Love Chart

Fred: Y'all have a chart or something?
Gunn: In the files. I'll get it for you later.

—Angel

Stories with a Love Dodecahedron at some point will throw in a Love Chart. It is usually simplified as much as feasible, with little portraits connected by color-coded arrows. Occasionally, some pithy or more detailed quote is put on the arrows to clarify. Sometimes such a chart is drawn up within the story by one of the characters.

Can be laid out using old good colored strings and thumbtacks. See also Tangled Family Tree.

Examples of Love Chart include:

Anime and Manga

  • Sora no Otoshimono features a chart. It includes the dog.
  • Love Hina and Mahou Sensei Negima (both written by Ken Akamatsu) have at one time or another had a character draw up a chart which tallied up in numeric form the relative levels of attraction/love that a group of girls has for the series' male lead.
    • Chamo tries to pull out his chart (see here) at two different points, only to be thwarted each time. The chart has separate categories for friendship, romance, lust, and so forth. The results aren't all that surprising for most, but Eva? Low affection + high lust = she just wants to rape the poor kid. Wait, that isn't surprising either.
    • There's also this, which shows the various relationships between the characters, as of chapter 255, though only the pink arrows indicate romantic relationships[1]
    • And here is one in English with definite explanations of what means what. Current as of chapter 335, should be updated as appropriate.
  • Genshiken includes a love chart for Show Within a Show Kujibiki Unbalance at one point. In a later volume, as a joke, it includes one for Genshiken itself, even though the relationships are pretty self-explanitory.
  • After about halfway through Monster, volumes began featuring complex connection charts between a mere fraction of the characters in the series... Yet there's rarely even one romantic entanglement shown.
    • Nina is clearly very fond of Tenma, as shown by the last moments of the show. However, this may simply be non-romantic admiration and respect especially since, though looking quite young, Tenma is almost twice her age.
    • Let us not forget Tenma's own proclamation of "what would I do without you" to Nina. Admittedly, he was desperately trying to stop her from killing herself, but it's still a rather strange thing to say considering their thus-far platonic relationship.
  • The Love Dodecahedron in Rumiko Takahashi's Ranma ½ is fairly complex. Just look at this chart.
    • That is a fan made one. Takahashi included one in the memorial book (Art of Ranma ½ in USA). That book also includes a chart about how the main character, Ranma, thinks about each of his rivals/enemies.
  • Since Seven Arcs loves to tease the shippers, a relationship chart of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha is released every now and then. Of course, since Seven Arcs loves to tease the shippers, anyone not married is listed as "best friends" at best. Much pointing and laughing are probably involved here.
  • One of these is at the front of the manga Sgt. Frog. Usually featuring every minor recurring character. It gets a bit cramped.
  • Ouran High School Host Club has a couple of these in the manga. Kaoru makes one, and not surprisingly Renge does, too—it doesn't including herself, though. It's the love triangle involving Haruhi.
  • Iris Zero features a fairly straightforward diagram at the beginning of its third volume in an omake section of sorts.
  • Given Juvia's Shipping Goggles and habit of Twisting the Words, she seems to believe that she's in a Love Dodecahedron, to the point where she actually made one of these.

Comic Books

  • The back of the third issue of Scott Pilgrim.
  • Not quite the same thing, but a long-running joke in X-Men fandom is the the nigh-impossibility of charting the kinship relations of the Summers family tree. The actual resulting graph looks something like a plate of spaghetti. For those not up on these matters, there's at least one edge labeled "Alternate Universe Far Future Clone."
  • Although it didn't appear in the comic book itself, DC once published one of these for the reboot version of the Legion of Super-Heroes in poster form.

Fan Works

  • A version of this was used in The Mad Scientist Wars, in a non-romantic version. The Tinker Family, after discovering that The Tinker Twins had adopted Desius and that Vladimir was the long-lost father of Chic Geek, Wallace Cane set out to create such a chart- It took up most of a table.
  • One worksafe fic on the Phoenix Wright Kink Meme had Apollo and Klavier invited to Phoenix's "family only" Thanksgiving get-together. Their minds boggled as what they had expected to be a very small group turned out to include "fifteen people--almost none of which had the decency to be genetically related to one another." Ema had to draw up a chart just so they could make sense of it. (One reader's rendition of it can be found here.)
  • The shipping tendencies of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fan-authors has lead more than one, or to make charts listing all well-known pairings. The latter include characters shipped with inanimate objects, or even themselves.

Film

  • Two of these are shown onscreen and described by the narrator partway through Brand Upon the Brain, giving to the fact that viewers are not geniuses. Each only contains three people, though, and each contains the same three people—the confusion comes from factoring in one character's Sweet Polly Oliver act.

Literature

Live Action TV

  • "The Chart" was a major plot element in The L Word.
  • As a subversion of sorts (as in this case it rarely deals with actual romance), in Kamen Rider Double, the second episode of every two-ep arc begins with a chart showing the involvement and roles of every person connected to the current case being investigated, with a "Previously On..." narrating over top.

Video Games

  • The Star Fox 64 player's guide included one of these for all the major characters.
  • Used in Fire Emblem 10, albeit more to depict character's military allegiences/family treesecret identities, with only a few critical romantic/familial bonds depicted; several characters had Multiple Endings, after all.
  • Several of these have been put out for Final Fantasy VII - most in the Anniversary Book which had one for every spin-off, but the most comprehensive one was in the original Ultimania guide which even included several minor characters such as Myrna, Elmyra, and Dio.
  • A comprehensive chart for Tsukihime, Kara no Kyoukai:, Fate/stay night and Melty Blood. Please note that even this horrible jumbled mess of relationships doesn't cover everything (No Rider -Love-> Shirou, Zouken -Love-> Justizia etc) and Fate/Zero was never added to the mix. Argh...
  • Soul Calibur IV had a mostly non-romantic version of this, including every playable character from the game (including the bonus characters), as well as the two main swords.
  • Metal Gear Solid Database had one, which was criticised for being somewhat inaccurate in places, but rather memorably made it so the fanboys could no longer ignore that Volgin and Raikov in Metal Gear Solid 3 were lovers.

Web Comics

  1. ↑ The best that my non-Japanese-speaking self can do is- pink=romantic, red=pactio, yellow=rival who're often friends, blue=familial, solid green=teacher/student, dotted green=admiration, purple=friendship, brown=antagonistic, grey=adoption. Blue Outlines are Negi's Class, Red outlines are the Baka Rangers. Yellow Boxes for those "in the know", Grey boxes for those in the ground. Note that all pink lines are monodirectional.
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