If you’ve read my first five Blogposts, you already know the basic structure of what I’m trying to build here: a framework that lets me systematically analyze villains and antiheroes, compare them across genres, and eventually gather enough data to find patterns in the kinds of “bad characters” audiences actually root for.
So far, I’ve defined four layers that make up a complete villain profile:
- Observable Traits (visual/audio presence, presentation, measurable surface-level coding)
- Personality Profile (Big Five values, used for comparison and clustering)
- Symbolism & Motivation (what the character represents, why they act)
- Creation Context (when and why this character exists culturally)
In theory, that framework is solid. But after writing the first five posts, I noticed something uncomfortable: the Personality Profile layer still sounded a little too clean on paper. The Big Five is the one part of my model that is unquestionably “scientific.” It has decades of empirical support. It has well-established measurement tools. It is widely used across psychology. And it gives me exactly what I need for statistical analysis: five distinct values that can be averaged, compared, visualized, and fed into cluster analysis.
But when it comes to fictional characters, the Big Five has a problem. It is usually measured through self-report questionnaires. Real people are asked how they feel, how they behave in everyday life, what they believe about themselves, and how they react across contexts. Fictional characters don’t get that luxury. They don’t fill out surveys. They don’t have off-screen daily routines. And even if they did, we wouldn’t see them. So the question I kept running into was simple: how do you measure a scientifically established personality model using nothing but on-screen behavior?
The problem with existing approaches: Before I wrote this post, I did what anyone would do: I searched online for examples. I wanted to see how others used the Big Five to analyze characters in movies or TV shows. And what I found was… not great.
Most examples fell into two categories:
- Clinical questionnaires copied and pasted into fandom analysis.
These were the classic “100-item Big Five test” formats. They technically work for measuring personality, but they are absolutely unusable for my goals. If I want to analyze 50 villains, I cannot spend hours per character. I need this to be fast. - Vague descriptive labels without method.
This was the opposite extreme: people saying things like “this character is high in Neuroticism” or “this villain has low Agreeableness,” but never explaining why, never showing which scenes count as evidence, and never providing a replicable scoring system.
For casual fandom discussion, that’s fine. But for a framework that aims at building a database and eventually running comparisons and statistical clustering, it’s a dead end. What I needed was something in between: a system that is scientifically grounded, but also practical enough to apply repeatedly.
Where it comes from: the science, explained simply
The key breakthrough came when I stopped looking for “character Big Five analysis” examples and instead went straight back to the original research and measurement tools. And what I found there was surprisingly reassuring: you don’t need 100 items to get a meaningful Big Five profile. The Big Five is not a single test. It’s a trait taxonomy. The tests are just tools for measuring it. My coding sheet is built around four cornerstone sources that are basically unavoidable in Big Five research:
Costa and McCrae (1992) – NEO-PI-R Manual
This is the professional manual for one of the most widely used personality inventories. What makes it useful here is that it breaks each trait down into facets and ties them to concrete behavioral examples. It is much easier to translate “makes detailed plans and follows through” into a screen-observable indicator than to translate something like “I often feel stressed.”
Gosling, Rentfrow, and Swann (2003) – Ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI)
This paper was essential for confidence. It showed that extremely short Big Five measures can still be reliable. They used only two adjectives per trait and still got valid results. That doesn’t mean longer measures are useless – it just means that brevity doesn’t automatically destroy reliability.
John, Naumann, and Soto (2008) – Handbook chapter
This is one of the clearest descriptions of high vs. low Big Five traits in everyday life. It helped me sharpen the difference between “low Agreeableness as cold manipulation” versus “low Agreeableness as blunt tough-mindedness,” for example. Those nuances matter a lot for villains.
Soto and John (2017) – BFI-2 update
Their work reflects a modern approach: wording items to reflect observable behavior rather than vague self-perception. This is exactly what fictional character analysis needs. When you can’t ask someone what they feel, you focus on what they do. So the idea behind this coding sheet is not to reinvent the Big Five. It’s to translate it. And since my entire framework already emphasizes observable traits (especially through ACIS), this fits perfectly into the “only code what is on screen” logic I’ve been using from the start.
So what’s next?
In the next post, I’ll finally present the actual 20-item coding sheet and explain how I rate characters in practice – including what “neutral” looks like when evidence is missing, and why I use a 1-7 scale instead of a simple yes/no.
Until then – see ya!
Literature:
- Costa, Paul T., and Robert R. McCrae. Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R) and NEO Five-factor Inventory (NEO-FFI). Psychological Assessment Resources (PAR), 1985.
- Gosling, Samuel D., Peter J. Rentfrow, and William B. Swann Jr. “A very brief measure of the Big-Five personality domains.” Journal of Research in personality 37.6 (2003): 504-528.
- John, Oliver P., Laura P. Naumann, and Christopher J. Soto. “Paradigm shift to the integrative big five trait taxonomy.” Handbook of personality: Theory and research 3.2 (2008): 114-158.
- Soto, Christopher J., and Oliver P. John. “The next Big Five Inventory (BFI-2): Developing and assessing a hierarchical model with 15 facets to enhance bandwidth, fidelity, and predictive power.” Journal of personality and social psychology 113.1 (2017): 117.
