Killed the most characters

[jack]

Ptc joked that authors kill off an average of three major characters -- most kill none, but one is George Martin :)

Which got me thinking, which author has really killed off the most characters? I want to say "named" rather than "major" so it's more objective. In which case you maybe want two categories: authors who kill off a whole world at the end of a book; and authors who kill off the most named characters -- but still have plot going on afterwards.

Who are the obvious candidates?

ETA: With thanks to Mark for the link and to seekingferrett, the current frontrunner is the Illiad with 254 :)
ETA: Apparently GoT beats it out with 293!

Comments

[pseudomonas]

There are stories with whole universes / multiverses being destroyed. I agree the named characters thing is a better measure - but you're probably still going to end up answering the question "Of the Everyone-In-The-World-Dies-At-The-End stories, which has the biggest named cast of characters"...

[jack]

Yes, I think so. But that's why I suggested a separate category for books where the plots goes on after. (I also think, maybe it only counts if it's a sudden death -- if you write a new book "100 years later" that doesn't necessarily count as killing everyone off :))

Also, I think "Of the Everyone-In-The-World-Dies-At-The-End stories, which has the biggest named cast of characters" may be a bit of a degenerate answer, but I genuinely don't know the answer! :)

[pseudomonas]

Well, there's a popular trope of "Everyone Dies apart from one character who escapes to tell the story"...

[jack]

Yeah, Moby Dick may set a good baseline :)

[seekingferret]

I'd bet the Iliad tops Moby Dick pretty handily.

[jack]

Good point, ok maybe that's our baseline for now :) I keep expecting some special case of a novel to exceed all the others, but the restriction on named characters weighs that down a bit.

On Schlock Mercenary (and for that matter, startrek) they kill clones of the whole cast several times. But only a couple of the clones are established on-screen separately to their originators so it doesn't really count :)

[andrewducker]

293 in ASOIAF:
http://www.sporcle.com/games/Foxen/list-of-deaths-in-a-song-of-ice-and-fire

[jack]

Wow, GoT is famous for killing off major characters, but I didn't realise it might actually beat out the Illiad!

[damerell]

Those aren't all named characters, are they?

[jack]

It says they are, are there exceptions, or am I missing something?

[andrewducker]

Yup. Start the quiz, click give up, and wait a few seconds - it will fill in all the names.

[damerell]

You're right. I just glanced at it, and the way it was coy about everyone's name misled me.

There's a dog, a pig, and a direwolf in there but it seems churlish to object to those.

[andrewducker]

With 223 names from the first three books here:
http://asoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/topic/47887-list-of-death/

[sfred]

I'm not counting the names, but CS Lewis kills almost everyone in The Last Battle.

[damerell]

I think it doesn't count if they get better (not least because otherwise GRRM's narrative trick of "killing" the viewpoint character at the end of a chapter might double his score).

I'm going for _Lone Wolf and Cub_; 28 volumes, 8,700 pages, and almost all of it is of the form "Ogami Itto is employed to assassinate some people / some people come to kill him; he shivs them up". Jack, do comics count?