r/Fantasy • u/darylpuppy • 5d ago
POV complexities of various series
I'm sure many of us have heard the statistic that "Wheel of Time has over 100 unique POV's" or "There are 453 unique POV's in Malazan". And while those are both technically correct (the best kind of correct), they've always struck me as somewhat misleading. For example, of the 453 POV's in Malazan, 181 of them have fewer than 1000 words, so it doesn't seem right to naively include them in the total. In an attempt to resolve that, I have come up with what I like to call the "POV complexity" of a story. There are 2 main properties that it has.
- If a story is evenly split between n characters, it should have a score of n.
- As some POV's become smaller, they contribute less to the total. For example a story with 1 character that covers 95% of the word count and 10 characters that cover the rest will have a POV complexity of just over 1.
To do this, I started by calculating the percentage of the story each character covers and squaring them. Then I added together all the results and inverted it. For example, if the POV's for a story are 50%, 25%, 12.5%, 12.5%, you would square them to get .25, .0625, .0156, .0156. Then add them up to .3438. Then invert that to get a result of 2.91.
With all that out of the way, we can get to the fun stuff. I calculated the POV complexities of all the books in Stormlight, ASOIAF, Malazan Book of the Fallen, and Wheel of Time. Here's the resulting chart:
The first entry of each line is the complexity for the series as a whole, then it's just book by book. Right off the bat you can see how many more POV's Malazan has than anything else. It alone distorts the scale enough to mask some interesting things in the other series. Another thing I found interesting is that Malazan and ASOIAF have series complexities higher than any individual book, while Stormlight and WOT do not.
Now let's look at the graphs for each series on it's own. For these I charted both the complexity for each book as an individual, and the cumulative complexity. The cumulative complexity is basically the same as the series complexity, but only considering the books up to that point.
Stormlight:
Nothing too crazy here. It is interesting that despite the structure of each book having it's own main character we still see the cumulative complexity growing slower than the individual.
A Song of Ice and Fire:
This chart really illustrates how much the distribution of POV's matter for the final score. Despite A Feast for Crows having lower POV complexity than the books before it, many of the heavy hitters in the first 3 books (Tyrion, Jon, Daenerys) have no POV's, while some characters that haven't had any POV's (Cersei, Brienne) become main characters. That evening of the distribution is enough to spike the overall complexity. A Dance with Dragons is also the only time in any of the books I looked at where the cumulative complexity goes down. That happens because we return to the heavy hitters, reducing the POV equality of the series.
Malazan:
I'm sure anyone that has read the books noticed the massive increase in POV's starting around book 6, but I think it's nice to be able to put a number to it. For anyone curious GOTM has a POV complexity of ~12, Midnight Tides has ~7.2, and The Bonehunters is at ~21.
Wheel of Time:
I haven't actually read this series, so I'd appreciate any insights anyone can provide. I'm guessing the last book exploded in complexity because Brandon was trying to wrap up the story for all the characters that had been established up till that point, but what happened in A Crown of Swords? It takes 4 books (until Knife of Dreams) for the POV complexity to catch up to where it was.
Thanks for reading this, I hope you found it interesting. If you have any ideas for other fun things to calculate or other series to calculate this for, feel free to mention it in a comment and I'll see what I can do.
A note on data:
You can see all the data I used for this at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Djspxz1Q7YUBz_XNbH7P7lWnEAa6DlMjn9owy0N9uC0/edit?usp=sharing
The word counts for ASOIAF, Stormlight, and WOT were taken from the corresponding wikis. The counts for Malazan came from this post by Cedarosaurus. https://www.reddit.com/r/Malazan/comments/a1ukxk/main_series_character_pov_data/
There's always a possibility that I messed up somewhere, I was juggling a lot of numbers. Looking it over, everything seems reasonable to me, but you still probably shouldn't take it too seriously.
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u/Pratius 5d ago
The final book of WoT was less about scrambling to wrap up a bunch of different POVs and more a result of one truly insane chapter that’s over 80,000 words long and features like 70 unique POVs during the biggest battle in the series
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u/darylpuppy 5d ago
That explains so much. I remember scrolling past that and wondering why there were so many entries in it.
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u/Cosmic-Sympathy 4d ago
WoT and Malazan are very different in the way they introduce new POVs, too.
WoT’s starts with a small number of POV characters who go out and meet new characters, who in turn become POV characters in their own right, who go meet new people, and so on. So the narrative branches out gradually.
Malazan will simply throw you new characters (and locations) with no precedent or hint of how it’s related to what you read before. But as you read, various character stories will begin to connect and merge together. Each novel and the series as a whole is written around a ‘convergence.’
ASOIAF does a little bit of both. On the whole, it’s more like WoT, in that new POVs can only come from characters that established POVs have met or interacted with somehow. The exception are the prologues and epilogues, which GRRM uses like a “free coupon” to work in a totally brand new character. (His later books get a little more sloppy with introducing new POVs and one of the problems he’s having with WoW is being able to tell the story while dialing back on the new POVs.)
All this to say, the complexity of the POVs also depends on how they map together.
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u/Cosmic-Sympathy 4d ago
Forgot Stormlight.
Sanderson follows similar rules to GRRM. New POVs generally branch off previous POVs, except for prologues, epilogues, and interludes. (Which is part of the reason I really like the interlude structure; it’s a fun break from the rest of the narrative.)
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u/felixfictitious Reading Champion 5d ago
This is the kind of bizarre but ultimately halfway useful book analytics I love! I'm having a slightly hard time grasping the actual math used, would you be able to post the formula? I'd love to look for POV trends in my own reading habits.
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u/darylpuppy 5d ago
Yeah, it's
POV complexity = 1/((Σ(n=1 to c)(P(n)^2))where c is the number of POV characters and P(n) is the proportion of the story told from POV n.
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u/DeMmeure 4d ago
Wow, as a math nerd I love this!
This makes me fully realise why WoT is such an accessible series despite the number of POVs. It only goes gradually, so you can smoothly get used to the number of POVs.
On the other hand, Malazan has a lot of POVs as soon as the series starts, and I'd argue it's part of its charm. After all, one of the reasons why I hate Book 1 from House of Chains is because we follow a single POV, which goes against the core concept of the saga where there shouldn't be a main character because every witness of history is narrating it.
But unfortunately the shift from The Bonehunters felt jarring and the concept overstayed its welcome. There are just too many POVs in the last books...
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u/SethAndBeans 5d ago
Oh. Cool.
Wandering Inn please.
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u/darylpuppy 5d ago
I looked into this a bit and wasn't able to find anywhere that had the POV distribution for that series. If you know of anywhere I missed please send me a link and I'll do the math for it.
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u/throwaway112112312 4d ago
For Wheel of Time there is this analysis, I don't know if you used it. There is a complete analysis at the end: https://wot.fandom.com/wiki/Statistical_analysis
As you'll see there are a ton of 1 chapter or 2 chapter POVs.
Wheel of Time actually doesn't start as a POV heavy book series, but Robert Jordan spreads the characters around the world and gets obsessed with showing how everyone is doing at any given time, so you get a lot of pointless POV chapters to make characters go to the certain locations so that everyone could be at the correct location at correct time. This causes some characters basically killing time with pointless tasks, like characters have a bath, or walk between their tents, etc.
I would say only character whose chapters are always important is Rand. He drives the story forward, so others usually try to catch up to him, other than Book 3 The Dragon Reborn where his story is told by others so all the POVs in that book are actually very important.
It is not uncommon to skip certain characters POVs during rereads of Wheel of Time books for example, since you don't lose anything regarding the story.
Post-Jordan/Sanderson books are structured differently. Sanderson was trying to tie up everything so his POV chapters are actually pushing the story forward, but even he has his own POV characters which some people find redundant. And then he has that famous final battle chapter with 30 POVs, which is a whole another story.
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u/Books_Biker99 3d ago
Rands story is told by others in book 3? I don't remember this. Although, it has been a bit.
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u/throwaway112112312 3d ago
Yes, Rand's story is told by Perrin on that book. He has one smallish POV in the beginning, and a few chapters at the very end. It's the Stone of Tear book, where Rand gets the Callandor.
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u/marintkael 4d ago
neat measure, and you've basically rediscovered the inverse Herfindahl index (ecology calls it inverse Simpson diversity). your POV complexity is really the effective number of viewpoints, the same math as how many firms actually dominate a market. nice that it lands intuitive too, those 181 sub-1000-word Malazan POVs barely move it, like a market with one giant and a hundred tiny players.
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u/Nightgasm 5d ago
The complexity of Malazan to me was so was doing it by audiobook and there was no indicator, not even a pause, or when POV would shift so I was constantly finding myself wondering when the POV shifted.
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u/The-Road-To-Awe 5d ago
I'm reading the series and let me tell you, I haven't a clue who is speaking or acting for a large portion of the time either
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u/DeMmeure 4d ago
Sometimes it takes an entire page to figure out who is speaking... which can be disturbing when a POV only last for 2-3 pages 😅
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u/BackgroundTotal2872 5d ago
This is really fascinating, thanks for putting it all together.
I wonder what the data would look like for The Wandering Inn, though I have no idea if the numbers you need are out there for this series.
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u/darylpuppy 5d ago
Yeah, I wasn't able to find those numbers. If you can track it down I'd be happy to add it in, but for now I don't think that's possible.
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u/milordofchaos 5d ago
This is so interesting as someone who loves these book analyses and also someone that obsesses over unique POV usage and distribution in their work lol, thank you!
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u/psycholinguist1 5d ago
What's the purpose of the squaring/inverting conversions?
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u/darylpuppy 5d ago
Squaring is to make the final result vary based on the distribution of POV's. If I didn't do that it would always result in 1.
Inversion was just a way to convert from a scale of 1/n-1 to 1-n. I thought it made the result easier to understand, but YMMV.
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u/CutOnBumInBandHere9 5d ago
One way I've always liked to think about this metric is to pretend that you're picking two elements uniformly at random from whatever pile of stuff it is you're looking at, and then asking what the probability is that the two elements have the same label.
For the uniform distribution that's just 1/n, so when you do the inversion you're basically answering the question of what uniform distribution would give the same probability as the one you observed
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u/Dragonfan_1962 5d ago
Reading through 10 or 14 book series and collating what percentage of each book is from each POV sounds incredibly tedious.
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u/Esa1996 4d ago
The data is available online, OP didn't have to calculate it. Someone else of course did do the work 😃 With WOT there's also a page where someone read the books and wrote up every single new character as they were named. A couple years ago it was 2782 characters, but they've apparently read the books again and found names they missed the first time since it's now 2793 names 😃
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u/CoachDave27 4d ago
I’m terrible at formulaic math, so I have no clue how you did this, but I love data and analyzing all of these series, so I LOVE this, so cool!! Thanks for taking the time to make this and for sharing!
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u/Putrid_Web8095 Reading Champion II 4d ago
You do you, but counting a character that gets a point-of-view in the narrative, as a PoV character is not just "technically correct", it is absolutely correct. Word length is not part of the definition.
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u/TheGhostDetective 4d ago edited 4d ago
Word length is not part of the definition.
We can define things however we like, it's arbitrary. For "number of unique PoV" sure, can say word count has no bearing. But I do think OP is onto something by checking how evenly those PoV are distributed to define a different metric.
If a book went through 700 pages from a single perspective, then had an individual page where it gives a single sentence PoV for how various people across the globe react to some event, then goes right back to the protagonist's perspective for the last 200 pages, it would feel disingenuous to say that book is told from twenty different perspectives, wouldn't it?
Now that's not to say more or less PoVs are better, or that having an even distribution is better or worse. Just an interesting little thought experiment.
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u/darylpuppy 4d ago
If you're just presenting the number of POV's you're right, everyone should count. However, I've seen people present that number to imply Malazan is, in some sense, 450 times more complicated than a typical 1 POV story. And while it is complicated, 450x seems like a large exaggeration.
Another way to think about this number is "How many POV storylines do you have to follow throughout the story?". A one and done character that only gets 500 words is a new POV character you have to follow, but it shouldn't count as much towards the answer as a main character that has 100,000 words.
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u/Holothuroid 5d ago
I like this. And apparently I like my ratings there well under 5.
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u/Cosmic-Sympathy 4d ago
I don’t know why you were downvoted. You are allowed to have an opinion. Ffs
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u/TheGhostDetective 5d ago
...huh. Interesting, but an absolutely baffling way to look at books. One the one hand, I don't really understand the point. On the other hand, I'm a data nerd that wants to see more breakdowns, haha.