fridge
verb
to kill/harm a character (in a movie, show, etc.) to motivate another
What does fridge mean?
To fridge a (usually female) character in a movie, television show, comic book, etc., is to kill them off or seriously harm/abuse/violate them in some way (as a writer) for the purposes of motivating or furthering the development of another (usually male) character. Fridging is considered, and widely criticized as, a storytelling cliché.
Examples of fridge
Nat and Gamora getting Fridged was the MCUs greatest sin
—@ToXieRat, X (formerly Twitter), 19 May 2025
call me petty but I'm still annoyed that the first female dr protagonist got fridged for another guy
—Fridging a woman solely for the emotional growth of a male character is beyond unacceptable at this point, and boring to boot.
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Where does fridge come from?
This use of fridge is attributed to comics/television/novel writer Gail Simone, who in 1999 published a list of over 100 comic book characters, all women, who were killed, injured, tortured, etc., on a website called “Women in Refrigerators.” The website’s name comes from an issue of a Green Lantern comic in which the superhero finds that his girlfriend has been murdered by a villain and stuffed into a refrigerator.
How is fridge used?
Fridge is used like any other regular verb, with regular inflections: fridges, fridging, fridged. The noun fridging is used for an example of a character being treated this way.
Viggo Mortensen seems fully aware of the dangers of “fridging”—that cinematic trope whereby violence befalling a woman becomes a man’s motivation to action—so he wisely subverts it in his sophomore feature as writer/director.
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