https://www.themarysue.com/charting-the-mcu/

everyone was still confused so i made this pic.twitter.com/PfV5mjw8bV

— Anthony Oliveira (@meakoopa) February 1, 2018

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:

pic.twitter.com/FrUKLxbaUz

— Yolosef Staline (@GregPogorzelski) February 1, 2018

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

If you are confused about why Ant-Man is trending slightly goth, you must realize all Rogues have an element of goth. Aragorn is goth. Gambit is goth.

He steals. He went to jail. He pines for his daughter. Goth.

If he weren’t semi-goth the Baskin Robbins joke wouldn’t work.

— Anthony Oliveira (@meakoopa) February 1, 2018

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

Black Panther is perfect centre.

GOTH: giant black cat.
PREP: literally a king.
NERD: smartest man on earth.
JOCK: did u see the pool he flipped the bitch

— Anthony Oliveira (@meakoopa) February 1, 2018

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

people keep asking what a GOTH JOCK is? like that is so easy. pic.twitter.com/AJRYGpLvar

— Anthony Oliveira (@meakoopa) February 1, 2018

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

he rules by subterfuge and guile and uses his fleeting moments of power to eat grapes and stage Elizabethan-style dramas about himself. Deep nerd. https://t.co/eK8gPqiubZ

— Anthony Oliveira (@meakoopa) February 1, 2018

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?

This is why Twitter even exists. It’s beautiful. pic.twitter.com/i56r2Nk1IN

— Matt!!! (@Huinks) February 1, 2018

(via Twitter, image: Marvel Entertainment)

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