Jenny and Joyce also both didn't seem so much like going down fighting, and they were two of the other big deaths for the series.

You could make the argument with Jenny, but you have to abstract it. And if she had really thought of herself as actively in battle, surely she would have been working someplace a little more out of the line of fire.

On Joyce, don't get me wrong, I get what was being done with killing her. But it does add to the pattern.

I have a hard time coming up with male characters in Buffy that COULD have been killed.

Xander, like Willow, is one of the unkillables. They poked out his eye, though.

Oz could have been killed, but it would have caused a completely different dynamic in Willow that would have made Season Four quite different. Him LEAVING was necessary for that arc.

Riley should have died. maybe. But the same thing with the arc holds here, too. Only with Buffy instead of Willow. If he had died, we might have got a nice revenge thing out of Buffy, though, but that would have completely ignored the fact that their relationship was always boring. Him leaving worked better for that. The revenge arc worked much better with Willow/Tara a year later, because their relationship always struck a chord of actually working.

Angel did die. Didn't stay that way, I admit, but the pain-causing of it was still there for us to feel all bad about. Sometimes I wish they had left him dead, then I remember that I liked Season 3, and five seasons of Angel, so I let it go.

They could have let Giles die at the end of Season 6. It would have hurt like hell, and Willow would probably never have recovered, but it could have been done. I just don't think they'd want to kill 2 semi-major characters in the space of three episodes.

The fact that they mostly killed the girls in Angel is a bit harder to justify, as it's an almost exclusively male show, but they did kill Doyle. And, well, in that show the girls were the ones that could cause the most pain, the most emotion, by dying, I think. Excepting maybe Wesley (and always excepting the protagonist). And I think Wesley needed to stick around just as Willow and Xander did (though I would have said the same about Cordy until they killed her character. Before they actually killed her, I mean.)

I dunno. I think I would have made the same choices, honestly. And I don't consider myself sexist. Maybe it's their love for females that causes them to do it - they want to cause suffering in the emotions of their viewers, and they assume that their viewers are most emotionally invested in the girls. I know I always was.

Angel didn't die.

And Joss has said that Oz would have died if Willow had been dating him at that time.

Oz could have been killed, but it would have caused a completely different dynamic in Willow that would have made Season Four quite different. Him LEAVING was necessary for that arc.

Actually Seth Green's desire to leave make the arc necessary. He wasn't supposed to leave. And supposedly, eventually, the Oz character would have been killed, to turn Willow into Dark!Willow.

At which time?

ETA: Nubbermind.

At which time?

At the time when Tara bought it -- the precise identity of the corpse was secondary, as Cindy says, to turning Willow. It was the role the corpse had played that was key.

Nova, I think season 5 (which was going to happen to Tara, with the remnants of Dark-Willow in the actual arc. They ended up putting that off a year.).

Yeah, I can see that.

So they wanted to kill a guy character, they just didn't get the opportunity. Teehee.

I look at it from the standpoint that the (good) women* go down fighting.

Define fighting, then. Because of the four listed (Tara, Anya, Cordelia, Fred), only Anya went down fighting as *I* define fighting. Tara was, as mentioned, collateral damage. Cordelia got her ghostly visit thanks to the PTB, to help out "her" guy (I don't remember the word-for-word of it, and am too lazy to look it up). We've gone into, at the time of airing, the complete lack of agency for Fred.

Contrast that to the main men we saw go down (both on AtS, mind): Doyle, going to his doom to save others; and Wesley, wounded in battle. Even Gunn, whom we do not see die on screen, but whom we are told is mortally wounded, holds up for one last step into battle.

Oh, what the hell, any excuse to make a spreadsheet...

There were 56 regular or recurring characters on Buffy. At least according to TV Tome's list, which seemed slightly arbitrary, but it's close enough for this. 21 are women, and 11 of them died on the show. I'm counting Buffy (but just once) and I've got no idea if Chao Ann died or not. Of the 35 men listed, at least 18 died; there were a couple minor characters I wasn't sure about. (Personally, I'd make it 19 and count Angel as dying, too, because that was certainly the emotional impact even if he wasn't killed.)

Angel obviously had fewer women in recurring roles, but of 14 women, 5 died. Of 22 men, 15 died. (Wowie.)

I don't think it's that more women die, it's that more of the women are important, and their deaths have more impact on the audience and the other characters. So we remember them. And I agree with NovaChild that there are fewer men whose deaths would have had that same impact. The men are often cannon fodder. Or get killed by Buffy.