Brainstorming: Character Popularity

[Admin]

Good news first: Since I live in a country with great worker protection I no longer have to go to work (With full pay! Go socialism!). That's great for two reasons: A) I won't expose my unborn child to a deadly pandemic every day B) I have a lot of free time on my hands.
What am i going to do with all this free time? Work on Film Studio Tycoon of course! so, I'm back in the saddle and work on Tv Shows has started in earnest. A feature I always anted to introduce alongside tv shows is character popularity (For Tv shows and movie franchises). We all know that certain character are more popular with the fandom than others, but I'm struggling a bit with turning this into a gameplay mechanic. What factors should influence the likelihood of a character turning into a fan favorite? I would say the actors talent should definitely play into it but is there anything else you can think of? Or should the popularity be otherwise random?
What do you guys think?

[Guest2]

Sounds good maybe an actors popularity too ?

[Mclovin]

Maybe Box Office and Ratings as well. If people tune more into a show, that main character can become popular

[Timothee]

Winning an award? or getting nominated at least.

[melocarma]

the more he storyline is involved, the more the popularity grows, I think.

but I don't know if in the game we will have this factor in the series, so I think the idea of ​​being nominated for awards + actor's popularity works better. For example, Katherine Heigl won an emmy for Izzie, in grey's, and participated in several successful films, which made the character more popular, before the producers of the series began to de-characterize her.

[spacekid]

Maybe it could depend on the actors genre specialties like a funny side character would be very popular among audiences because the actor has good comedy skill which makes that character more funny and loveable or it could be random because in some franchise's some characters that probably weren't supposed to be fan favorites ended up becoming very popular like Boba Fett from star wars, Agent Coulson from Avengers(who ended up getting his own show), Dobby from Harry Potter, Baby Yoda, etc. all of whom who I would say are very popular among fans and a lot of fan favorites aren't always the main character and sometimes even outshine the main character... if that made any sense.

[JoeGuest]

I think character popularity is an interesting game idea, but I guess I question the relationship between character popularity and quality of series or viewership, for example? I'm not sure in my own life the popularity of a character has that much of an impact of whether I watch the series. I guess in the age of the franchise it could yield its own spin-off? I'm trying to work out what tangible effect character popularity has in the game, basically.

[Caelius]

Characters that generally end up being fan favorites are those with redemption arcs (ie Jaime Lannister, Steve Harrington), so maybe you can tie specific tropes or storylines to characters? Idk how viable that is but just throwing it out there.

[pbjtyme]

What if you implemented character traits that display to the audience what kind of character you want this guy to come off as to them.

It'd be something like:


Character Name: Tony Stark // Iron Man

TRAITS: Leader, Sarcastic, Humorous, etc. 


Each trait would add to the difficulty of the role and the actors talents would determine how well they can reflect these traits to the audience which would decide how they see the portrayal of the character.

Hope I didn't respond too late to this.

[cybertimelord]

how important a character is should play a part there should also be consideration for the actors fame and popularity and how long the character has been there