Infographic: Death on Game of Thrones vs death on The Walking Dead

The holidays are here, which means it’s time to gather with the ones we love. This year, what better dinner table conversation is there than the two biggest shows on TV: Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead?

Redditor nachorykaart is here to help. They’ve made an infographic comparing the rate of mortality on Game of Throne versus The Walking Dead. There are some rules to go over first.

• Every death represented on the infographic takes place between Seasons 1-5 of each respective show.
• All deaths happened onscreen, or were heavily implied to have happened offscreen.
• Background characters are defined as someone with no name or lines, or someone who does not provide anything to the show.
• Not every death in major battles got counted, as a lot of them happened offscreen.

You can see the entire infographic here, but for the purposes of dissecting it, we’ve divided up each section. Nantes Ryka starts the graph with the main character deaths. Again, this is just for the first five seasons.

"TWD vs GoT deaths by Nantes Ryka"

As you can see, Game of Thrones edges out The Walking Dead by six deaths. While Rick Grimes, the main character on The Walking Dead, is still alive and well, Game of Thrones lost Sean Bean’s Ned Stark in Season 1. Furthering the comparison, Catelyn Stark died in Season 3—Lori, Rick Grimes’ wife, was killed off The Walking Dead Season 3.

Moving on, here is a comparison between the side and background character deaths from each show:

"TWD vs GoT deaths by Nantes Ryka"

Here’s where the discrepancies start to show. What is a side character? On Game of Thrones, it includes characters like Ser Dontos Hollard, whom Littlefinger double-crossed and murdered in Season 4, after he helped Sansa escape King’s Landing. Side characters on The Walking Dead could include little Sophia, who died and came back as a Walker in Season 2. Background characters get a little more tricky, as both shows have had large battles where these kinds of characters die in droves.

In Season 4 of The Walking Dead, the villainous Governer brings an army to attack Rick Grimes and his followers at the prison where they were staying. Main characters, side characters, and background characters all died during this battle. Nonetheless, large battles happen more frequently on Game of Thrones, and generally they’re bigger, and a lot of random soldiers die. Just look at the numbers: 546 dead background characters on Game of Thrones vs 161 on The Walking Dead.

However, the background characters don’t include non-human combatants. On The Walking Dead, Walkers (aka zombies) are often the ones killed (again) in battle. Let’s take a look at those numbers.

"TWD vs GoT deaths by Nantes Ryka"

As far as Game of Thrones goes, non-human character deaths could include direwolves, White Walkers and horses. The Walking Dead has killed a few horses over the course of its run, too…what does everyone have against horses?

Finally, we come to the totals.

"TWD vs GoT deaths by Nantes Ryka"

For a show that has come under scrutiny for its high levels of gratuitous, Game of Thrones is dwarfed by The Walking Dead, at least so far as numbers of death are concerned. Of course, 83% of the characters killed on The Walking Dead are Walkers, which muddies the waters a bit.

Sadly, this infographic doesn’t include Seasons 6 or 7 of either show. In both cases, there was a lot more death to go around. Think of the Battle of the Bastards, or the massive Walker herd in The Walking Dead Season 6. Add in those numbers and I’m sure this infographic would look very different.

The Walking Dead recently had its mid-Season 7 finale. It won’t return until February 2017. That’s a while, but we have to wait even longer—until the summer of 2017—to see the Game of Thrones Season 7 premiere. It’ll probably come on just as The Walking Dead wraps its seventh season.