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.
Yes, this.
do those numbers change when you don't count villians?
How do you count that, tho? How about Jonathon? Or Ben?
I would count it by last known activity. Ben=bad guy. Jonathan=not bad guy. I figure it would vary, but, on the whole, with additions and subtractions based on personal preference, probably balance out. More or less.
I agree. Categorizing them as what they were when they died is all that makes sense. I mean, we all start out good, or at least assumed to be good, at birth. We accept switching, when someone turns
bad,
so I think we have to accept it, when someone turns good, even if it the turn only actualizes minutes before death. Jonathan wanted to help when he died, right? I haven't done much rewatching of S7, but remember noble!pre-death!speech on the hellmouth seal.
Or, have a grey-hat category.
In my plan, they're hatless.
Heh. See, at first I thought "This is the kind of obsessive thing I do that makes people back away from me slowly," and then I remembered where I was and knew it would be okay.
Yeah. Here? We're liable to send you a tiara, Strega.
Gunn's not dead. Gunn's dying, but he's not dead.
Yes. This is canon. And well, people
think
he's dying, and Illyria
thinks
he's dying. Illyria also used to listen to plants.
Look! A pyramid!
I did start marking good/evil (although as noted, that got tricky) and my vague impression was that it didn't skew things too much. But I'm not sure how thorough I was in sorting by different criteria.
Hatlessness aside, I think "iffy" can be a category. I wouldn't count human (BtVS) Harmony as a villain. She was just conceited and snobby. I think the only ones who get put in the villain pile are the killer characters, and/or the characters who wanted to be killers/criminals/doers of other evil. I don't think being mean makes a character a villain. Similarly, had all three nerds died at the end of S6, I'd have put them in my villain pile. It would have hurt to put Jonathan there. But I would have. I'm very strict.
Schroedinger's Gunn?
[added whitefont just in case]
brenda, just so.
It's a box of AUs for fic writers to open. Possibly Pandora's, depending who's opening it.
whitefont just in case.
Riley was in the credits for S5. They used that cool shot of him through the glass table in restless...
And the second half of season 4 after Oz left.
It just occurred to me that A:TS didn't kill off a single recurring (as opposed to main credits) female character who wasn't a villain. Kate, Virginia, Gwen, Anne/Lilly/Chanterelle, Nina - they all got to walk away.
They also let Harmony, Justine and Eve (unless she stayed in the W&H when it came down) get away, but they were all gray enough that I put them alongside Lillah and Darla.
I find that I'm much more prone to, be it TV or comics, get crankier about qualitative stuff regarding deaths than quantitative.
Yes, this.
To me a death where the character doesn't stay dead does not count, which takes Buffy, Spike, Angel and Connor off the list. Neither does the death of a villain, like Warren or Glory, or one of a truly minor character like Larry. Those deaths may have some impact, but they were not extensively mourned on the show.
Using that subjective criteria, I come up with a list of female deaths that matter consisting of Jenny, Joyce, Tara, Anya, Darla, Lilah, Cordelia and Fred. Male deaths that mattered were Jesse, Jonathan, Doyle and Wesley. That's eight to four/possibly three, depending on how you count Jesse -- I think of him as a redshirt. And while Doyle and Wesley both had heroic deaths, only Anya (and, arguably, Jenny and Darla) got that privilege from the list of women.
I'd give Darla a heroic death--well, the last time--but not Jenny. She didn't die wussy, but she didn't die for a reason either.
Riley was in the credits for S5. They used that cool shot of him through the glass table in restless...
"We're the government, baby -- it's what we do."
I think Darla had an extremely heroic death for someone most of whose time was spent being a villain. I mean, there are two classes of villain -- the ones we get inside of (Darla, Lilah, Jonathan, Faith if she'd died S3) and the ones with whom we have less intimacy. Darla definitely skews to the "did a million bad things, many of which were onscreen" side of that countinuum.
Oh, and Angel didn't die. It's a thing.
