Uncanny X-Men Writer Gail Simone Claims Male Comic Creators Harmed Female Characters Because Of "Breakup Or Divorce"

Uncanny X-Men writer Gail Simone loves to court controversy on her social media posts, and now she’s posited that many comic writers killed off superhero girlfriends because they “had just gone through a breakup or divorce.”

Last year, Marvel Comics relaunched the entire X-Men line to try to reset lagging sales for what were once their bestselling books. Gail Simone was tapped to write Uncanny X-Men, the line's flagship title in the process.

Gail Simone is known as a feminist and is somewhat of a troll on social media to court controversy through her postings and grow her following, which has been effective over the years. She gained much of her notoriety in 1999 by coining the term “fridging” for “women in refrigerators” as a literary trope in fiction where female characters face more harm than their male counterparts.

She created a “Women in Refrigerators” website. She called the situation sexism in pop culture, though it was really a trend in the 1990s to up the danger and violence in books by harming supporting characters, most of whom happened to be female in a male-dominated superhero market.

Though it was simply about supporting characters falling to harm, Gail Simone harped on fridging because of a recent Ron Marz penned Green Lantern book where the villain stuffed his girlfriend into a refrigerator after killing her, which the character opened his fridge and reacted with shock. Again, it was very clearly just an edgy shock value removal of a supporting character that had little to do with sexism, but it was used to propel Gail Simone’s career to new heights to “combat” such stories.

Ron Marz said at the time, “To me the real difference is less male-female than main character-supporting character. In most cases, main characters, 'title' characters who support their own books, are male. ... the supporting characters are the ones who suffer the more permanent and shattering tragedies. And a lot of supporting characters are female."

He elaborated, “I created her [Alexandra DeWitt] with the intention of having her be murdered at the hands of Major Force. I took a lot of care in building her as a character, because I wanted her to be liked and her death to mean something to the readers. I wanted readers to be horrified at the crime, and to empathize with Kyle's loss. Her death was meant to bring brutal realization to Kyle that being GL [Green Lantern] wasn't fun and games. It was also meant to sever his links with his old life, paving the way for his move to New York. And ultimately I wanted her death to be memorable and illustrate just how truly heinous Major Force was. Thus the fridge.”

Regardless of this explanation, Simone continued on this crusade that it was somehow a factor of sexism. Now, she’s doubled down on X while talking about the situation.

She started talking about the X-Men and not fridging, saying, “think this is an interesting topic. If writers write certain characters as assholes for years, is it really surprising if readers start to loathe those characters? I feel like this is the case with Xavier, Reed, a lot of authority and father figures in particular.”

To which a fan asked, “Too many writers projecting their daddy issues onto the characters?”

Here, she tied it back into men’s sexism claiming it was because of divorce situations with the writers, “I do wonder about this, sometimes. Like, the big secret of Women In Refrigerators is how MANY of the writers of those stories had just gone through a breakup or divorce. It was a LOT, some even confessed that was part of the reason for those stories.”

This seems in direct contradiction to what Marz said was a story element that had nothing to do with the character’s sex.

What do you think of Gail Simone bringing back fridging? Leave a coment and let us know.

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