New ways to explore characters across a series

OpenFiction started as a spoiler-safe character reference. But the more series we add, the more it becomes something else too: a genuinely useful way to explore who's in a series, how they're connected, and where they show up. Today's update adds to that.

Cast view is now available on series pages

Switch to the Cast tab on any series page and you'll see detailed character cards rather than a plain table - role badges, description snippets, and a summary of which books each character appears in. It's a much more approachable way to get your bearings in a new series, or to remind yourself who's who before picking up the next book. Search, filtering, and pagination are all supported for larger series.

Appearance heatmaps give you a visual overview of the whole cast

The heatmap tab shows a grid of characters against books, colour-coded by appearance type. Solid cells for POV chapters, medium for on-page appearances, faint for mentions. At a glance you can see which characters dominate which books, where someone drops out of the story, and where new faces start appearing. For sprawling series like Wheel of Time or The Expanse it's a genuinely different way of seeing the shape of the story - without spoiling anything you haven't read yet.

Browse characters by occupation.

The Characters page now has an Occupation tab alongside Role, Species, Nationality, and Gender. Each occupation links to a dedicated page listing every character with that role across all series on the platform. The browse section also has a cleaner column layout with sort controls - most used or A-Z.

There's more...

Entity links in appearance notes now render as clickable cross-references, so curator notes that mention other characters or groups link through directly.

Coloured table headers across the site give data tables a more consistent, branded feel.

We now track 621 characters across 13 universes.

OpenFiction is in beta and free to use. If you read across multiple series and find yourself losing track of who's who, it's worth a look.