This is handy. When I read, sometimes I have to go back and figure out who a character is so this is definitely right up my alley.
That was exactly what I struggled with—and still do!
Show HN: I built an app to generate story relationships using Mermaidjs
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Re: Show HN: I built an app to generate story relationships using Mermaidjs
#22Wild that I was daydreaming earlier today about generating some diagrams with mermaid to show the plot and characters over the lifetime of a tv series!
This is a neat idea! My first try will be "The Sopranos".
Re: Show HN: I built an app to generate story relationships using Mermaidjs
#23I did Dungeon Crawler Carl - hilariously wrong graph TD A[Carl] -->|Pet| B[Princess Donut] A -->|Enemy| C[Mordecai] A -->|Allies| D[Ellie] A -->|Allies| E[Katia] A -->|Enemy| F[The System] B -->|Rival| G[Bea] D -->|Friend| E E -->|Friend| A
I am reading it right now and thought what would be the outcome of doing the same!
Bea being Donut's rival… sounds interesting. Depending how you interpret it, it's not entirely wrong?
Carl being enemy of Mordecai looks really wrong though.
As for Carl being an enemy of the System (I assume the AI), that's also debatable.
And if the friend of a friend rule applied here, I think Carl would be a friend of Ellie too, since Carl is a friend of Katia, and Ellie is a friend of Katia too. And they are all allies. Weird.
Re: Show HN: I built an app to generate story relationships using Mermaidjs
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
i'm suffering some frequency illusion right now because I only heard about Dungeon Crawler Carl for the first time, literally yesterday and today here it is in a comment
It's by far my favorite series. Def pick it up if you have time!
Mine too. I was disappointed I was going to be left with nothing exciting to read after The Wandering Inn, but this series is amazing. +1 on the suggestion!
Re: Show HN: I built an app to generate story relationships using Mermaidjs
#25Hi, I created the app. I appreciate all of your comments. I know some may find the result of a book not concise or accurate. One issue was that I couldn't afford the price of a better LM service. At first, I tried a free tier of Gemini, but its results were disappointing. Later, I switched to DeepSeek and got better results.
Re: Show HN: I built an app to generate story relationships using Mermaidjs
#26The system prompt can be found here: https://github.com/herol3oy/austen/blob/main/src/server/rout... It would be more interesting if the graph could be generated by sourcing an arbitrary epub file into a RAG and have it figure out character relations without reading the whole book. I wouldn't be surprised if it all could be done with a script using aichat[1] and rendering the diagram using graphviz. [1] https://githu…
Oh, this is a great idea. I'd love to try it and maybe I could add this feature to the current one! Thank you.
Re: Show HN: I built an app to generate story relationships using Mermaidjs
#27Nice idea but the results weren't comprehensive for the book I tested. I find that chatgpt with web search enabled does a better job with the simple prompt "Create a relationship diagram for the characters in using mermaidjs. Include the relationships between people."
Re: Show HN: I built an app to generate story relationships using Mermaidjs
#28Dorothy is the “enemy” of the Wizard?
Re: Show HN: I built an app to generate story relationships using Mermaidjs
#29I tried "The Wise Man's Fear" and the results were not so great[1]. It got a good number of the characters, but only showed them being related to Kvothe. Harry potter worked better'ish, but still not great[2]. My primary interest would be using these relational graphs to generate better structured summaries of stories in a structured JSON object for improved search/recommendations. - [1] https://austen.pages.dev/ecbc…
The thought of The Kingkiller Chronicle hasn't crossed my mind in many years, and now I have renewed sadness that the story will never be finished. :'(
Pat Rothfuss is still working on it, last I heard.
Re: Show HN: I built an app to generate story relationships using Mermaidjs
#30It would be neat if this could handle spoilers. Imagine a friend becomes an enemy 75% of the way through the book. Would there be some way to say "What are the character relationships - I'm on chapter 7 right now"?