I was thinking about Buffy's 3 main ships (to me): Bangel v. Spuffy v. Fuffy. I was wondering how many episodes (BTVS or ATS) where each ship has scenes together. Then inspired by these two polls I decided to add in two other non-Buffy ships: Gethan and Spangel.
Kudos to the Fuffy and Gethan shippers, who are working with not a TON of episodes with scenes together. Especially Gethan shippers, who only have 4 canon episodes! To be fair, Spangel fans only had 13 until S5 of ATS.
Summary ship episode count:
Spuffy (Spike x Buffy): 71
Bangel (Buffy x Angel): 49
Spangel (Spike x Angel): 35
Fuffy (Faith x Buffy): 21
Gethan (Giles x Ethan): 4
Any blatant negative ship comments, like calling a specific ship indecent will get you blocked. Ship and let ship. Other comments welcome.
Full details under the cut!
What's the Universe? The TV Buffyverse. (BTVS TV or ATS TV eps, the comics and books don’t count.)
How to start? I started with the pre-count. The pre-count is episodes where both characters in the ship appeared.
Spuffy pre-count: 96 (inc. 0 on ATS)
Bangel pre-count: 56 (inc. 2 on ATS)
Spangel pre-count: 42 (inc. 22 on ATS)
Fuffy pre-count: 21 (inc. 1 on ATS)
Gethan pre-count: 4 (inc. 0 on ATS)
How to verify? I did not rewatch all the episodes! I rewatched a few, after checking transcripts, recaps, and ship gif pages.
What doesn't count? Someone talking about the other person, because I am not trying to include the various episodes where Faith is haunting the show. They must appear in a scene together for it to count. They must both be fully aware of each other. Shared dreams (like the Fuffy ones) do count, but regular dreams do not. Buffy Bot, Wishverse Buffy, and FirstEvil Buffy do not count. I treated Faith and Buffy as their "mental" selves during the two body swap episode scenes. Also I treated Angel the same as Angelus and soul-less Spike the same as soul-ed Spike.
Notes per Ship...
Spuffy (Spike x Buffy) 71 total
S1: 0 / S2: 7 / S3: 1 / S4: 9 / S5: 18 / S6: 17 / S7: 19 / ATS: 0
4x06 Wild At Heart does not count because in the cemetery she is not aware he can hear her speech "to him." 4x16 Who Are You? does not count because Spike encounters Faith in Buffy's body, so I counted that as a Faith-Spike scene. 4x22 Restless also does not count because while he appears in Xander's dream and so does Buffy, this is Xander's dream so neither appearance counts. 5x08 Shadow does not count because he dreams of her, but it's not a shared dream.
Bangel (Buffy x Angel) 49 total
S1: 6 / S2: 19 / S3: 18 / S4: 1 / S5: 1 / S6: 0 / S7: 2 / ATS: 2 (S1)
3x03 Faith Hope and Trick does not count because when naked Angel appears at the end Buffy has already left. 3x09 The Wish does not count because Wishverse Buffy is not regular Buffy. 4x08 Pangs does not count because Buffy is not aware of him.
Spangel (Spike x Angel) 35 total
S1: 0 / S2: 10 / S3: 1 / S4: 0 / S5: 0 / S6: 0 / S7: 0 / ATS: 24 (S1, 2, 5)
4x08 Pangs does not count because Spike does not share a scene with Angel. 7x21 End of Days and 7x22 Chosen both do not count because while Spike watches Angel, Angel does not seem to be aware of him watching. For ATS, besides all of S5, they share scenes in 1x03 In The Dark and 2x07 Darla.
Fuffy (Faith x Buffy) 21 total
S1: 0 / S2: 0 / S3: 13 / S4: 2 / S5: 0 / S6: 0 / S7: 5 / ATS: 1 (S1)
Every Faith appearance in a BTVS episode means she will have a scene with Buffy. She has 5 Buffy-less episodes on ATS. I did count the dream sequence in 3x22 Graduation Day Part 2 because I read it as a shared dream. They are both aware of the other.
Gethan (Giles x Ethan) 4 total
S1: 0 / S2: 2 / S3: 1 / S4: 1 / S5: 0 / S6: 0 / ATS: 0
Similar to Faith, whenever Ethan appears in an episode, he will have a scene with Giles.
This doesn't have visualization yet but I wanted to share the results.
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Finally get to post something I created! Eventually I will make a Tableau dashboard to dig into this data, but for now here is a very rough racing bar chart, showing the top 11 BTVS characters by speaking time, per episode. This is built on the work done by J. Freedland in GitHub, which I linked to previously. Details below the cut.
A Flourish data visualisation by Buffy Data Viz
When I googled how to create a racing bar chart for free, I found something called Flourish. It was very easy to create, so I decided to go ahead and make a rough version of this. (No coding required if you want to create your own. This post sadly not sponsored.) The colors on this aren't great, to keep it legible I limited it to the top 11 characters, it lacks captions, and it lacks images (faces) for the top characters. I can actually fix all that in Flourish but don't have the time at the moment. BUT you get the point.
Notes:
This is cumulative speaking time per episode for each character, in seconds. (The original J. Freedland data did the work of compiling this for each character for each episode.)
Angel and Angelus are treated separately in the original J. Freedland data, but I chose to combine them into one character labeled "Angel." This is consistent with how Spike's speaking time is treated, with only one entry. (I also deleted the original Flourish bars for Angel and Angelus, you can only see the combined bar here.)
For whatever reason the original J. Freedland data combines E01 and E02 for S06 into one entry.
I have not spot checked the J. Freedland data with a stopwatch, but from reviewing it at a high level it seems accurate.
ADDED 09/01: Joyce has speaking time in S7, but this is the First using her body. So note that this data source credits First's speaking time to the character the First is using. (You can also think of it as this data using the actors and not the characters.)
Happy to share the source data (currently in excel) upon request, however it is really just the raw csv from J. Freedland's GitHub in excel, and then basic math making it cumulative to put into Flourish.
If you have any requests for this type of chart for BTVS let me know! It would be relatively easy to re-create this for specific characters and / or focus on specific seasons.
BTVS Speaking Time: Buffy Boos edition (racing bar chart)
Buffy is a hero. Buffy saved the world ALOT. Buffy cannot be reduced to the people she dated / flirted with.
And Yet... It is fun to compare. I created the Buffy Boos edition of the previous chart, and made some other improvements. ("Love interest" sounds like a 1980s term, and trying to be gender neutral I chose "boos.") So you have 17 of Buffy's boos in a racing bar chart, showing their speaking time, per episode. Unlike the previous version (with all characters) this has images for the top characters, and INTERACTIVE CATEGORIES. (Again, credit to J. Freedland who did the GitHub data work.) Details below the cut.
A Flourish data visualisation by Buffy Data Viz
The best part is the INTERACTIVE CATEGORIES!! They are color-coded in the chart and you can add or remove them at will. You can also flip the chart from Most to Least. (Do you reject that Faith was a boo? Remove her. Don't want to see minor baddies like Dracula? Remove them. Bored with the people she only flirted with? Remove them.)
Made using Flourish, it was free. This still lacks captions, which I hope to add in later. Will update if I do. End goal is a Tableau dashboard to dig into the full data, but this is fun for now.
This is a cumulative speaking time per episode for each of Buffy's boos in seconds. (The original J. Freedland data did the work of compiling this for each character for each episode. Note that on a high-level review it seems accurate. And the original data combines E01 and E02 for S06 into one entry.)
I have combined Angel's and Angelus's speaking time. This is consistent with how Spike's speaking time is treated. (I also did this in the previous chart.)
Online it looks like The First used Spike as a disguise a few times, so Spike's time could be inflated by that. You would have to check the Forever Dreaming transcripts for those moments to be sure. No other boos were used by The First as disguises.
I used the term "boos" very broadly. A racing bar chart of just Angel vs. Spike would be boring. As expected, adding Riley in does not make it less boring! I would not really count all of these people as boos, but Buffy had some sort of interesting interaction with each of them. Note this includes any speaking time they had, including to people besides Buffy, and also even when Buffy isn't around.
I DID intentionally leave out Xander in this, even though Buffy does flirt with him (magic, making Angel jealous). I considered adding him but his speaking time will dwarf all the others, so I did not.
Happy to share the source data (currently in excel) upon request, however it is really just the raw csv from J. Freedland's GitHub in excel, and then basic math making it cumulative to put into Flourish.
If you have any requests for this type of chart for BTVS let me know!
I'm gonna do a longer post about this later, but wanted to get this out there. https://github.com/jfreedland/Timestamp-Audio-in-Buffy-the-Vampire-Slayer/blob/master/HowToUse.txt
The Tableau creator for "6 reasons to watch BTVS" mentioned this in her sources. Based on the Forever Dreaming scripts and the DVD closed captions - J. Freedland has come up with character speaking times! It's pretty amazing because it's broken down per episode and it's open source. I think this is the most accurate out there. Thank you J. Freedland!
