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So action movies that use the murdered wife and daughter trope don’t just harmlessly use a theatrical device, they also contribute to the lack of representation of females in the media. According to the BBC in 2018, more than half of the films named Best Picture in the Oscars failed this test. The infamous Bechdel Test questions whether a film includes two speaking female characters that discuss something other than a man. Lack of female representation in Hollywood and the videogame industry is well documented, and problematic. But I do think that this trope is something to be treated with caution. Tropes are nothing new, and not necessarily something bad – sometimes they can be comical, and even endearing. Is this what the public wants to see? While it’s common knowledge that the nuclear family dynamic is on the decline, is this really the way we want it portrayed? Why does media that portrays women as silenced and fragile do so well? Why are movies where women are used as plot devices heralded so much more than movies that have developed female characters?Įvery genre has associated tropes, so is a dead wife and daughter motivating a male protagonist just an example of this? Marvel’s ‘The Punisher’ (based on the comics) was nominated for ten awards, winning Best New Media Superhero Series.
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Popular children’s books ‘Skulduggery Pleasant’ spends the fourteen-book series searching for justice from the villains who stole away his wife and daughter, during which the author won eight awards, as well as being nominated for a further two. In 2001 when the game was released, it won no less than twenty gaming awards, including a BAFTA. Hard assed ex-DEA Agent with a murdered wife and daughter. Let’s take some more examples: Max Payne.
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Guardians of the Galaxy was also the highest grossing superhero movie of 2014. For instance, Guardians of the Galaxy features Drax - everyone’s favourite muscled, literal, red tattooed alien – whose wife and daughter ( unnamed) were murdered, obliging Drax to spend the rest of the movie reaping revenge. The answer here lies not in the fact that I found thirty examples after a cursory glance at Google, but in how popular and highly grossing these films are. What would Die Hard be without a German villain? What would Bridget Jones Diary be without a guy telling Bridget he likes her “just the way she is”? Would anyone really watch the Scream movies without an obscene amount of spurting ketchup blood? Some tropes just come with a genre, and maybe murdered wives and children is just a necessary trope of action movies.Īre there lots of movies where the sole motivation for our protagonist is the murder of the women in their lives (who are typically considered to be dependants of our chiselled action hero)? Or have there just been so many movies that anything can seem like a pattern? Sometimes it’s an almost integral part of the experience. Secondly, every genre has some associated tropes. That doesn’t mean that the trope is common, only that a lot of movies have been made with lazy writing.
However, what I struggle with here is figuring out if this trope is even a problem.įirstly, there have been so many thousands of films made, that you can probably find a few hundred that have the same origin story. See the bottom of this article for the list of examples I could find that use this trope. This harrowing experience is then used as an excuse for our male protagonist to throw his fists into the air, whilst screaming “Nooooo!”īut more importantly, the murders of these women will then be used to justify another 108 minutes (in the case of Once Upon a Time In Mexico) of our champion rampaging the streets, shooting baddies, and walking coolly away from explosions. Often we never even see the wife and child (unless you count their mangled corpses), or even catch their names. This gruesome plot device involves a male protagonist’s wife and child - usually daughter - being murdered. If you’ve seen any of the above, then you’re already familiar with the trope we’re about to dissect.
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So everyone recognises at least one of the above, right? We’ve got a few movies in there, some TV shows, a handful of video games, even a beloved Shakespeare play. Law Abiding Citizen, Guardians of the Galaxy, The Mentalist, X Men, Apocalypse, Macbeth, Max Payne, The Punisher, Final Fantasy 4, CIS, Twilight Zone.