Archetypometrics, a Pragmateia: Empirical Determination of the Fundamental Archetypes of Fictional Characters

Storytelling is fundamental to how people and cultures encode, share, and preserve knowledge. Stories may be viewed as characters interacting and evolving over time, making an understanding of characters key to understanding stories. Moreover, representation of real people by characters in fictional stories affects how people live their lives: Fictional characters matter because real character matters. Here, we determine the essential dimensions of the space of fictional characters in film, television, and literature. We draw on a data set comprising 464 crowd-sourced semantic-differential traits scored for 2000 characters across 341 stories. On performing dimensional reduction and studying the alignment of traits and characters, we find that twelve archetypes afforded by six essential dimensions dominate the makeup of characters. We interpret these six dimensions as three primary dimensions expressed as semantic differentials of base archetypes: 1. Fool ⇔ Hero, 2. Angel ⇔ Demon, 3. Traditionalist ⇔ Adventurer;and three secondary dimensions: 4. Lone Wolf ⇔ Diva, 5. Outcast ⇔ Sophisticate, 6. Brute ⇔ Geek. We find that the three primary dimensions of character space are congruent with the three dimensions of essential meaning: 1. weak ⇔ powerful, 2. safe ⇔ dangerous, and3. structured ⇔ unstructured. We also observe that the ‘Big Five’ personality traits are covered by these six essential dimensions, showing that fictional characters, however outsized, reflect everyday people. In considering combinations of the six essential dimensions, we generate an expanded set of 232 archetypes (e. g. , Traditionalist-Demon-Hero). We perform a detailed analysis of the resulting collection of archetypes for characters and stories. We construct an allotaxonograph for comparing pairs of characters. Our map-and-list visualization is a generalization of the standard correlation coefficient, and has broad applicability to system comparisons. We provide a comprehensive set of appendices and an interconnected online card collection which together offer explorations of ranked lists of traits, characters, and archetypes; character maps in archetype space for each story; and individual cards for stories, traits, characters, and archetypes. Our empirical discovery of 12 base archetypes advances the basic science of stories, while offering an analytic framework for the development of new narratives.