speaking of fun little statistical stuff, I was poking around in my own ao3 archive (as you do) and out of curiosity looked at my archive warnings, where I apparently have 83 marked as Major Character Death. this is not, all things considered, a large percentage of my oeuvre as archived on ao3, but I was sort of curious how it distributes across characters.
I counted fic where characters die multiple times once, and fics where I did alt-POVs of the same fic once. I did include fic that in some way dwelt on or concerned canonical character death. I waffled a little on counting fic where characters die temporarily and come back before the end of the fic, and decided to include them on a subjective "does this feel like it's MCD enough" basis.
what I learned is that I have killed:
digging more into specifics:
34 of those I only killed once
Loki won the "most killed" award with 10 deaths, followed by Sam Winchester with 8, so congratulations guys you get some kind of a trophy
8 out of 47 killed characters were female (or 17%)
34 out of 47 killed characters died at least once in canon, though 6 of those were not permanent - so mostly I'm writing about characters who are dead already, not creating new ones!
Of the winners of the most killed award, for the most part the overall frequency of their being tagged in my work was in line with the number of times I've killed them, so the more often I write about a character the more likely I am to kill them.
The exceptions here were Thor and Steve Rogers, who I mostly just write watching other people die, apparently, and Celegorm, who has died in 13.5% of all the fics I've written about him. (Compare Loki, at a measly 3.5%, or Sam at 7.2%.)
and here's a fun little chart showing the characters I've killed more than one time.
further analysis that might be interesting: a comparison of the character death rate in my own fic vs. the character death rate of my faves in canon. is there any correlation? who can say. also potentially interesting: a comparison between the major character death fics in my bookmarks vs. the ones I've written.
was this productive or useful for anyone? no! spent the time doing it anyway. what can I say, there are five or six things I should be doing that I'm avoiding
