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

[ash48.livejournal.com]

These are great examples. There's a hell of a lot of stabbing on the show and if each one of those is considered a sexualised death then there sure are a lot of them.

I'm pretty naive when it comes to knowing what would be considered a sexualised death or not. I am suspecting I might need to search out some further reading. I sure many essays have been written about it in context of movies and other TV shows.

We're (my meta partner in crime *g*) considering listing the types of deaths on the show and leaving it open to interpretation. I know that where some would see a a death as sexualised others wouldn't.

Hmmm... I wonder if "almost" deaths would count. Lucas's mum in the bathtub for instance...

Thanks so much for this.
xx

[galwithglasses.livejournal.com]

A list by type of death might be interesting but without the context such as position, clothing, aggressor, it might not answer the sexualized violence question. Still it might be worth doing. These kinds of discussions seem to come up often and it's nice to have concrete details to add to the discussion. On this show you'd have to have column for death by falling piano, crazed mannequin, garage door, fork in the dish drainer.....

[ash48.livejournal.com]

Yes. I was just thinking about all the other relevant info that could go with that and suddenly the whole thing looks like an enormous amount of work. But also... with a show like this it's not so cut and dried.

I was thinking about the Woman in White for example. She's a ghost who has already died and then she gets "killed" by the boys (or rather, helped to leave by the boys.). We'd have to have a rule about which deaths we count. Argh..

Hee.. and yes. The methods of deaths would be quite something to read I reckon. We could have death by window or maybe list it as "decapitated" and then list "by window". Or "strangled" by "hands", "cord" etc. Jeeez... might be counting left for a rainy day. :)

(sorry, musing out loud there. I think if bythedamned sees this she'll be shaking her head. *G*)

xx