The statistics for the dead bro walking cliche in Doctor Who

[spiralsheep]

The dead bro walking cliché is that black male characters are killed disproportionately to white males (and other characters depending on the context).

There are, I think (?), 12 black male guest characters in new Doctor Who (where "guest character" = having a name and/or speaking in more than one scene but not being a recurring character).

Comments

[sabonasi]

For Supernatural, the death rate for Black male guest characters - as defined above - is 100%. Seriously, I cannot think of a single Black male guest character who actually lives to see the end of the episode. (Sarge came very close before getting his throat slit by a demon in the last seconds of the episode "Croatoan". There's no contextual reason that a random white hitchhiker couldn't have served the same purpose.) On the reoccuring side, the death rate is 66%. Jake and Gordon went down after being in more than one episode, and Special Agent Victor Hendriksen is so far still alive. Gordon - and to a lesser degree Jake - hit with the context mentioned by the OP, but it's not context everytime, dammit. (Sidenote: Black female guest characters, on the other hand, have no issue surviving Supernatural episodes.)

bobthehaitian has episodic statistics for Heroes episodes, and I wrote a bit here on the characters that die and the characters that cheat death, as the white male characters far much more often in the latter category. (It's the eighth post down.) Note: the thread descends fairly quickly into the Bad Place.

[yeloson]

I enjoyed the statistics for the Transformers movie, as described in VG Cats:

http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=241

[spiralsheep]

Sidenote: Black female guest characters, on the other hand, have no issue surviving Supernatural episodes.

I haven't checked but I suspect this might also be true in Doctor Who. The women have other cliches inflicted on them, of course, and if there were enough South Asian characters to form a pattern then I wouldn't expect any fewer cliches for them either.

[just_katarin]

More than all of the black make guest stars dying, I have issues with the way the people of color on Supernatural are portrayed. None of them are portrayed as being "as good" as the white heroes and they're constantly not getting it/needing to be saved/the villian.

And don't get me started on Gordon's final episode. It was so strange to be watching it between my fingers because reducing him to the animalian black made me want to throw things and at the same time Sterling K. Brown was giving the best performance Supernatural has ever seen.

[sabonasi]

More than all of the black make guest stars dying, I have issues with the way the people of color on Supernatural are portrayed. None of them are portrayed as being "as good" as the white heroes and they're constantly not getting it/needing to be saved/the villian.

Yeah, it's the trifecta of lack of quantity, lack of quality, and the defaulting to white male for the lead heroes. I like Hendriksen, but even he gets outsmarted in the second episode that he appears.

And don't get me started on Gordon's final episode. It was so strange to be watching it between my fingers because reducing him to the animalian black made me want to throw things and at the same time Sterling K. Brown was giving the best performance Supernatural has ever seen.

Huh. I took "Fresh Blood" as an indication that Sam was well on his way to choosing (through free will*) to assume the throne of the anti-Christ due to his complete willingness to murder Gordon before Gordon was vampired (followed by actually murdering Gordon); with Gordon as the tragic hero whom remains the good guy to the end, since, despite a literal loss of humanity (compare/contrast to Sam), Gordon goes out embodying the best traits of a hunter.

I could, though, be giving the series too much credit, expecting follow through when the writers' overall track record with race is pretty poor. (I was very surprised that "Fresh Blood" didn't pull a last minute cop-out before Sam murdered Gordon, since "It's okay" cop-outs appear both with Gordon in "Bloodlust" and Jake in "All Hell Breaks Loose, Part II".)

(But I see what you mean about "the animalian black".)

(And Sterling K. Brown did knock it out of the fucking park, didn't he?)

*I'm convinced that "Sam came back wrong." is a big, fat red herring.