Fox took a low-risk flyer on Deadpool. It had a budget smaller than any other X-film (in fact, the only other X-film to have an eight-figure rather than a nine-figure budget was X-Men in 2000, and Deadpool’s budget was $68 million to the first X-film’s $75 million), and was released in February with most of the marketing being done virally (read: cheaply) and voluntarily by Ryan Reynolds for whom this was, in many ways, a vanity project.
It succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest imaginings (which had to relieve Fox, given how badly X-Men: Apocalypse had underperformed), making over $300 million at the box office (the highest gross of any X-film in terms of raw dollars). Naturally, a sequel was green-lit tout de suite.
The post-credits scene in Deadpool was a Ferris Bueller’s Day Off-style scene of Deadpool in a bathrobe telling the audience to go home already, but also teasing that Cable would be in the next movie. Given that Deadpool has been tied to Cable since his first appearance (we were introduced to Deadpool in New Mutants #98 when the merc with a mouth was hired to kill Cable, and the pair shared an ongoing monthly series from 2004-2008), it only made sense.
Cable first appeared in New Mutants #87 by Louise Simonson & Rob Liefeld, conceived as a new drill-sergeant type to run the New Mutants. Prior to this, the team was a group of trainee mutants still learning how to use their powers. The character of Cable was retrofitted into the Marvel Universe, established as having a past with several characters. Later, it was retconned that Cable was Nathan Summers, the child of Scott “Cyclops” Summers and Madelyne Pryor, born in Uncanny X-Men #201 and sent to the future in X-Factor #68. Cable was raised in the future and later travelled to the past.
Simonson left the book in issue #97, and Liefeld (who had been co-plotting the book) took over full plotting with Fabian Nicieza scripting. The book was cancelled with issue #100 and started afresh as X-Force, a title more in keeping with the strike-team mentality that had taken over the title.
The second Deadpool movie not only brought in Cable, but also a version of X-Force, a team that Deadpool puts together after an abortive attempt to join the X-Men.
Also in this movie is Domino, a character introduced in the same issue as Deadpool (though it was later revealed that this was the mutant Copycat, the comic book version of Vanessa, disguised as the real Domino to spy on Cable).
Back from the first movie are Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool, Morena Baccarin as Vanessa, T.J. Miller as Weasel, Leslie Uggams as Blind Al, Brianna Hildebrand as Negasonic Teenage Warhead, Stefan Kapičić as the voice of Colossus, and Karan Soni as Dopinder. Back from X-Men: Apocalypse in a quick cameo are James McAvoy as Professor X, Nicholas Hoult as the Beast, Evan Peters as Quicksilver, Tye Sheridan as Cyclops, Alexandra Shipp as Storm, and Kodi Smit-McPhee as Nightcrawler. Also footage from X-Men Origins: Wolverine featuring Hugh Jackman as Logan is used and repurposed in the mid-credits scene. A different version of the Juggernaut from the one played by Vinnie Jones in X-Men: The Last Stand appears via CGI, with Reynolds providing the voice.
Newly arrived in this film are Josh Brolin as Cable (his fourth role in this rewatch, having played the title role in Jonah Hex, the younger K in Men in Black 3, and Thanos in Guardians of the Galaxy and Avengers: Age of Ultron, as well as Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, which we’ll get to later this year), Zazie Beetz as Domino, Julian Dennison as Firefist, Jack Kesy as Black Tom Cassidy, Eddie Marsan as the Essex Orphanage headmaster, and Shioli Kutsuna as Yukio (with the same name, but none of the personality or powers of the same-named character from the comics nor the one played by Rila Fukushima in The Wolverine). In addition, Alan Tudyk and Matt Damon (the latter credited as “Dickie Greenleaf,” a riff on the Damon/Jude Law movie The Talented Mr. Ripley) cameo as two rednecks, and the members of X-Force include Terry Crews (Bedlam), Lewis Tan (Shatterstar), Bill Skarsgård (Zeitgeist), Brad Pitt (the Vanisher), and Rob Delaney (Peter).
Not back is director Tim Miller, who backed out of the sequel over disagreements with Reynolds. He was replaced by David Leitch, fresh off John Wick and Atomic Blonde.
For the holiday season in late 2018, Fox released Once Upon a Deadpool, a PG-13 version of the movie. A third movie is in limbo at present, as the fate of the X-films in light of Disney’s acquisition of Fox is unknown. The X-films may continue as is, be integrated into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, start over as a separate thing, or some fourth option. (One suspects the box-office performance of Dark Phoenix will have an impact on that ultimate decision.)
“Let’s Fuck Some Shit Up is my actual legal middle name”
Deadpool 2
Written by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick & Ryan Reynolds
Directed by David Leitch
Produced by Simon Kinberg, Ryan Reynolds, & Lauren Shuler Donner
Original release date: May 18, 2018
Deadpool is smoking a cigarette and playing a Logan music box in the apartment he shares with Vanessa. He lays down on a bunch of barrels of fuel and, after turning on all the gas burners on the oven, tosses a match into the air and the apartment explodes, blowing his body apart.
We flash back to his career as a hired assassin, but he only targets criminals. We see him take out gangsters all over the world. On his and Vanessa’s anniversary, he cuts a job short because he’s late to meet with her and the mark has locked himself in a panic room.
He arrives home and they exchange presents—he gives her a skee-ball token as a memento of their first date, while she gives him her IUD. She’s off birth control and they can have a baby.
After they start working on getting her pregnant, and then watch Yentl (with Deadpool commenting that “Papa, Can You Hear Me?” from that movie has the same tune as “Do You Wanna Build a Snowman?” from Frozen), they start trying to pick out baby names. The mark from earlier shows up with his thugs and tries to kill Deadpool. He succeeds in killing Vanessa. Deadpool chases him down and kills him, but he’s now suicidally depressed, which is why he blows himself up.
Colossus shows up at the wreckage of his apartment and brings him to the X-mansion. He heals, of course, and Colossus offers him a chance to become an X-Men trainee. (He also meets Negasonic Teenage Warhead’s new girlfriend, Yukio. Negasonic is a full-fledged X-Man now.) Deadpool is reluctant at first, and also complains that he only sees the same two or three X-Men every time he comes to the mansion. (Professor X is actually meeting with several X-Men behind him, and the Beast quietly and discreetly closes the door so Deadpool won’t notice that they’re there and avoiding him like the plague.)
Deadpool finally agrees to become an X-Men trainee, mostly because he saw an image of Vanessa after he blew himself up and she said to follow his heart. He thinks that maybe this means he should become a hero.
The first mission that Deadpool goes on with Colossus and Negasonic is to deal with a situation at the Essex Orphanage, which takes in mutants. One of the orphans, a New Zealand native named Russell, but who calls himself Firefist, is causing tremendous damage. Deadpool manages to completely fuck up the whole thing, including killing some staffers at Essex, and both Deadpool and Firefist wind up imprisoned in the Icebox, where they’re fitted with collars that neutralize their powers. In Deadpool’s case that means that the cancer that his healing factor has kept in check will soon kill him, which he’s fine with, as with Vanessa dead and his attempt to be a hero a failure, he has nothing left to live for.
Decades in the future, Cable stands over the blasted remains of his home, his wife and child having been killed. He uses a timeslide to go back to the early 21st century and kill the person who would grow up to kill them: Firefist. He breaks into the Icebox and tries to kill Firefist. Deadpool actually tries to protect him, not wanting to see a kid get killed, and in the fight, his control collar is damaged. Now fully powered, he and Cable go at it, eventually going over a cliff. Deadpool falls into frozen water and again sees Vanessa in what he thinks is the afterlife, and then is ejected back to life, as it were. At one point during the fight, Cable winds up with the skee-ball token that Deadpool gave to Vanessa, which was the only thing Deadpool had left of her.
Feeling abandoned by Deadpool, Firefist makes friends with the Juggernaut in the Icebox. Deadpool returns to Weasel’s bar and decides that he needs to rescue Firefist from the Icebox. Weasel learns that they’re transferring several prisoners to another facility thanks to the damage Cable did, so Deadpool plans to hit it. But he needs a team, and he can’t go back to the X-Men, so he forms his own, with Weasel hitting LinkedIn to find more heroes: Bedlam (who can disrupt electricity), Zeitgeist (who has acidic vomit), Domino (who has good luck), the Vanisher (who’s invisible), Shatterstar (an alien from Mojo World who says he’s better than humans), and Peter (who has no powers, but he read the ad and thought it would be fun). Deadpool calls the team X-Force (which he says is less sexist than “X-Men,” and he dismisses Domino’s comment that it’s derivative), complete with a crossing-of-the-arms-in-an-X that is totally unrelated to the “Wakanda forever!” gesture, really, truly, honest.
Cable takes Weasel prisoner and threatens to torture him—before he can even start the torture, Weasel breaks, telling Cable everything, including that the weather report is for high winds.
X-Force flies over the prison convoy in a helicopter. Several people express concerns about the fact that there are high winds, but Deadpool barrels forward. Unfortunately, the winds prove problematic. Bedlam crashes into a bus windshield, Vanisher lands on live electrical wire, Shatterstar is blinded by his ponytail flying into his face and falls right into an active helicopter blade and is sliced to pieces, and Zeitgeist lands in a wood chipper. Peter lands safely, and tries to save Zeitgeist, but the latter nervously vomits acid onto Peter, which eats through his arm, and Peter bleeds out while Zeitgeist is chopped to ribbons.
Only Deadpool and Domino survive. They go after the convoy. Deadpool goes on at great length that luck isn’t a super power while Domino has phenomenal luck in getting into the driver’s seat of the convoy. Deadpool—riding behind on a stolen motor scooter—is surprised. Cable then shows up also, and a massive road battle ensues.
During the fight, Firefist manages to escape, and also release Juggernaut. Deadpool and Domino also escape, but not until after Juggernaut literally rips Deadpool in half.
Domino takes Deadpool back to Blind Al’s place. Weasel and Dopinder (who has decided that he wants to be an assassin-for-hire and is apprenticing with Weasel; for his part, Weasel mostly has him being the bar’s janitor, insisting that it’s training) show up, offering to help him out. Deadpool—whose legs are still short and stubby and growing back slowly—says that his first target is Cable, then he’s going to save Firefist.
Cable himself shows up and offers an alliance. He explains that the adult Firefist’s first kill was the head of the Essex Orphanage. He got a taste for killing after that. Deadpool agrees to the alliance, but only if Deadpool gets the chance to talk him out of killing the headmaster. Cable agrees to give him thirty seconds to try it before he blows the kid away.
Dopinder drives Cable, Domino, and Deadpool to the X-mansion, where Deadpool tries and fails to convince Colossus to help out. They then head to Essex, where Dopinder realizes he’s not cut out for this, and waits in his cab.
Firefist is all ready to destroy the orphanage. Domino recognizes Essex as the place where she was raised—and tortured. She goes in and kills a bunch of the workers there, and frees the kids. Colossus, Negasonic, and Yukio show up and take on the Juggernaut, while Cable and Deadpool fight more of the Essex thugs.
Firefist chases the headmaster into the school. Deadpool tries and fails to stop him from killing the headmaster, but Firefist insists that Deadpool doesn’t even care about him. Deadpool puts one of the Icebox collars on his own neck so that he’s vulnerable to show that he does care. Cable then uses his last bullet to shoot Firefist, but Deadpool gets in the way of the bullet, sacrificing himself for Firefist, since with the collar on, his healing factor is toast. However, it affected Firefist, as the charred, bloody teddy bear that Cable carries as a remembrance of his daughter is now a clean, shiny, happy teddy bear, so it worked! Firefist will no longer grow up to be a bad guy.
After an exceedingly long death scene, Deadpool dies. Cable uses the last burst of his timeslide to go back to when the fight started, and he puts the skee-ball token on the spot on Deadpool’s chest where the bullet will hit him. The rest of the fight goes the same way, but this time Deadpool isn’t shot, saved by the token. Oh, and Dopinder runs over the headmaster, killing him.
Domino’s luck enables them to decode the collar and Deadpool’s healing factor is restored. Negasonic and Yukio return to the mansion with the freed orphans, but Colossus stays with Deadpool, Cable, Domino, Firefist, and Dopinder. Deadpool finally has a proper family.
Yukio and Negasonic manage to fix the timeslide, and they give it to Deadpool, who goes back in time to save Vanessa, then also saves Peter (but not any of the rest of X-Force), and then kills the Wade Wilson who appeared in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and then kills Ryan Reynolds on the day he first reads the script for Green Lantern. (“You’re welcome, Canada.”)
“Only best buddies execute pedophiles together!”
I really want to like this movie more than I do. I mean, it’s enjoyable for all the same reasons that the first one was. Reynolds remains letter-perfect in the role, which is no mean feat. It would be easy for the role to just be a one-note diarrhea-of-the-mouth fourth-wall-breaking joke machine. But Reynolds manages to make the character three-dimensional. Yes, he’s that, but he’s also convincingly a psychopath trying very hard to be a hero (and doing a shit job of it, yeah) and a person who is believably in love with Vanessa.
But that’s the problem with the movie: it fridges Vanessa.
Every time I’ve mentioned fridging in this rewatch it’s led to at least one or two comments saying, “I’m not sure this is really fridging,” so let me cut that off at the pass: what happens to Vanessa is the textbook definition of fridging. Based on the events of 1994’s Green Lantern #54, in which GL’s girlfriend was killed and stuffed into a refrigerator, the term was coined by comics writer Gail Simone to point up the laziness of far too many comics writers when confronted with writing a female character—too often, they are killed, maimed, injured, raped, whatever in order to bring pain to the male hero. (Ironically, Simone had a lengthy and influential run on Deadpool’s monthly title; she was the one who started Deadpool’s dialogues with the “yellow boxes” of narrative captions.)
Which is exactly what happens here. Vanessa is a great character, a slightly nutsy cuckoo woman who adores Wade Wilson for exactly who he is, and who can keep up with his verbal Jackson Pollocking. And all that Reynolds, Rhett Reese, and Paul Wernick can think to do with her is kill her off to make Deadpool suffer? Seriously?
The thing is, it isn’t necessary. Yes, Deadpool’s suicidal grief motivates a lot of what he does in the film, but there are other ways to accomplish it. Why can’t Vanessa have the role that Weasel has, helping him in his work, holding the X-Force auditions with him, and so on? Given what a scum-sucking weasel, pardon the pun, T.J. Miller is, dropping him would be no loss. Heck, why not have Weasel be the one killed to motivate Deadpool, and Vanessa helps him work through it? And since they also raised the notion of Vanessa and Deadpool wanting to have kids, why not have his impending fatherhood motivate Deadpool’s desire to join the X-Men and save Firefist? Heck, in the comics, Vanessa is an actual powered character, so maybe do that so she can fight alongside him?
What’s especially frustrating is that the movie does a wonderful job satirizing another tired trope, which is that all the super-powered people in comics (and in movies that adapt comics) are skinny. Firefist is a chubby specimen, and the only time you ever see a fat person in a comic book, they’re either not powered, or their powers are very specifically related to their obesity. Firefist is a breath of fresh air, and I love the fact that he’s discriminated against as a fat kid is part of what turns him evil. Julian Dennison absolutely nails the role, making the character’s anger and frustration (and, it must be said, immature idiocy) convincing and real.
I also love the fact that X-Force is summarily killed off due to their own incompetence. X-Force embodied the worst of 1990s excesses in mainstream comics, turning what had been a great book about young mutants (seriously, some of the best work in Chris Claremont’s storied career appeared in The New Mutants) into yet another grim-n-gritty book with big guns and big blasts and macho posturing and uniforms with simply endless numbers of pouches. (I particularly liked seeing Shatterstar killed, as I never liked that asshole.)
This is one of two times in 2018 that Josh Brolin managed to take a comics character I disliked intensely and make me care about them. He did it in Avengers: Infinity War with Thanos (whom I have always found to be a spectacularly uninteresting antagonist, one of the weakest villains in Marvel’s pantheon) and here with Cable. Of course, they mainly accomplished this by fridging Cable’s wife and daughter, who don’t ever get a name. Or personalities. Or much of anything.
I’d think the movie was completely sexist if not for the brilliance of Zazie Beetz as Domino, the triumphant return of Brianna Hildebrand as Negasonic, and the anime-on-overload cuteness of Shioli Kutsuna as Yukio. Beetz in particular nails the role of Domino, her deadpan asides nicely complementing Reynolds’s rapid-fire snark. More of her, please! And more of Negasonic and Yukio, for that matter, as it’s the first same-sex relationship between good guys that we’ve seen in a superhero movie. And still the only overt one so far.
In the end, Deadpool goes back in time and, basically, negates the movie, as he saves Vanessa—so the filmmakers eat their cake and have it, too, as we’ve got Vanessa back for the third film! Maybe this time, she’ll spend all of it pregnant, so we can have that tired trope, too…
Next week, we begin a two-week jaunt back to the 1990s, as we look at two pilot movies for TV shows that adapted DC characters, starting with 1990’s The Flash.
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be at Emerald City Comic-Con next weekend in Seattle. Find him mostly at the Bard’s Tower booth (alongside a bunch of other authors, among them Mercedes Lackey, Larry Dixon, and Jonathan Maberry), as well as the occasional bit of programming.
Yes, Deadpool’s suicidal grief motivates a lot of what he does in the film, but there are other ways to accomplish it. Why can’t Vanessa have the role that Weasel has, helping him in his work, holding the X-Force auditions with him, and so on? Given what a scum-sucking weasel, pardon the pun, T.J. Miller is, dropping him would be no loss. Heck, why not have Weasel be the one killed to motivate Deadpool, and Vanessa helps him work through it?
You think Deadpool, even with Vanessa still alive, would be reduced to suicidal, why-bother-living despair by the death of Weasel? Not sure about that.
what happens to Vanessa is the textbook definition of fridging. Based on the events of 1994’s Green Lantern #54, in which GL’s girlfriend was killed and stuffed into a refrigerator, the term was coined by comics writer Gail Simone to point up the laziness of far too many comics writers when confronted with writing a female character—too often, they are killed, maimed, injured, raped, whatever in order to bring pain to the male hero.
I happen to have Gail Simone right here http://www.lby3.com/wir/index.html and she was talking about the disturbing tendency of superpowered female characters to get killed off, depowered, maimed etc “(ignoring for the moment the wives/girlfriends of superheroes – a whole ‘nother problem)”.
You forgot Brad Pitt’s cameo as Vanisher.
Edit: Never mind, I see it now. Carry on.
I’ve found with fridging, it’s very easy to recognize in the aggregate, but for any given individual case, there are always reasons that for one person or another, it feels like a legitamate story option vs ‘fridging’. For spome people, this particular story line might be very resonant. But I agree that, ultimately, it’s just a symptom of un-creativity. And I think something can still be an emotionally resonant story, or even internally logical, but still fridging.
That said, I was expecting some kind of meta commentery on fridging at some point in the movie, so the whole time I was wating for that in the movie. I was thinking the whole point of killing her was going to be making some fridging joke – come to find out that, when asked, they didn’t even know the trope existed.
Other than that, it was a fun (although surprisingly developed at time) movie. And I also wanted to add that I love the intro you do in the re-watches of the comics history of the characters, as I usually don’t know any of that information going in.
Maybe they thought they could get away with the fridging because she was always going to be brought back in the end. I dunno, it’s the one thing about the movie I didn’t like either. I hope they do better with 3.
This movie gave me a newfound appreciation of the Domino character. I always found her comics iteration to be a dull as dishwater Longshot knock-off. Zazie Beetz owned every scene she was in, and the move-makers did a delightful job of actually putting her probability powers into action. It was amazing. I am looking forward to Deadpool III solely for the return of this Domino character.
Didn’t enjoy this film as much as the first one, but it was still fun, and I LOVED how Cable was portrayed. Yes, what happens with Vanessa sucks harder than in the first movie.
@1 – ajay: Yes, sure, Gail Simone said “superheroines”, but right in the same sentence refers to characters “cut up and stuck in the refrigerator”, which is a specific reference to Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend Alexandra. And the comic book page of Kyle finding Alexandra’s body in the fridge is right next to that paragraph.
Yeah, it is kind of a fridging, although Vanessa still has a continuous presence and feedback in the movie unlike Fridge-Classic where there are forgotten and unrepresented except as a source of revenge-rage, but as tvtropes says “Tropes are not good, tropes are not bad, tropes are just tools”. This is a fridge which is used well and works with both the characters and characterisation of both Vanessa and DP. My only real complaint is that her ressurection is in a post credits “maybe” sequences, and it also derails Colossus/Deadpool (OTP4EVA!!!). Oh well, maybe the can have a OT3.
This was a great movie. There were so many great points to pick in it. I particularly liked Firefist as portrayed by Julian Dennison and I think he is going to be a great actor to watch throughout his career. I recommend Hunt for the Wilderpeople in which he co-stars with Sam Neill, too.
Best one-off gag in the movie. I have never heard an audience laugh as hard as they did at that point, that was just a brilliant little touch.
I gotta say, you are wrong when you say he only saved Peter. He obviously saved the Vanisher too, he is there at the end; did you not see him? Okay, okay, sorry. I do hope we get Peter more in future movies though. You couldn’t use him in a major role, but he would make a good recurring secondary character. I think they need to have a talk with Dopinder too, get that guy a therapist. I also hope they can add Courier to the cast of X-Force, post Mister Sinister time travel version. Get a little trans representation in there too.
I wish they’d committed to the gag of casting Keira Knightley as Cable though. Change none of the story or dialogue, go with everyone excepting Wade play it like Cable is the grizzled male badass. That would have been great, but I accept it might have been a meta-gag too far for normal audiences.
Quoth random22: “He obviously saved the Vanisher too, he is there at the end; did you not see him?”
Dammit, you made me snarf my coffee!!!!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@7 – random22: “Tropes are not bad, tropes are just tools” is not true when the trope is used over and over again, and it almost exclusively involves killing women to motivate the male hero.
@9 That just makes it a poorly used tool, it doesn’t make it less of a tool for that. Bad craftsmen always blame their tools, remember.
I’ve been on the fence about whether I want to see this movie. The first movie had elements I enjoyed, but the crude humor and violence weren’t to my taste overall. I’ve been wondering if maybe I should track down the Once Upon a Deadpool version of this.
@3/Lisamarie: “I’ve found with fridging, it’s very easy to recognize in the aggregate, but for any given individual case, there are always reasons that for one person or another, it feels like a legitamate story option vs ‘fridging’.”
Good point. The whole issue with something like this, or like whitewashing Asian characters or stories failing the Bechdel Test or gay characters being killed off, is about the aggregate. In each individual case, the creative choice may be justified within the story; but if most stories do it the same way and few or none try to make exceptions to the pattern, then it creates a systemic imbalance or injustice. So it’s not about saying a choice was wrong for the single story in which it happens; it’s about wishing that there were more stories that were exceptions to the pattern. In short, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.
I don’t think there’s anything particularly odd about the Yukio character in this movie being unrelated to the one in Wolverine since Yukio isn’t a superhero alias, just someone’s first name.
@11:
I still think the answer to the issue boils down to who is creating stories. Rather than expecting or demanding that individual creators write stories differently, we should be encouraging a wider range of people to create stories in the first place. Let artists (even commercial ones) do what they want to do, and what comes naturally. Just financially support a wider range of artists.
I thought they were aware of what they had done, as the entirety of the Bond-style opening credits sequence is them calling themselves out for murdering Vanessa at the start of the film, and then using the death-dream sequences and the time-slide reversal at the end to “fix it.”
Still lazy storytelling and a poor use of Morena Baccarin again.
Otherwise, I did enjoy the rest of the film. I love Dennison and Beetz as Firefist and Domino so much.
I was stunned that they dug down deep enough in the barrel to pull out Zeitgeist. I remember sitting in the theater thinking “I’m sure they just took the name; they wouldn’t actually use his comic-book powers…oh, yeah, OK, they did that too. Why did I doubt it?” And since my brain had already gone to a comics-minutia place, I spent a large chunk of time wondering if Russell was supposed to be Rusty Collins, from early issues of X-Factor. And yeah, he is, although he’s nothing like comics Rusty except for the name and the powers. I have no memory of Rusty Collins being called “Firefist,” or anything other than Rusty, but I’m sure someone can quote me the issue number. If I’m sitting there trying to spot the next easter egg, instead of engaging with the plot, that’s probably a bad sign, but I’m not sure Deadpool cares either way.
@13/Anthony Pero: It’s not an either-or choice. We need to do both. They’re not competing solutions, they’re both essential and mutually reinforcing parts of the same solution.
Besides, the problem with saying “Leave creators alone to do what they want without criticism” is that creators need criticism if we want to improve. We all have bad habits or flaws in our work, and smart, responsible creators are open to criticism so that we can recognize our bad habits and try to do better. That’s as true of perpetuating stereotypes or exclusionistic tropes as it is of any other storytelling flaw like cliched plotting or repetitive characterization. Creators that reject criticism as an affront are only hurting themselves, because they’re closing themselves off to self-improvement. I’ve learned a lot by listening to criticisms of my own writing and trying to improve how I do things. Or listening to criticisms of bad storytelling trends in general and realizing there are aspects of them in my own work that I need to try harder to avoid.
So believe me, you’re not defending artists by saying they should be sheltered from criticism of their choices.
I was always under the impression that they fridged Vanessa knowingly, that it was part of the deconstruction of that trope, and that the fact that she’s resurrected at the end of the movie is a wink to this…
LynMars and andrewrm: You’re giving the screenwriters way too much credit, sadly. They were asked about the fridging trope when they were interviewed during the publicity tour for the movie, and they were utterly unaware of it.
https://www.vulture.com/2018/05/deadpool-2-writers-defend-treatment-of-female-characters.html
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Movie was good but Domino was awesome. She made the movie for me.
@16:
Lol. I certainly wasn’t saying don’t criticize artists (unless you think criticism is the art of telling other people what to do). I AM saying I don’t think it will fix the problem. Enough people giving their money to diverse artists will, however. That’s how commercial businesses work.
It is interesting that you interpreted “Rather than expecting or demanding that individual creators write stories differently, we should be encouraging a wider range of people to create stories in the first place” as “Leave creators alone to do what they want without criticism.”
I was agreeing with your comment at #11, or at least I thought I was. You said “In each individual case, the creative choice may be justified within the story; but if most stories do it the same way and few or none try to make exceptions to the pattern, then it creates a systemic imbalance or injustice. So it’s not about saying a choice was wrong for the single story in which it happens; it’s about wishing that there were more stories that were exceptions to the pattern.” I was offering a practical way to support that thought; push more diverse creators.
I mostly enjoyed it — especially X-Force rolling into battle — but yeah, the thing with Vanessa left a bad taste in my mouth; and sometimes, especially in sequels to these kinds of movies, you start to get the feeling that they’re trying a bit harder than they actually need to.
Is it wrong of me to want a Longshot movie, though?
I love how “Once Upon a DeadPool” Fred Savage brings up the fridging issue and hilariously sums it up as “now that’s just lazy writing” just like DP does at various points int he movie for other situations. DP is not amused…
Otherwise, having seen the original and then the PG-13 with my teens, the PG-13 had to cut a lot of the better pieces out to get the rating, one example being pretty much all of Domino’s antics at the Essex House get cut so you miss out on another awesome scene of her luck being very cinematic.
@10 – random22: That’d be true if it wasn’t almost exclusively done to female characters. It’s not just a tool, it’s something writers do over and over, even after society has called many creators out for doing it. And even if Reynolds and co. had never heard of the term “fridging”, in 2017-2018 they should be aware that using female characters in this manner is not acceptable any longer.
Sigh. Once fridging is brought up, all other discussion dies.
I would watch a one-act play with Morena Baccarin. Can she get 90% screen time in Deadpool 3?
@20/Anthony Pero: “I AM saying I don’t think it will fix the problem. Enough people giving their money to diverse artists will, however. “
As I said, they’re not mutually exclusive or competing options. They’re both necessary parts of the same solution. It’s great if creators who don’t look like me get to compete equally alongside me, but that’s not going to happen if creators that do look like me don’t participate in changing the culture so that it isn’t built exclusively around us.
I wish they had found a way for Morena Baccarin to be in more of the movie, and I didn’t like this one quite as much as the first since the freshness and surprise factor was gone, but daaaaang the casting in DP2 was good. Every single major role was absolutely perfect. Going in, I was especially skeptical of Beetz as Domino and Brolin as Cable but they ended up being mind-blowingly good. I am crossing my fingers that a DP3 or X-Force movie gets made; I really want to see these characters again.
I wonder if Deadpool being ripped in half was a nod to Ultimate Wolverine v. Hulk?
Speaking of Deadpool being ripped in half, why didn’t his lower half grow a new upper half instead of the other way around? Is there maybe a 2nd Deadpool that we haven’t seen?
@18,
One of the things I note from previous experience is that just because someone on a press junket says something, it doesn’t make it true. See “Star Trek: No, Its Not Khan, Honest, Trust Me”.
@27 – There’s no brain in the bottom half.
@27 and @29 I understand, from a sight-gag perspective, that DP with tiny legs was part of the movie. But from a story perspective (and I thought this at the time in the theater) it doesn’t make sense that they don’t grab his lower half in order to re-attach it.
@29 @30 There’s no brain in the top half, either. /Negasonic Snark
Only Colossus knew Wade enough (DP/C:-1TP4EVA)and was smart enough to put him back together, and he wasn’t around when he got ripped in half. Deadpool told Domino to carry him away like he was a rucksack, and her not knowing just how his healing function worked. Wade, being nuts, might just have liked the idea of being carried like a rucksack, or not thinking it through, is completely in-character for him.
The Super Duper Cut Unrated end credits had DP going back in time to kill baby Hitler. Think he ends up changing his diapers instead, but he will tell Cable to do it… Also has a nastier end for Juggernaut.
No excuse for fridging of course, but I thought they were limited in how much they could use Baccarin because of her time commitments elsewhere.
I just want to highlight this part. “ Heck, why not have Weasel be the one killed to motivate Deadpool, and Vanessa helps him work through it?” So fridging only applies to women? (Honestly don’t know just asking) So if a male dies that’s fine for motivation to do anything but if it is a woman then it’s fridging and no woman can possibly die without that label being attached now in any series with a male counter-part that outlives her? Seems unrealistic even if it is an over used trope doesn’t mean it cant work in some stories.
Personally I enjoyed the movie, almost loved it as much as the original.
The casting is great, the story is compelling, the humor is on point and Reynolds delivery is pitch perfect as usual. The fridging is a problem. And if the film makers had taken the time to consider it, it would have made a perfect opportunity to comment on the trope in a hilarious and Deadpool centric way .
If they had DP open a fridge door and walk into the fridge for each of his encounters with Vanessa after she died instead of a glowing wall of light. With perhaps a couple of comments of “It’s cold in here”.
They could have kept the story, which aside from Deadpool’s motivation, was a good story with some nice character development and plenty of entertainment unchanged while still making a meta commentary on the Fridging trope. Anyone who isn’t aware of the fridging trope would have simply accredited the fridge door aspect to the usual Deadpool Crazy. And it would have fit perfectly in the spirit of a Deadpool movie. Still not doing Morena Baccarin justice but it would have been the same film elevated from good but flawed to great.
Hopefully they finally give Vanessa something to do in the 3rd installment.
@33/perrin188: “So fridging only applies to women?”
Yes, basically, because as we’ve already mentioned, the issue isn’t about any single work, but about the aggregate pattern, the recurring tendency in decades’ worth of fiction for female characters to be treated as disposable plot devices who only exist to advance male characters’ plots, rather than having lives and storylines of their own. The reason it’s a problem is because it’s usually done to female characters to motivate male leads; if it were done equally to both sexes, there’d be no issue in the first place.
It’s like weather vs. climate. If it rains a couple of days per year in the desert, that doesn’t mean it isn’t still a desert. What defines its climate is the overall pattern, not individual cherrypicked examples. Fridging is a problem of the cultural climate, the pervasive bias across hundreds of different works of fiction to portray men as active characters and women as mere victims. But the only way to improve the climate — to make the desert bloom, so to speak — is to point out that there are too many examples of the pattern and that more creators need to make an effort to avoid perpetuating it. A single individual homeowner overwatering their lawn isn’t solely responsible for a drought, but they have a responsibility to recognize the larger problem and adjust their behavior appropriately for the good of the whole community.
@34 Not sure why “doing Morena Baccarin justice” should be a priority of this movie. This is a Deadpool movie not a Vanessa movie.
@Several While I do think “Fridging’ is historically an overused trope, complaints about it theses days are completely overblown, in that anytime anything bad happens to a female character it comes up. The truth is, whenever a story is about one particular person, all other character’s journeys within the story tend to be in service of that character, regardless of gender. You want to complain a character is not properly utilized in an ensemble piece go at it, but this is a Deadpool movie and is properly focused on Deadpool.
You can’t say that the filmmakers didn’t consider the fridging aspect when they literally spelled it out, in text, on the screen, as it was happening.
I just wish they had done more than say “Seriously, are we really doing this?”
This film is a good example of why I hate the internet sometimes. There was so much antagonism from fans about Zazie Beets being cast as Domino because they took a white character with a black patch over her eye and made her a black character with a white patch over her eye. It’s not like they didn’t take other characters and mess around with them completely, but this was what they complained about and there was uproar. Then the film came out and she nailed it. She was one of the highlights of a great film. It was the same thing with Anna Kiop as Starfire in Titans. Again, they were blessed with an actress who is one of the best parts of the show. now we have controversy about Captain Marvel because of things the actress has said. Brie Larson is entitled to her own opinions, even if you don’t agree with them. The film is what’s important and from what I can tell (not having seen it yet) it’s a mid tier origin story. It’s no Captain America Civil War but it’s no Thor Dark World either. Some people love it, some don’t, but the amount of toxic commentary before it was released has probably damaged the earning potential for no good reason. Brie is entitled to her opinions as much as I am, even if I don’t particularly agree with them. It’s not as if she sanctions eating puppies or something. Weirdly, a male can say what he likes and be forgiven. Mel Gibson comes across as a truly horrendous individual but his time in the wilderness was pretty short. All was forgiven in a surprisingly short time. Yet you put an alternative ethnicity actress in a role and it’s a crime against humanity for some reason.
@38/Adrian lucas: “Some people love it, some don’t, but the amount of toxic commentary before it was released has probably damaged the earning potential for no good reason.”
No need to worry about that. Captain Marvel is already a smash and is projected to have the strongest opening weekend of 2019 so far by a wide margin. If anything, organized hate campaigns like this tend to backfire, because the people behind them are a far smaller segment of the audience than they believe they are, and their reprehensible actions just make more people want to prove them wrong and bring success to the things they want to fail.
@39 ChristopherLBennett That actually surprised me reading your link. I thought the 100 million plus number was a tad optimistic and was expecting more of a 70-80 million opening personally. I’m happy to be proved wrong though.
@39 I’m glad to see that about CM, I was really nervous and worried that the hate campaign (and the counter campaign too) may have put people off and Marvel would retreat from the woman led superhero market, so I am very glad that has not happened.
@39.
Indeed. The people who campaign against things would be wise to remember what happened with the Married with Children boycott. It just increased the ratings.
Just loving the number of men here who are popping up to declare that Gail Simone, the inventor of the term ‘fridging’, is wrong about what ‘fridging’ means…
I think the Keira Knightley as grizzled bounty hunter film has already been made – it was called, by coincidence, Domino. No robot arms though.
@37 – Brenda: Exactly. They might have not known the name of the trope, but they knew what they were doing.
MaGnUs: Then why didn’t they say so in the interviews? Why didn’t they say they were making fun of that tendency? Instead, they gave hamfisted answers that proved that they hadn’t thought it through at all.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Allow me to correct myself, “they should have known what they were doing”.
I absolutely loved that they killed off X-Force immediately, especially Shatterstar. When I saw they were using them, particularly him with that stupid face thing, I was astounded. It was a lovely and hilarious twist to gack them all off like that. Especially Shatterstar.
I’m on the fence about fridging. On one hand, death of a loved one is an incredibly powerful motivator (killing Weasel or even Dopinder wouldn’t have the same effect on DP), and it is something that has gone on for a very long time (it pops up in mythology all over the world). It’s featured throughout human history. Some characters, such as Punisher, cannot exist without the death of loved ones; Batman, Spider-Man… these all rely upon the trope. But on the other hand, it is symptomatic of larger problems in our various societies.
We can’t just do away with the concept of death as a motivator. I don’t know of a solution, however.
@47/BonHed: The problem is not that characters are killed off to motivate leads. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that part of it. The problem is that it’s overwhelmingly done to female characters to motivate male heroes. The solution is to have more female characters who are the actual heroes rather than disposable props and plot devices. Remove the gender inequality and you remove the problem with killing loved ones.
It was more of the same, only more broad and over the top. In many ways, it’s a better sequel, but also weaker than the first Deadpool. Regardless, the jokes still land, the constant fourth wall breaking still works. Reynolds owns the character, and Brolin is a welcome presence as Cable.
And the X-Force skydiving fiasco is my main source for uncontrolled belly laughs. I’m a sucker for dark comedy and seeing these losers suffer such grisly deaths is by definition the very essence of darkly comical.
@48, I agree that more heroic female characters are needed, no question about that. But I don’t think we can just unilaterally say the act of killing a female character is always problematic. This limits what stories a creator can tell. Not every creator wants to make a female lead hero. It may not be the story he/she wants to tell, or a variety of other reasons. I don’t think we should expect creators to change their stories just because of this issue. As a long time player of pen & paper RPGs, it doesn’t feel like a good fit for me when playing female characters. It’s just not the story I want to portray.
Numerous characters cease to exist without this trope. Frank Castle would have no reason to become the Punisher without the murder of his wife and kids. Bruce Wayne doesn’t go on to become Batman without the murder of his parents. Eric Draven doesn’t come back from the dead to take vengeance for the rape and murder of his fiancé (and James O’Barr was literally motivated to create The Crow after the death of his girlfriend – without that, he wouldn’t have written it). How do you tell these stories without the deaths of these female characters? What other action would motivate these characters to tell their stories?
What part of the repeatedly quoted “it’s not any single case, it’s the aggregation” is not clear?
I understand that, but as I said, by unilaterally saying the trope is problematic and should not be used, creators may feel limited in the story they can tell.
As this post shows, the first thing that happens when a female character is killed to motivate the hero, the creators are slammed for it. New writers may not want to deal with the negativity, and may not write their story. That’s the problem I have with this. I’m being told that I shouldn’t write my story or play the character I want to play because this is in the backstory.
@52/BonHed: If that leads to less stories about vengeance, I’m all for it.
@54 and there it is, you basically made my point for me.
“Unilaterally”? No, not at all.
@55/BonHed: I have a dislike for revenge stories, so I couldn’t resist. My larger point is that “limiting writers” by disgracing a go-to trope may actually result in more unusual and more varied stories.
@57, I was emotionally and psychologically abused as a child, and I took great solace in stories of vengeance. They were a cathartic way for me to deal with the situation. I saw people being able to overcome the events that traumatized them. So while I couldn’t do the things that I wanted to do to those that tormented me, I could at least see it done in stories. So I have a deep love of stories involving vengeance.
@56, yeah, unilaterally. I’m being told that by using this trope I’m lazy and should know better. That’s tremendously discouraging to me as a creator. Literally the first problem identified in this movie is the fridging of Vanesa, and the reviewer knocked the movie down because of it.
@58 Speaking as a female, I have a difficult time feeling sorry for your complaints that you’re being told you’re lazy for using a female’s death as a motivating factor. There are, in fact, many motivating factors that can lead to vengeance stories without killing off the main female. Perhaps explore those instead of letting every female in your life know that she’s only useful to you as a dead person.
Bonhed, how do you think it makes women feel when every time a writer needs to motivate a male hero, they kill his wife or girlfriend?
This is exactly what I’m talking about! I’m getting slammed because I want to tell a story with this trope. MaGnUs, I never said that a writer should always go for this trope. I never said women were only useful to me when they’re dead. I said it’s a legitimate story element, and that every time a writer uses it, they are slammed for it, and their story is viewed as lesser because of it.
Would you have told James O’Barr he was lazy because the actual literal murder of his girlfriend drove him to write a comic about vengeance, and that he should explore a different story to tell?
Just a reminder to please keep the conversation civil, and not make criticisms or disagreements too personal in tone. The aim here is to have a constructive, useful discussion–if that’s not possible, then perhaps it’s best to agree to disagree and move on.
There should be a new adage for comment threads like these. Call it Godwin’s Fridge.
Quoth BonHead: “But I don’t think we can just unilaterally say the act of killing a female character is always problematic. This limits what stories a creator can tell.”
As a professional storyteller of 25 years’ standing, this statement is, IMO, nonsense.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@52/BonHed: “as I said, by unilaterally saying the trope is problematic and should not be used, creators may feel limited in the story they can tell.”
As a creator myself, I disagree. I am in no way limited by my desire to be inclusive and unbiased in my fiction. Perpetuating a sexist prejudice or stereotype is not liberating; just the opposite, if anything. By striving to always give my female characters as much personality and agency as the male characters, and to make them equal protagonists rather than always being secondary to male heroes, I give myself more creative freedom.
If you always kill off female characters to motivate male protagonists, that’s a sexist cliche. But if you have as many female protagonists as male protagonists, and if you kill off as many male characters as female characters, then it’s not a sexist pattern anymore, and so you can occasionally, when necessary, kill off a female character to motivate a male character without it being a problem. Because then it’s balanced. So you’re wrong — evening out the balance gives you more freedom to tell the stories you need to tell.
@58/BonHed: What can I say? That’s terrible, and if stories of vengeance, of all things, helped you to cope, then that is of course a good thing. I still don’t like them, but I guess I live in a friendlier world than you do.
Any thoughts about my larger point?
Does anyone know a story, in any medium, where the opposite is true? I.e. a man was killed off to motivate a female character? I’m sitting here, wracking my brain, and can’t think of one…any wives losing a husband and kids and seeks revenge? Anything?
@67 Ned Stark from A Game of Thrones.
@67, It’s definitely rare and harder to pick examples, but Widows is a recent one. And even that wasn’t really direct motivation, but a domino effect. That recent Jennifer Gardner movie (Peppermint, I think) was a ‘you killed my husband & child’ revenge flick.
@68 – Ned Stark was a main character and had an entire character arc. And I’m not sure what woman his death served to motivate?
@67/Austin: Again, it’s not about any single instance. It’s not saying that any story choice should be forbidden, or that the alternative has never been done at all. It’s just about noticing that a single approach is overused and not enough creators are offering alternatives. That’s not saying “You are forbidden to do this ever,” it’s saying, “Hey, guys, maybe consider doing this other thing instead, since it’s less of a cliche?”
To BonHed: Saying that a trope is overused is not saying that it should be banned. It’s saying that creators should try harder to avoid lazy cliches, because it makes their work fresher and more interesting if they don’t just do the same thing we’ve seen a million times. And if it isn’t done constantly, if it’s just one option on the list, then it becomes less of a cliche and its use — when justified — will garner fewer complaints.
@67. Austin: Lady Snowblood is a classic of female vengeance.
Then there’s the movie inspired by it, Kill Bill, where the Bride’s groom is killed on their wedding day.
@73 – She didn’t even care about her fiance in Kill Bill. Her motivating factor was that they (seemingly) killed her unborn child and tried to kill her.
@75. Austin: You going to argue with Tarantino about the inspiration? I mean, it’s fine if you do. But if you’re just playing a game of “Contrarian,” have at it.
@67/Austin: I posted a reply before, but it disappeared when I edited it, so I’ll try again, though with a more streamlined answer:
“Does anyone know a story, in any medium, where the opposite is true?”
Of course there are individual examples of men dying to motivate women, or women dying to motivate women, or men dying to motivate men. The problem isn’t that they don’t exist, the problem is that there aren’t enough of them compared to the frequency of women dying to motivate men. Pointing out a cliche doesn’t mean there are no exceptions — and it certainly doesn’t mean that its use should be forbidden. It just means it would be nice if more creators made an effort to avoid the cliche and the underlying cultural assumptions and biases it embodies.
@@@@@ Austin
I can think of a specific example: Alex Marshall’s A Crown For Cold Silver, which is a fantastic read.
@76 – Not being a contrarian. Game of Thrones and Kill Bill were just not good examples. Which actually helps prove my point that it’s very rare to see fridging the other way. It goes to show that fridging is a one-sided thing that really needs to stop. Writers have to learn to be more creative!
@77 CLB
I don’t know about that. I think there are a *ton* of movies where young men set out to avenge their fathers. It’s just people are especially sensitive to women dying as motivation after the whole crab-face-guy thing ;)
@80/vinsentient: That doesn’t actually refute the point, because it’s still young men who are doing the avenging. Again — the source of the problem is not vengeance plots, it’s the lack of female characters in protagonist or non-victim roles. If both the avenger and the victim are male, that’s even worse, because then women are entirely absent rather than just being disposable.
What this boils down to is that we need more stories that are about women, that are driven by women and give them the same agency and depth as any male lead, rather than stories about men in which women are merely plot devices. Fridging is just one symptom of that larger problem.
@79. Austin: Uh… “any wives losing a husband and kids and seeks revenge”?
If you are looking at the man in that scenario (a woman called the Bride (till we find out her real name) loses her new husband) as a non-entity, as totally insignificant, you may have just invented reverse-fridging.
@82 – Yes, the groom was totally insignificant and a non-entity. But you are forgetting one key element for fridging: it has to serve as motivation! The Bride, by all indications of the rest of the 2 movies, did not seem to care that the groom was killed. What motivated her, what drove her character arc, was that they betrayed her and tried to kill her (which, IMO, was a bigger motivating factor than the death of her unborn child. That was my impression). The murder of the groom didn’t seem to serve her character arc in any way. (Do we even learn who he was? Did she just pick some random guy that would marry her?)
Again, not trying to be contrarian. I just honestly don’t think that’s a good example of reverse-fridging. @69 mentioned a Jennifer Garner flick that sounds like it fits the bill. I’ve never seen it, though.
Okay, I finally gave in and borrowed Deadpool 2 from the library — the original cut, since they didn’t have the Fred Savage version. I’m still not fond of the sophomoric humor and ultraviolence, but other than that (and the waste of Morena Baccarin), it was a pretty good movie with effective character work. I particularly liked how they leaned into the Deadpool-Colossus friendship and let Colossus be more than a joke character.
Domino was fun, though they kind of made light of the revelation that she’d been raised/tortured in the mutant orphanage; there was no emotional weight to it, and I’m not sure whether that’s on the actress for not selling the emotion or the director for not telling her to, since I’ve never seen Zazie Beetz in anything else.
Zazie Beetz is in the show “Atlanta”, and she’s pretty good.
Oh, and it was cute that a lot of the other characters’ digs at Cable were with regard to a pouch on his wardrobe. Even if it was just one travel bag/fanny pack rather than a dozen useless Leifeldian pouches, they still got the joke in there.
Meanwhile, I remember enough Mythbusters experiments to know that dropping a lit cigarette into a can of liquid fuel would accomplish nothing more than putting out the cigarette. It’s not the liquid that ignites, it’s the vapor, and only if just the right ratio of vapor to air is present. Also, as a mercenary, couldn’t Wade have gotten his hands on some C4 easily enough?
I’m puzzled that Vanessa’s “Your heart is in the wrong place” didn’t really seem to have any payoff. If I hadn’t already read this review, I would’ve thought Wade’s prolonged death scene (why didn’t anyone call an ambulance?) was going to lead to the realization that he wasn’t actually dying after all because his heart was positioned anomalously (either because he had naturally enantiomorphic anatomy or had messed-up insides from all his regenerations) and the bullet had missed it. I wonder if that was the original intent and it was changed in rewrites, leaving that line as a script orphan.
I didn’t remember everything in the review, though, so I thought this was going to lead to Deadpool “preventing” Russell from killing the evil headmaster by killing the guy himself before Russell could. That is sort of what happened, but not in that order. Now I’m trying to remember what story it was where I did see that done — where the guy who’s already a hardened killer commits the murder to stop the other person from doing it and losing their innocence.
Ah, I remember that about the heart line, yeah.
@86 – Well, in Harry Potter, Dumbledore basically puts Snape up to that for a similar reason. (Sorry if I’m spoiling a book from 10+ years ago :) )
@88/Lisamarie: Hmm, I guess that qualifies, sort of, but I don’t think it’s the story I’m trying to remember.
It seems like something that Wolverine’s probably done in some story or other, but I’m not sure that’s it either. Maybe the Netflix Punisher? (If so, it would’ve had to be in Daredevil or season 1 of his own show, since I haven’t gotten around to watching season 2 yet.) There are just so many characters of that type in fiction, killers trying to redeem themselves and not wanting the people they care about to lose their innocence.
@89 – Buffy? Season 5 finale when Giles killed Glory’s human host because it needed to be done and he knew Buffy couldn’t do it.
@86 Blood Debt by Tanya Huff.
@90 & 91: It was neither of those. I’ve never even heard of the latter. It was probably a TV show or movie, and something where the character in question was your brooding, hardened killer on a redemption arc, trying to save an innocent from killing in revenge and becoming like him (or her) by killing the person before they could.
Although it sounds like that’s been done often enough that it could derail the thread if folks keep trying to guess it for me. Maybe it’s not even one thing I’m trying to remember, just the general trope feeling familiar.
She’s not the protagonist, but the woman who helps the protagonist of John Grisham’s The Firm smuggle out documents does so because his enemies had killed her husband.
@93: Um, that’s not even close.
Your review of the first one made me want to see it (still haven’t) because of Morena Baccarin’s character. Your review of this one makes me not want to see it because of the absence of Morena Baccarin’s character. I didn’t bother to read the “it’s not fridging” v “it is fridging” comments because OF COURSE it’s fridging. It doesn’t matter if the fridged character is powered or not. (OK, I read 1 comment, got irritated at it, and skipped the rest.)
@95/BillReynolds: For what it’s worth, Baccarin has a somewhat bigger presence in the film than you’d think from the description. It’s not as much as she deserved, but a decent amount of screen time for someone killed in the first reel.
Saw an ad for James Cameron’s Alita and it reminded me of fridging and this thread (I hope Alita qualifies for this watch, even though it isn’t exaaactly Western style superheroics).
I haven’t seen the movie, but in the original manga you can see Yugo’s death as being the incident that forces Alita to move on from Ido and start living her own life and discovering her own past, beginning with finding her own vocation as a motor ball athlete rather than being a bounty hunter like Ido, and finding her own place to live.
On the other hand, for long stretches of the manga, it seems almost as though Alita is used as a witness to men’s stories, rather than as the main character of her own story…. so there is that.
@97/vinsentient: I don’t think Keith’s covered any manga adaptations.
I’m not covering manga simply because I don’t know them well enough.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
“What a pity”
Shere Khan, The Jungle Book
Hmm, let’s see… There have been tons of Japanese live-action films based on manga, but not many Western ones as far as I can tell. In addition to Alita and Ghost in the Shell, there was Dragonball Evolution and Speed Racer. There was a Death Note adaptation on Netflix a couple of years ago. There were the two ’90s films based on The Guyver. According to Wikipedia, there was a Canadian-French Crying Freeman adaptation starring Mark Dacascos, and a straight-to-video Fist of the North Star. And Oldboy was a US remake of a Korean adaptation of a Japanese manga.
Of course, only a few of those could be loosely considered superhero stories.
I’ve actually seen the live-action, Western Guyver and Crying Freeman. They don’t do anybody in the cast any favours and have that made in Vancouver for ten dollars and some tax credits look. I’d hate to subject krad to them :)
@101/vinsentient: I think I rented the Guyver movies on home video long ago, and that’s my only exposure to the franchise. The first one is notable for having Mark Hamill in it, around the time that he was starting to reinvent himself as a character actor specializing in roles as far from Luke Skywalker as possible.
But sometimes I wonder if The Guyver has more prominence in the West than it seems, given how many people I’ve seen over the years who misspell the name of Richard Dean Anderson’s MacGyver as “MacGuyver.” Or maybe they’re just thinking of the word “guy.”
Ned Stark was a main character and had an entire character arc. And I’m not sure what woman his death served to motivate?
Spoiler: His daughter Arya spends the next three books muttering obsessively to herself about how she is going to find and kill the people responsible for Ned’s death. She has a list, and she goes through it every night before she goes to sleep. (Other people get added to it as well.)
@96 Not to mention that for someone who is dead, she also has a huge amount of post-death agency in her actions too. The movie could be subtitled Deadpool 2: “Vanessa tells Wade to quit fucking moping”.
Christopher, you know any examples that subvert fridging? I’m trying to look for those stories. Maybe that can help us all be better in telling our own stories!!
@105/J.U.N.O: I’m not sure what you mean by “subvert fridging.” You mean stories that avoid it, or that lampoon it in some way? I’m not sure that avoiding it even counts as subversion, since it’s just not doing it.
I guess maybe the best way to subvert the trope is, if you have to kill a female character, have it be for reasons that are about her own life and her own journey, rather than just making her a prop in a conflict between men. This is why I like the generally much-reviled “Sins Past” storyline that J. Michael Straczynski wrote in The Amazing Spider-Man in 2004. People hate it for its revelation that Gwen Stacy had an affair with Norman Osborn before he killed her, but I liked it because it reinterpreted her death — one of the iconic fridgings in comics, though it predates the term by decades — as something that happened because of her, as the culmination of her own story rather than just an angst-generating beat in Peter Parker’s story. Along similar lines, there’s the establishment of Barbara Gordon as Oracle in the comics. She wasn’t fridged, but the way the Joker paralyzed her in The Killing Joke to try to drive Commissioner Gordon mad was very much the equivalent of a fridging, something brutal done to her in a way that reduced her to a passive object used by one man to hurt another man. But later creators redeemed it by turning Barbara into Oracle and making her a unique, powerful kind of hero as a paraplegic woman, rather than just a victim.
The Young Justice TV series subverted The Killing Joke in a terrific way. In its version of the continuity, Barbara is still paralyzed, but it happens because she chooses to put herself in the path of Cassandra Cain’s sword to save her from becoming a killer when she’s sent to kill the Joker. So Babs becomes the one with agency, acting to save another female character’s soul, and the Joker is the passive target.
I suppose another subversion would be for the target of an attempted fridging to defend herself and either escape the villain or defeat him herself. I can’t think of a specific example of that, but I’m sure it’s been done.
Do you have examples from your own work? I’m trying to look for examples from poeple I admire. I’ve been around these forums for the past few months and your blog as well
Would Atlanna in Aquaman count? That’s mostly what I was thinking of: someone who dies but TWIST! they return at the final moments stronger than ever to beat the villain. Dead Man Defrosting for women B)
That’s just a hypothetical I made up, I haven’t read any stories where that happened but that seems like an interesting way of subverting expectations.
Damn, Sins Past. That’s just undignified. Though I, too liked, that YJ subversion