A Python pipeline that counts character mentions in YouTube premiere live chat, run on seven anime franchises and rendered as bar chart race videos. Most of the work is aliases, because a global audience rarely types a character's credited name. The aliases are my favourite part: a record of what an audience calls people, which no roster has.
74 Attack on Titan characters in the run, 50 with aliases, and the Narrator has 24
Live chat names characters in its own words and languages.
- The Narrator in many languages: berättare, erzählperson, narrateur, người dẫn chuyện.
- Eren is jaeger, jäger and "suicidal maniac". The Japanese side types 死に急ぎ野郎.
- Rimuru carries 16 names, including his past-life name. Hisoka is "grim reaper" and "magician".
- JoJo chat types Jotaro as qtaro.
Splitting AniList roster names poisoned the One Punch Man counts
Using parts of roster names as aliases breaks when the names are English wordplay.
- One Punch Man's monster names split into aliases like man, all and mouse, which match normal chat several times a minute.
- Auto-added characters now get only their native-language name.
- Nicknames stay hand-curated.
- Matching is fuzzy (rapidfuzz) with a cutoff of 80, in 30-second buckets.
The six newer runs total 64,113 mentions across 401 episodes
Hunter x Hunter's 146 episodes of chat produce about the same total as Slime's 26.
- A 2011 catalogue premiere draws a thinner live audience than a current season.
- One Punch Man's 56,874 come from the earlier pipeline and much denser premiere chats. It has its own analysis.
| franchise | mentions | episodes of chat |
|---|---|---|
| JoJo's Bizarre Adventure | 15,997 | 48 |
| Mushoku Tensei | 11,143 | 49 |
| That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime | 9,889 | 26 |
| Hunter x Hunter | 9,534 | 146 |
| Frieren | 9,074 | 34 |
| Attack on Titan | 8,476 | 98 |
| One Punch Man | 56,874 | 33 |
The counts measure attention in the premiere window only
A mention is someone typing a name, so this counts attention, including the times chat was complaining.
- Only the premiere window is covered.
- A character who becomes a favourite the week after an episode airs does not show up.
Bars now ease between frames, and each episode is titled
The first Frieren race snapped bars to each new value, so busy episodes flickered and no spike had an episode label.
- Two fixes: ease the bar width between frames, and print the episode title along the bottom.
- Some jumpiness stays: the data is per episode, and smoothing a real step invents a change that never happened.
- Four races shipped with cloned commentary and generated music: One Punch Man, Mushoku Tensei, JoJo and Hunter x Hunter.