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Affective Networks Media Page

Page history last edited by Alston 11 years ago

The following visualizations are based on the "Kills" page on the fan wiki Lostpedia (http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Kills), that list in descending order by amount the characters responsibly for any known fatalities, on and off the island. The visualization sizes the node relative to their total kill count, but map only deaths of characters on the islands who were credited with names. The colors of the nodes indicate gender.

 

Mapping Murder in 'Lost'

 

Prompted by the investigation of affective relationships and the identification of female mercenaries as a cluster of unattached characters, I exaggerated the node size here to get a sense of the spread of how the culpability and burden of violence falls along gender lines.

 

Mapping Murder making Gender Visible

It is somewhat less clear that this chart indicates. In our affective mapping, we saw male characters out numbering female characters by quite a margin--but here perpetrators and victims of violence who are male appear to outstrip those who are female.  

 

Premised on the crash of international flight from Sydney to Los Angeles, Lost boasts a cast of characters from a diverse set of national origins. However, considering the varied circumstances of international mobility, I was curious how diverse that cast might appear if we broke it along the axis of the industrialized world and the "rest," and how that might factor in our violence chart. Through that lens, characters from nations such as South Korea, Australia, the United Kingdom and US broadly form one large category. On the other side we might say we have a particularly violent axis with Sayid, a former Iraqi torturer, Mr. Eko, a former Nigerian drug lord, and a former Soviet soldier, Mikhail Bakunin. Jacob and the Man in Black, supernatural siblings thousands of years of old, whose rivalry it is revealed set the course of events that cause the crash into motion, raises an interesting of categorization. Born to a human mother who spoke Latin, they are orphaned and then adopted by the island's original protector. That role of protector is inherited by Jacob, while his twin punished by his brother for causing the death of his adoptive parent, is killed and transformed to an malevolent force trapped on the island. I chose to classify Jacob as part of the industrialized world because of his incredible mobility--he visits most of the main character in their pasts marking them as "candidates" to replace him. That places the Man in Black in the opposite pole, a character marked by lack of access and mobility. That would place this character alongside characters from the non-industrialized world, confirming the shows apparent alignment of violence with this attribute.  

 

Mapping Murder Industrial World vs Not

 

In my final transformation, I indicate whether the characters with a high kill count dies prior to the final season. We see that by the last season, only Sayid Jarrah remains on the non-industrialized column. What more, while Sayid does survive into Season 6, he actually dies twice. Lostpedia notes that Sayid "appears to have been shot more than any other survivor" and is noticeably misidentified as an "other" (http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Sayid_Jarrah). Finally, Sayid's four amorous partners all die by the end of the show's run. Similarly, Mikhail Bakunin is frequently killed or thought to be killed, only to return. He eventually violently takes his own life in the course of keeping the survivors escaping. Mr. Eko's wikpedia page quotes the shows writers as deciding that the character required a "shocking and emotional death." (The corollary to characters like Sayid and Mikhail in the industrialized-nation column would be Martin Keamy, the American personification of evil.) One is compelled to ask why the humanity of this set of characters are more likely to be taken up as the material for dramatic ends.    

 

Mapping Murder via nation and mortality (correction: Charles Widmore does not die prior to season 6)

 

 

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