We talk a lot about how marginalised characters are depicted in our shows and books. How they live their lives, what stereotypes they conform to and, most often of all, how many times they’re completely erased. But one of the most prevalent problems that dogs all marginalised people is not how their characters live - but how they die.
Who dies?
Firstly, they die a lot. Death is something that hits marginalsied characters disproportionately - and that’s especially true in genres where character death is common or expected, like dystopias. We see this time and again on the shows we watch, on Supernatural there’s an enormous number of fridged women, a string of dead POC and half of the very few GBLT people the show has included have died. Warehouse 13 has killed off a Black woman Lena and killed (and resurrected) a gay man, Jinks. Falling Skies, especially in the first season, had an astonishing number of dead POC and do we even have to mention how many POC have died on The Walking Dead? The Vampire Diaries has a host of Black witches who serve the vampires - before dying, and so many random Black people have been devoured that it has become a running joke. I don’t believe American Horror Story ever had POC except to kill them - and while it was a show with a huge death count, the POC didn’t last more than an episode or 2. The violence and death on American Horror Story also disproportionately targets gay people and women.
These are just a few examples - but in most shows where there are character deaths - especially a number of character deaths - it is the marginalised people who are disproportionately on the slab.
Who Survives?
So you minority character has kicked the bucket and joined the choir invisible; the survivors pick up the pieces and start to move on to their next adventure and... what do you know, all the living people are straight, white folks! How shocking is that!?
This is the next problematic element we see so often. Too often in shows with a high death count, it is not just the minorities who disproportionately fill the graveyards, but they start with smaller numbers in the first place.
See, this is where tokenism can be a problem. When you have a nearly entirely majority cast, even one or two deaths among your minority characters can halve their numbers - or wipe out your minorities entirely and, as the death toll mounts, so too does the diversity plummet. When I first started watching the first season of The Walking Dead I was impressed by the number of POC - who then started dying, splitting off from the group and otherwise disappearing until we end up with an increasingly White cast. In the Falling Skies we see the same issue - we started with several POC who were whittled down through the season, even new POC joining the cast killed off until we ended with a far far far Whiter cast.
In extreme cases this can make the enemies seem very targeted in their killing. Increasingly surrounded by dominant characters, the marginalised are still unerringly picked off. And there’s no greater example than shows that simply don’t have more than one or two tokens at all and even they die - wiping out everyone or nearly everyone of their marginalisation - as we saw on Warehouse 13 and Haven.
When faced with this problem, too many shows will introduce a new token. This doesn’t fix the problematic death so much as it underscores it - T-Dog’s death wasn’t made more worthy by Oscar’s introduction, it just emphasised how little T-Dog mattered, how much he was reduced to being just a token inclusion. After the decimation of POC in the first season of Falling Skies, we had a brief introduction of Jamil and Diego before they were both shuffled off.
