http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MenAreTheExpendableGender

Negan, The Walking Dead "I don't enjoy killing women. Men — I can waste them all the live long."

A Double Standard in media whereby women automatically have the audience's sympathy and men don't. Comes in large part for the need for hordes of non-faceless Mooks whose suffering and death we won't lose much sleep over in all sorts of media.

A female character can lose some or even all of the audience's sympathy if they are manipulative, somehow "immoral", ugly, violent or just plain evil. Male characters, on the other hand, have to earn the audience's sympathy by entertaining or interesting us with their actions. If they don't, we either don't care what happens to them or want them to suffer for failing to entertain/interest us. A Lovable Coward male character is not an exception since we find them entertaining.

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Strangely, women find it difficult to lose audience sympathy by being useless, worse than useless, or selfish cowards—as long as they don't get other people with the audience's sympathy killed, that is — and sometimes even then, if this person (usually a man) was perceived by the audience as somehow not strong enough. Stranger still, all this can still hold true if the woman in question has already been established as a badass (See Chickification). As a mark of the true Double Standard this trope exemplifies, a woman is more likely to lose the audience's favor by getting another woman killed than by getting a man killed.

The boundaries between this trope and one that it spawned (the existence of characters who Wouldn't Hit a Girl), are sometimes confusing and difficult to define, but as a general rule, that trope refers to when characters within the story are unwilling to harm women, this one refers to when the story itself seemingly refuses to let a woman come to harm. The disparity is most obvious when the source of danger that is threatening the cast has no actual intelligence or sentient character of its own, as when you see the rampaging T-rex, tornado, human-killing robot uprising, nuclear bomb, or hungry zombie horde ignore a female character in favor of killing a male one, with no plausible or justified reason for them doing so other than the author doesn't want a woman to be hurt. Conversely, this trope could be a meta-example of Would Not Hit A Girl from the author.

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Perhaps strangest of all, this trope also bleeds over into villain roles: the suffering and death of female villains is generally either not dwelt upon or played for sympathy, if only because they are generally less evil than their male counterparts. But the suffering and death of male villains, on the other hand, is much more acceptable if only because they are often so much, well, eviler.

About the only place where this is usually averted is in the horror genre, but even then, there's usually a clear disparity in male vs. female deaths - male deaths are much more likely to be either comically portrayed or quickly forgotten about.

The consequences in fiction of this are complicated, but in summary:

See the Analysis for more.

There are a lot of related tropes:

A show where Anyone Can Die may or may not be an aversion, depending on how the deaths are depicted.

This mentality is noticeable throughout human history and can be considered the root of a great many sexist gender roles, as indicated by the related tropes above. But thats all we will say about it, no real life examples please.

Examples:

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Anime & Manga

Comedy

Lampshaded by Jason Manford in his 2011 stand-up show. He references the trope by name without quite decrying it. Jason Manford: In the house, when there's a noise downstairs, who's checking that noise out? That's dad, isn't it? A hundred percent of the time, that's dad. You could be married to a ninja, you're still the first one down the stairs. Why is this, is it because you're stronger or braver or better at fighting than your wife? No. It's because out the two of you, you're more expendable. It's not nice to hear, dads, I understand. The family will be upset but they'll crack on.

Comic Books

Y: The Last Man: Two male astronauts who survived the Gendercide by being in orbit when it happened die ensuring the survival of their female crewmate after a fiery re-entry, because she was pregnant with a baby that could have belonged to either of them. Their deaths are shrugged off by the characters with a sort of "What idiots but hey a baby!" reaction. Also, male corpses are pictured in an advanced state of decomposition as well as piled on each other and loaded into a garbage truck. Female corpses, on the other hand, are handled with a lot more discretion. This is probably because there are just so many bodies that they can't deal with them all like they should, and the woman who Yorrick sees loading men in a dump truck does go out of her way to see every man gets a proper funeral at the end of her one-shot and states how disgraceful it was to the men. However, Yorick is shown mostly being disgusted by male corpses, even if those corpses are those of his loved ones. In comparison, having to defend himself with fatal force against a woman trying to kill him is portrayed as so traumatizing it causes his mind to start shutting down, as opposed to the death of every other man on Earth. And while the comic tries the Author's Saving Throw of saying that males will (eventually) get an (offscreen) funeral, every on-page portrayal of dealing with them shows the corpses being thrown in piles in trucks or for burning, emphasizing that their deaths are purely treated as the impetus for starting the story, a plot hook. Virtually every female death in the series is treated with at least some form of dignity, up to and including a massive state funeral.

When the Justice League of America moved to Detroit they introduced a group of new superheroes that had an equal number of males and females. However after the new additions proved to be unpopular DC decided to get rid of them by killing off the men (Vibe and Steel) and having the women (Vixen and Gypsy) leave the team. The only reason for having only the men killed appears to be this trope.

In a letter column for Brian Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming's Powers, in response to the first several story arcs, a female reader wrote in to ask why Bendis felt the need to kill so many women in his Powers stories. Bendis's reply was that, looking back over the stories the reader mentioned, three women had been brutally killed, but so had something like forty men.

One may wonder how much of the importance attached to the "Women in Refrigerators" phenomenon is a matter of perception, since for the most part the victims in question happen to be attractive young women. For instance, the death of Spider-Man's girlfriend Gwen Stacy in Amazing Spider-Man #121 caused a huge outcry among fans (so big in fact, that Marvel brought Gwen back as a clone less than two years later to assuage them), her death is still seen as a deep injustice by a number of diehard fans, and many people want to portray it as the Ur-Example of Stuffed into the Fridge. Before her death, four supporting characters had been killed off in-story really without causing a ripple among readers, all men of various ages: Uncle Ben, Bennett Brant (Betty's brother, caught in the crossfire to provide a reason for her to hate Spider-Man), Frederick Foswell (Daily Bugle reporter) and George Stacy (Gwen's father, died trying to save people's lives to provide an obstacle to her romance with Peter Parker). In later years The Death of Jean DeWolff, the second female supporting character to be killed off, caused another major stir. The deaths of various male supporting characters — Professor Miles Warren, Nathan Lubensky (Aunt May's fiancé), Ned Leeds (one of Peter's oldest Bugle colleagues), and even Harry Osborn (Peter Parker's oldest and best friend of the male persuasion) — not so much. Harry Osborn who, as it turned out, could not well be replaced in his role in the cast, but that was fourteen years after his death. Even Aunt May (whose apparent death in Amazing Spider-Man #400 was widely seen as a satisfying ending to a fulfilled life) was brought back to the living more quickly. And while only Uncle Ben is referenced in-story nearly as often as Gwen Stacy, quite a few of the dead male characters are all but forgotten both by the writers and the fans.

A Conan the Barbarian comic has Conan finding out just how many of the men he is presently dealing with (most of whom need killing) have had carnal knowledge of his current concubine. She responds with a quiet dignity, "it's not easy being a woman in a man's world." Conan then bluntly subverts the trope by countering, "You should try being a man in it."

Between the quarantine, the concentration camp, and the military operation there are a lot of soldier injuries and deaths on-panel in Revival. Every one of them is male except for Big Tina, who is established as a villain. Civilian deaths include females.

Fan Works

Surprisingly present in Team Four Star's Dragon Ball Z Abridged: Cell's absorption of the male Android 17 is shown in its entirety and played for laughs, with 17 complaining about how "not cool" a death it is the entire time, while Cell's absorption of the female Android 18 is played as tragic, using dialogue that equates it with rape, and happens off-screen. Of course, being Team Four Star, they immediately subvert it with an alternate scene where Krillin accidentally blows 18's head clean off her shoulders with a bomb.

Films  Live-Action

Jokes

A little girl is looking at her dad's sword, hung over the fireplace. She asks her mum what it's for, and Mum replies "That's what makes men strong and powerful, so they fight wars." The daughter says "They believe that?" Mum says "Yes. That's why they're expendable."

Literature

Live-Action TV

Music

This trope is the subject of the song "Men" by Loudon Wainwright III: Have pity on the general, the king and the captain

They know they're expendable; after all, they're men

Music Videos

Miserable The ending of the video seems to take a great amount of glee showing the Giant Woman Pam/Vallery eating the all-male band. With lots of shots of each terrified man begging for his life before showing Pam/Val eat him entirely on screen with no cutting away or GoryDiscretionShot for any of them. And by the end, not only is every single man dead, but the Giant Woman gets off scott free, suffering no repercussions for what she did. It's hard to imagine an all-female band getting eaten one by one would ever end with all of them killed off, or be portrayed in such a cavalier way.

Radio

In the 1930s Flash Gordon radio serial, Flash is forced to chose one of the people he loves to be sacrificed. The men draw lots to decide which of them will be sacrificed, but Flash immediately exempts Dale Arden from the choice because "as a woman, she must live".

Roleplay

In Dino Attack RPG, the overwhelming majority of anonymous Red Shirts are male, and the only known female Red Shirt was merely wounded, not explicitly killed like her male peers. The only women who are killed, such as Amanda Claw , are major characters whose deaths bring great emotional impact and serve to motivate the survivors to fight even harder to defeat the enemy.

Tabletop Games

In the Clue VCR Mystery Game, the characters are shocked and horrified to learn that Prof. Plum had killed his wife, but they barely even blink at the fact that Mrs. Peacock had murdered several husbands. It was also implied that Col. Mustard had shot his brother, Reggie, and Mrs. White had poisoned Mr. Boddy, and again, neither of these provoked anything close to the revulsion shown toward Prof. Plum.

Tabletop RPG sourcebook: GURPS Lensman includes an interesting analysis of the phenomenon in the section "Women and Lenses", pp. 9-10.

Warhammer 40,000: While the background material hints that there are just as many females as there are males in the Imperial Guard Army, most of the Imperial Guard Models are all male, with few to no female variants throughout the years. Other races tend to have one set of "female" traits for every 3 "male" traits (breastplates mostly). One whole regiment of Imperial Guard is made up solely of males as well, the aptly named Vostroyan Firstborne (made of firstborn sons). Space Marines may be this at a glance, due to genetics basically making female space marines in fluff impossible, but are largely balanced because each new initiate marine is still infinitely more valuable than 10k imperial guard women and that their Distaff Counterpart, the Sisters of Battle, are all female. Also averted with the Eldar and the Dark Eldar. Where females are quite common, just wearing battle armor so it's less noticeable.



Video Games

Web Comics

Complete aversion on all points in Dead Winter— a sympathetic male character is seen sniping a female extra, whose death gets just one panel, and you see blood spatter from the exit wound. Another aversion on all counts is Digger. The hyena Digger comes to name Ed is an exile who killed his wife, because it was the only way to protect his child. Having been driven half-mad by the death of her first child at birth (which, while common to hyenas, she thought she was exempt from, since Ed was a surviving firstborn and therefore a living good luck charm), she began to beat first Ed, and then their daughter, at which point Ed realized his wife was never going to get better; so he killed her, in her sleep, to keep her from doing their daughter lasting harm, and then peaceably accepted exile because he knew that what he had done was technically unforgiveable (technically because most of the tribe knew the circumstances and felt he should be forgiven, but his in-laws, lead by his wife's sister, insisted upon exile if not the death sentence). It's worth noting that Digger's hyenas are an aversion in a more general sense as well, because, being based on real hyenas, the gender roles as we know them are reversed (males are smaller and physically weaker than females, and tend to be the noncoms while women are hunters and warriors).

In xkcd, one of the characters is playing a game where he gets the life history of the people he's shooting in an FPS. The caption indicates he starts feeling guilty when one of them turns out to be a woman. Then he starts feeling guilty that he didn't feel guilty for the dozens of other guys he just shot.

In The Order of the Stick, when Haley, Belkar, and Celia are under attack by the Greysky City Thieves' Guild, this is played straight in the nameless mooks. There are a few women, and elves, but men dominate by a ratio of more than 5:1 and they are killed without sympathy (although Haley does mention most of the guild are jerks). Most notable when Belkar and the Cleric of Loki fight their way through a massive crowd of thieves, and all of the men are slaughtered while the lone woman gets kissed. It's inverted later after the mooks are dead, because the lone female named character, Crystal, is treated without any sympathy or redeeming features, while the level-headed and male Hank comes up with a plan to end all of the bloodshed.

Inverted in Xenospora. The matriarchal society of Praxis Prime measures losses by male deaths.

Web Original

In the essay Survival Horror and the Female Protagonist , it is theorized that this trope is why female protagonists are so common in the genre. Female protagonists of modern horror in general push the boundaries in terms of defining the feminine and add a certain emotional touch to the genre that a male protagonist often fails to provide...

, it is theorized that this trope is why female protagonists are so common in the genre. The Mary Sue faces this criticism for their condemning of comics and videogames where female characters are put in harm's way, yet seldom showing outrage when the same happens to a male character. Case in point, The Killing Joke is considered misogynistic filth due to the treatment of Barbara Gordon, while no mention is made of James Gordon's kidnapping and torture in the same book, and Jason Todd's ordeal in A Death in the Family,

A tacit example on This Very Wiki: the page image for Missing White Woman Syndrome (originally from Cracked) attacks the titular syndrome by noting in a parodic manner that black "girls" who go missing don't receive the same attention and sympathy; no mention is made of "male" humans of any race despite it being perfectly possible to make the same point that way. Apparently, saying that Missing White Woman Syndrome is bad by pointing out the lack of sympathy afforded to victimized men just wouldn't tug the same heartstrings.

Web Videos

Discussed in Vampire Reviews' episode on Underworld: Awakening. Protagonist Selene is shown killing normal humans for the first time, and the movie clearly does not expect this to make her less sympathetic. Maven notes that all of her victims were male, and wonders if the filmmakers would have played a female character's death in the same way.

Emily Cousens discusses the Unfortunate Implications of this trope in a CBC interview .

Western Animation

Superjail! on [adult swim] makes a habit of killing male prisoners in the most graphically disturbing ways possible. One episode it depicted a woman getting shot and slumping over to suggest the chaos had gone too far. Considering this was interspersed between images of men being decapitated and graphically disemboweled, it was a particularly jarring and perhaps intentional invocation of this trope.

Some mild but significant examples in Avatar: The Last Airbender. In the episode "Zuko Alone", we learn that the soldiers lord their power "mostly over women and kids", this small dialogue serving both to damn the soldiers in the audience's eyes as well as gain more sympathy for Zuko and forgive him nearly killing the guy with firebending towards the end. Also, in the Grand Finale, Zuko agrees to an Agni Kai with Azula so "no one else has to get hurt", implying Katara being hurt is worse than him losing and possibly dying (this despite knowing firsthand how competent she is) . Both these examples are particularly interesting as he comes from a surprisingly liberal country.

. Both these examples are particularly interesting as he comes from a surprisingly liberal country. Spoofed in an episode of The Simpsons. Homer and Marge find that Lisa went with Marge's reporter friend to a feminism convention and go to find her, only to learn that she and the reporter went to an erupting volcano instead. Homer says "I'll go save Lisa; you stay here!" and the feminists boo at the perceived Stay in the Kitchen. So Homer says "Okay, you go; I'll stay here", and gets more boos for putting her in danger. Exasperated, he asks "What do women want?!"

In The Venture Bros., OSI strictly forbids the killing of women among its agents as a way to maintain a moral high ground. Brock really doesn't understand this and asks his mentor Hunter if any loopholes exist. The only one we hear is that a vampire is undead and thus not technically alive in the first place, so he could totally kill a female vampire if he wanted. Years later, Brock is sent to kill a rogue Hunter only to find that he's undergone sexual reassignment surgery and as such is off-limits .

. In the original Under the Hood comic, Black Mask's assistant Mr. Li is killed by Jason Todd. In the film adaptation, Batman: Under the Red Hood, Mr. Li becomes Ms. Li, who ends up Bound and Gagged by The Joker, but is otherwise unharmed.

Numerical Aversions

Anime & Manga

Comic Books

Films  Animation

Atlantis: The Lost Empire averts this to an almost ahistorical extent. Despite being set in 1914, the crew of the Ulysses clearly has a good number of women, note Including in combat roles, the dude in the sub pod who shouts "We're getting killed out here!" has a female copilot and very few, if any, are seen to have escaped its destruction. Rourke's eulogy specifically mentions that the crew had "some of the finest men and women I've ever known." Rourke's Gas Mask Mooks in the climax are assumed to be all male, but they wear heavy, full-body coats and don't speak, so we can't say that for certain.

and very few, if any, are seen to have escaped its destruction. Rourke's eulogy specifically mentions that the crew had "some of the finest men and women I've ever known." Antz averts this with the ant society in the film operating on Gender Is No Object, having both male and female ants as workers and soldiers, with the queen loyalist faction of the latter completely wiped out in the war with the termites early on in the movie. It should be noted that this film uses the Insect Gender-Bender as bug movies often do, and thus this trope isn't averted nearly as much as it should have been; realistically, the entire army (and the workers, and the main characters) should have been female.

Films  Live-Action

Literature

In Carnosaur a woman and her two children, a son Simon and daughter Fiona, get attacked by a dinosaur. Both Fiona and her mother are killed and Simon lives. The villain's henchmen later debate killing the boy because he saw the dinosaur and decide not to, with Simon's gender never entering their decision-making process. Males and females still die in essentially equal numbers but this incident of the brother surviving and the sister dying in a sibling pair is noteworthy as usually writers will seemingly choose the girl to spare and not the boy.

David Weber's Honor Harrington series completely subverts this. There is an abundance of female villains, including mooks. There are women serving in the navies, marines, and armies of Haven, Manticore, and every state except Grayson, plus there are female pirates, merchant crewmembers, thugs, and Havenite State Sec personnel. The women die as often as the men-which is very frequently, considering that it is a military sci-fi series. In-universe, the conservative Graysons are the only ones who play this straight, but they are gradually moving away from it. For a long time in their history Graysons had to adopt this strategy as they were teetering on the brink of planetary extinction. They needed babies to survive which required lots of women having lots of babies. Due to a massively unequal sex ration between males and females, they practiced polygamy for the same purpose. A major subversion occurs in "A Short Victorious War." Captain Helen Zilwicki is commanding cruiser escorting a Manticorian convoy that comes under attack by the Havenites. She orders the convoy to scatter and engages the Havenite fleet, destroying three ships and crippling one before her ship is destroyed. Her husband and four year-old daughter were on one of the ships in the convoy that managed to escape. Her daughter is confused and crying, but her now-widowed husband comforts their daughter, telling her "We're safe now. Mommy made it safe." Both of them become major characters later in the series.

In Percy Jackson and the Olympians and The Heroes of Olympus, male and female demigods are killed roughly equally. Likewise, the monsters killed by the heroes are about equally male and female. The third book of the prequel series shows five demigods going to fight the titans. There are two boys and three girls, and two of the girls are killed, but none of the boys. The Olympian goddess Artemis only takes girls as her hunters. And many of them are killed during the Sequel series.

Inheritance Cycle: Despite a fairly large body count and some intense torture on three of the prominent female characters, only glorified extras seem to be vulnerable to death during the series. The village of Carvahall loses a number of male villagers during the resistance, but only three old women die from cold in the mountains, off-screen and with passing mention of their names. The sole exception to this trope is the elven queen, killed during the final confrontation with the king's forces in the final book.

Live-Action TV

Theatre

Into the Woods: The first act follows the logic of Grimms' fairy tales (albeit the gory, non-Bowdlerised versions), while the second act Anyone Can Die. This ranges from sympathetic characters making relatable mistakes (The Baker's wife getting distracted, Rapunzel panicking, Jack's mother mouthing off) to troubled anti-villains (The Witch disappearing, The Giantess going on a grief-stricken rampage) coming to tragic ends. Given the domestic focus of these fairy tales, a lot of these characters just happen to be women.

Video Games

Web Animation

Red vs. Blue: Season 9 had female mooks mixed in among the dozens of male mooks getting mowed down.

Web Comics

A massive inversion occurs in Outsider with the elflike Loroi. Male Loroi are smaller and weaker than females and are only around 10% of the population, thus they have no real function in society besides highly protected breeding stock, with females holding absolute power and doing everything, including being warriors. And since the Loroi are a Proud Warrior Race currently involved in a brutal war against a rival alien empire, that inevitably means countless women fighting and dying while the men Stay in the Kitchen. Two space battles have taken place in the comic thus far and every single Loroi casualty was female. Beryl briefly lampshades this while reflecting on the differences between Loroi and humans. She believes that women being the expendable gender is the natural state for a warrior race and thus considers male warriors from other alien species to be a curious oddity, a sentiment shared by the entire Loroi race.

Web Original

A massive aversion occurs in Dead Ends. Most female characters who are introduced are killed off by the end of the chapter. In fact, by chapter 6 Foxy is the only female main character still alive.

Western Animation

Gorn Aversions

Anime & Manga

Comic Books

The Walking Dead shows no mercy to those who die in the comic, whether those doing the killing are zombies or humans.

Films  Live-Action

Live-Action TV

Game of Thrones's Anyone Can Die situation does indeed apply to the female characters, and some of them do die in gruesome ways. Notable cases include Septa Mordane (slaughtered offscreen but her severed head is left on display, Ros (used as archery target practice for Joffrey), Talisa Stark (stabbed repeatedly while pregnant), Catelyn Stark (throat slashed), Shae (strangled to death by her lover), Shireen Baratheon (burned at the stake as a sacrifice), Obara Sand (impaled on the prow of a ship), Nymeria Sand (strangled and then hung from her own whip), Osha (stabbed in the throat), Myranda (thrown to her death off the battlements, complete with out of focus shot of her blood splattering on the ground), Margaery Tyrell (blown up in a terrorist attack), Lyanna Mormont (crushed to death while killing a giant wight), Missandei (beheaded in a public execution), Cersei (crushed by falling bricks) . Other females do die more modest deaths however.

. Other females do die more modest deaths however. Averted in The Punisher (2017). While Frank Castle himself is extremely gallant to women in general, he won't hesitate to punish villainous women just as ruthlessly as men. Season 2 even opens with an extremely brutal fight scene in a tavern bathroom between Frank and a hit squad consisting of two women and one man, and Frank doesn't pull any punches, nor does the camera pull away. While one of the women is taken out in a way that she could possibly have survived, it's certainly not for Frank's lack of trying.

Spartacus: Blood and Sand - once the series moved out of its gladiator ludus setting (where any deaths would logically be males, due to no female gladiators) female characters died just as often as the males. In the Season 1 finale, Lucretia is stabbed in the stomach by Crixus as revenge for her torture of Naevia with the intent to kill her and her unborn child . In the war against the Romans, Spartacus's forces include several Action Girls who are just as likely to die as the males. Laeta is in fact the only major female character to survive the series.

Video Games

Western Animation

Thematic Aversions

Anime & Manga

Sonic X tends to avert this trope particularly in series three, where Molly and Cosmo both die. Cosmo's death is long, tragic and beautiful; Molly's not so much, perhaps because she's only in one episode while Cosmo is a character throughout the third series. Of course, if you watch the 4Kids English dubs you'll walk away thinking they were just Put On A Bus or something.

Fan Works

Xenophilia presents a version of Equestria where, on average, female ponies outnumber the males by four to one, and in Ponyville, eight to one. Thus, historically, stallions have been more valuable simply because there are barely enough of them to go around. This leads to an inversion of the typical sexism seen in Real Life, such as a social stigma against mares hitting stallions, old-fashioned ideas about stallions staying in the fields, and so on.

Films  Live-Action

In The Great Wall, monsters besiege the Great Wall of China during the Song Dynasty. Among the defenders are an all-female unit with an extremely risky role: they jump off the wall, with ropes attached to metal rings around their waists, to attack the monsters at close range and then get pulled back up. One of these women is grabbed and pulled down by the monsters and her bloodstained metal ring, the only thing left, is pulled up and tossed onto a pile of similar rings.

The 2015 Russian film "Battalion" tells a very fictionalized story of the 1st Russian Women's Battalion of Death that averts, subverts, and plays straight this trope. After the fall of the Tsar, the new Russian government recruits female soldiers. The male soldiers who have been fighting on the front for three years are demoralized and in many cases refuse to fight. The generals and the new government leaders agree to recruit women and send them to the front lines, with the expectation that this will shame the soldiers and encourage them to fight. The women are sent to the front lines and find that the men have no interest in fighting because they believe the war will be over soon and they just want to go home. The women fight in three battles. In the final battle they end up getting trapped in their reserve trench and the male soldiers get convinced to aid them and charge into battle to rescue them. (In real life, the women overran all three German trenches, but had to withdraw when they didn't get any reinforcements.) There are also numerical and gorn averions here. During the battle scenes, the Germans gas, shoot, choke, beat, and stab a lot of women. All of these deaths are depicted very graphically.



Literature

Harry Potter: Snape attempts to get Voldemort to kill James Potter and his son Harry, but spare the mother, Lily, who he loves. However, Lily sacrifices her life for Harry instead. Dumbledore even gets Snape to admit that he acted as if Men Are the Expendable Gender: Dumbledore: If Lily means so much to you, surely Lord Voldemort will spare her? Could you not ask for mercy for the mother, in exchange for the son?

Snape: I have- I have asked him—

Dumbledore: You disgust me. [Snape seems to shrink a little] You do not care, then, about the deaths of her husband and child? They can die, as long as you have what you want? The death of Charity Burbage in the Villain Opening Scene of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The previous three books each featured the death of a sympathetic male character and all these deaths were treated with great weight. In contrast, Charity Burbage' s death was essentially just a plot device to explain why the Muggle Studies position is open this year and she's barely mentioned for the rest of the book (and in the film, she's not mentioned again at all). Of course, she had never previously appeared in the series, although she was quickly established as a sympathetic character. It's also notable that Snape managed to not lose any sympathy points for allowing her to die as part of maintaining his cover.

In The Mortal Instruments men are more likely to be killed in combat. However, it is mentioned several times during the plot that, as an example in a major battle, several women are killed in combat. The humans who are killed by vicious vampires and werewolves, but that does not happen frequently, are about equally men and women.

Live-Action TV

The opening of one episode of Growing Pains has a subversion of the "husband goes to check out a strange noise in the night while the wife stays safely in the room" scenario, where both Jason and Maggie Seaver carefully investigate a potential robber while brandishing a hockey stick and ice skate respectively as makeshift weapons, which turns out to be their son Mike sneaking back into the house after staying out past curfew .

Video Games

Saints Row again. During the final mission of the Vice Kings arc Tanya Winters (female) is confronted by Johnny, King, and Playa (all male) and brutally shot several times before King sends her plunging out the window onto a parked car below, killing her. The entire death plays out as if she were just another male boss and no one even bothers to comment on it .

. Assassin's Creed generally has fewer female enemies, but when they do die they both usually had it coming and aren't treated with any more weight than the other enemies who get a Final Speech. The only female villain who doesn't get treated like the rest is Lucrezia Borgia, partly because the historical one lived through the strife caused by her family only to suffer Death by Childbirth, and because it's clear that she is at best an Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain who loses most of her drive to do ill once her brother and father are both dead. Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood has Lia de Russo, an amoral smuggler who Ezio finds standing over the body of her latest kill and hunts down and kills without a second thought. The Hellequin Caha is also dispatched by a single crossbow bolt to the back of the head without any fanfare. Assassin's Creed: Revelations Ezio kills Mirela Djuric and Lysistrata, one of whom is a Romani turncoat working for the Templars and the other an Ax-Crazy thespian who kills for fun and whose targeting of male victims indicates that she believes in this trope. Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag also doesn't treat the deaths of Lucia Márquez and Jing Lang as being anything less than karma. For Lucia Márquez, it's because she intended to wipe out the Taino people including a woman who was very likely her own half-sister (not that either knew) as revenge for the (probably deserved) death of her father. And in Jing Lang's case, she and feigned a romantic relationship with Assassin in an attempt to get information of a treasure cache and played to both brothers' paranoia so that they killed one another.



Characterization Aversions

Anime & Manga

Variation in Berserk, again. Casca is considered less expendable than the rest of the Hawks during the Eclipse but not because she's female, but because she is in charge in the absence of Griffith. More literally, during the Conviction's Arc, Nina's cowardly and indecisive behavior in the face of imminent danger, even though she wasn't a main character or anything. Her failure at being useful to the group she was tagging along with (which included a child, Isidro, and a retarded thus truly helpless woman, Casca) and trying to avoid putting herself on the line for everyone's welfare was met with unanimous disapproval.

The Legend of Mother Sarah is an aversion in that, even though it's a woman-centered story, it doesn't treat female death (which happens quite a lot) as something to be grieved over more than male death. If anything, women just get no special treatment for being women.

Zig-zagged in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Dio Brando and the Pillar men view their male vampire minions as disposable props to achieve their goals, frequently killing them for the slightest infractions and absorbing them to rejuvenate themselves. Although they're less picky when it comes to their enemies and victims. in Phantom Blood, though Dio cares little for most of his male allies, he often consumes men and women who are against him. In fact he seems to enjoy eating women more. He begins to view his minions less as disposable and more as useful (But plentiful) pawns in Stardust Crusaders, but doesn't grow out of his sexually motivated diet choices. The Pillar men in Battle Tendency straight up find it distasteful to harm women. Most of their Kick the Dog victims happen to be male and they appear to avoid harming women because of this. Although Esidisi and Kars didn't seem to have a problem latching his brain onto Suzie Q and risking her getting killed to outsmart Joseph and Caesar, or brutally stabbing Lisa Lisa in the back after tricking her into attacking a body double respectively.



Films  Live-Action

Live-Action TV

Eddie Orlofsky of Desperate Housewives is a Serial Killer who only targets women (including at one point the fan favorite Julie Mayer, though she survived) but the show is remarkably sympathetic towards him, depicting him as very much a Tragic Villain. He is even given a Freudian Excuse that explicitly blames a woman for what he became - his mother.

Western Animation