Do Appearances Represent Personality of Created Characters

Abstract

This paper studies the relations between outside properties and personalities of created characters in comics/anime. Fans of comics/animes can generally predict the personality of a character from how the character is expressed in the drawing. From this facţ it seems that people have some common unconscious senses for relationships between outside properties and the inside personality of characters. We propose a method to study the relationships between outside properties and personality by calculating the conditional probability for certain attributes. We analyze the dataset of Character Elements Kingdom, which is a fan site of characters appearing in comics and anime. Given the appearance or personality as the conditional attribute, the posterior probability distribution for a category of attributes is obtained. From the posterior probability distribution, we discuss the relationships between outside properties and personalities of created characters. Through the discussion, we confirmed that there were some tendencies for the relationships between appearance and personality, e.g., “black hair girls seemed to be relatively stable though blond hair girls seemed to be relatively active.” These findings suggested typical patterns of designing created characters in Japanese comics/animes. We believe the knowledge obtained through our study can be referenced for creating new characters in some narrative content.