The most controversial thing that happens in Deadpool 2 takes place in the first few minutes, even before the opening credits roll.
Deadpool doesn’t finish a mission. One of the men from that incomplete mission comes after Deadpool and fires a gun into his home. Vanessa, the love of Deadpool’s seemingly immortal life, is hit by a stray bullet, which kills her.
There’s now a debate on whether Vanessa was “fridged,” a term for a comic book trope in which the girlfriend or wife of a hero dies to further said hero’s motivations and story. The trope reduces the girlfriend or wife to a plot device. They have no business existing aside from being a source of pain for the hero.
The controversy was compounded by comments from Deadpool 2’s co-writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (who wrote the screenplay with star Ryan Reynolds), who said they didn’t know the trope existed.
“I think at some point somebody just said, ‘Y’know, Deadpool kind of works best when he’s had everything taken away from him, when he suffers,’” Reese told Vulture. “So the thought was maybe we can really, really engender great suffering for him by having his line of work be the thing that costs Vanessa her life.”
With the debate that Deadpool 2 has caused, Reese probably knows what “fridging” is now. The term has a long history that existed way before superhero movies and geek culture fused with mainstream pop culture.
The term was created in 1999 to point out how lazy writers and creators can be when creating female characters. The term was one part of a bigger push for creators, writers, editors, and artists to tell richer, more rounded, and more realistic stories for women and female characters. Recognizing “fridging” changed the way audiences thought about and consumed stories and highlighted the blind spots that creators have when making their stories.
The controversy surrounding Deadpool 2 is a reminder, especially to fans disgusted with fridging, that even the most progressive of superhero movies can still rely on the genre’s most frustrating tendencies — that even though representation of women should be better, it isn’t.
The Women in Refrigerators trope is a clichéd storytelling device
Gail Simone is a beloved comics writer who’s penned famous arcs of many series, including Deadpool. Before she was a professional comics writer, however, she was a popular comic book fan blogger. In 1999, Simone first identified and named the Women in Refrigerators trope when she made a very long list of female comic book characters who’d been gruesomely tortured, maimed, and/or murdered, all for the sake of furthering a male character’s heroic journey.
Simone named the trope after the fate of Alexandra de Witt, a murdered superhero girlfriend whose body is stuffed into a refrigerator and left for her boyfriend to find, in an infamous 1994 issue of Green Lantern. The idea of the “fridged” woman wasn’t literally about refrigerators but encompassed a litany of female comics characters who’d been subjected to extreme violence or death.
The power of fridging as a plot device is that it often motivates the hero who is left behind. A male hero’s grief in the aftermath of shocking violence against a woman is a tried-and-true element of storytelling. It’s a staple in film plots of all genres, from noir classics like The Big Heat to the Fast & Furious series to the James Bond films to the Bourne series; and it especially figures heavily in the often overwrought stories of comic book heroes.
Several examples of fridging loom large over modern pop culture. Perhaps the most immediately recognizable example is the infamous “What’s in the box?” moment at the climax of Seven. But there are other noteworthy examples, too: the character of Rachel Dawes in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy ultimately proves to be a disposable character whose horrifying fiery dispatch fuels Bruce Wayne’s desire for revenge against the Joker.
In fact, most of Christopher Nolan’s films involve a female character being gruesomely killed to further a man’s grief-stricken character arc. Several famous modern fantasy heroes, from Ned Stark to Anakin Skywalker to Severus Snape, are haunted by the deaths of women around them, often women who died before the main action of the series even begins.
An adjacent device is the hero’s overwrought reaction to the threat of violence — often sexualized violence — against her: Witness the abduction at the center of The Iliad, which leads to a war on behalf of Helen of Troy, or Odysseus’s rage in the climax of The Odyssey when he kills all of Penelope’s potential suitors.
The threat of sexual violence against a female character drives the plot of several Arthurian legends, as well as the plot of the first novel in the English language, the 1740 epistolary novel Pamela, and most classic vampire tales of the 19th century and beyond. It also drives the desolate quest at the center of John Ford’s 1956 Western masterpiece The Searchers; the list could go on and on.
This trope works hand in hand with fridging to perpetuate the idea that women are objects whose value is dependent on their sexual purity as well as their worth to a man.
Arguably, there’s another adjacent plot device to fridging: The storied fan site TV Tropes refers to this as as “the Lost Lenore,” named in honor of the famous mysterious figure who haunts the protagonist of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” The idea of this trope is that the woman who dies isn’t actually presented as disposable; rather, she continues, even after her death, to haunt the protagonist and somehow influence the action from beyond the grave.
It’s often hard to make a clear distinction between these two tropes, however. Women in fiction have historically overwhelmingly lacked control over their own stories, so it’s difficult to effectively present them as having agency in death that they were denied when they were alive.
This dilemma reflects the larger problem with inherently sexist tropes: They don’t exist in a vacuum, but in a context where they both reflect and perpetuate the idea that women don’t have any agency over their own lives in the real world.
Calling out this trope allows us to look more closely at how women are treated in stories
When Simone first identified the women in refrigerators trope, she garnered a litany of responses from noted comics writers and fans. Comics critic Heidi MacDonald’s response was typical of many of them. While acknowledging that female characters were frequently devalued, she noted, “If you composed a list of MALE superheroes who had been killed, maimed or otherwise dispossessed, it would be just as long.”
This criticism is often joined by the argument that losing things and undergoing pain is a basic part of any hero’s journey. It acknowledges that the death of women is part of a larger narrative pattern but holds that that narrative pattern shouldn’t be considered a comment on gender.
Comics editor Joan Hilty’s reaction best sums up why this argument is flawed. “The response that ‘male characters get killed too’ is completely disingenuous,” she wrote, adding, “it’s not just how often it’s done, it’s HOW it’s done and TO WHOM certain things are done. The sexually violent visual language of how these women get killed is remarkably consistent.”
This is important because at its core, a trope isn’t just a plot device; it’s an argument for a limited version of reality.
Tropes like this one distort reality — and our view of women
Stories aren’t created in a vacuum; they reflect a viewpoint about reality. We know this because we know that stories can change our viewpoint about reality. Research has shown that the stories we consume can influence our politics, condition us to fear new things, and teach us to believe in gender stereotypes.
So the narrative patterns that emerge across many stories over time — tropes — have a very important social context. They’re built out of our belief systems, both good and bad. Many tropes are idealistic, based on firm ideas about good and evil. Many are also problematic, built on broad societal stereotypes and other harmful assumptions about groups and classes of people. Tropes, even more than individual stories, present viewpoints about the world.
The viewpoint of the Women in Refrigerators trope is that women are essentially ... not fully human. That is, they don’t actually do anything; they don’t make choices of their own, or do their own things or have their own lives. Everything we see them do onscreen is in relation to the men around them; their actions are most often about influencing or impacting a man’s actions or behavior.
Fridging is far from the only trope that generalizes women to an extreme; in fact, often in film, even when women are presented as complex people who have actual personalities, those personalities are all presented in exactly the same way:
You only have to be these three things. pic.twitter.com/M9YkUdoblM
— ScreenJunkies (@screenjunkies) December 13, 2017
The act of fridging goes a giant step further: It doesn’t just relegate women to being choice-less sidekicks in a man’s story. By its sheer frequency as a plot device, this trope creates the position that women are most impactful, most important, and most relevant to the men around them when they’re being violently tortured or murdered.
The Women in Refrigerators trope doesn’t just make a female character disposable; it typically makes her disposable in a horrifically torturous or violent way. Often, she’s first rendered powerless — literally in the case of de-powered superheroes. The violence inflicted on her serves to ramp up the hero’s grief over what happens to her. Just look at this tiny excerpt from the original Women in Refrigerators list for a litany of horrible things happening to women, all in the name of giving the men around them more to angst over:
- Fury II (child kidnapped, husband killed twice, insane)
- Gwen Stacy (dead)
- Hawkwoman (depowered)
- Hellcat (dead)
- Huntress I (dead)
- Huntress II (sexually abused)
- Ice (dead)
- Illyana Rasputin (kidnapped and raised by demons, aged, de-aged, dead)
- Invisible Woman (miscarriage of second child)
- Jade (lost natural powers)
- Jarella (dead)
- Jean DeWolff (dead)
- Jean Loring Palmer (“nervous breakdown”)
- Jet of New Guardians (died in battle after contracting HIV)
A crucial element of fridging is that the women in these stories don’t have independent narrative arcs prior to their torture and/or deaths — and afterward, they’re usually cast away without much afterthought.
Culture critic Anita Sarkeesian devotes an episode of her Tropes vs. Women series to fridging. She discusses the counter-trope, termed “Dead Men Defrosting,” in which male superheroes who are killed off violently tend to not just return from the dead but come back better than ever. That magic is nearly almost always denied to fridged women.
A famous exception to this general rule is Barbara Gordon, who fought her way back from the brink of death after one of the most famous fridging moments in comics — her sexual assault and maiming in The Killing Joke — to become the powerful figure Oracle (Simone was one of the writers who wrote Gordon as Oracle) beginning in 1989. But she was given this narrative arc partly in response to the fan outcry over her treatment.
Other famous female comics characters aren’t so lucky, like Daredevil’s girlfriend Elektra (she dies in his arms after being stabbed), or superhero Stephanie Brown (tortured to death with a power drill), or Spider-Man’s girlfriend Gwen Stacy (he accidentally snaps her neck in a rescue attempt). Gwen did eventually get her own series as the delightful Spider-Gwen, but not until 2015 — 42 years after she initially died in the Spider-Man comics — and only in a totally disconnected alternate universe.
All of this violence, taken together with the long, long list of women who’ve been relegated to plot points in male-dominated narratives, turn women into objects rather than people: They’re things to be given to and taken away from men. That pattern reflects a sexist view of the real world, and also has ramifications within the real world. The more we’re asked to buy into fictional representations of women as voiceless beings with no independence from the men around them, the more likely we are to believe that real women lack autonomy and independence.
Does Deadpool 2 “fridge” Vanessa?
If you ask the creator of the term and onetime Deadpool writer Simone, Vanessa wasn’t fridged. Simone tweeted that although Vanessa was killed, and that she’s Deadpool’s girlfriend and her death has an emotional toll on Deadpool, it doesn’t really, in her eyes, fall into the trope:
One of the main tropes of the WiR storytelling cliché is that after the woman is killed or whatever, she no longer really exists in the story, her agony is just a motivator, and she's never really a person in that scenario.
— GAIL SIMONE (@GailSimone) May 23, 2018
She says the term she coined primarily referred to stories where the hero’s wife or girlfriend’s existence was more plot device than person, more something than someone. This doesn’t happen in Deadpool 2, as Vanessa appears in the movie after her death and becomes a spiritual guide of sorts for Deadpool. And in the Deadpool 2 mid-credits scene, her death is ultimately reversed — Reese and Wernick might have unintentionally avoided the trope.
Simone’s point also highlights how Vanessa is treated in the first Deadpool movie, which Reese and Wernick also wrote. That movie’s treatment of Vanessa and its female characters has been lauded. And in particular, the effort to give Vanessa humanity and not present her as just a sex object, especially since she is a sex worker, has also been praised.
It’d be easier to say Vanessa was fridged if the first film had treated her poorly, if we were dealing with a story in which death is permanent, or if this movie is the end of Vanessa’s story (it most likely isn’t).
There are, of course, people who would disagree with Simone, arguing that the film succumbs to the trope. “Her death is just a trope and, to a degree, just lazy, since they end up retconning it in the post-credit scene, and Vanessa is 100% alive again. Why even do it, then?” reads a post on the Mary Sue.
That the term has outgrown Simone and that people can disagree with the creator of “fridging” might be the entire point — that the term is meant to be a discussion rather than a litmus test.
Therein is the possibility that Deadpool 2 could be using elements of “fridging,” that it also could be subverting other facets of it, and that it’s something that we don’t immediately have to completely dismiss.
The spirit of “fridging” was more about making audiences and creators think about the female stories being created and consumed, not destroying existing ones. It was about bettering the stories written for female characters. For Reese and Wernick, who have claimed to not know the term, the discussion could be a moment of insight and help inform their judgment in future scripts.
The fight over Deadpool 2’s fridging is divisive. Changing someone’s mind about whether it does or doesn’t constitute a fridging probably isn’t going to happen. But the existence of the fight, and the conversation around it, shows the progress the term has made and how it can change the way stories are told.