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Comment by Raphmedia | Hacker News Reader

Or you know... you could count the number of chapters that every character has and come up with the one that has the highest number of chapters as the main character?

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Or you could just count the number of times their names are mentioned... Except neither approach really represents character importance accurately. Why just go the naive route when you can extract more information from your data by using a more complex approach?

The article actually counters your point exactly:

"For example, Arya Stark, Sansa’s younger sister, has the third most chapters with 34, but ranks behind Sansa in terms of network importance."

I don't think the naive approach is too far off in this case. Arya's importance is reflected in the sheer amount of exposition devoted to her. She's pretty clearly being set up to make a major return at some point, just as it is with Daenerys. The characters with a lot of network connections, on the other hand, are easy to kill off because they're ultimately redundant.

> Or you could just count the number of times their names are mentioned

"Hodor"

Which, if your RTFA, they have done and noted. They show that this is not quite as simple as it seems since, for example, Arya has more POV chapters but Sansa is more important to the story.

Is she though? What measure are you using to say that Sansa is more important than Arya?

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