spellbinding storytelling: schrodinger's trope

this blog post will contain spoilers for the film deadpool 2 and various other films.

so, tropes. we love them, we hate them, we complain about them, we write them, and ultimately we know that they are unavoidable. storytelling is a derivative medium. personally, i love a good tropefest, but some things need to be put to rest. one of these tired out tropes is a little something called 'fridging'. to 'fridge' a character is kill them to advance the plot of another character. generally, the fridged character is a woman, killed to push along a father, brother, or lover. examples of this can be found everywhere. popular tv drama supernatural, for example, hangs its entire premise on fridging mary winchester. another famous example is gwen stacy, who dies in basically every run of spider-man she has ever existed in. then there's rachel in the dark knight rises, the mom in the most recent godzilla film, and particularly offensively the pacific rim sequel kills off mako mori.

in deadpool 2, they fridge vanessa. but, i can hear you all yelling already, they subverted it! they talked about it being wrong! wade saves her in the mid credit scene! they brought her back!

here's a thought: does subverting a trope count if the story still depends on it, still benefits from it?

yes, deadpool 2 addresses the concept of fridging. wade wilson himself looks into the fourth wall and basically calls it bullshit.

but the film still kills vanessa. the film still has wade wilson spend an entire film spurred on by the death of his girlfriend. she is the motivation for all his actions, everything he does in the film hinges on that.

until they hit us with that mid credit scene, and then everything is all better. she didn't die, he saved her, but the film still followed all the same plot points. i guess this is supposed to make us realize wade would have grown on his own, made the right decision on his own, but you know what that scene said to me?

'we didn't have to kill this woman and we did it anyway'

by bringing her back and maintaining the rest of the plot, deadpool 2 tells us vanessa's death didn't actually matter. wade wilson would have made every decision in that movie even if vanessa had lived. and this is supposed to be a comfort? of subversion of a bullshit sexist trope?

if anything, it makes her death feel even more egregious. they know the trope is outdated, overdone, and sexist. they know they can write the film without it, vanessa's time travel resurrection proves it. they knew those things and chose to kill her off anyway. knowing it didn't need to happen, knowing how it was going to come off.

that's not subversion. that's just doing something shitty and afterwards having a good laugh about what a shitty thing it was to do. you know what would have been subversion? if wade wilson stopped it from happening in the first place, made a speech about fridging while preventing vanessa's death, and then the movie could have continued. he could have made all those choices anyway, without a dead girlfriend as motivation. it would have been a better and more interesting movie.

tropes are not bad, inherently, they are a necessary tool for storytelling. but we have to think critically about which ones we use, and when, and how. and we need to hold narratives accountable for claiming to 'subvert' shitty tropes, when all they're really doing is slapping a big label on it saying 'this is bad and we did it anyway'.