This is the most directly argued-about relationship in the catalog: when a title adapts existing source material, does staying faithful to that source trade off against carrying a social message? WhatSphere scores both dimensions independently — a faithfulness score for how closely an adaptation tracks its source, and an advocacy score for how much social messaging sits in its content — and places every scored adaptation on the two axes together. The current set covers 120 adaptations, with an average faithfulness of 75 out of 100 and an average advocacy of 23 out of 100.
The reason to score the two separately is that they are constantly assumed to be opposites — that an adaptation must be either faithful or message-driven, never both. Measuring each on its own axis is the only way to test that assumption rather than inherit it.
How WhatSphere measures this
Faithfulness rates how closely an adaptation follows its source in plot, character, and tone; advocacy rates how prominent social messaging is in the finished content. The two are computed from different inputs and do not feed each other, so a title can score high on both, low on both, or high on one and low on the other. Each adaptation is then sorted into an advocacy tier — entertainment, mixed, message-leaning, or advocacy-driven — and its average faithfulness within that tier is reported. Every figure here is generated by WhatSphere’s scoring model, not by a critic’s judgement. Scores describe who a title appears to be made for and how its content is composed; they are not ratings of quality, and a higher or lower number is never a verdict on whether a title is good.
What the data shows
The headline result cuts against the assumed trade-off. The large majority of scored adaptations fall in the entertainment tier — 82 of 120 — and that tier carries the highest average faithfulness (83 out of 100), while the small number of message-leaning and advocacy-driven adaptations sit lower on faithfulness. Rather than faithfulness and advocacy trading off smoothly along a line, the data clusters: most adaptations are both faithful and low on explicit messaging, and only a handful occupy the high-advocacy end at all.
That clustering is the finding. Because the high-advocacy adaptations are so few, the apparent negative relationship between faithfulness and advocacy rests on a small number of titles and should not be over-read into a law. What the catalog supports is narrower and firmer: faithful, entertainment-first adaptation is the norm in the scored set, and heavily message-driven adaptation is uncommon — the inverse of the impression the discourse often gives.
Caveats and limitations
Only adaptations with both a faithfulness and an advocacy score appear here, and that is a modest subset of the catalog, so the averages are sensitive to which adaptations have been scored. The tiers at the high-advocacy end hold very few titles, which makes their average faithfulness statistically fragile — one or two additions could move it noticeably. Both scores are model estimates of finished content, not measurements of intent, and faithfulness in particular depends on how fully a source has been researched. The tier averages should therefore always be read with their counts attached: an average drawn from a single adaptation is a lone data point, not a pattern, and treating it as the latter is the most common way this kind of chart is misread.
Why it matters
“They changed the source to push a message” is among the most common and least tested claims in adaptation debates. Scoring faithfulness and advocacy on separate axes, and showing that most adaptations are faithful and low-advocacy at once, replaces the assumed trade-off with an actual distribution a reader can inspect. The titles linked below are the adaptations the catalog has scored on both axes; each page plots where the title falls.
