Merlin Meta: Race and Gender Statistics

[such_heights]

beccaelizabeth started this current meta trend off with statistics on Torchwood - out of the speaking characters, how many are female, how many non-white characters are there, and does it pass the Bechdel test (women talking to each other about something other than a man)? dsudis crunched numbers for the first season of Stargate SG-1. lefaym also did a post last year on Doctor Who and the Bechdel Test. (If anyone knows of other, similar sets of stats out there, I'd love to see them!)

So, I decided to run the numbers for Merlin.

A couple of notes - this is looking at speaking characters only, and though I've tried to be objective as possible it's possible I've overlooked things, misjudged things, or that there are simply two valid cases to be made. (Especially with regard to the Bechdel Test, because I really wanted 'The Moment of Truth' to pass, for instance, but I don't think it does.)

Episode Title	No. of Speaking Characters	No. of Women	% of Women	Bechdel Test?	No. of Non-White Characters	% of Non-White Characters	Death Tally
The Dragon's Call	12	6	50%	Pass	2	17%	1 WM 3 WF
Valiant	10	2	20%	Fail	2	20%	2 WM 1 NWM
The Mark of Nimueh	8	3	38%	Pass	2	25%	(none speaking, misc. plague victims)
The Poisoned Chalice	11	3	27%	Fail	2	18%	(none)
Lancelot	8	2	25%	Fail	2	25%	(none)
A Remedy To Cure All Ills	8	2	25%	Fail	1	12.5%	1 WM
The Gates of Avalon	10	3	30%	Fail	1	10%	1 WM 1 WF
The Beginning of the End	12	2	17%	Pass	1	8%	1 WM
Excalibur	11	3	27%	Fail	2	18%	2 WM 1 NWM
The Moment of Truth	10	3	30%	Fail	2	20%	2 WM 1 NWM
The Labyrinth of Gedref	8	2	25%	Pass	1	12.5%	(none)
To Kill the King	8	2	25%	Pass	2	25%	1 WM 1 NWM
Le Morte d'Arthur	8	4	50%	Pass	1	12.5%	1 WF

[code - WM = white male, WF = white female, NWM = non-white male, NWF = non-white female]
[All corrections on both my counting and my maths welcome!]

Overall Stats

Out of 42 speaking parts over the 13 episodes, 27 were white men, 8 were white women, 6 were non-white men, and 1 was a non-white woman, giving us a 76/24 male/female ratio and a 83/17 white/non-white ratio.

In posts in other fandoms, people have made reference to the way these reflect the society in which the show is set. Though I would expect (well, hope for), a roughly 50/50 gender balance, the show's too anachronistic to make it worth my while pulling up figures on the different populations in Britain in the Middle Ages - which means, of course, that the set-up of the show allows them to cast as diversely as they'd like.

I'm not going to make a lot of commentary of the above figures, I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions. All this really tells us is a baseline about who gets to speak, not anything else about representation or positive presentation. One last set of stats, however:

Congratulations! You've just ended up in Ye Olde Camelot. Here's how your survival chances are looking based on your gender and skin colour once you get there, assuming you get a speaking part.

• If you are both white and male, you've got a 40% chance of dying.
• If you're male but not white, you have a mortality rate of 67%.
• If you're white and female it's 62.5%.
• Good news, though! If you're female but not white, you have a guaranteed 100% survival rate. It's just that it's also 100% likely that you are in fact Guinevere.

eta: figures changed thanks to heather11483's correction!
eta2: and again thanks to oconel! (This, this is why I shouldn't be allowed near numbers.)

Comments

[such_heights]

More often than not I find the show's 'conscience' when it comes to whose death is a just one is more or less arbitrary and based on the main characters and who we're supposed to like, more than anything else.

For SERIOUS. It is Bad and Wrong to kill Uther even though he has killed lots and lots of people, but the rest of time Arthur and Merlin will quite happily kill their opponents and enemies rather than defeating them in other ways, and these enemies usually deserve death because they're killed (or attempted to kill) people along the way.

And with Nimueh, she doesn't even do that! Merlin asks her to do something, accepts the consequences, and when it doesn't go to plan he offers to sacrifice himself instead, but when Gaius gets there first he ... decides Nimueh must die. I have no idea why. It's very Uther 2.0, as it sounds like it's pretty much exactly that series of events that got magic driven out of Camelot in the first place, and it's not exactly Nimueh's fault!

[heather11483.livejournal.com]

And with Nimueh, she doesn't even do that! Merlin asks her to do something, accepts the consequences, and when it doesn't go to plan he offers to sacrifice himself instead, but when Gaius gets there first he ... decides Nimueh must die.

It wasn't Merlin's best moment. :/ I know he was angry, but since when is anger a justification to haul off and kill someone? He kind of forgot what Gwen told him in the previous episode. *g* And furthermore, Nimueh did nothing more and nothing less than she said she would (she told Merlin it wasn't his life that would be taken and he didn't even hear her), and what she was asked to do. She didn't make the rules, and she didn't deserve to die just because Merlin couldn't handle the consequences of his decision to play around with that sort of magic. It's something that I hope gets explored in the next series, but I doubt it does. :/ I seriously think that the show expected us to believe that justice had been served, or something, but I found it pretty unsatisfying, dramatically.

I'm not sure I like the message being sent (albeit probably unintentionally) by the fact that Magic is pretty much only okay when Merlin does it/when it's in the service of the king/prince, and it's never okay in the hands of women, so far. And I think the next series would benefit greatly from a female sorcerer who's benevolent. So far we've got Morgana, but chances are good that she will eventually do something bad even if it's for the right reasons. *dreads*

If I were better at organizing my thoughts I'd do a whole other meta on this stuff. :P