If there's a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits that includes one woman, when the party gets cut down one by one expect the lone woman's survival to be basically guaranteed. Similarly if the story demands random mooks get a beat down by a character to up the sense of danger or because they are generic enemies in a video game, or just show off how awesome the protagonist is, they will be male. One exception to this is a Heroic Sacrifice that is commonly committed by a man and often for a woman and/or The Hero. If the plot requires a tragic death that motivates the protagonists or shows how evil the villains are, the victim will be female. If the story requires random anonymous characters to die just to move the plot forward, they'll likely be male.The consequences in fiction of this are complicated, but in summary: female deaths - male deaths are much more likely to be either comically portrayed or quickly forgotten about. 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.Ībout 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. 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. Conversely, this trope could be a meta-example of Would Not Hit A Girl from the author. 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. 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. 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. Stranger still, all this can still hold true if the woman in question has already been established as a badass (See Chickification). 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. A Lovable Coward male character is not an exception since we find them entertaining. If they don't, we either don't care what happens to them or want them to suffer for failing to entertain/interest us. Male characters, on the other hand, have to earn the audience's sympathy by entertaining or interesting us with their actions. 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.Ī 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. A Double Standard in media whereby women automatically have the audience's sympathy and men don't.
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