It's a sad state of affairs when a beloved character dies, some fans won't even accept it as real, a predicament made all the more confusing because characters rarely stay dead. Because of this, fans love to speculate (morbidly) on the odds of a character coming Back From the Dead. The result is a kind of "Sorting Algorithm Of Deadness", where the circumstances, cause, genre, and reaction caused by a death are tallied up to see just how dead a character really is. See the Sorting Algorithm of Mortality to determine whether a character is likely to die in the first place.