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January 26, 2023

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So what about dead boyfriends?

January 6, 2023

Whenever I explain the DFGRR to a new person, I inevitably get one of two potential reactions:

a) "Sounds cool! Who are your contestants? Which genres do you cover?"

b) "Aren't there female characters whose boyfriends all die? Your blog sounds sexist."

In honor of/to spite everyone in B camp, therefore, I've decided to research the Dead Fictional Boyfriends of American media. My first step was to pull up the Cartwright Curse page on TV Tropes and skim through the TV section for the names of women whose boyfriends tend to bite it. There are a handful, as it turns out, including:

  1. Samantha Carter of Stargate SG-1 (1997-2007), Stargate Atlantis (2004-2009), and Stargate Universe (2009-2011)
  2. Maggie O'Connell of Northern Exposure (1990-1995)
  3. Buffy Summers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003)

Interestingly, however, each of those curse descriptions comes with a caveat.

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MacGyver: How to Kill A Girlfriend with a Hairpin and a Piece of Duct Tape

October 25, 2022

Wait, they only hired 1 woman in season 3 and just had her play all the roles? That's something that a parody of a TV show should do!

- My husband, after reading about Elyssa Davalos in my last MacGyver post

Welcome, dear readers, to Part II of my MacGyver analysis, in which we will finally learn how many women MacGyver narrowly saves using hastily improvised contraptions...and of course, how many girlfriends he fails to save. Let us begin with a few words on...

The Character

Carol Varnay: Do something.

MacGyver: What?

Carol: You're the one who picked the embassy lock with a lightbulb filament and ground-up pencil lead. You're also the one who shorted an alarm system with a chewing gum wrapper and a half a lemon. Come ON!

- "For Love Or Money" (1987-05-04)

MacGyver has a heart of gold, a lot of random knowledge, and strong improvisational skills. He is, in fact, a man after my own heart, and I choose to believe that he'd be a DFGRR reader if he were real.

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Women Will Die: Requiem for Roe v. Wade

June 27, 2022

[Author's Note: This entry was originally written June 27, 2022. I have added updated 2023 information in brackets, where relevant. The first and most important update is this: women have died.]

My friends, I assume you have heard that the Supreme Court of the United States has overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating the federal case law that required states to legalize abortion until fetal viability - a 50-year-old precedent. You probably know that abortion is now fully illegal in 9 states, with at least 12 others poised to follow suit, and the situation is shifting day by day.

[2023 update: abortion is now banned in 14 states, and severely restricted in 6 others. An additional 9 states have attempted to ban abortion but been blocked in the courts. Source]

It is not my place to claim any particular insight into the issues surrounding pregnancy, motherhood, and abortion. I'm a practicing Catholic, and an opponent of the death penalty, and a registered organ donor, and a regular fixture at my local blood bank, so I'm in favor of saving lives whenever possible. But I'm not a person who has ever been pregnant. So you may very well not be interested in what I've got to say, and that's OK. Come back next post when we're back to the funny stuff. I'll be here.

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Pride Month Special

June 19, 2022

Happy Pride Month, my friends! June is a good time to do many things, but especially to reflect on the resilience and awesomeness of the LGBTQ+ community - as well as the question of why they still have to take so much shit from the world.

This blog is not specifically about LGBTQ+ issues, and yet...

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I'm on a podcast!

May 13, 2022

Greetings, #DFGRR enthusiasts! A few months ago, the Making Fun of MacGyver podcast invited me onto their show to discuss the dead women in MacGyver. Today, I had the honor to guest-host an episode with them. Check it out!


About

Male protagonists of long-running franchises tend to be unlucky in love, by which I mean their girlfriends tend to die. The Dead Fictional Girlfriends Research Report tracks and analyzes this phenomenon - its causes, its prevalence, and its implications for the world of entertainment (and beyond).

Ongoing Features