A question...

[ash48]

for my thinky flisters.

A while ago bythedamned and I posted figures and meta on deaths of males and females on Supernatural. It generated some healthy discussion and some interesting questions.

One thing that came up a few times, was that how many men or women died isn't as important as HOW they died.

The question is: What is critical or important about the way the characters die? My assumption is that male characters die differently to female characters and therefore there's an imbalance, or maybe there's bias toward one sex over the other (?). My further assumption is that women's deaths are more sexualised then men (deduced by the various comments made). IF this is true what is considered a "sexualised" death? What they are wearing when they die? Their position when they die? Who kills them? Does penetration with a knife symbolise sexual penetration? etc.

Deep I know (and damned heavy! sorry about that..), but I am genuinely curious. Maybe there's meta out there already on this? If not.... ;)




(if anyone looked at the past dozen posts of mine they'd swear I was ADD or something.../o\)

Comments

[elliemurasaki.livejournal.com]

The woman who died in Crossroad Blues, her death was very definitely sexualized. Contrast Dean's death by hellhound, which was very definitely not.

[ash48.livejournal.com]

Ahh... interesting. I remember reading someone's comment on the stats meta that said they considered Dean's hellhound death as being sexualised because of the way he was laying on the table. ( And yet, he was ripped off the table and mauled). So maybe the lead up was sexualised but not the tearing apart.

Hmmm... has I've mentioned above a couple of times. This is a huge can of worms and I can see that peoples interpretations will varying. And hence running a mile from any potential meta on the subject.

Purely a list of types of deaths maybe. :)

Thank you.
xx

[amonitrate.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I thought Dean's death was pretty sexualized, perhaps even more explicitly sexualized than the woman in Crossroad Blues. He was splayed out crotch to the camera at one point, etc. The show inflicts more sexualized violence on Dean than on the other male characters, in my opinion. I think there's a tendency to not read violence against male characters as sexualized even if the same scene would be read as sexualized if the character was a woman, and there are some good reasons (violence towards women is more often sexualized in reality and in entertainment) but I think we do a disservice to the topic if we ignore when violence towards male characters is sexualized. As you said earlier, the cabin scene with YED!John is another example, though it's less blatant than Dean's death in 3.16.