The graphs are back! (Ch21 spoilers!)

Hey everybody! Beth here.

As some of you no doubt remember, when season 1 left off we had this graph of the character relationships:

Eagle-eyed observers may notice that this is an absolute eyesore, a complete clusterfuck, and not particularly helpful for keeping track of anything. So, for season 2 we're starting things off by changing the graphing scheme entirely!

To start with: You'll note that there are fewer nodes. Don't be afraid! We didn't kill Melvin while you weren't looking. For the sake of readability, we're excluding characters who:

• Only appear online, and have no anchoring to offline characters

• Only have one major appearance after which the only character who talked to her wants to never see her again (Nichole is no friend of Dorothy)

Then there's the colors! Instead of a system of "how much have they interacted", we're now labeling connections qualitatively, and assigning weights so that clusters of characters are somewhat related to their closeness to each other.

Starting the breakdown of important clusters, we of course have... The quadrangle of stupidity:

Two edges are fake-dating. Both diagonals are issues that could be solved by simply learning to communicate. The remaining edges are... Well, Nichole and Rashmi's friendship is under some tension at the moment. Ru and Kathy don't know each other all that well.

You'll notice, however, that this isn't all four PoVs in chapter 21, because season 2 is promising a steady supply of Tahani Time. Let's see how her cluster is doing:

Tahani is comfortably situated in the bluest, healthiest segment of the graph, right next to her bestie Ru, her Tahanicule, and some bitch from the server who surely won't bother her too much. As the character whose primary purpose is to already have her shit together to contrast with the failures surrounding her, we're sure this region of the graph will be an island of stability in updates to follow!

(Note: Some of you may be surprised that Sif is here, given that Sif was supposed to be quietly removed from canon.)

On the subject of bitches from the server, Laura's big red line leads to Emmy, a character who's hard to assign to any particular cluster. Emmy has additionally asked to be referred to as "some asshole from the server", rather than "some bitch".

And speaking of some assholes, these ones are Brad's problem. Whoever Brad is. The quadrangle of "who cares" and their outgrowth, Quinn, are a cluster we know of unwillingly due to text messages. Good for them or sorry that happened.

And that's the graph update! Hope you enjoyed it, we'll be back with another one after chapter 22: Jealousy Meter.