beautiful character relation diagrams

[Tamahome]

I've been reading Pynchon's Inherent Vice, which is supposed to be his easiest book. (It's not sf, although it can be pretty trippy, dude. And it's a movie.) And yet it has 130 characters, 37 entities, 6 gangs, 4 bands, and 1 dog to keep track of. Then I found someone made beautiful character relation diagrams for every chapter, and in the pdf versions I can just search for names on the fly while reading. All the lines are labelled, and there's color coding depending on what side a character is on. I was amazed at how reading the book became a breeze. I'm sure there's other genre books that could benefit from this kind of treatment. If nothing else, it demonstrates the power of the right note taking. That blog post mentions Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and Infinite Jest.

https://thomaspynchon.com/inherent-vi...

Oops, did I just slashdot that site?

Direct link: https://inherent-vice.com/

[Jessica]

A lot of classics I've read (Count of Monte Cristo, Wuthering Heights, etc) included a character map, but they almost always spoil the plot by revealing secret parents or who marries who later in the book! Now I avoid character maps until the end of the book.

But it looks like this Inherent Vice map has different versions for each chapter? Well done!

[William]

The Galactic Milieu series by Julian May is epic and seriously requires tracking of the various interwoven generations. The wikipedia page includes a detailed chart that can really help, but as Jessica said - watch out for spoilers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galacti...

[Trike]

Wow.

Wow.

[RJ - Slayer of Trolls]

What about diagrams for ugly characters relationships?

[Trike]

I wonder if anyone has done this for the Wheel of Time series. Someone (Brandon Sanderson, maybe?) once said there were 2800 named characters in WoT. That chart would be rather on the large side.

[Tamahome]

https://www.reddit.com/r/WoT/comments...

[Trike]

Stumbled on a Star Wars family tree: https://usefulcharts.com/blogs/charts...

[Trike]

Game of Thrones chart of betrayals and alliances: https://www.etsy.com/listing/59743311...

Targaryen family tree: https://www.deviantart.com/rfgane/art...

...I’ve gone down a rabbit hole.

[Trike]

Romantic relationships of the X-Men comics: https://warwickfuller.files.wordpress...

Marvel Cinematic Universe connections: http://www.christiantate.co.uk/wordpr...

[Trike]

Tamahome wrote: "https://www.reddit.com/r/WoT/comments..."

I can’t get the Imgur link to open. Looks complicated, though.

[Janet]

Trike wrote: "I wonder if anyone has done this for the Wheel of Time series. Someone (Brandon Sanderson, maybe?) once said there were 2800 named characters in WoT. That chart would be rather on the large side."
Yes, I read all but the last ones that Sanderson finished for the series. To be honest, while being compelled by the stories and characters, I also sort of burned out on the story. I'm still up in the air, if I will read the completion of the story. I've enjoyed Sanderson's work over the years.... just having trouble, as well, meshing the two authors in my brain. Perhaps I am just being like a kid that cannot imagine vinegar on potatoes?

[Tamahome]

Here's a pdf character map for Infinite Jest, a notoriously large and challenging book. http://sampottsinc.com/ij/IJ_Diagram.pdf