A critical term for killing, harming or sidelining a female character to drive a male hero's story, named after a 1994 Green Lantern issue.

Where did Fridging come from?

Comic writer Gail Simone coined the idea on her site Women in Refrigerators, launched in March 1999.

What does Fridging mean?

It means using a woman's death or trauma as motivation fuel for someone else's arc rather than developing her as a character in her own right.

How do you use Fridging?

Critics apply it to a specific scene by naming the female character killed and the male hero whose revenge or grief her death sets up, as reviewers did with Vanessa in Deadpool 2.

Is Fridging still popular?

The term is a classic of comics and film criticism and gets reached for whenever a story kills a woman early to motivate a man, as happened with Deadpool 2 in 2018.

Fridging

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Published November 1, 2026

Fridging is a cultural criticism term for the trope of killing, harming or depowering a female character to motivate a male hero's story arc. Comic book writer Gail Simone coined it in March 1999 after cataloging the pattern on her site Women in Refrigerators, named for a 1994 Green Lantern issue in which the hero's girlfriend was murdered and stuffed in an appliance. By 2018, critics were applying the label to the opening of Deadpool 2.

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Overview

Fridging describes a storytelling shortcut in which a female character is killed, maimed, raped or otherwise written out of her own agency so a male lead has something to be sad about or avenge1. The word points at the structural problem, not any single scene: critics use it when a woman's suffering functions as fuel for someone else's arc rather than her own2.

The reference image is literal. In Green Lantern #54, hero Kyle Rayner comes home to find his girlfriend Alexandra DeWitt murdered and stuffed inside his refrigerator by the villain Major Force2. Gail Simone's catalog treated that panel as a particularly on-the-nose example of a much wider pattern across superhero comics, and the appliance stuck as the metaphor1.

Fridging migrated out of comics discourse into film and TV criticism, where reviewers apply it to any cold-open girlfriend death or sister-in-the-morgue setup used to launch a male protagonist's revenge plot3.

Gallery

Origin & Background

Platform

Personal website (lby3.com)

Creator

Gail Simone

Date

1999

Writer Gail Simone launched the website Women in Refrigerators in March 1999, posting a list of female comic characters who had been killed, depowered, assaulted, maimed or otherwise sidelined by injury1. Simone and a group of correspondents wrote to prominent comic creators asking why the pattern was so lopsided, and the replies were published on the same site1.

The name came from Green Lantern #54, published by DC Comics in 1994, in which the villain Major Force murders Kyle Rayner's girlfriend Alexandra DeWitt and leaves her body in a refrigerator for Rayner to discover2. Simone's list did not argue that no female character should ever die, but that writers reached for the plot device far more often, and far more gratuitously, for women than for men1.

How It Spread

Through the 2000s, fridging moved from Simone's site into academic and journalistic writing on gender in genre fiction3. The Dallas Observer used the term in a piece on recurring deaths of women in comics, and Bowling Green State University professor Jeffrey A. Brown treated it in his October 2013 book Dangerous Curves: Action Heroines, Gender, Fetishism, and Popular Culture4.

Film criticism picked up the word as superhero movies went mainstream. When Deadpool 2 opened on May 18, 2018, and killed off Wade Wilson's girlfriend Vanessa in the first few minutes, critics called the sequence a textbook fridging5. Screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick told Vulture they had not heard of the term before writing the scene, with Reese saying "we didn't even think about it... We didn't know what fridging was"5. Readers pointed out that a franchise built on knowingly subverting superhero conventions had leaned on one of the oldest ones5.

Two decades after Simone's list went up, the vocabulary stuck. Fridging shows up in reviews of prestige TV, video game writing and action franchises whenever a woman dies early to give a man a reason to swing a sword2.

Timeline

1994

DC Comics publishes Green Lantern #54, in which Alexandra DeWitt is murdered and left in a refrigerator for Kyle Rayner to find.

1999-03

Gail Simone launches the Women in Refrigerators website, cataloging female comic characters who were killed, depowered or assaulted.

2013-10-01

Jeffrey A. Brown discusses the trope in Dangerous Curves: Action Heroines, Gender, Fetishism, and Popular Culture.

2018-05-18

Deadpool 2 opens with the death of Vanessa, prompting widespread criticism of the scene as fridging.

How to Use This Meme

In criticism, writers apply fridging to a specific scene by naming the character killed and the male hero whose arc her death serves. A common construction is "X gets fridged in the first act so Y can go on a revenge quest." The label is strongest when the dead character had little screen time of her own, when her inner life is unexplored before the death, and when the camera lingers on the male survivor's grief rather than her story3.