Thread by @will_wagner

In #TheExpanse novels, each chapter has exactly one POV character. Because I'm strange, I went through them all last night and tallied how many each character has. Here is a thread of some things I learned.

There are a total of 34 characters with at least one POV chapter. 23 of these have more than one. As of the end of "Tiamat's Wrath", at least 14 of these characters have died. (I won't spoil which ones.)

Breaking it down by gender, we have 13 women and 20 men, or 21 men if we consider "The Investigator" to be male. A few non-binary characters have appeared in the books, but none has had a POV chapter so far. Women have 179 chapters while men have 268.

Breaking it down by heritage, we have 15 Belters, 12 Earthers (including Luna natives), and only 5 Martians. The remaining two are The Investigator and another character whose origin would be a little bit of a spoiler. Belters have 132 chapters, Earthers 228, Martians 58.

The character with the most POV chapters by far is James Holden (108 chapters). He's also the only character to have at least one POV chapter in every novel, though the number of chapters he has in each book steadily decreases as the series goes on.

The rest of the top five are Naomi Nagata with 35 chapters, Bobbie Draper with 33, Elvi Okoye with 29, and Josephus Miller with 27. (If you lump in The Investigator's chapters from "Cibola Burn" with Miller, then he's tied for third with Bobbie at 33.)

Aside from Holden, the character who has POV chapters in the most books is Bobbie Draper with 5. Alex Kamal and Naomi Nagata both have 4. Amos Burton, Clarissa Mao, and Chrisjen Avasarala all have 3.

Of the people with POV chapters in more than one book, the one with the highest average chapters per book is Elvi Okoye at 14.5.

In most of the books, aside from the prologue and the epilogue, the chapters are roughly evenly spread between two to five main characters. "Babylon's Ashes" is a massive departure from this pattern with a total of nineteen different POV characters.

Of course we're still waiting on one more novel, which comes out in a couple of months and could affect all these numbers somewhat.

I hope you have enjoyed this #TheExpanse Numbers Hour. We now return you to your regularly scheduled twitter.

For those who've read all the books or don't mind spoilers:

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Something that occurred to me as I was looking at this data again is that every character who has had a POV chapter in the first five books has appeared in the show at least a little (now that Bull has been transplanted)

As I've been re-reading Babylon's Ashes I noticed that (rot13)

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Something else I've noticed here while reading Leviathan Falls is that as the series progresses there's been an increasing usage of consecutive chapters overlapping slightly as the POV switches between people who are in the same place with each other.

Okay, updated stats including Leviathan Falls incoming. Please mute #LeviathanFallsSpoilers if you don't want to see this.

#TheExpanse

This new book breaks all the rules by having several chapters with multiple POV characters (sometimes *at the same time*). In these cases I'm counting these chapters multiple times, once for each POV character.

#LeviathanFallsSpoilers #TheExpanse

We now have a total of 43 POV characters. Of these, 27 have more than one chapter. 17 POV characters have definitely died.

#LeviathanFallsSpoilers #TheExpanse

There are 16 female POV characters and 26 male POV characters (or 27 if you count "The Investigator" as male). A few non-binary characters appear in the books but none of them have POV chapters.

#LeviathanFallsSpoilers #TheExpanse

Breaking it down by heritage, we have 13 Earthers (including Luna natives), 8 Martians, 15 Belters, 3 Laconians, 1 from Freehold, 1 from Dobridomov.

#LeviathanFallsSpoilers #TheExpanse

This leaves out "The Investigator" whose origins are...whatever, and one minor character from Leviathan Falls who I think never had an origin stated (Ekko Levy).

#LeviathanFallsSpoilers #TheExpanse

The characters with the most chapters are:

James Holden (122)
Naomi Nagata (42)
Elvi Okoye (36)
Bobbie Draper (33)
Josephus Miller (27)

#LeviathanFallsSpoilers #TheExpanse

The characters who appear as POV characters in the most books are:

James Holden (9)
Bobbie Draper, Alex Kamal, Naomi Nagata (5)
Amos Burton (4)
Chrisjen Avasarala, Elvi Okoye (3)

#LeviathanFallsSpoilers #TheExpanse

Among characters who appear in multiple books, those with the highest average chapters per book are:

James Holden (13.555...)
Elvi Okoye (12)
Naomi Nagata (8.4)

Holden's larger role in Leviathan Falls shifted him above Elvi here.

#LeviathanFallsSpoilers #TheExpanse

This concludes our second #TheExpanse Numbers Hour.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled twittering.

#LeviathanFallsSpoilers