I recently conducted a survey about peoples opinions of the characters in the HBO show Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones is a fantasy drama series with a very large ensemble cast, a feature it inherited from the book series it was based off of which told the story though first person narration from 20-30 subjects. The characters are extremely important to the story and extremely important to the stories audience, so I set out to investigate the audience’s relationship to the characters in more detail.

I posted a survey on the subreddit /r/gameofthrones, an internet forum where the series is discussed, asking volunteers to rate 35 Game of Thrones characters on how much they liked them on a 7 point scale where 1=Least favorite, 2=Hate, 3=Dislike, 4=Neutral, 5=Like, 6=Love and 7=Most favorite. A few more questions were also asked. The response was strong, there were 674 participants who answered every question and rated exactly one character as least favorite and exactly one character as most favorite. The data from these participants is what I will use for the rest of this article, and is available for public download at the end.

The first thing to do is just rank the characters by average rating, see the table below.

Character Rating Tyrion Lannister 5.95 Arya Stark 5.66 Jon Snow 5.58 Oberyn Martell 5.57 Bronn 5.35 Eddard Stark 5.28 Jaime Lannister 5.2 Davos Seaworth 5.11 Margaery Tyrell 4.93 Varys 4.89 Hodor 4.89 Robb Stark 4.83 Olenna Tyrell 4.82 Stannis Baratheon 4.74 Sandor Clegane 4.71 Samwell Tarly 4.69 Ygritte 4.67 Khal Drogo 4.66 Grey Worm 4.6 Jorah Mormont 4.6 Robert Baratheon 4.43 Brienne of Tarth 4.33 Sansa Stark 4.33 Petyr Baelish 4.25 Daenerys Targaryen 4.24 Tywin Lannister 4.24 Daario Naharis 4.06 Bran Stark 4.06 Melisandre 3.7 Catelyn Stark 3.66 Theon Greyjoy 3.48 Cersei Lannister 2.99 Ramsay Bolton 2.96 Shae 2.76 Joffrey Baratheon 2.03

To those familiar with the show, the ratings are about what you would expect. The evil, bratty king character is rated by far the lowest and the more protagonist characters are rated the highest.

What will be even more interesting though is the question, are there different types of fans? Ratings for all characters are not independent, there are some significant correlations. For example the largest correlation is r=0.46 between ratings of Robb Stark and Eddard Stark, people either tend to like both a lot, or feel neutrally about both.

The best was to investigate the structure of a dataset like this is a factor analysis. Factor analysis is a statistical procedure that tries to reduce data with lots of variables down to more fundamental underlying variables that predict the observed variables. When I run this analysis on the data here there appears to evidence for the existence of only one important underlying variable. This does not mean that everything can be reduced down to this one variable, this variable in fact only predicts about 15% of the variation in ratings. There is lots of variation not reducible to any underlying variables. But this one factor does seem to have important consequences for how people rate characters.

After the number of underlying variables is discovered, the next task is figuring out how the underling variables should be characterized. This is done by looking at the factor loadings. When factor analysis extracts underlying factors from a dataset it produces estimates of how each observed variable relates to the underlying factors. If a variable loads highly on a factor than the variable correlates highly with the factor, if it is low than the observation does not have much to do with that underling factors. In the table below the loadings of each character rating on the one factor identified as being important are given.

Character Factor Loading Daenerys Targaryen -0.79 Joffrey Baratheon 0.67 Ramsay Bolton 0.61 Tywin Lannister 0.6 Cersei Lannister 0.59 Petyr Baelish 0.56 Bran Stark -0.5 Catelyn Stark -0.44 Jon Snow -0.42 Hodor -0.37 Theon Greyjoy 0.35 Robb Stark -0.35 Grey Worm -0.34 Stannis Baratheon 0.33 Ygritte -0.33 Eddard Stark -0.33 Daario Naharis -0.33 Arya Stark -0.28 Samwell Tarly -0.27 Brienne of Tarth -0.27 Sandor Clegane 0.24 Jaime Lannister 0.23 Melisandre 0.23 Khal Drogo -0.23 Tyrion Lannister -0.19 Shae -0.16 Jorah Mormont -0.09 Sansa Stark 0.08 Varys 0.08 Margaery Tyrell -0.07 Davos Seaworth 0.07 Bronn -0.06 Oberyn Martell -0.05 Robert Baratheon 0.03 Olenna Tyrell 0.03

The factor could be described as relative preference for evil characters. The measures the load most negatively on the factor are all “good guy” charterers, and the ones the load most positively are all evil charterers.

If you wish to play with the data yourself, get it here.