A Quantitative Analysis of the Number and Roles of Characters in boys' comic

Abstract

Characters are one of the most important elements in creating an engaging story. There are many works in which characters make it more interesting. Therefore, in the fields of narrative theory and natural language processing, many studies have been conducted on the roles of characters and their relationships. However, there have been few quantitative studies focusing on the number of characters. In this study, we analyzed the number of characters and their roles in each story in boys' comic, and accumulated numerical data on the appearance, exit, and role change of characters at appropriate times in a full-length story. In addition, conducted factor analysis to extract the combination patterns of the roles of the characters. As a result, it became clear that there is a common feature in the number of characters in a story in boys' comic. In addition, we extracted frequent patterns in the arrangement of characters over a medium- to long-term time series.