9 Problems Nobody Wants To Admit About The Arrowverse
8. It Always Sticks Women In The Fridge
Although Supergirl has set about righting this wrong in the weeks and months since it arrived in the Arrowverse, it's true that the CW's various superhero series have frequently perpetuated one of the comic book medium's most damaging tropes: sticking women in refrigerators.
The term, coined by a bunch of comics journalists and writers in the late nineties, denotes the trope in which a writer de-powers, kills or maims a female character as a plot device in order to derive drama from a particular scenario. Arrow's writing team obviously didn't get the memo that said device still isn't looked upon all that highly these days, as no less than six of the Arrowverse's leading women have been axed off since 2012.
Moira Queen, Sarah and Laurel Lance, Shado, Amanda Waller and Samantha (mother to Connor) have all been killed, and even now Thea's in a coma. It's just embarrassing, and while there are obviously plenty of deceased males littered across the CW's ever expanding graveyard of wasted talents, their deaths are rarely used as a reductive measure to extrapolate onscreen melodrama, as they're typically series villains anyway.
The universe's obsession with death as a whole is beyond tedious no matter how you look at it, and - almost five years on from that original debut - things don't look any closer to changing.