If you’re familiar with the Game of Thrones HBO series, you may know it’s derived from the Song of Ice and Fire books by George RR Martin. There are many remarkable things about the Song of Ice and Fire books (hereafter refered to as “Game of Thrones” books for the sake of simplicity).
- They’re long. All put together almost 4,500 pages with at least 2 more books on the way.
- Every chapter assumes a unique character point of view.
I love how the story jumps through so many characters and wanted to see how much of the story Martin assigned to which character POV, so I pieced together this visualization. Click on it to go to the interactive version which is way, way, way better. Note, however, that there are potential spoilers if you’ve watched the show and haven’t read all the books all the way through. (Also, oddly, there seems to be some weird issue… if it doesn’t load fully, just hit refresh.)
Because the books are so stinking long, every pixel in the interactive visual represents 5 pages. That makes the scale something like this:
I took every chapter in the Game of Thrones books and then logged the character point of view. Then I grouped those characters by the house they belong to (or serve). The width of the house (and of the character’s image) indicates how much of the story is told from their point of view.
Each chapter is represented by a line between the place in the book where the chapter is located and the character whose POV the chapter is told from. The chapter lines are sized according to how many pages the chapter runs.
Finally, when you hover over a book or a house or a character, you’ll see the chapters the belong to that book (or house or character) highlighted.
Enjoy! I hope you have as much exploring the books with this as I had creating this visualization.