Narrative universality asks a question about the story rather than the cast: does a title tell a broadly human story that invites any viewer in, or is identity the thesis of the work itself? WhatSphere scores universality on a 0-to-10 scale, alongside how central identity is to the narrative and how inclusive the story is of a general audience. Across the catalog 2,073 titles have been assessed, with an average universality of 7.9 out of 10.
The distinction this measure draws is not between titles that have identity and titles that do not — nearly all stories touch it — but between identity as a texture of a universal story and identity as the central argument a story is making. Both are legitimate; they are simply different, and the score keeps them distinguishable instead of collapsing them.
How WhatSphere measures this
Three related fields do the work. Universality rates how broadly a story’s themes reach beyond any one group. Identity centrality places a title on a scale from incidental — identity is present but not the point — through prominent to thesis, where identity is the organising argument. Audience inclusivity rates whether the story reads as universal, broadly inviting, demographically targeted, or exclusionary. A separate self-congratulatory measure flags messaging that appears aimed at affirming the audience rather than telling a story. 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 catalog skews strongly universal. The overwhelming majority of assessed titles — 1,880 of 2,073 — fall in the incidental band, where identity is present but not the narrative’s thesis, and these titles carry the highest average universality (8.0 out of 10). As identity centrality rises toward thesis, average universality falls in an orderly, monotonic step — the small thesis group (18 titles) averages 3.8. That is the expected relationship and a good check that the two measures are capturing what they should.
Two things temper any over-reading. First, the self-congratulatory measure averages very low across the catalog (1.1 out of 5), so messaging that exists mainly to flatter its audience is rare, not pervasive. Second, the high-centrality and exclusionary bands hold only a handful of titles each, while the universal and broadly-inviting inclusivity bands together account for the large majority. The catalog’s centre of gravity is universal, broadly inviting stories — not identity-thesis content, which sits at the thin end of the distribution.
Caveats and limitations
Of every measure in the catalog this is the most interpretive: it reads the emphasis of a narrative, which is a harder thing to score than a cast tally and carries more model judgement. The thesis and exclusionary bands are very small, so their averages are fragile and should be treated as indicative rather than precise. And a low universality score is a description of a story’s scope, not a criticism — a deliberately specific, identity-centred story is doing something valid that this scale simply marks as less universal, with no quality judgement attached.
Why it matters
Few debates generate more heat and less measurement than whether stories have become message-first. Scoring universality, identity centrality, and self-congratulation separately — and finding that the catalog is dominated by broadly universal stories with rare identity-thesis outliers — lets a reader replace a vibe with a distribution. It also keeps the most interpretive of the catalog’s measures honest about its own limits, marking a deliberately specific, identity-centred story as less universal in scope without ever implying it is less worthwhile. The titles linked below span the range from incidental to thesis; each page shows where the story falls and on what basis.
