Will A Major Female Character Die in “Death of the Family”?

An offhand comment made by Gail Simone on Twitter has us wondering: is it possible that her firing off the Batgirl title could have been the result of a disagreement with editorial over the decision to kill a female character in order to pump up Batman in the currently-ongoing crossover story Death of the Family?A little background: one of Simone’s most famous (or infamous, depending upon your view) early accomplishments was establishing the website Women in Refrigerators, which examined the way Simone felt female supporting cast members and even superheroines were often offered up as sacrifices in order to motivate the men in their lives or make them seem more impressive.Simone wrote at the time, “An important point: This isn’t about assessing blame about an individual story or the treatment of an individual character and it’s certainly not about personal attacks on the creators who kindly shared their thoughts on this phenomenon. It’s about the trend, its meaning and relevance, if any. Plus, it’s just fun to talk about refrigerators with dead people in them. I don’t know why.”So it wasn’t all that surprising when fellow comics writer Mike Nelson, responding to news of Simone’s firing, asked her jokingly, “Did you not put enough women in refrigerators or something?”. What was a little odder, perhaps, was Simone’s cryptic response: “Funny you should say that.”A few options have been offered by fans on social media and message boards for the comment, including that DC kicked her off Batgirl to shunt her over to Kyle Rayner’s comic, Green Lantern: New Guardians. Rayner (pictured above) is the character whose girlfriend was literally killed and stuffed in a refrigerator, thus naming the trope Simone is critical of. Neither of those is particularly likely.What’s more likely, it seems, is that Simone was asked or instructed to kill a female character in order to give some “punch” to the Death of the Family event and found the death to be shallow and meaningless, contributing to the problem she’s long been critical of.There are three candidates we can think of…