Bloodthirsty or Lovestruck?

Exploring Violence and Affection in Uncanny X-Men, Issues #100 to #149

Introduction

Superhero comics are often associated with action, battles, physical conflict and saving the city. However the personal relationships between characters can be just as important to their development. This project explores how violence and affection are distributed among characters in X‑Men issues #100 to #149. By examining recorded instances of conflict and affectionate behavior I wanted to investigate whether certain characters are portrayed more through violence, affection or a combination of both.

Methodology

The data for this project comes from the Claremont Run Project, which documents character appearances, interactions, and narrative events throughout Chris Claremont’s run on Uncanny X-Men. The dataset was made publicly available through the claremontrun R package and TidyTuesday’s June 30, 2020 collection.

I began by cleaning and organizing the dataset in Excel then grouped character interactions into two categories: violence and affection. Violence included actions and experiences such as conflict, capture and torture while affection included kissing, hugging, dating and other romantic or emotional interactions.

I calculated scores for each character. Created a third metric, Bloodthirstiness by dividing violence by affection. I then used Flourish to visualize the results through three charts.

Who Fights and Who Loves?

The data reveals differences in how characters are represented. Wolverine has the violence score at 44 but an affection score of only 2. Cyclops meanwhile has a high violence score of 40 but also records 29 affection points. Marvel Girl/Phoenix has a closer balance, with 30 violence points and 29 affection points.

These differences suggest that characters with involvement in physical conflict can also have prominent emotional relationships.

Violence vs. Affection

The slope chart highlights the contrast between each characters violence and affection scores. Wolverine and Nightcrawler exhibit large differences while Cyclops and Marvel Girl/Phoenix have comparatively balanced scores.

One interesting exception is Shadowcat, whose affection score of 9 exceeds her violence score of 6. This suggests that relationships and emotional interactions may play a larger role in her recorded characterization.

Who Is the Most Bloodthirsty?

To explore these differences further I created a metric called the Bloodthirstiness Score calculated by dividing a characters violence score by their affection score.

Wolverine ranks highest with a score of 22 followed by Nightcrawler at 7. Cyclops despite having one of the violence totals has a ratio of approximately 1.38 because of his relatively high affection score.

Although the name is intentionally dramatic the score measures the frequency of two recorded categories rather than a characters actual desire for violence.

Limitations

The analysis has limitations. Characters do not necessarily appear often meaning higher totals may partly reflect greater exposure. The scores also cannot fully capture the circumstances or emotional meaning of events. Additionally comparisons between violence and affection depend on whether the two scores were constructed using counting methods. Characters, with zero affection cannot receive a defined Bloodthirstiness Score.

Conclusion

The visualizations reveal that violence and affection are distributed unevenly among X‑Men characters. Wolverine stands out for his high violence‑to‑affection ratio while Cyclops and Marvel Girl/Phoenix demonstrate that physical conflict and emotional relationships can coexist prominently within the same character.

Ultimately this project demonstrates how quantitative analysis can reveal patterns in characterization while also highlighting the importance of interpreting those patterns within their narrative context.