Basically, it's an interactive chart that allows you to assess each character based on their "goodness" and their "attractiveness" -- e.g., Cersei is, arguably, beautiful but batshit crazy and super-evil.
Yes, this is purely for Game of Thrones, but I'm fascinated by the overall project. After all, both attractiveness and goodness, especially with regards to fictional characters in a complex fantasy world, are highly subjective.
For example: my Best Friend and I take completely different stances on Danerys Targaryen. I would place her in the "Beautiful and Mostly Good" category, since I'm #TeamTargaryen and am rooting for her. But the Best Friend would probably place her in the "Beautiful but Kinda Evil" category, since she's #TeamStark.
But what do you do with characters like the White Walkers? I mean, sure. From our perspective, they should be Evil, because they're killing the characters we've grown attached to. But what if they feel like they're justified?
And what do we do with someone like, say, Jamie Lannister? Or Arya Stark? Both characters started out firmly in one camp -- Jamie was bad (he pushed a kid out of a tower!) and Arya was good (she was an innocent little girl). But the morality lines have definitely blurred...Jamie's redeemed himself in a lot of ways (mainly through his friendship with Brienne) and Arya is literally an assassin. Not so clear-cut.
I mean, characters like Ramsay and Joffrey -- that's pretty obvious. But not for everyone. (Which is part of what makes good fantasy so...well, good. And important for younger readers.)
The article does point out that this isn't a static exercise: that it was inspired by a Instagram post of a scatter plot that has already changed over the seasons as characters act and react to plot events. But the key point was this:
"In a way, how the characters are distributed in the plot speaks to how we (or the show’s creators) view the nature of goodness. If the characters lie along a diagonal line from the bottom left to the top right, it means that — whether in how they are depicted or just our perception — we may be conflating moral and physical goodness. If, on the other hand, there's no real trend, it suggests that readers can easily disentangle their perceptions of morality and physical attractiveness." [my emphasis]
To me, there's the connection to Disney -- and the Villain-centric course I've been teaching these past few semesters. After all, according to the idea I kinda ascribed to above -- i.e., that good fantasy gets at complex portrayals of characters, blurring the lines between morality and between morality and appearance -- Disney movies (most of them) are not "good fantasy." (See also: something like Harry Potter, where Snape is perhaps the ultimate example of an unattractive-but-ultimately-good-but-still-does-super-questionable-things character.) Definitely something Disney doesn't do -- at least in it's earlier films, where evil is pretty much always "unattractive" (according to the standard of the day -- there's a big difference in the unattractiveness of Cruella de Vil vs. Ursula) and good is always beautiful/handsome. Newer Disney movies are starting to challenge this -- e.g. Hans in Frozen didn't look like a "typical Disney villain" -- so I'd be fascinated to see what a Disney version of this would look like.
[But fairy tales are also not traditional fantasy -- the functions of the stories are completely different. What gets really interesting, to me, is when we look at the Disney adaptations of traditional literary fairy tales -- do we view a film like Beauty and the Beast as a fairy tale or as a children's fantasy movie?]
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