Minor Character Explanation

To begin to investigate minor characters, I created a bar graph to look at minor characters and the amount of works they appear in. I did this by using the split characters\ function and individually selecting minor characters based on the definition. This graph shows that Cat Grant was the most popular minor character to write about with 24 works, as I added the Katherine Grant character tag as well. The second most popular minor character was Sam Arias with 6 works. The third most popular minor character was Jess, Lena’s secretary. The first two were unsurprising as they both had one full season where they were a main or recurring character. Jess, however, was quite surprising. She was in one episode for one scene as Lena’s secretary. She wasn’t even given a last name and credits list her character as a “Receptionist”. As of December 15th, she has over 1213 fanfictions that lists her as a character. Of the works that she is in, 1171 of those have Lena Luthor in it and 1109 of those have Kara and Lena in a relationship. Additionally 30 of those works have a Lena and Jess friendship tag. Sam has 3634 works under her name of which 2737 have Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor. She also has 979 works with her and Alex in a relationship. Cat Grant has 4993 works under her name with the most popular relationship being Kara Danvers/Cat Grant with 3029 works. Both Sam and Cat Grant are more popular in AUs with “Alternate Universe – No Powers” being one of the most popular tags for them. For Jess, one of the most popular tags is “Lena Luthor Knows Kara Danvers Is Supergirl”, which indicates her character is more likely to be in canon compliant works. I think the reason for this is Jess’s character is tied to Lena being a CEO who doesn’t take proper care of herself. For Lena to be a stressed CEO it needs to be canon compliant to a certain point.

Two interesting observations on this bar graph is that all the guys have 2 or less works written about them and there are only 4 men shown. There were a lot of male villains and side characters on the show, so it is interesting to see none of them were very popular. I suspect that is due to having a female lead, which usually attracts more women to a show. The second observation I have is there are very few villains on this list. The three “villains” on this list aren’t actually villains in the traditional sense. Jack Spheer, Lena’s ex-boyfriend, is used by another scientist to develop mind controlling nanobots that ultimately kill him. On reddit, when viewers were asked about what minor characters they would like to see more of, none of the ones they listed were on this graph. This makes me suspect reddit and fanfiction sites have entirely different demographics. 

In the future I’d like to show the graph that I used to find the minor character data in Gephi. It was not included because the graph was too messy as it included the assigned nodes which I didn’t know how to get rid of. Additionally, I’d like to poll the reddit page to see roughly how many redditors write and read fanfiction.