>>126558682I think it's mostly a problem if it's done a whole lot. Like creating a female character with the intention they're just going to exist to be killed off to further the protagonist's isn't necessarily bad writing on its own and could be implemented well into a story, but if it's happening all the time across the entire industry, then it's probably worth mentioning/attempting to avoid.
Like I honestly don't know how much this actually happened in comics at the time so it's possible some of Simone etc.'s complaints were exaggerated. I also think it's possible "fridging" is maybe used too specifically nowadays by some people to refer to almost any female character's death. But it still seems to happen a lot.
And for an example of something that I think might legitimately apply to the term since it's a subject I actually know really well: the Castlevania game series arguably fell into the fridging trope too much across a really short period of time, i.e. there's like five instances from that series over ~10 years I can think of off the top of my head where a character's motivation is "I'm getting revenge because my wife/girlfriend died/was killed." Always female characters, and typically characters that only existed offscreen and didn't do much anyway. It does have the problem of making these characters just feel like the writing props they obviously are.
Now, I'm not saying this to shit on Castlevania, but more to say that I think that trope happens a hell of a lot within that series alone, so I can see how someone might see it as too prevalent within an entire industry/media in general. Arguably Castlevania somewhat mitigates this by having a bunch of female protagonists so it's not like all the women in the games only exist for men, but I'm sure the same goes for comics as well.
tl;dr I think it is an actual thing, but it's probably more of a problem when looked at as a whole across media than in one specific instance looked at in isolation
