One of the most popular recent posts on the Game of Thrones subreddit is a prediction sheet for which characters are going to stay alive, die, or become a White Walker during the final season. “I feel like we are filling them out like people fill out their March madness brackets,” the uploader wrote, except instead of guessing if Duke will beat Kansas, entrants are forecasting whether a child — like poor Little Sam — will meet the same grisly fate as Rickon. And Robb. And Catelyn. And Ned. And… most of the Starks, actually. Hopefully everyone involved studied up first, like, Reidar Lystad and Benjamin Brown.
The two researchers from Sydney, Australia’s Macquarie University watched every episode of Game of Thrones and turned it into a “study about characters’ deaths and their chances of survival, published in the academic journal Injury Epidemiology,” according the Huffington Post. What they found is pretty interesting. For instance, the chance of a character dying within the first hour of being introduced is 14 percent. Also, 52.7 percent of deaths take place during the day. But the most compelling part of the study is who has the best shot of, well, not being dead when Game of Thrones ends in May:
They concluded that the probability of survival was worse for characters who were male and lowborn, had not switched allegiance, and were featured more prominently in the series… Lystad said Sansa and Arya had better chances of survival compared with many other main characters, since they’re highborn women who have changed allegiance. (Lystad and Brown interpreted Sansa’s decision to marry Joffrey Baratheon and her return to Winterfell and Arya’s choice to train to serve the Many-Faced God as switching sides, but Lystad admitted many fans would argue Arya has always been loyal to House Stark.)
The Stark sisters are followed by Tyrion and Jon (yes, Jon already died, but “if they come back to life and feature in the show, then we have not counted them as being actually or really dead”), then Daenerys and Cersei because they’re “both highborn women, but also two badasses who have stayed loyal to their cause.” Based on Lystad and Brown’s findings, I would not check the “alive” box for Grey Worm. At least he had some fun. To read the entire study, head here.
(Via the Huffington Post)