- reducing characters to characters - 

Relation of characters in film, theatre, literature and other media to characters (letters and numbers) can be understood as the relation of a person to his/her name. With a help of ancient systems of gematria (Hebrew language), isosephia (Greek language), numerology etc. we can arrive to a situation where one character can be represented by one character.

It is usually considered that Plato claimed that "the 'essential force' of a thing's name is to be found in its numerical value, and that words and phrases of the same numerical value may be substituted in context without loss in meaning." A direct review of the Cratylus, however, shows that Plato made no such claim and that gematria is not discussed in it either explicitly or implicitly. What can be more accurately stated is that Plato's discussion in the Cratylus involves a view of words and names as referring (more or less accurately) to the "essential nature" of a person or object.

Reduction of characters to their names and to one single character can be done with use of ASCII character encoding scheme translated to binary code. Counting percentage of zeroes (0) and ones (1), we can, randomly, without cultural influences of different languages and alphabets, as well as traditional systems (gematria), produce the result based on numerical relation between 1 and 0 as a defining ellement of a character. However, we must avoid prejudices of 0 as something insignificant, and 1 as something important.

As an example, you can see the results for "Frankenstein" and "Dracula".

Frankenstein

01000110 01110010 01100001 01101110 01101011 01100101 01101110 01110011 01110100 01100101 01101001 01101110

percentage of 0 - 46.876%

percentage of 1 - 53.125%

Dracula

01000100 01110010 01100001 01100011 01110101 01101100 01100001

percentage of 0 - 55.35%

percentage of 1 - 44.64%