This Nerd/Jock/Goth/Prep Chart for Marvel Characters Is My New Favorite Thing

One of the benefits of getting older is making fun of definitions that may have once felt isolating. Thus is the case with this brilliant two-axis model that approximates where MCU characters land along high school movie lunch table lines.

On Twitter, the ever-delightful writer and comics fan Anthony Oliveira (@meakoopa) created an initial chart, then updated in response to people demanding to know where even more of their beloved heroes would land. If you know these characters well, you can’t deny that there’s something incredibly accurate about their placement. You can’t always say why, but it just feels … right.

Thousands of people liked and retweeted Oliveira’s graphs, and many of the reactions were like this:

Oliveria gamely explained some of his choices in response to queries. Take, for example, his explanation of why Ant-Man edges towards goth:

Addressing T’Challa’s dead-center position of total balance:

Whenever folks were confused about how some of these attributes could be combined, Oliveira had examples on hand.

And my favorite explanation, in response to a query about how my boy Loki can be both a goth and a nerd:

This is all tongue-in-cheek and in good fun, and it becomes all the more entertaining when you start wanting to argue with the “data points” based on your own gut feels about a character. To wit: I don’t think I’d place my darling sensitive artist Steve Rogers so high up among the convergence of jock/prep, yet the case could be made that in some of the MCU’s depictions, he lands therein.

And, of course, all of these definitions are silly in the end—we all encompass many aspects, as do our super-powered faves—but a well-charted graph is always good to gaze upon.

Who would you position differently—or has this awakened a new understanding of character alignment you’d never considered before? Who is missing, and where would you put them?

(via Twitter, image: Marvel Entertainment)

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Kaila Hale-Stern

Kaila Hale-Stern (she/her) is a content director, editor, and writer who has been working in digital media for more than fifteen years. She started at TMS in 2016. She loves to write about TV—especially science fiction, fantasy, and mystery shows—and movies, with an emphasis on Marvel. Talk to her about fandom, queer representation, and Captain Kirk. Kaila has written for io9, Gizmodo, New York Magazine, The Awl, Wired, Cosmopolitan, and once published a Harlequin novel you'll never find.

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