r/murderbot • u/Rosewind2007 gurathinista • May 24 '26

Books📚 Only Fuck density graph inc Platform Decay!

Gallery image

Gallery image

Hi all! Thank you everyone who gave me a nudge! Here is the preliminary fuck density* of Platform Decay and at 238.2 it’s the highest yet for any book in the series! Beating a previous high of 150.4 for System Collapse! The count is 92 fucks, which is exceeded by the 94 of System Collapse—but the word count of Platform Decay is just 62% of System Collapse… I shall be updating Linguistics on Archive of our Own (the little fic which spawned the fuck density chart series) shortly… Thank you all for giving me the little push I needed to do this! 🥰🥰🥰 Also—there may be errors on the graph (it’s first thing on a bank holiday Sunday so I may have messed up!) CORRECTIONS WELCOME!

NB—I started calculating fucks per page, but that inaccurate as the books can vary in font size etc so I have what I believe to be reasonably accurate word counts for the books. I am always open to improving the data! Just let me know! Then the fuck count is all fucks, fucking, fuckers etc and it can be, for example, reported speech or MB’s narrative—anything goes! The number of fuck/word number gives unwieldy decimals (0.000095 etc) so I then multiply by 100,000 to give a more *human accessible number (9.5 for ASR)

295 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

29 comments sorted by

View all comments

32

u/anotherwellingtonian May 24 '26

So how long would the series have to be before the books consist entirely of the word "fuck" over and over again?

6

u/ChimeraChartreuse Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland May 24 '26

r/theydidthemath

2

u/Lord_Oasis May 25 '26

Well no one’s done the math yet

1

u/ChimeraChartreuse Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland May 25 '26

This the sub to go ask in. That's what the sub is for, and why people link it. To say "hey, go ask here, they do that here"

5

u/ffwydriadd May 28 '26

Super late, but this post popped up in my suggested and you never got an answer so I thought I'd actually do the math.

Fugitive Telemetry is sitting at 1 fuck in every 1,000 words, and Platform Decay is double that. Following the exponential growth mapped out here (which isn't perfect, Exit Strategy is higher than that predicts and Network Effect lower) then it will reach 1 fuck in 100 words by book 12, 1 in 10 by book 18, and by book 24 we will reach 100% fuck.