The term Women In Refrigerators has been part of the critical vocabulary of pop culture for nearly two decades now, but if you're not too familiar with comic book discourse, you'd be forgiven for having never heard of it until recently. Thanks to two of the biggest superhero movie releases of 2018, Avengers: Infinity War and Deadpool 2, using the troublesome trope to hang key plot points on, the term has reentered our conversations about comic book-related media.

Accordingly, this is the perfect time for a little Fridging 101, exploring the term's origin, development and impact. (It's a cold and bloody job, but somebody's got to do it...)

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The name Women In Refrigerators, usually shortened to just fridging or fridged, was coined by comics writer Gail Simone in 1999. The name was inspired by a storyline in 1994's Green Lantern #54, in which Kyle Rayner (Green Lantern) arrives home to find the dead body of his girlfriend Alex DeWitt stuffed inside his refrigerator.

This excessively grim crime inspired Simone to set up a website under the same name as the trope, dedicated to listing as many examples of fridging as possible. "This is a list I made when it occurred to me that it's not healthy to be a female character in comics," she establishes. "I'm curious to find out if this list seems somewhat disproportionate, and if so, what it means, really. These are superheroines who have either been depowered, raped, or cut up and stuck in the refrigerator. [...] Some have been revived, even improved -- although the question remains as to why they were thrown in the wood chipper in the first place."

Unfortunately, her hunch about it being "disproportionate" proved correct.

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As well as an exhaustive list of heroines on ice, Simone also created a list of responses to the site from industry professionals -- and she snagged some top drawer responders. Then up-and-comer Geoff Johns pointed to a "long history of the majority of male creators," while Marv Wolfman put it down to an attempt by writers to create higher emotional stakes, explaining, "I think it generally means killing female heroes is supposed to elicit more emotions from readers than killing male [ones.]" He also attributed "the wholesale slaughter" of female characters being "easier" for writers to do because they are fewer in number, significance and are mostly "cookie-cut outs" of each other. In other words: expendable.

Different respondents had different interpretations of what the trope's existence meant, and Simone herself wasn't after definitive answers at the time. Her focus, rather, was oncollecting information and insight.

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As with other codifiers for sexist trends in media, like Alison Bechdal's more recent Bechdal Test, and Nathan Rabin's Manic Pixie Dream Girl, fridging began as an observation about a particular medium. Of course, it has since become a facet of feminist criticism across pop culture with a universally-accepted definition.

DC's Identity Crisis raped and killed Sue Dibny, Elongated Man's wife

In 2013, for example, video game journalist Anita Sarkeesian adapted the term to fit the history of video games across hundreds of examples as part of her "Damsel In Distress - Tropes Vs. Women In Video Games" series. Sarkessian posits fridging as the modern "edgy" extension of damselling; if the noble hero arrives too late to save the fair maiden from harm, then his rescue mission becomes a vengeance one.

In both cases, women are reduced to plot devices and their bodies to objects; either serving as the reward for a job well done or as the brutalized impetus to inspire a man to action. Or, as Sarkeesian notes, a digital reward in God of War III in the form of a PlayStation Trophy for using a half-naked woman's body as a literal object to wedge open a door after liberating her from a sexually violent god.

Over time, the trope has evolved to encompass not only the damage done to a female character, but the consequential effect the damage has on her closest male ally, be it her friend, boyfriend, husband, father, brother or son. From this, we can split the trope into two subcategories. One is the Disposable Woman -- a female character created solely to be hurt or killed for the purposes of advancing the story. Elongated Man's wife Sue Dibny is about as disposable as it gets in 2004's Identity Crisis crossover; her rape and murder used purely to incite the drama for what was billed as the "comic event of the year!"

The other subcategory is Stuffed Into The Fridge, which is when harm inflicted to a character of either gender is done purely to cause another character trauma. The worse the body looks, the louder the obligatory "NOOOOOO!" will be. This was taken quite literally in 2009's Blackest Night #3, when Firestorm (Jason Rusch) is forced to watch helplessly as his girlfriend Gen is tortured, turned into salt and has her heart ripped out so that his anguish can power the Black Lantern Corps.

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As the Women In Refrigerators site proves, women are more likely to be fridged through a combination of the trope's roots in damselling and the aforementioned explanations offered by Geoff Johns and Marv Wolfman. Just like in real life, female characters are also more likely to suffer sexual abuse, too. Male characters are more likely to be the beneficiaries of Stuffed Into The Fridge anguish partly because they outnumber female ones, are treated as being less disposable, and because we tend not to automatically empathize with them in the way we do with female ones. Rather, empathy for men has to be created.

Superheroes (of the manly variety) have a double dose of this problem because their superiority is right there in the name. We can't root for a billionaire tech genius in a bat suit without a couple of murdered parents in his backstory, or Kryptonian goodness incarnate without the loss of his entire homeworld. As for Wonder Woman? She voluntarily left a utopia behind to give us mortals a hand. Oh, poor... her? Gendered stereotyping helped pack Alex's corpse in with the meat and chilled vegetables -- a direct invite to the Kyle Rayner pity party.

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While Simone's original study had to do with quantity more than anything else -- quantity being what gives something trope recognition in the first place -- these revisions and additions are important. Though fridging is not exclusive to comics, the reason it was extracted from the superhero genre is because, like TV soap operas, it's a genre that repels contentment in favor of melodrama. The mythic gods and folklore champions that superheroes are descended from frequently went through hell because drama and tragedy go hand in hand. To wrap female characters up in cotton wool and protect them from bad things wouldn't be good representation (or good drama) but fridging is the opposite extreme.

Contrast Women In Refrigerators with the idea of the Final Girl in Horror movies, a subversively compelling trope that, while inflicting just has much harm as fridging on its unfortunate participants, is also perversely celebratory of female resilience, allowing hard-to-kill heroines like Scream's Sydney Preston and Halloween's Laurie Strode to harness their own pain for self-motivation, not for the benefit of anyone else. There are examples in superhero comics, too, of heroines subverting fridging to become hardened survivors of the dreaded ice box.

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As a standalone story, The Killing Joke is textbook fridging. The Joker shows up at Barbara Gordon's apartment, physically and sexually assaults her, and as a direct result Batman is finally pushed over the edge (or so it seems...) to give readers what is considered to be one of his greatest stories. Alan Moore has since disowned it, and Barbara's eventual rebirth from a battered Batgirl to the organizational heart of the Bat-family as Oracle enabled her to deal with her own trauma and remain an indispensable player in the Batman mythos.

Similarly, Earth 2's Lois Lane's death appeared to have been crafted solely to amp her husband up a few gears towards his noble self-sacrifice, but wound up giving her new robotic life as Red Tornado. (In a possibly self-aware twist, her back-up body even emerged from a cryogenic chamber, having been literally fridged.) And yet, Simone's original question still hangs in the air, unanswered, as to "why they were thrown in the wood chipper in the first place."

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It's important to also note that fridging doesn't instantly make a story bad. Thanks to Gerry Conway's nuanced writing, Gwen Stacy's murder in The Night I Let Gwen Stacy Die, one of the earliest examples of the trope, has a more complex emotional effect on Peter Parker's character than just swearing an oath of vengeance, and has had far-reaching effects in subsequent Spider-Man stories. Gamora's murder in Avengers: Infinity War successfully builds Thanos into the mournful maniac that the Russo brothers promised us he would be.

RELATED: The Amazing Gwen Stacy Problem

Fridging can be an ugly blemish on fan-favorite stories or make lesser ones look even worse. But in both cases, it boils down to female characters being disproportionately cast as disposable pieces of meat who can only contribute to the plot when they're stuffed inside a refrigerator. Even when you're aware that it's an issue, it's difficult to make work.  Deadpool 2 openly called out its own "lazy writing" rather than attempt to make Vanessa's fridging amount to more than just a James Bond parody and a sexy, ghostly rendezvous. Unfortunately, despite the film's post-credits retcon, the image was already done, and no amount of jokes in the opening credits can make it go away.