Regarding the ranking, here's how it works: it is based on how affectionate you were to asterion
If your affection is positive, you'll get Great or Grand, otherwise you'll get fearsome or ruthless. Which of the two depends on whether it's an int or float value.
Whichever one you got, the other two categories depend on how hard you went on your decision to be nice or mean to him: you start on Calf, and as you go up (or down if you've been mean to asterion) you'll go through bronze, silver, gold and platinum. Then you jump to the next category: Peacock, starting on bronze peacock, then silver peacock, etc.
So, for example, Bronze Peacock is higher than Platinum Calf.
Why is peacock the next category? You'll see in Build 0.3.
Currently the highest ranking achievable in the game is Great Gold Peacock (which is only achievable by the Arts background, because there's one dialogue choice exclusive to it that can fulfill an old dream of Asterion) and the second best is Grand Silver Peacock (achievable by all backgrounds.)
Why go through all this trouble? We want to know how the average player is treating Asterion is so we can balance the game accordingly. We could have had you enter a numeric value into the survey but we thought it would be too mechanical and this was more fun. Plus we know who lied in the the Feedback Form thanks to this, because they put rankings which aren't achievable just yet.
All of that said, don't bother thinking too much about optimizing your ranking. If you got as far as petting Asterion you can be sure you are on the right track. We are doing our best to give you guys information on how well you are doing in-story, via Asterion's reactions, and the ranking is just a fun thing on the side.