Supernatural body count

[fishpatrol]

I should be working right now, so this is just a quickie drive-by post...

Given the nature of several posts I've come across today, I got curious and wondered just how many male vs female characters have been killed off.


I'm seeing quite a few comments along the lines of "it's always the women being killed off in Supernatural" and etc in response to Jo and Ellen's death. (As an aside: it was a very touching scene -- I admit it, I cried even though I anticipated it). As I was washing my hair a few minutes earlier, I thought to myself, is it true that women are killed off more frequently than men in Supernatural? Or is this a case of the availability heuristic at play (i.e. Jo and Ellen are both well-liked female characters, their death was vivid, therefore it is easier to call to mind the deaths of female characters)?

I thought there would be a list of dead characters in Supernatural somewhere online, but my Google-fu failed me, so I had to rely on my own (somewhat rusty) memory. Counting only characters that have appeared in more than one episode, I have come up with the following list:

Dead females:

pamela
ruby
lilith
jo
ellen
mary
ava
jessica
bela

Dead males:

azazael
jake
andy
hendrickson
uriel
john
ash
gordon
alastair

I cannot, for the life of me, recall whether Rufus died in Season Five or not. Assuming he's still alive, a quick tally shows that there are nine dead women and nine dead men.

If we subdivide this list into Good Characters, Bad Characters, and Characters With Questionable Intentions, we get the following:

good:

pamela
jo
ellen
mary
jessica

hendrickson
john
ash

questionable:

bela
ava

andy
uriel
gordon
jake

bad:

ruby
lilith

azazael
alastair

There are more dead-questionable male characters than female and more dead-good female characters than male -- however, I doubt these differences would hold up in an individual sample t-test.

Assuming my memory didn't fail me terribly and I'm not missing a whole bunch of dead characters, the deaths of both genders seem to be fairly evenly distributed. If we count single-episode characters, the distribution might change, but I don't think that speaks so much about the SPN writers being misogynistic, but rather, horror genre tropes in general.

This post has nothing to do with my opinion on the depiction of female characters in Supernatural or whether Jo & Ellen should have died or...whether Castiel should have been cast as a woman. This is just about objective numbers. Take them as you will. ;)


Also: I hope Death looks like this!
(I don't read Sandman, but I like Gaiman's depiction of Death :))