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

[yeloson]

We should really do this for more shows & movies.

[spiralsheep]

I tend to be of the "lies, damn lies, and statistics" persuasion and, I confess, I mostly only worked these out because it amused me to demonstrate (elsewhere) that anyone with basic maths can spin statistics to appear to favour their argument. I also have a distrust of lists and statistics in complex situations where the context is important because my maths isn't good enough to factor in all the meaningful data. That having been said though, sometimes statistics are useful as a blunt instrument to shock people into understanding. It's certainly always interesting to look at something from a new perspective and/or using different tools for analysis. ::nods agreement::

[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

[yeloson]

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

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