Living in Westeros on Game Of Thrones must be awfully scary, since people get murdered or killed in war so often that its hard to get too attached to any one person, but the Injury Epidemiology journal has just published a study on what sort of factors have the most impact on a person’s estimated chance of survival on Game Of Thrones in order to figure out who faces the most risk. Unsurprisingly, the characters who would be most likely to survive in any other setting are the most like to die on Game Of Thrones, with the study determining that characters who are “male or lowborn” (meaning they’re just regular folk) who are “featured more prominently” and never “switched allegiance” have the highest risk of death. That means the inverse is also true, so highborn women who have betrayed someone have the best chance of survival—a conclusion that owes a lot to Cersei Lannister and Sansa Stark.
Of course, the survival rate for men who stayed loyal to their side is also skewed by the massive numbers of Westeros residents who died in battle, which brings up another fun stat: The odds of someone dying within their first hour of appearing on screen is 14 percent, so a Game Of Thrones character’s chances of survival begin to improve once they’ve been around for longer than an hour—or once they’ve appeared in more than one episode, which may also have something to do with the way TV works.
The other important thing to note is that Game Of Thrones is a fictional show, with writers planning out every single death that occurs, so the actual best way to survive is to be important to the story. Other than that, just avoid being a regular person who only appears in one episode and has a line or two.