Accusing showrunners of killing a strong female character just to further the storyline of a male character she's close to, a group of over 24,000 fans are petitioning AMC to bring Beth Greene back to The Walking Dead.
The accusation should sound familiar to comic book fans; award-winning writer Gail Simone, whose Secret Six #1 was released last Wednesday, began her career in comics not as a writer, but as a blogger criticizing that very phenomenon.
Founding the website Women in Refrigerators -- a reference to the way Green Lantern's girlfriend was killed in a then-recent story -- Simone called attention to the plight of female characters being treated more as props than as characters.
Whether that's a fair assessment of what happened to Beth is up for debate, but one thing is clear: the outcry surrounding the character's death has been pretty loud, and many fans feel she was dismissed, or that her death was needless or anticlimactic.
The petition goes on to acknowledge that it would be difficult to bring someone back on a show like The Walking Dead, but also said that on television, "anything is possible."
The series has already wrapped principal photography on Season Five, of course, so it's unlikely a petition would be able to sway the present-day storyline.
Nevertheless, fans of the character and the actress shouldn't count out the possibility of a flashback-style return, which isn't unprecedented on the series.
The petition also notes that Beth's Season Two suicide attempt and subsequent journey of self-realization made her an inspirational figure to fans who saw her as someone they could relate to.
