On Women in Refrigerators

Let’s be clear here: you don’t have a Woman in Refrigerator every time a female character dies, nor even every time one dies and a man in her life chooses to do something about it. The real issue is agency, which we can shorthand as the ability to make meaningful choices, to take meaningful action. If the woman dies fighting for a cause she believes in, she isn’t in the refrigerator. If she uncovers the villain’s secret and is killed to keep her from telling, she isn’t in the refrigerator. It doesn’t even have to be noble; if she makes a stupid mistake and gets herself dead, I still don’t think it’s part of this trope. The point is that her death has a context related to her own actions. She’s a character, not a pawn sacrificed to push someone else’s story forward.

(source: sfnovelists, via sapphoshands

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On Women in Refrigerators
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