge, but it's too late, you're already bleeding out on the ceiling, maybe you always have been.

#supernatural #spn #lisa braeden #jessica moore #mary winchester #ruby supernatural #jo harvelle #that post that's like. doomed by the narrative bc the writer is a misogynist. literally #sam and dean's occasional convictions that they cant get close to women bc their lives are too Dark and Serious & theyll put them in Danger #would be neurotic and self centered except they are literally right. they ARE cursed. #ellen's conviction that jo will die young if she hunts and dean's condescension towards her. would be misogynistic. #but theyre right. jo will get fridged. she's blonde. it is literally a plot point in no exit that the ghost wants to get her more bc shes #blonde #like. they live in misogyny world.

[goshyesvintageads]

Crosley Corp, 1951

#Shelvador #ad #1951 #refrigerator #mid-century #advertisement #1950s design #post-war #defrosts #food #50s couple #midcentury #advertising #fridge #interior styling #designed from the women's angle #50's style #postwar #mid century

[gongaga-twunk]

A lot of my problems with totk arise from how obvious the hand of the creators is. A lot of the things in this game feel very contrived; we start off strong with the game forcing you to get a heart container. Which. Yeah, sure, alright. I can handwave that, it's fine. Then we get to the skyview towers, which are... very similar to the Sheikah towers (which were still functioning just fine when we found them in botw). The challenges from the Sheikah towers came from how old they were. They were still functioning fine; the world around them changed. With the skyview towers, they're glitched, they're broken... something that by all means just feels like a reason not to give you the map. The Sheikah towers are tricky because after all that time, they should be. The skyview towers are tricky because the game needs them to be.

And there's so many things like that in the game; things that can be dismissed as flawed on their own, but stack up and become extremely irritating. I can't remember who exactly pointed this out, but since you don't technically even need the master sword to beat Ganondorf, Zelda turning into a dragon is completely and utterly pointless. She could have just put the sword in some other holy place, this is just an excuse to metaphorically put her in a crystal again. For a process that is supposedly irreversable and forbidden, it's stupid that she went and did so anyway. Again, it serves the needs of the game, without really justifying itself.

There's just a ton of things like that. I'm very tired and frustrated writing this so it might not make a lot of sense, but it's just. Aughh I wanted to like this game SO BAD

#totk critical #totk criticism #Legend of Zelda stop fridging/martyring/sexualizing/etc the women in your games #I promise you don't have to do it Nintendo people will be happier if you oh I don't know #Let us talk to Zelda for more than five minutes #Let Paya have a personality beyond her implied love interests #OH YEAH. AND STOP SEXUALIZING RIJU HOLY SHIT

[scintillyyy]

okay. so the thing with fridging--the thing with fridging! is that i feel like it's become shorthand for any woman's death or perhaps any character's death that was used to further another character's story and that's. a bit off what the *idea* was when gail simone first made her her women in refrigerators website/list. which, is still available and free to peruse at your own leisure here.

so when gail simone created the women in refrigerators website/idea, it was not actually meant to condemn any of the deaths or disabilities or awful things that had *happened* to those women. it's purpose, first and foremost, was a question:

(from the front page of gail simone's website, linked above)

i'll put the rest under a cut for length

all women in refrigerators was, at its heart, was gail noticing that female characters she loved often met rather awful ends at a rather high frequency. & the point of women in refrigerators was not that these awful things shouldn't have happened to these characters, even gail was aware that it a medium like comic book people were going to have terrible things happen to them for the drama of the story, see:

--it was a question on whether 1) other people thoght she was looking too much into it & seeing something that wasn't there (she originally posted the list on a comic book sites and the response she got was, i guess rather...vitriolic at the very idea she would raise questions about whether women were treated worse than in comic books) and 2) whether other people agreed there was even a problem to begin with. it was a conversation, not a shaming, not a callout. gail's letter she sent to the creators are there. their responses discussing the issue & whether they thought there was one was all there! women in refrigerators was not meant to be condemning of those stories that had a women die for the sake of a man, it was a basic starting question much like a bechdel test is just a basic starting question--not meant to be some gotcha, just the starting point of a much greater conversation.

and not every creator agreed with her premise! there were absolutely arguments about how bad things also happen to male characters. characters like jason todd and uncle ben *in particular* were used to defend the fact that women in refrigerators wasn't some big conspiracy against women in comics, that the bad things that happened to them were just conceits of the genre. others agreed with gail that there was a problem there (ie/women tended to be more affected by these things than me) that they should probably try to do better about in the future. other creators agreed, but then went to go on to justify why their female character in particular needed to go in the fridge. mark millar, who would later go on to write kick-ass said, and i quote: "granted, the female stuff has more of a sexual violence theme and this is something people should probably watch out for, but rape is a rare thing in comics and is seldom done in an exploitative way." ron marz himself responds to alex's death!

because fridging isn't about one death. it's about a trend of awful things happening to women, often far more awful and gratuitous than happens to men, at a far more frequent rate. but fridging also doesn't mean that every individual death or disability is a problem or than individual deaths and disability shouldn't happen. the problem is the sum of the parts, not that this one character was used one time specifically to give pain to another character.

which is why the fridging conversation generally doesn't and can't cover a lot of protagonist male characters--because of the ways their deaths are usually handled with grace, autonomy, guarantee of long term grieving, and a dignity that women characters aren't afforded. it's why, though, you can use the fridging problem as a baseline model for how characters of color and infants often are treated in comparison & why those of far more apt comparisons--because they're often used in similar, concerningly frequent ways to affect protagonist characters with no consideration to the thought there may be a larger problem at hand there. (consider war games: an event designed specifically to cut down what was considered excessive bloat of the batfamily designed to kill off steph & gavin king. why, when the decision to kill them off was made was steph even given consideration of a heroic swan song arc where she was given the reward of robin as a consolation prize for her upcoming death & an entire heroic redemption arc from making a mistake -> fighting to rectify that mistake and learning the true meaning of her heroism while gavin king is not given any consideration in his own death--he was a pawn in a plan he was unaware of, there only to get his throat slit & his identity used for evil)

#anyways actually reading the women in refrigerators site should be a prelude #to talking about fridging i feel

[mrpsychokiller]

tex red vs blue is insanely transgender but im the only one who sees it that way because im crazy in the head.

what if there was a past version of yourself. a woman, a wife, a mother, with long hair and a sweet smile. and she died long ago. and you are her. but you are not her. you're nothing like her, but the people who knew her desperately want you to be her, want to preserve the memory they have in their minds of the woman they loved through you. but you never asked to be her, never asked to carry the burden of someone else's expectation of who or what you should be. you have a new name. you prefer to go by this one. people remark on how weird it is that it's a guy's name. sometimes the people who loved [the past version of] you call you by your old name. they are not referring to you when they say it. you live in the shadows of someone who's long gone, and you're something different now, but you don't feel like you're ever allowed to define yourself on your own terms, to be your own person, to control your own life, because you exist solely through the memories people had of you. and the longer she has been gone for, the more desperately people try to get her back, the less you resemble her and the less you know who you are, or if you ever even got to be anything at all. what i mean is that transition could have saved him

#🧃 #rvb #red vs blue #DONT ask me why i got up in a cold sweat at 7 am with thoughts on tex red vs blue. i miss her so bad #anyways i do think if anyone in rvb could ever be actually trans coded (which nobody is because theyre created by fucking rooster teeth) #its gotta be tex #but because i know a trans subtext couldnt ever possibly be intentional i also think tex is a fascinating subject on the #''dead wife'' trope and the way stories like this treat female characters #and how tex's existence somehow seems surprisingly self aware as she actively rejects being the Dead Wife #and its brought to attention how existing solely as the angst memories men had of their dead wives #actively denies her of agency as a person inside the narrative #but also more generally denies dead wife characters agency in any narrative theyre written on #tex's struggles as a character inside her narrative are also the struggles of fridged/killed off female characters outside their narratives #on a meta textual level by being written by men in male centered stories who dont allow the women they write to exist as people #tex is a fascinating character and i am fucking furious she exists in a that stupid ass show. ill save you girl. ill take you out of there

[filmnoirsbian]

Imagine being a rampant misogynist and then "gifting" your intellectual property to the public domain under the guise of "keeping it out of the hands of bad people" and then being surprised when people (esp women) assume the crime of those "bad people" was an intention to diversify the story 🤔🤨 I want to see the emails.

#this is abt fables btw. #like ok grown man who wrote one of the worst fridgings in dc history (which is really saying smth) and then said u wanted to shoot #all the women fans upset by it tell me more abt how dc wanted to give writing credit to “bad people.” I'm just curious. #tcp #oh the things we invent

[liauditore]

ok i reblogged smth on my sideblog that i really liked but didn't agree with the main point op made but i didn't wanna. seem like i was arguing with them in the tags so i'm writing this here lol.

pearl didn't throw the fight against scar.

in fact, everything mentioned in that post contributed to her decision to Actually Fight Him.

Pearl has been meaning to sacrifice herself for someone else all season, and when she lost her mounders she scrambled to find a replacement.

Scar rejects that notion, in his own words "it would be lame".

Pearl ends the series talking a lot about Double Life and what it did to her, the lack of closure she got from it. I think hearing that from Scar made her realise she was becoming like Scott and that's very not who she is. I think she got her senses back in those last moments and had faith in Scar that she could fight him properly and really give him the victory he deserves.

Cus yeah. Anything else would be lame.

Scar earned that victory through and through.

#liauditore is unhinged #secret life spoilers #finally putting this into words now that the adrenaline rush has settled #sorry im always thinking about pearl forever #it's funny that the last big drama in the community was about fridging women because that was basically-- #-- what pearl was trying to do to herself #and it would've been fine storyline wise but i think this is even better

[alpaca-clouds]

Let me talk about Women in Refrigerators

You know what? This is a thing that is kinda annoying me in the Castlevania fandom. How everyone is screaming about Women in Refrigerators, while folks so clearly do not understand what the trope actually is about and why it is a bad trope.

Like, there is not a single death of a named woman in Castlevania, that not at least someone has called "fridged". Alright, maybe Drolta. But other than that... yeah, folks definitely have called Lenore and Carmilla fridged. And... No, people, you misunderstand the trope.

The name of the trope was coined based on Green Lantern vol. 3 #54 (from the 90s), in which Green Lantern finds his death girlfriend stuffed in a refrigerator - mostly for shock value in the reader. Mind you, this was the 90s, when superhero comics were really, really edgy and stuff. And in fact the kind of story happened a lot of times during this time. Female characters being killed, raped and tortured for pure shock value, with the story not featuring any idea of what this did to the female character, but rather focusing on what this does to the male characters. (And mind you: Yes, a woman can be considered fridged and still survive the ordeal. A lot of folks do consider Barbara in The Killing Joke fridged as well.)

So, what does "Fridging" in terms of the trope mean? Basically it means that a female character suffers a horrible fate just so that another (most probably male) character can be motivated to do something and react to this thing happening, setting in motion a character arc for the surviving character - or even setting into motion the plot.

In many examples it should also be noticed that at times the female characters mostly just exist to meet their horrible end. Supernatural as a show is really bad in this regard. Like, within the first episode of the show THREE FUCKING WOMEN get fridged, just so that the brothers can travel together and start the plot.

So, let's move back to Castlevania.

Lisa is fridged. There is no way around it. Yes, it does not feel like it, because they still managed to make her a character of sorts, but yeah, she definitely is fridged. She dies a horrible death and that death is what motivates the plot, as well as what motivates both Alucard and Dracula. That is very classical fridging no way around it.

Carmilla and Lenore, though? Yeah, they are not fridged. They are characters who just die. Their death is not used to motivate another character. Their death is also not random, like most fridging deaths. Especially Carmilla is basically asking for her death, of course. She is a villain and gets the same death as all other villains. And while it is a bit different with Lenore, she definitely is not fridged either, giving that she literally dies in the last episode with no plot or development happening because of her death.

In Nocturne it gets a bit more complicated. Is Julia fridged? In a way, I would argue, she is, mostly on the value that she exists as a character to die and for her death to be the basis for Richter's character arc, giving him the trauma he needs to overcome.

Esther meanwhile does not feel fridged to me. Because Annette's trauma is not deeply linked to her death, rather than the entire slavery experience in general.

Tera? Well, for Tera it is too early to tell. I still assume that her change into a vampire is going to be used to have the characters realize, that vampires are not inherently evil, and to give us a view into what vampire society looks like. At least that is what I assume.

By the way: The fridging of female characters is my big issue with the PS2 Castlevania games. Like, in Lament of Innocence both Sara and Elisabetha are getting fridged to motivate Leon and Mathias. And the same is true for Rosalie in Curse of Darkness, who as a character only exists to motivate Hector. I mean, she is so replacable as a character, that Hector fucking replaces her by the end of the game.

#castlevania #castlevania netflix #castlevania nocturne #refrigerated women #women in refrigerators #fridging #feminism #women in media #julia belmont #castlevania lisa #castlevania tera

[evilwickedme]

It's very frustrating to talk about fridging bc the original point of it was like a very specific criticism of how minorities are treated in comic books in particular and it's now been universalized so much people think it means "killing a woman off because she's a woman" or "killing any character to motivate another character" (the definition according to tvtropes fyi, kill it with fire kill kill kill kill). Fridging isn't bad because you're killing a character as motivation, and it's not bad because you're killing a minority off, it's bad because it's a pattern of behavior from an industry overrun by white men writing and drawing and editing those stories. You're allowed to kill a woman off if it suits your story, but the issue was that women are constantly getting hurt or depowered or raped or killed off to motivate other, non-coincidentally male characters.

The problem that stood behind the original women in refrigerators website was that the narrative that the comic book industry at large was telling was that the purpose of female characters was to get hurt in order to motivate some other guy. Kyle Rayner's girlfriend gets stuffed in a fridge, we're not sad because her life got taken from her too soon, we're sad because Kyle Rayner just lost his girlfriend. Gwen Stacy gets killed by the Green Goblin, we're not sad because she didn't get to live a full happy life, we're sad because she didn't get to live a full happy life with Peter Parker. That is not to say that the story doesn't still get told. Peter going after the Green Goblin is horrific and terrible and amazing and leads to some great plot and character development. But the choice was not to hurt Peter himself, not even to threaten his loved ones but not actually harm them, the choice - CHOICE! - the writers in the comic book industry consistently made was to hurt a character who was already part of a marginalized group, and to do that for the benefit of a (presumably) white male cishet able bodied main character's narrative.

I speak mostly in past tense because once fridging took hold in the collective popular consciousness it didn't disappear completely, but it did fall out of favor in being used so blatantly. It became isolated cases rather than the main feature of one of the best selling batman books of all time. Characters get killed off occasionally, and those characters are even sometimes members of minority groups, and biases still inform those writing choices, but I'm struggling to remember reading a comic in the last couple of years that specifically fulfills the criteria for fridging.

Anyway if you're reading this in context, you know that at the end of this month (may 2023) Marvel is planning to celebrate the most famous fridging of all time by absolutely not learning their lesson and fridging another character. They're being lazy about it, too - they've decided to do it to Kamala Khan in Peter Parker's book, two characters that mean close to nothing to each other, and being extra awful by making it a Pakistani Muslim woman being killed off during AAPI month, and so far the information we have doesn't even involve Kamala's own friends and family and superhero team mourning her at all. It's supposed to motivate Peter, because it's part of his book, and it's also supposed to parallel Gwen Stacy, and they chose to do... This. Kamala is a wildly popular and beloved character who deserves better, and frankly Peter deserves better too. If you're going to fridge, at least do it well.

But I'm also already seeing white men, who supposedly agree with me and think this is bad, saying, well it's for MCU synergy, not "because she's a female" or "because she's not a white character" (direct quotes don't @ me). And firstly, ok, way to assume the rest of us didn't also catch up to the obvious conclusion that marvel comics is doing MCU synergy, AGAIN. The thing is that those aren't separate concepts at all? Or well, they are, but they don't negate each other. They're trying to do MCU synergy and make Kamala into a mutant, but they could've done that a million other ways, just as cheap and not as offensive - a simple retcon would've sufficed, they just did that a few years ago with Franklin Richards.

They chose to do it by killing her off, and they chose to kill her off in somebody else's book to motivate him rather than tell a story about her, and they chose to do it while celebrating Gwen's fridging for some fucking reason. This is context that, when removed from the situation, makes the whole thing meaningless. And you can say a lot about Gail Simone, but that she didn't have a Goddamn point is not one of them.

#how do I even tag this #fridging #women in refrigerators #kamala khan #ms marvel #spiderman #peter parker #gwen stacy #comics #marvel comics #marvel #sexism #racism #gail speaks

[grirnoires]

imagine if you will... play in this space with me...

#pathologic #eva yan #nara pathologic #clara is still the changeling because she does not have a woman who dies at a pivotal midpoint in her story like artemy and dankovsky do #you heard of healer switches nowww get ready for ... idk what to call this. unfridging women swap (hesitant to call it fridging but also wh #what else do i call it... ) anyway. smiles so much i am developing lore as we speak #phone art

[storm-of-feathers]

I learned recently that some people refer to Clover's death as fridging and i just want to say from the bottom of my heart that is so fucking stupid.

#dgmw his death was... odd... in the narrative. #BUT. it cannot be fridging by definition. because he is a man. #fridging is a feminist critique on how women are used as tragic backstory fodder or to advance the plot #for example: deadpool 2 #fridging is NOT when Character You Like dies

[sovpologist]

i wanted to wait until the seasonal story was over before i talked about this because i wanted to see how the arc played out (while i'm not super sure crow's revenge arc is "over" it feels like it's at least on pause for now), but yeah my opinion didn't change. amanda's death was fridging, and i find it really disappointing for the writers to try to preemptively stave off this criticism by having caiatl basically turn to the camera and say "THIS ISN'T FRIDGING-- she died for her convictions, not [crow's] grief!" having caiatl say that doesn't change the fact that in the narrative, amanda DID die so that crow (+other male characters) could be sad about her. if you're going to kill off a female character for male angst, take the criticism head on instead of wasting our time using a (female!!) character as a mouthpiece to deny that it's fridging.

ultimately we will have to wait and see the longterm impact of amanda's death on the narrative, but the immediate impact was a focus on crow's feelings, with devrim, mithrax, and zavala's feelings also being centered. normally i would try to afford them some grace but what was even the point of this story beat? any deeper narrative meaning you can wring out of amanda's death (guardians coming to terms with permanent loss, the futility of revenge, coping with grief) has been done before and done perfectly well in forsaken + haunted, so the only new thing it adds to the story is men feeling sad that amanda is dead. im also less willing to give them the benefit of the doubt because this writing choice comes at a time in destiny when we have been seeing less and less focus on female characters & female relationships in favor of men and their relationships. i'm frankly sick of complex female characters being paired up with a man, relegated to his therapist and/or love interest and being used to further his character development, and then being removed from the narrative

#negative #defiance spoilers #i guess i just thought we were past fridging women for male character growth in 2023 #long post

[freakwiththeknifecollection]

Spn fandom Bechdel test challenge, talk about an spn woman without mentioning Dean

#supernatural #spn #spn fandom #spn women #women of spn #spn ladies #I love the guy but come on #it's bad enough that they're doomed by the narrative and fridged but they can hardly exist in fandom spaces without #being compared and contrasted to Dean in some way #there are interesting points to be made but can these women have their own identities and motivations outside of him sometimes? #the show treated some of them as accessories to Dean's story and that's all they are in fandom sometimes #they're just used to teach you something about Dean to reflect Dean to want to be Dean #and once the point is made they're not talked about again at least not individually