Story structure
Damsel in distress
A narrative device in which one or more men must rescue a woman who has been kidnapped or placed in other peril.
The damsel in distress is "a narrative device in which one or more men must rescue a woman who has been kidnapped or placed in other peril," typically a beautiful, high-status young woman, often a princess. The lineage is long: Andromeda chained to the rock for Perseus, the princess-and-dragon of the Saint George legend, the rescues of medieval chivalric romance (the phrase descends from the French demoiselle en détresse), Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty, the Gothic novel, silent-film serials, Fay Wray in King Kong, and video games from Donkey Kong's Pauline to Princess Peach, called the "quintessential damsel in distress" by Time.
The criticism is now part of the term: feminist critics read the trope as perpetuating "regressive and patronizing myths about women," and writers from Angela Carter to Jane Yolen have subverted it. The pattern still powers genre fiction, and the rescued woman as the apex of a love triangle between rescuer and villain is a standard staging; horror's deliberate inversion is the final girl, the woman left standing who does the confronting.