FRIDGED! The woman in the refrigerator trope compared!

Oh shit GBU let's fucking go 🤘🏽

Send it to the Wrong Box.

Happy to see this show return.
Liked and commenting to help that algorithm.

PS Toss Green Lantern into the Wrong Box

Shout out to Gail Simone for coming up with the term

"I guess bullseye killed him because he had a bunch of forks in him."
" No that just means he's done."
Oh Ben, never change!

I read that GL story within a tpb that collected from his first issue to THAT issue. I was 13 , I honestly had a bit of a crush on Alex just by reading those issues, I was never a fan of Hal Jordan but the concept of Green Lantern was always cool to me. So you could say was the ideal reader for the book. Holy f@&# sh** It shocked me so much that I went really to full denial at first, I really thought she fainted and didn't understand what even happenned in the fridge on my first reading. It was super disturbing and it brought me back to that pstd-inducing comic "death in the family" that I read being like 9 years old... And I really thought she was all broken to getting stuffed in the damned frigde. I think it's not only the fact that she was horribly murdered but also that the jarring shift in tones through out this one comic, because it goes from lovey-dovey couples stuff, wacky scifi shenanigans, and then something out a grindhouse movie. It's just too much

I'm not a Spider-Man hater, but I can't help thinking that he seriously screwed up. After Osborn became amnesiac, for some reason Spider-Man made they extremely stupid decision to cover things up. Then when Norman regained his memories and returned as the Goblin, Spider-Man drugged and subjected to psychological trauma thinking that would somehow make anything better. So I'm not sure I can say Spider-Man bears no responsibility in Gwen's death. He also made a bone headed move when sabotaged Doc Ock'a arms without anticipating that them going out of control would cause any danger, which ultimately happen causing the death of George Stacy.

Ron marz still has a career BTW

Kevin Smith was on a web series with Deborah Ann Wolf in which she runs a role playing game. He had never played one before and in the pregame chat jokingly said something along the lines of "I hope you don't kill me". She replied something along the lines of then they'd be even.

I hope that one of the next episodes you guys do is on Marvel UK. I would LOVE to see a Death’s Head head-off.
I’ve skimmed a bit and I know there’s events like Battle Tide and Death 3 (Death cubed.)
Would also be funny to see you guys talk about the Sleeze Brothers.

Fridging is a literary trope in which a character exists for the sole purpose of being killed, assaulted, or otherwise harmed in order to serve as an inciting incident that motivates another character's journey. Fridging is most common with female characters, but male characters can be “fridged” too. So Uncle Ben was fridged. Johnny Blaze's step father was fridged. In Buffy Willows girlfriend Tara is fridged. Han Solo was fridged TWICE once frozen and once stabbed. In Harley Quinn 31 her boyfriend Mason is kidnapped, tortured and then killed because she went up against a very bad person ...IE he was fridged. Sometimes large groups of characters will be fridged like Morlocks. Or in movie Scanners they introduce a group of Scanners who's only purpose was to reveal friendly like minded individuals who are then all fridged. A character that existed well before thoughts of fridging them can still be fridged like Gambit was killed so Rogue can have a whole character arc in Xmen 97 .Generally fridging happens to elevate a villain (like Joker for Jason or Bane for Alfred ). A lot of times that characters matter to the main character in a visceral way. So yes it might be a wife/child/girlfriend because that is who matters to main character. With Gwen Stacy, before her fridging, Capt Stacy was fridged. Side note: I also consider destroying a character's character just to make it a plot for the main character a "fridging". So if a character does something so completely out of character that it destroys that character for future use...just to help story for main character...that to me is a fridging too. So Hal Jordan was Fridged when he killed off GL Corps. Or if they spend time making a character likeable just to reveal they are a bad person. But that is my own opinion. The having a characters purpose to be killed, hurt or tortured in some way for the purpose of character or story motivation has long been a successful trope. And it's male or female. dog or child or robot or horse etc.

LSD addiction....
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

I love Ron Marz's GL run... but that death was so pointless. You didn't even get to the part that pisses me off the most, because that's what follows: he moves to New York and IMMEDIATELY starts dating Donna Troy. It's very fast, and I don't like it. He never gets to grieve her. So why kill her?

I hadn't heard that Marz had created Alex to die, but that he tried her out and didn't like her. So by that story, her death was more a reset like, "Oh, decided no on Alex." But I may be wrong on that.

On Spider-Man, I will note that MJ had been around almost as long as Gwen (ASM 42 vs 31). The bigger thing was that Stan preferred Gwen, and just wanted MJ as a background character, "the other woman" so to speak. However, most fans at the time, including Conway who was only nineteen (!!) when he took over the book, loved MJ and found Gwen boring. So Conway killed her. Then of course, because fans are fickle and not a monolith, everyone freaked out, so Stan deflected all blame onto Conway (it's most likely that Stan approved the issue even though he claims he did not). Stan then ordered Conway to bring Gwen back... so Conway did, but as a clone. By this time, enough sentiment had swung into Conway's favor that the death stuck.

All this stories makes me seriously question the authors mind. I mean, no normal adult can think up things like this, without the idea being there before... right?

I have thoughts:

FIRST ….the first to be fridged were Steve Trevor and Larry Lance. Slightly before or right around the time of Gwen

Second….I was FURIOUS…that Deadpool 2 was spoiled just with no thought. A huge plot point and people were just spoiling away.

Good is Gwen from Spider-Man, Bad is Karen Page cuz it's more Joe BS, Ugly is Alex because this was simply fucking gross in all aspects.
Her being made to die, her being intentionally written to be a good character solely to be more missed by readers, the very gross manner her death was handled.
Alex shouldn't have been killed period, Gwen arguably only truly became beloved after she died, and Karen was just considered a mess management didn't care about anymore.

Would Jean DeWolffe fit into this trope? Her character was utilized to show that "deash was real/permanent " by Peter David . Ladies have it rough in four-color fiction.🖖♾

I remember when I first read that issue of green lantern and was so sad when. Alex died, Kyle was and still is my favorite lantern. Also, I always liked how they always brought Alex up whenever Kyle got into a relationship, it showed that he did not forget her and that he was always worried it would happen again but that's me

Fun fact; spider man had a cold during that fight, he was fighting in canada in the issue before and got soaked, no one ever brings that up.

Worst day ever, after the uncle ben thing. But before Aunt May gets fucking sniped. lmao.

I don't believe Fridging is a thing... whether is done right or not is just the concept of good or bad writing and thus whether its done respectfully or not...

its interesting cause i personally think the gwen stacy one is worse simply because how her character is treated before her death and then you kill her off to replace her with some one else is just bad cause you can make a argument about how green lantern one is his first tragedy to motivate the character in a fucked up way but spiderman already had something like that you simply killed gwen to replace her and make spider man feel bad and motivated something that spiderman was already feeling

I feel like Death of Gwen Stacy at least has the sheer amount of history backing it up (meaning she was around for a decent amount of time before dying), and how much it informs the character of Spider-Man moving forward. Like, this is the 2nd most defining moment in his career as Spider-Man, bar none. The thought of her literally haunts him.

Idk. I like the story of The Death of Gwen Stacy. It makes me sad, mad, and the weird hollow feeling of nothing being solved when Norman impales himself

Wrong box! Wrong box! Wrong box!

Green Lantern definitely belongs in the wrong box

Green Lantern 54 was the first Green Lantern comic I ever read, just randomly picked up at a comic shop as a pre-teen because I liked the cover, had no clue what it was about. I didn't realize Alex and Kyle were new characters, and thought they just killed off a major character who'd been around for 54 issues

I've never understood why this is a problem or the term fridging, because only one woman in comics has ever been put in a fridge to my knowledge. And isn't any side character sidelined for the main character? I've just never understood this complaint.Because can't you also say this about male characters?

It wasn’t even 8 issues in that Alex was killed. Kyle only became GL at the end of GL #50. In less than 4-5 issues, Alex was introduced and promptly killed off. Kyle is my favorite hero but his introduction wasn’t the best.

I think green lantern is def wrong box material.

it was that issue of Green Lantern that 1) made me stop reading GL for a LONG while and 2) give us Gail Simone, she was just a fan at the time and wrote about this comic and well the rest is history so, while GL #54 was THE WORST something good came out of, Gail Simone working in comics.

YES!!! it should be in the Wrongbox!!!

Did Tiffany seriously refer to Bullseye as a C-lister?

EDIT: Rewatching this, I clearly wasn't paying attention to what Tiffany was saying. My apologies.

While I hate ALL three of these deaths, the GL story could have gone a totally different way that I would have marginally preferred. Have Major Force battle Kyle, separate him from his ring, then kill HIM. Alex finds Kyle dead, then finds the ring and uses it to mercilessly beat down MF. SHE becomes the new GL. No one would have seen this swerve coming.

It'd be nice if as a narrative device, this concept had stopped as being a terribly dodgy idea, but not so far.

I never knew that it was planned to off Alexandra DeWitt as a growth moment for Kyle Rayner. I know it put me off Green Lantern until Hal returned. With the death of Gwen Stacy and Elecktra it was a little different. I was 11 when I read that comic. And everyone was talking about it. It was a big deal because we considered Gwen Stacy a major character. (Remember, these comics came out monthly and trades did t exist so my peer group thought of Gwen Stacy as a main character. ) What made Elecktra different was. . .Okay, here’s a hard truth. Daredevil was kind of boring. I mean he fight The Purple Man and Stiltman. His only real claim to fame was his disability and even then. . .let’s just say we had questions. His book wasn’t the one everyone was dying to read. Until Frank Miller came along. It became an action book. Elecktra almost killed Ben Urich. The worse thing they did after the death of Elecktra was constantly trying to make Bullseye a thing. He got elevated after he offed Elecktra and he would not stop appearing everywhere. I was shock he didn’t fight the Hulk. But Alex, that was out of pocket. And Major Force? The Z-list hero from Captain Atom? WTF? When I pick up Green Lantern I see that original art (we got the 1st editions as we are
Comic geeks and we are members of comic stores. That issue put me off Green Lanternand Ron Mark.

She's funny, bright and pretty.🎉

A few things:
They did ship Gwen off to Europe for a time (during which, according to JMS, she fell into Norman Osborn's bed) and for a while it seemed she might never return. This always felt like an attempt to be rid of her but Peter was never going to be open to taking up with Mary Jane if he didn't have some closure. In this case, closure ended up being a closed casket. (Broken necks can be so unsightly.) At least until Miles Warren had his way. While I had read some already, the first issue of a Spider-man series I owned was the issue where Peter gets back from France to find a living Gwen Stacy in his apartment. Women in apartments! The horror!

The Spider-man and Daredevil stories had another aspect of the two leads being characters ethically determined to never kill. Beat someone senseless, OK. But not kill. In both cases the heroes are driven to a snapping point by the deaths of hugely important people in their lives. Contrast with somebody like Wolverine, who'd announce his intent had already been to kill the offender but now there needed to be massive suffering included. Spider-man desire for vengeance was alleviated by Osborn offing himself. something the first movie lacked. As for Daredevil, this was the second time he'd been on the verge of killing Bullseye. The first after bullseye had killed Elektra but was left crippled and helpless in a hospital bed while Matt wrestled with what to do. Looking back, and considering all the mayhem Bullseye went on to perform after being restored, Matt should killed him in that hospital bed.

I always felt Gail Simone was a bit full of crap in her essay. These are comic books. The lead characters are eternally alone, other than the company of other superhumans because the universe (aka the editors) is cruel and needs the character to remain interesting in the eyes of the target audience. Such is the plight of characters who age about a decade after being continuously in print for 60 years. They're on the suffering merry-go-round for eternity. A few years ago, Simone got mad at me on Twitter because she was berating Adam Baldwin for not being the person she'd fantasized him to be and instead being unashamedly opposed to much of her politics. She acted as if he should know who she was, and I linked the essay in the thread. I also mentioned that one of the nastiest things I ever saw done to a female character was in fact written by Simone. In 'Secret Six' she had a character, wildly altered from the original version as to make one wonder why a new character wasn't created, inflict on wonder woman the vivid memory of her execution. (She got better.) This was so traumatic it left Diana in drooling catatonia. Simone got pissed and blocked my then account.

The part of the movie 'Logan' I truly hated was the telegraphed deaths of Eriq La Salle and family. Logan's first instinct to not endanger these people with the presence of his group was entirely correct.

I blame the CCA for the misidentification of LSD use by Harry Osborn. His behavior was plainly what you'd associated with heroin use but it was forbidden to depict that then. LSD was a gray area and they got away with using that.

What was weird as well was that even after taking charge of his deceased father's company and becoming quite wealthy, Harry was still sharing an apartment with Peter, where he found one of his Spider-man costumes, and had the psychotic break that made him become the second Green Goblin.

Everybody talks about Peter Parker's women suffering but has this been worse than what his male friends have experienced? The one bright spot in Flash Thompson's life, the wife he brought back from Vietnam, was wiped from existence when it was realized that it was ridiculous for a man who was a high school classmate of Peter to have served in Vietnam. He also came back from Vietnam uninjured but the later continuity has him losing his lower legs in Iraq. He did get to be Agent Venom and bang Valkyrie but then they killed him. Johnny Storm and Bobby Drake are well advised to be more distant friends.

I would say Gwen got bridged

I kind of think Gwen's death isn't a fridging but in some ways worse.

Like, it wasn't the use of a woman as a disposable plot device to motivate the male protagonist. It was just the disposal of a woman you no longer had use for period.

At least Kyle's dead girlfriend was supposed to drive a story. Gwen gets the axe because they want to replace her with Mary Jane. It's pretty messed up.

But then again I still kind of like the Kevin Smith Daredevil run. So what the hell do I know? :p

See, because Spiderman was too busy, or is too important, so he tried to act like Daredevil was his rival and cooked up this whole insane- no really. It's clever. Kind of.

To further sponser GBU with weird themes! 😂

I love how quiet and disapproving everyone got when Sins Past came up.

I've missed GB&U!
More of this please!

Not only do I vote to send Lantern to the Wrong Box, I also suggest the Wrong Box be decorated to look like a refrigerator to emphasize that it contains comics that are egregious

What a joke its not about being misogynistic or for making the male look good its literally a story about a character having something happen to them and how they respond im sorry you're such sad little sjws

Honestly I got to give it to the green lantern book. it originated the term. It gave the character little agency and its not like they have reconned her to have more agency like gwen, they invented the character to get fridged too which some how seems worse then the other two cause at least the other two were established characters there for actual real reasons and not just made to die. It made her fight in her underwear to which some how seems worse cause at least the other two died fully dressed with their boots on and like you said about the implications about the bad guy undeessing her and dressing her in something else. Just all of it feels icky.

I think years later someone made Kyle believe that someone shoved his mother into an oven lol