Jordan Schermerhorn is a global health graduate student at Duke University and admittedly knows very little about Game of Thrones. But she knows how everyone dies.

By combing Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire (ASOIAF) wikis, Schermerhorn decided to find out exactly how bloody the ASOIAF universe was, aiding her school work in the process. What follows is a summary of her findings which, as she notes at her blog, are based on a ton of assumptions, summaries, and speculations. However, she does have a link to the raw data if you want to check it out for yourself or improve on it.

Sheremerhorn found that no one really grows old in Westeros:

As she notes in the post, the data shows that less than half of the characters reach a 45th birthday. That’s a grim outlook.

And for all the outrage over killing our favorite characters, George R.R. Martin seems to be keeping the grisly demises fairly spread out. Here’s the same survival rate data separated by house affiliation:

But how does the survival rate in the ASOIAF universe compare with modern countries? Well, Westerosi life is much worse than living in Japan, for example. It also has a lower survival rate than Afghanistan in 2012, a country that struggles in all metrics we keep track of:

Of course, Shermerhorn’s analysis is far from complete. Authors don’t take the time to mention every single person who dies on a battlefield, of old age, or merely living life — it would be incredibly boring and cumbersome. So the data will be a bit skewed. That said, the data shows that being a woman in Westeros is rough, as is being part of The Night’s Watch. “I definitely do not want to live there,” writes Shermerhorn.

Valar Morghulis indeed. You can read much more about Shermerhorn’s analysis at her blog.

—

HT Regressing

IMAGE: HBO