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Dammit, we're out of misogyny! Pass the Sunny D instead, will ya?

Bad Things happen to heroes and their supporting cast. Superhero comics are no different. Characters get hurt, traumatized, maimed, and killed all the time, for a variety of reasons.

For supporting characters, those reasons can range from illustrating villains' evil, to motivating the heroes, or to giving those characters themselves a chance to overcome their victimization (if they're still alive, and that might not be a problem either in superhero stories).

However, there's one obvious distinction that seems to affect how this sort of drama plays out in comics: whether the supporting character is male or female. When Bad Things happen, especially in the last decade or two, they happen disproportionately — and in a disproportionately ugly way, including brutal rapes and murders — to women. Worse, female characters often seem to suffer these slings and arrows simply to upset male superheroes and give them motivation to defeat the villain — i.e., to do their jobs.

Even among the superheroic supporting cast of a story, a female character is more likely to suffer permanent consequences due to villains' machinations or from a fight — and in settings where concerns like paralyzation, depowering, or death can often be disposed of by the end of an issue, these problems more often stick to a female character.

Main characters aren't immune to this Double Standard, either. For example, Superman has been depowered, power-shifted, and dosed with a spectrum of colored kryptonite throughout his history. However, he never gave up his powers for an extended period of time, continued trying to fight evil as a secret agent, and had to be frequently rescued by Lois Lane, complete with a scantily-dressed and bound Clark on covers; DC left that to Wonder Woman, years back.

Now, few people suggest that comics writers in general have it in for women. Supporting characters are supporting characters, after all — being imperiled or suffering so as to affect the main character is part of their job description. Many C List Fodder heroes are female, making them handy when cheap deaths are called for, particularly in big events. Most heroes are male, so certain roles in their personal supporting casts, particularly love interests, tend to be women. Further, Bad Things happening to women strikes many people as more dramatically powerful.

However, putting aside all the sexist aspects of those very causes, they unavoidably add up to women tending to suffer and die much more cheaply — and worse, less heroically — than men in superhero comics.

Trope named for the website and a jarring example of the trope from Green Lantern.

Note: Examples for this trope should not include every major misfortune of a female character in a story, and especially not tragedies among a mostly-female cast. In some cases the narrative in question actually benefits from the maiming or death, as in the case of Gwen Stacy's death or Barbara Gordon's rebirth as Oracle. This trope comes into play when the woman in question is not just killed, but devalued in some fundamental way (note how many of these characters die in the kitchen after attempting to stand side by side with their male counterparts). In other words a cheap, gruesome, often sexually humiliating death which serves no purpose other than to motivate a male character and is just as quickly forgotten in future story arcs. Also note that the character need not die to qualify; many female superheroes end up raped, traumatized, mutilated, brainwashed or psychologically scarred in ways rarely visited upon male superheroes.


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