The Importance of Power and Centrality in a Network: An Analysis of “Miraculous Ladybug”
(A deviation of network research I conducted for COMM/INFO 4360: Networks and Social Capital)
When conducting research on the popular children’s show Miraculous Ladybug, I posed the following question: Does the network have more trust in nodes with formal power or informal power? There are several instances in the setting where some nodes have formal power and some have informal power. Ladybug, for example, as a superhero, has formal power. She must protect Paris, and she would enact that mission regardless of the public’s opinion—it just so happens that the majority of the people of Paris are rooting for her. However, as Marinette (her civilian self), she has informal power in her social network, as several people believe she is a talented young woman and a natural-born leader. As a collective, they largely feel positively toward her. Marinette displays strong moral character, often helping her classmates with social issues in and out of her superhero persona. Chloe, who is somewhat of a villain in the network, is an example of a character with formal power through privilege, as her father is the mayor of Paris. While most nodes in the network feel adverse to her, she still commands authority within the network, as she constantly dishes out threats on behalf of her dad. Adrien, who acts as the superhero Cat Noir, also has privilege-related formal power, as he is a well-known model, and his father is a revered fashion designer. However, it is important to acknowledge that Adrien does not abuse his power in the network, while Chloe often does. All in all, Chloe has poor moral character, while Adrien has good moral character, as he only aims to do good with the formal power he acquired through nepotism.
In Gephi, I visualized and analyzed this question using centrality. Degree centrality, closeness centrality, and betweenness would best visualize this question, as Marinette has many links, but formally powerful characters like Adrien are overall better connected in the network through closeness and betweenness centrality, as he has a trusting relationship with a wider array of people outside the core of the network that Marinette is close with. Degree centrality is the number of links a node has, while closeness centrality is the reciprocal of the average distance between a node and every other node in the network, and betweenness centrality is based on how many pairs of nodes would have to walk through a specific node to get from one to the other on their shortest path. Before running any simulations, I hypothesized that while Marinette would be the most central node through degree centrality, Adrien was likely the most central node through closeness and betweenness centrality.
Here is my final Gephi visualization after watching all 4 seasons of “Miraculous Ladybug”:
Blue nodes represent network members who are both civilians and have been called on to help the superheroes. Yellow nodes represent civilians with no known connection to Ladybug and Cat Noir. Red nodes represent known heroes and villains. Green nodes represent those who are known/perceived to only have helped Ladybug and Cat Noir once. Two nodes have a tie if they have mutual trust in each other, noted by intimate disclosures–notice that ties are not directional.
The figure below represents the final calculations for centrality in the network. Column 1 indicates the type of centrality, column 2 indicates the nodes with the highest totals, and column 3 identifies those totals for all of those nodes, respectively:
| Degree Centrality | Marinette, Alya, Adrien | 15, 12, 11 |
| Closeness Centrality | Marinette, Adrien | 0.611, 0.5945 |
| Betweenness Centrality | Marinette, Adrien | 105.758, 92.777 |
From these totals, it can be inferred that Marinette is distinctly recognized as the most central character in the network. These measures can help me in concluding that Marinette, by forming bonds of trust with members of her network, became a central node. Though Adrien is well connected through his trust ties with nodes in many different clusters of the network, Marinette is highly centralized in the core of the network, which is largely comprised of their high school classmates. In a greater context, this trust becomes more and more important as Hawkmoth (the villain) continues to terrorize the people of Paris, and Marinette (as Ladybug) must look to others for assistance. In short, Marinette, an informally powerful node, has more trust in the network than a character like Adrien, who has a good deal of formal power.
Though this network is made of fictional characters, their ties reflect real-life social network principles. In this network specifically, the trust that the network has in Marinette makes her a more central, and therefore more powerful, node.