Boyfriends In Refrigerators

Has anybody totally subverted Women In Refrigerators yet?

Action Girl battles supervillians, the mob, demons, vampires, etc. And she never gets touched.

The reason why she never gets touched is that every issue has exactly the same plot:

• AG meets a new guy while saving him from monsters.
• They get close.
• They agree to go on a date.
• When she arrives at the date site, she discovers monsters laughing over his sexually mutilated corpse.
• Congratulations, they've discovered her Berserk Button.

Rinse and repeat the next issue. (Perhaps just a limited series?)

Are we asking about a subversion (the boyfriend/girlfriend is never harmed) or inversion (the boyfriend of an Action Girl is the one who gets killed)?

Sounds like an inversion, and I have yet to see one.

Yes, inversion, sorry.

So plotting this out, the issues would be:

• In the fridge.
• Gay rape, suicide response.
• Chest Burster
• Jealous girl shreds him.
• Mind Rape, zombinfication or whatever. AG has to take him down herself. Final issue?

On second thought, the fans will all complain that the creators are dumping on her, because she's a girl. So just forget it. Sorry.

edited 18th Aug '11 1:23:24 PM by hcobb

It is still an incredible cheap way of providing drama by proxy, bad writing, so why would you even want to do it? And a whole series based on that? Who would read crap like that?

edited 18th Aug '11 8:03:58 PM by eX

Why does it have to be gay rape? Because Rape Is Okay When It Is Female On Male?

In any case, I can think of one particular comic book story in which a male character was raped by a jealous female character, just to piss his girlfriend off. Unfortunately, I can't think of what book it was...

edited 18th Aug '11 9:11:49 PM by KingZeal

The entire point is to yank out all of the comic book gender tropes, invert them, and plug them back in to eleven. Man on man rape is the only kind that gets to skip any female element. It's 100% GIR free, right?

But there must be no gender confusion, in order to avoid diluting the tropes. So AG has a reasonable body shape "female athlete" and dresses sensibly. How about a cowgirl in jeans, buttoned up western shirt, leather jacket, cowboy boots and cowboy hat. That's perfectly feminine and a bit of an American fetish. It's not even considered crossdressing anymore. The point is that she's never exposed, never abused and never even suffers clothing damage.

Her short-lived boyfriends will all dress absurdly, but in totally male fashions. Say a Scotsman in a kilt, brawny faux action boy who never buttons his shirt, and even the Elegant Gothic Lolita is a boy dressed in a fancy version of male Victorian age clothing.

And even with all of this, the complaint would be that she's being treated poorly, because she's a girl. That's because the double standard judgement call is coming from inside the heads of the fans.

That bit about male elegant ghotic lolita reminded me of a bit I'm gonna put in one story. Action Girl wants to train under great martial arts master, but he, playing Dirty Old Man, says that he will train her only if she will have sex with him in return or defeat his currentl girlfriend, who is Elegand Gothic Lolita. She picks up latter, fights and wins, but ends with five broken bones. And then she finds out old master is gay, his girlfriend is a crossdresser and she got trolled.

I have no idea what you are talking about here.

By GIR I meant Women In Refrigerators of course, in the sense of Girlfriends in Refrigerators.

The bias is to see the refrigerators as being more than half full of women when the truth is much less than that.

I don't get the "invert and plug them back in to eleven" bit. What's the point of that?

... Huh? Female-on-male rape portrayed as not okay defies gender roles more, IMO.

The Women In Refrigerators thesis is that in the comic books, women are treated as:

• Weak
• Over emotional
• Mental cases
• Evil
• Needing protection, etc.

So all I am saying is completely avoid that in a series, apply the "bad tropes" to the other gender and it's still women as victims day. This is because the double standard is largely in the eyes of the beholders.

Not really. Reversing a stereotype doesn't undo the stereotype. It just creates a new stereotype.

It's like when somebody doesn't like Humans Are Special and replaces it with Humans Sucks, which, in my opinion, can either end with humanity being destroyed or near extinction, fighting hopeless battle for survival, or turned into race of anti sues (Former is okay, latter not so much).

Maybe if it were played totally for laughs. No drama, no angst, unless the angst leads to a punchline or is so completely unrelated to her situation that it could still be laughed at. I refuse to invest in anymore moody "deconstructions", "medium commentaries" or "Satires" that forget humor.

I'm against the people in refigerators tropes in general. They've really been overplayed to the point that if anyone dies in anything ever, it can be called a fridging.

I curse the day that Gail Simone came up with that term. Curse her!

Well you must admit that it does have a certain

== Pun ==

== Evasion ==

== Space ==

Fridge logic to it...

Y'know, it might be nice to see more characters react to a Stuffed in the Fridge incident the way Austin Powers did:

edited 21st Aug '11 3:29:50 AM by RavenWilder

A word of clarification: Women In Refrigerators is not a trope, at least not one recognized by this very wiki. Our Women In Refrigerators article is about Gail Simone's website of that name. The relevant trope is Stuffed into the Fridge or Disposable Woman.

edited 21st Aug '11 1:09:07 PM by MetaFour

Okay, but the fact still stands that Simone created this whole fridge thing & (un)willingly made it into the annoyance that it is today.

And That's Terrible.

Eh, it was just putting a name to the pre-existing tendency for Disposable Women to be, well, women, which is a pretty obnoxious trope to start off with.

Yes, and that is somewhat understandable. Somewhat. But what W.I.R. failed to realize is that it isn't just women who die to get a plot going or something like that, it focused on the Barbra Gordon's and Alex Dewitt's and forgot the Jason Todd's and Uncle Ben's. And by the time people realized this, the fridge trope gained such infamous notoriety as being a sexist trope that the attempts to include men merely caused it to become bloated and all-inclusive, much like the Mary Sue tropes.

But you still see areas that the Japanese have conquered, where the Americans dread to tread.

For example: Death by Origin Story subversion.

Hero's mom dies when he's very young and this leaves him an emotional wreak, unable to support the girls in his life when they really need him.

The twist? His mom has actually been there all the time, protecting him from beyond the grave.

Name that really really famous Anime and note the lack of a matching comic book.

Well, it does technically have a manga (or comic book, as you say). It's just not complete yet.