Embedded Files
Focus on
The surrealistic adventures of Rick and Morty take place in the daily life of a very normal family. Beth and Jerry Smith, a married couple from their youngest age, their two children, Morty and Summer, and the recently returned scientific grand-father, Rick. Even though the Smith family members seem like secundary characters at first glance, they allow to address deeply human problematics which concern familial interactions over the course of episodes: parents' divorce, the abandonment of a daughter by her father, the loss of loved ones, depression, or alcoholism.
Thus we found interesting to dive into the social interactions of the Smith family in order to study those subjects, especially by analysing their words.
"Beth, having a family doesn't mean that you stop being an individual. You know the best thing you can do for people that depend on you? Be honest with them, even if it means setting them free."
A Meeseeks to Beth, S01E05TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. An overview of the family words
1. An overview of the family words
Let's start with some basic statistics we can compute by analysing all the lines said by the Smith family in the transcripts we collected.
Note: we recall that we couldn't collect the transcript of all episodes, so this analysis is not totally exhaustive.
Who is the most talkative?
Who is the most talkative?
In general Rick is the most talkative character, followed by Morty. Then we find Jerry, and lastly Summer and Beth with similar ratios (figure 1). If we consider the average number of tokens per line in transcript, Rick remains at first position but Jerry becomes the second most talkative character per intervention (figure 2), followed by Morty, Beth and Summer who are very close to each other. This analysis allows us to distinguish the frequency to the length of an intervention. Indeed, it shows for instance that Jerry doesn't speak very often, but he can string together many words in a row when he starts.
Figure 1 - Pie chart of tokens ratio per character
Figure 2 - Average number of tokens per intervention
Figure 3 - Lexical diversity ratio per character
Who has the greatest lexical diversity?
Who has the greatest lexical diversity?
Lexical diversity refers to the ability to use various distinct vocabulary terms in speech. In practice, we obtain it by dividing the number of unique words per the total number of words.
Here, we note that previous ranking is almost reversed (figure 3)! It means that the characters who talk the less use the greater pannel of different words.
What are the favourite words of the Smith family?
What are the favourite words of the Smith family?
To study the family as a whole at first step, we computed the frequency distribution of the 75 most common words said by the Smith family (figure 4). The first series of word are quite neutral, like "know", "gonna", "look". However we can find a bit further some words related to family, like "grandpa", "dad", or "family" itself.
Figure 4 - Cumulative frequency distribution of the 75 most common words of the Smith family
To detect especially the couple of words that each character repeats the most, we carry out a Term Count-Inverse Document Frequency operation (TC-IDF). We found out the Top-5 words per character, and we represented all the specific words in wordclouds (figure 5).
Figure 5 - Top-5 words and wordclouds for each character
"Rick, the only connection between your unquestionable intelligence and the sickness destroying your family is that everyone in your family, you included, use intelligence to justify sickness."
Dr. Wong, the family therapist, S03E032. All SMITH Characters Individually
2. All SMITH Characters Individually
To analyse multiple sentiments of each character in the Smith family, we started by doing it separately.
We used the NRC emotion lexicon to measure the sentiment scores of the words they use.
The words are all associated with positive or negative sentiments and some of them with specific emotions of positiveness (joy, anticipation, trust, surprise) and negativeness (sadness, disgust, anger, fear).
Of course, the NRC lexicon does not include all the words found in each character's lines, but can be representative of each one's personality. Let's go!
Rick Sanchez
Rick Sanchez
Richard 'Rick' Sanchez is one of the titural two main protagonists. He is a megagenius scientist, capable of creating complex scientific inventions. Upon the series' inception, Rick's mental health was large source of speculation. He is willing to be extremely brutal such as when people betray him or his life or those close to him are in danger. He is usually portrayed as homicidal and having a large disregard for life. This does not make him completely heartless, however, as he has been shown to be shocked, startled or annoyed by the loss of life that he deems unnecessary, foolish, or unreasonable. Also, despite his general disregard for others, he is also shown to care about maintaining relationships and holds a sentimental value of his family.
The results of our study show that his sentiments are more positive (55.9%) than negative! His frequent cursing is a big part of his weight of emotions like fear, anger and disgust. From the other side: he is always very excited of his adventures in other dimensions, where he often willingly kills aliens to get the resources he needs. The fact that he is shown to find killing fun, as well as his pure excitement of his inventions and his ideas can justify the percentage of emotions like trust, anticipation and joy. Although Fear is quite high in his sentiment ranking, which takes part of his adventures.
Morty Smith
Morty Smith
Morty is the other main protagonist of the series. He is the grandson of Rick and is often forced to tag along on his various misadventures. He is a young, good-natured, and impressionable boy who can be somewhat easily manipulated. Morty may sometimes act spineless, but he has shown bravery and quick-wittedness in the face of adversity. While all members of his family have expressed their belief that Morty is unintelligent, there is substantial evidence to the contrary in many cases. He is also shown to have repressed anger issues which have caused him to become hysterical and homicidal.
Morty's positive and negative sentiments are quite close to each other and this is a fact because he often seems confused about how to react, and he is not very self-confident. It seems that he can easily trust and a lot of what he says show anticipation, but also fear and anger. It's also noticeable that Rick's and Morty's emotions are quite similar at some point, since their emotions are mostly related to their common adventures. However Morty is more fearful and sad than Rick.
Summer Smith
Summer Smith
Summer Smith is the deuteragonist of Rick and Morty and Morty's older sister. She has some personality traits of a typical teenager. It is revealed that Summer can be jealous of the close relationship about her grandfather Rick and her brother Morty, and she can sometimes feel ignored by her grandfather. However, she is also shown to care a lot about her family. She is considered smart, humorous, ambitious and also, much more selfless that the rest of the family.
Summer has more positive sentiments! Her trust level is at the significant level of 38% and seems to be quite joyful, at least compared to Rick and Morty! Still she feels more fear than Morty, but it should be related to the less large number of words she has in transcripts.
Beth Smith
Beth Smith
Beth is Rick's daughter and Morty's mother. She is an intelligent, ambitious, and independent woman who suffers from a variety of deep-seated insecurities. Although Beth can sometimes be derisive of what she sees as weakness, dependence or emotional vulnerability, she can still be compassionate and caring at times Characterized by a superiority complex and abandonment issues, Beth gradually came to struggle with her husband over his contributions to their marriage.
Beth also has more positive sentiments in general. Her level of trust is remarkable, like for her daughter, as well as the fact that she has been joyful as much as sad and fearful.
Jerry Smith
Jerry Smith
Jerry is Beth's husband and Morty's father. Jerry is a loyal family-man, but can be insecure and misguided. Despite being generally passive and weak most of the time, Jerry has the ability to channel the inner-strength to face his fears.
As expected, Jerry is the most joyful character of the Smith family, and we do love him for that (59.8%). He feels a lot of trust, like the others. However in comparison with his wife, he is less sad and less fearful in general.
3. How they interact to each other: a Sentiment Analysis based on episodes' transcripts
3. How they interact to each other: a Sentiment Analysis based on episodes' transcripts
To analyse the interactions specific to the Smith family, we filter the transcript by considering only the lines said by a member of the family where another member is called.
We used the VADER rule-based tool for sentiment analysis. This method processes negations, punctuation and letter case variation. Hence it is more accurate to compute the sentiment score of given speech.
We used the default valence VADER lexicon, but we also used the sentiment lexicons provided by NRC (National Research Council Canada). In particular, we used the NRC-VAD (Valence, Arousal, Dominance) lexicon and the NRC-Emolex (Word-Emotion Association Lexicon). Indeed, those lexicons allow us to diversify our sentiment analysis by scoring the 13 following sentiments, especially from the Robert Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions:
valence, arousal, dominance, positiveness, negativeness, anger, fear, anticipation, trust, surprise, sadness, joy, and disgust
Besides the NRC-VAD lexicon evaluates ≈20 000 terms instead of ≈7 500 in the VADER lexicon, which represents 2.6 times more terms.
Robert Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions
We obtain a quite indigest table of sentiment scores for each sentiment and each pairwise of characters in the Smith family ("compound" score in VADER result).
Thus let's visualise the result of each sentiment to get a better picture of it (from most to less surprising)!
Dominance relationships
Dominance relationships
Dominance relationships are quite strong in the Smith family: dominance sentiment equals 0.85 (std = 0.44) in average.
First, we shows that there is no dominance relationship between Rick and Morty: both characters obtain a very high score, but there is almost no variation of dominance between them.
Still, Rick remains a dominant character: by looking at dominance variations, he clearly dominates Jerry and Summer.
"Listen, Jerry. It's all over, Jerry. Jerry, get out of the booth. Jerry, you don't get it. I don't give a f*** what you think, Jerry. Stay scientific, Jerry. Hey Jerry, you in here being stupid? Calm down Jerry. Not now, Jerry. Jerry, hand me a scalpel and a bundle of dynamite!" - Rick to Jerry
"Okay, with all due respect, Rick. I beg your pardon, Rick. Rick, would you please go back to me on David Letterman? You should try having a little respect for the dummies of the universe. Ah, Rick? Well, I can see that you're busy..." - Jerry to Rick
However... Beth, his daughter, dominates Rick! Indeed, we notice that the greatest dominance variation scores is reached by Beth and Rick.
Another surprising result appears between Beth and his husband Jerry. Although Beth seems to dominate Jerry when we watch the series, transcripts' analysis shows the opposite situation: Jerry is slightly more dominant than Beth in his words.
Valence relationships
Valence relationships
According to the Wikipedia definition in psychology, "valence is the affective quality referring to the intrinsic attractiveness/"good"-ness (positive valence) or averseness/"bad"-ness (negative valence) of an event, object, or situation".
To study valence, we tried to apply the VADER method to two lexicons: VADER lexicon then NRC lexicon, to compare results. Indeed, the VADER lexicon has less words, but the rating is more accurate (10 people instead of 6), and it is defined for the VADER method since it's the default lexicon, provided by the team who works on the algorithm. Perhaps the results would make more sense to apply it on transcripts' lines.
According to the VADER lexicon, the Smith family shows some valence (mean = 0.34) but valence manifestation through interactions is very irregular (std = 0.87). On the other hand, we observe much more valence by using the NRC lexicon (mean = 0.99) in all relationships (std = 0.01).
Thus the results from the NRC lexicon are difficult to analyse, but using the VADER default lexicon leads to meaningful results.
In fact, the study shows that the highest unbalanced relationship for valence sentiment is between Jerry and Beth: Jerry manifests a lot of valence when he talks to his wife. In contrast, Beth has a very low valence score with Jerry. This observation could be part of the explanation of Beth and Jerry's divorce.
Besides Beth shows more valence in her interactions with her son Morty, than Morty to his mother: this is a quite natural relationship between a mother and his son in his teenage years!
Lastly, to support our previous analysis of dominance, we see that Jerry is a bit more agreeable with Rick, than Rick is.
Positiveness and Negativeness in relationships
Positiveness and Negativeness in relationships
Here, let's study how much the characters use positive or negative words in their family interactions.
The use of positive terms is more regular than the use of negative terms (std = 0.47 < std = 0.78) among different relationsips. However the Smith family tends to use more negative than positive terms (mean = -0.59 > mean = -0.78).
By analyzing positiveness, we notice that the interactions of Jerry with his father in law, Rick, is the most positive, but it's the relationship which is the most unbalanced if we look at the score variations ranking. We confirm the idea that Jerry is a very positive and pleasant character, while Rick denigrates him.
By analyzing negativeness, we observe that Summer and Morty are both very negative to each other - typical brotherhood relationship, probably... Then we find again how much Beth is negative when she talks to Jerry, which supports again their divorce. Lastly, we note that the highest unbalanced relationship is between Morty and his mother: Morty manifests a lot of negativeness.
Trust in relationships
Trust in relationships
The Smith family members don't seem to trust each other, since the median is located around -0.99.
However, some interactions stand out from the global trend. Jerry shows great confidence in Rick, but of course, there is no reciprocity. We observe the same situation between Beth and her daughter Summer: Beth trusts Summer a lot.
Fear in relationships
Fear in relationships
Although we don't detect any fear in the Smith family words globally, Morty manifests a bit more fear when he talks to his mother. Same for Summer when she talks to his father. Thus, children express a little more their fear to their parents, which is quite relevant interpretation of family interactions.
Sadness in relationships
Sadness in relationships
All the interactions in the Smith family show no sadness (mean = -0.98), except Morty with his mother.
Arousal relationships
Arousal relationships
Arousal refers to excitation, to being deeply awoken and aware in a given situation.
Here, basic statistics shows that the Smith family's words are not a proof of a great arousal sentiment: the median is around -0.99 and we don't observe many variations.
The relationship between Summer and Morty is the only case where we notice a real difference in arousal: Summer shows arousal when she talks to Morty.
Anticipation in relationships
Anticipation in relationships
Anticipation is almost not expressed in the Smith family relationships (mean=-0.92), except for Summer with her mother.
Beth: You're the worst!
Jerry: No! You're the worst! You don't support this family!
Jerry: All you care about is yourself!
Beth: You think supporting the family is about supporting you emotionally...
Jerry: You've got two children being dragged across the cosmos...
Beth: ...but you're unsupportable! Because it's never enough, Jerry!
Jerry: ...by your dangerously ill father, and you force me to watch it happen!
Beth: It will never be enough support to satisfy you! And you don't even know what it's like...
Jerry: Because you'd rather lose them and lose me than lose him!
Beth: ...to be afraid of losing anything because you cling and you cling and you cling...
Jerry: And why? Because you're the child, Beth. You, not me, you!
Beth and Jerry's argument, S02E03Note: in the following sections, we indicate that results don't help the interactions analysis because all interactions have similar sentiment scores. Since there is no significant score variations, we cannot distinguish and compare relationships. It could be due to a lack of terms in used NRC lexicons.
Joy in relationships (no variations)
Joy in relationships (no variations)
There is little joy in the Smith relationships (mean = -0.99, std = 0.01).
Anger in relationships (no variations)
Anger in relationships (no variations)
All relationships manifest almost no anger (mean = -0.99, std = 0.003).
Comment
Disgust in relationships (no variations)
Disgust in relationships (no variations)
There is no disgust in the Smith relationships (mean = -0.99, std = 0.008).
Comment
Surprise in relationships (no variations)
Surprise in relationships (no variations)
Stats
Comment
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse