#imo a lot of gwen stacy’s recent development has been a conscious attempt by witers to try to push the industry beyond this trope

[golvio]

Fridging is also a fairly gendered phenomenon. The original name of this trope was “Women In Refrigerators,” coined by writer Gail Simone in criticism of an incident from the Green Lantern comic book series, which she and a lot of fans saw as part of a larger misogynistic trend of writers killing off female characters, typically love interests, who they didn’t know what to do with but wanted to insert some kind of shock value to raise the stakes for the (implicitly more important, more developed, more humanized, and therefore less disposable) male heroes. This term eventually came to apply to other media outside of comics, as it’s a trope that was fairly common in other genres (and still kind of is, depending on where you look).

me tryna explain the difference between "fridging" and "death by origin story" and "character dies and that impacts other characters and that's not a bad writing decision"

[schafpudel]

I’m just explaining how i first became familiar with this trope if it’s extended to just love interests in general then that’s totally understandable as definitions can change and more diverse writers have been putting themselves out there and getting fandom attention since the 2010s but i first heard the term in a feminist context to describe a more specific phenomenon to describe an extremely specific gendered relationship dynamic that was EVERYWHERE in comics in the 90s and extended to a lot of other ‘edgy’ stories in the 90s and 2000s extending far beyond comic books imo a lot of gwen stacy’s recent development has been a conscious attempt by witers to try to push the industry beyond this trope and you can’t get the full context of spiderverse gwen’s significance without understanding how fridging factors in as i think a lot of the ‘darker and edgier’ stories were trying to capitalize off the pathos of gwen’s death without really understanding how it worked or being willing to develop the love interest at all like how the ‘i forgot i murdered my wife’ trope was EVERYWHERE in indie horror after the smashing success of silent hill 2 but there are also examples of this trope in other industries that exist independently of american comics that still illustrate a problem with misogyny in the entertainment industry internationally like you see this trope pop up in anime sometimes it even showed up in the most recent zelda game it’s everywhere and it’ll probably exist for as long as the patriarchy exists which is why it’s important to know how to spot it but also to understand the difference between fridging versus a character death that’s not misogynistic or dehumanizing to the deceased as after we had conversations about this trope in fan and media spaces a lot of writers have been pushing back against this trope even in stories that do discuss the death of a woman steven universe being one of my favorite examples because of how well done rose’s posthumous character arc is

me tryna explain the difference between "fridging" and "death by origin story" and "character dies and that impacts other characters and that's not a bad writing decision"