#and remember she TOLD maverick GOOSE would’ve accepted the risk ‘he would’ve flown anyway’

[bearsinpotatosacks]

I'm glad you enjoy my post. I only don't use the term fridging because I think the terms been misinterpreted and overused to the point where ANY woman dying in fiction is classed as fridging. But the way you explained it in the tags really does make sense.

She died to give an emotional plotline to TGM but her death isn't shown to affect anyone in the story, which is the definition of fridging I think. Yet again, I wish any of the women were explored in a complex way like Maverick, Rooster and Ice but like you said, that goes against the target audience.

I do have to remind myself that Carole (and Bradley’s) purpose in Top Gun is probably to make Goose's death hurt more. That's who Carole was, and beyond that there's nothing else for her to do or be.

Maybe I just want some kind of mid-quel series between Top Gun and TGM to flesh things out. Like who Carole was before she died.

Also just realising she was definitely fridged because we weren't told when or how she died. Her only purpose was to die so there could be some emotional story beat, again, literal definition of fridging.

I love your interpretation of Mav and Ice. I love how realistic they both feel because well, they're white men in the Navy starting in the 80s. What it does make me wonder about Carole? I know you don't write for her but your analysis of Top Gun itself just made me wonder about her. Like whether she was a traditional military wife or just kinda met Goose and fell into it. Did Goose's death and the period between his death and her's change anything? Did it make her more skeptical of the military because of the cause of Goose's death or was her asking Mav to not let Bradley fly purely out of her hurt for Goose's death and not a moral/political thing also. PS. I read your Slider fic and absolutely adored it

well… i think any attempt to flesh out Carole’s character is gonna be completely based on conjecture, because we’re not given more than “slightly naive Christian woman who doesn’t always say exactly the right thing.”

But I think it’s helpful to remember where she fits into the narrative at large, and why: Carole Bradshaw is the villain of the Top Gun franchise. Top Gun is her villain origin story.

The rhetorical purpose of the top gun franchise is: to make money, obv, AND to get people to join the navy. (to what extent it’s successful at achieving that latter goal is the topic of a different post… im certainly not the first to say it’s pretty easy to find an antimilitary reading of TG.) but if top gun is aiming to portray the navy as someplace you want to be, and someplace where you have to earn a spot to be (as I keep repeating over the last couple weeks, it’s all about honor), then Carole Bradshaw becomes the villain of the recruiting story of Top Gun: Maverick, because she (momentarily) prevented her son from joining the navy with the honor he thought he deserved, and she is to blame for the emotional through line of the entire movie. Thank God! we don’t have to blame maverick for fucking up and preventing Bradley from achieving his Dream Of Working As A US Military Contractor! we can blame his dead mom instead, so that maverick is still a good guy whom we, a moderately-conservative pro-navy target audience (🤑), can still root for & pay money to see.

so yeah narratively speaking she’s just a scapegoat. She has no agency in the story whatsoever, she’s only an object to receive blame. any backstory/reasoning/character we invent for her doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t really matter WHY she does it—whether she hates the military or not, narratively speaking we have to blame her just the same either way—it just matters that she does it. and then she has to immediately die so she can’t explain herself and maverick has to self-sacrificially take the blame. Because otherwise the plot of TGM wouldn’t happen, which would not achieve the rhetorical goals of making a bunch of money and getting kids to sign up for the navy.