From the main list: Which Series Has the Most Characters?

[Dicentra spectabilis]

106580

From:  MadameSSnape at aol.com 
Date:  Fri Jul 16, 2004  10:15 pm 
Subject:  Re: [HPforGrownups] The Number-of-Characters Challenge (was:
JKR and the Snap...
 
In a message dated 7/16/2004 8:11:55 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
nkafkafi at yahoo.com writes:

Take the book you proposed and open it in pages 1, 100, 200, 300,
400... and so on until the end of the book. Write down the characters
that are mentioned in these pages. Then count the characters you
wrote. An individual character only counts once, even if he/she
appears several times. Repeat the same procedure in HP, and I'm
talking about all five HP books taken together. Publish your result
here. And you'd better do a honest job, because if we're not sure
about the results, will send you to sample pages 50, 150, 250, 350
and so on.

I leave it to your fair judgment what name counts as a character and
what name doesn't, as long as you use the same criteria in both your
contender book and HP. To illustrate, I think that Blaise Zabini
shouldn't count as a character in HP (at least not currently) but
Seamus Finnigan should.

And remember, the prerequisite is that this book (or at least 97% of
it) is told from the PoV of the same one character. "Le Morte
D'Arthur", "War and Peace" and "The Wheel of Time" are out.
================
Sherrie here:

A series, then, would be a fairer comparison than a single book -
unless you
also limit yourself to a single HP book. Obviously, five books are
going to
have more characters than any one single book.

Therefore - I nominate the Merlin series of Mary Stewart (The Crystal
Cave,
The Hollow Hills and The Last Enchantment - I won't even count The
Wicked Day).
The series is told entirely from the PoV of Myrddin Emrys, better known as
Merlin, and since it spans his entire (rather long) life, includes a
VERY large
number of characters.

Sherrie
(who readily admits it's been a long time since she's read these books -
since they don't have ANYTHING to do with Gettysburg!)



106582


From:  "nkafkafi" <nkafkafi at yahoo.com> 
Date:  Fri Jul 16, 2004  10:41 pm 
Subject:  Re: The Number-of-Characters Challenge (was: JKR and the Snap...
 
Sherrie here:

A series, then, would be a fairer comparison than a single book -
unless you also limit yourself to a single HP book. Obviously, five
books are going to have more characters than any one single book.

Therefore - I nominate the Merlin series of Mary Stewart (The Crystal
Cave, The Hollow Hills and The Last Enchantment - I won't even count
The Wicked Day). The series is told entirely from the PoV of Myrddin
Emrys, better known as Merlin, and since it spans his entire (rather
long) life, includes a VERY large number of characters.

Neri:
Sure. I have no problem with a series. In fact it will be very
difficult for any single book to challenge the whole series of HP. So
I register the Merlin series as Sherrie's contender (Merlin is indeed
a worthy opponent for Harry...) but as I said before, I demand the
results of the sampling as proof. Therefore, please follow the rules
I suggested before: the number of characters appearing in pages
ending in 00 (that is 100, 200, 300 and so on) in all the Merlin
series, vs the number of characters in such pages in the HP series
(US or UK version or whatever translation you have).

Neri