POV Distribution in the Craft Sequence (UPDATED 2024)
In any book with multiple POV characters, I’m interested by the distribution of pages. From whose perspective are we experiencing the story? What does their perspective add to the story – or hide from us? What does it tell us about the world, and the author’s priorities in sharing that information with the reader?
There’s much more we can go into about point of view and the questions above, but for now we’re focusing on the first part: which characters do we see most from? No judgement calls, no analysis, simple numbers of pages. The rest can come later.
So, I went through my paper copies of the books and did a rough breakdown of each POV characters. A few caveats before we start:
This was done by hand, mostly on trains, and thus a significant opportunity for error, whether due to transcription or misunderstanding which character was viewing a particular scene. I tried to go back through the books and my notes to confirm, but there may still be errors.
Most of the time it was obvious whose POV we were in, but occasionally there were uncertainties. This particularly came up when a scene starts in a seemingly third person narrator then goes into a character POV, but those were thankfully relatively few and far between.
Where a POV section takes up less than a full page, I made judgement calls about what proportion of the page it took up, and added up the smaller sections later. When a chapter ends with a page only partially filled, this was counted as a partial not a full page. Therefore, the number of total pages may not add up to the total number of pages in the book. I’ve noted where this is a particular issue.
If / when I make any corrections for errors, I will edit this page and make clear where the edits fall.
2024 update - I’ve changed my mind about new posts for each new book, and will instead be adding them in here. Wicked Problems is now live! But be aware that it contains character spoilers.
If anyone wants to use this breakdown for their own analysis, you are very welcome to do so – just link back to this breakdown! You can check out the original data here.
Three Parts Dead
Three Parts Dead has 10 POV characters, plus a small number of POV-less pages. Tara Abernathy has by far the highest number of pages at 60.7%, followed by Abelard at 16.1%, then Cat Elle and Elayne Kevarian at 8.4% and 6.3% respectively.
My copy of Three Parts Dead has 333 pages, but numbering starts on page 7, leaving us with 326 pages of text. The number of POV pages tracked totals 325 pages, so we have lost one page with either miscalculations or semi-blank pages at the end of chapters.
Two Serpents Rise
Two Serpents Rise has 5 POV characters and a single page without a POV. Caleb Altemoc is, however, essentially the only POV character until 82% of the way through the books. Prior to this, Alaxic narrates brief interludes, but they total 1.8% of the total text whereas Caleb ends up with 93.1% of the total POV pages in the book. This is the only time so far in the Craft Sequence that any character ends up with such a huge majority of POV pages.
Other POV characters, who narrate small sections after the 82% mark, are: Mal Kekapania (2.4%), Balam (1.9%) and Temoc (0.5%).
My copy of Two Serpents Rise has 347 pages, but numbering starts on page 7 leaving us with 340 pages of text. The number of POV pages tracked totals 314 pages, so we have lost considerably more pages than in Three Parts Dead to miscalculations, semi-blank pages at the end of chapters, and blank pages separating the sections of the novel – this is the only Craft Sequence novel so far to be split into three books with interludes.
Full Fathom Five
Full Fathom Five is a two-hander, split unequally between Kai Pohala (62.9%) and Jalai’iz / Izza (34.5%). When reading, this split feels more equal than it is so I was quite surprised by this result.
We have a handful of pages from the perspective of Edmond Margot (2.3%) and about half a page that I think had no narrator.
My copy of Full Fathom Five has 382 pages, but numbering starts on page 9, leaving us with 373 pages. The number of POV pages tracked totals 348.5 pages, so again we have lost quite a few here to either miscalculations or semi-blank pages at the end of chapters. From having a quick flick through my copy, there are a lot of chapters that end with only a couple of lines on a page so I think that is where most of the discrepancy arises.
Last First Snow
Last First Snow has 7 POV characters and about 2 pages I couldn’t assign to a perspective. Elayne Kevarian has the highest proportion of pages at 55.8%, followed by Temoc at 25.3%, Chel at 7.4% and Mina at 6%. Chimalli (2.3%), Zack (1.3%) and Alaxic (1.3%) complete the roster.
My copy of Last First Snow has 380 pages, but numbering starts on page 7, leaving us with 373 pages of text. The number of POV pages tracked totals 385.5 pages, so we have the opposite problem than in the previous books. I think this is likely a miscalculation / transcription error where smaller sections of text were listed as a half page rather than a quarter or third and thus added incorrectly.
Four Roads Cross
Four Roads Cross has the most POV characters at 14, along with a handful of pages I couldn’t assign to a particular POV. Only 5 of these characters go above 5% of pages: Tara Abernathy (44.7%), Cat Elle (22.7%), Matt Adorne (8.2%), Abelard (6.2%) and Daphne Mains (5.9%). Corbin Rafferty has some essential POV scenes but only gets 3.7% of the pages, and the rest are fairly negligible, largely showing up during a climactic fight scene showing different perspectives.
My copy of Four Roads Cross has 414 pages, but numbering starts on page 7 leaving us with 407 pages of text. The number of POV pages tracked totals 377.5 so we have again lost about 30 pages, to either miscalculations or semi-blank pages at the end of chapters.
Ruin of Angels
Ruin of Angels has 12 POV characters, plus a small number of POV-less pages. Kai Pohala has the highest proportion of pages at 45.5%, with Zeddig coming in second at 27.4%, Izza following at 14.8% and Raymet with 6.9%. The rest of the characters (including an unnamed ‘mail demon’, amusingly) each have less than 1%, again mostly showing up during climactic fights.
My copy of Ruin of Angels has 565 pages, but numbering starts at page 9, leaving us with 556 pages of text. The number of POV pages tracked totals 527 pages, so we have again lost about 30 pages to either miscalculations or semi-blank pages at the end of chapters.
Dead Country
So, this one’s easy. Tara Abernathy is the only POV character in the whole book, which is 239 pages long. So Tara has 100% of POV pages.
I haven’t bothered to make a table of this for obvious reasons.
Wicked Problems
NOTE: THERE ARE CHARACTER SPOILERS FOR WICKED PROBLEMS HERE. READ ON WITH CAUTION.
Wicked Problems widens the pool of narrators again, with 11 POV characters. Unusually, I didn’t count any POV-less pages. We have a new lead here, with Dawn having the highest proportion of pages at 28.9%; however, this is significantly less than leads normally have, meaning the POV is more evenly spread out than usual. Dawn is followed by Caleb Altemoc on 19%, Kai Pohala on 14.3%, Tara Abernathy on 11.8%, Temoc Almotil on 9.5% and Abelard on 9.3%. From there we jump down quite a bit to Elayne Kevarian, who has 3.8% of POV pages, followed Teo Batan, joining the POV list for the first time ever on 1.3%, and Mal Kekapania is unexpectedly back but only has 1% of POV pages. The list rounds out with two more newcomers: Eberhardt Jax has 4 pages of POV time (0.9%) and Kopil, the King in Red, has about a third of a page, which gives him 0.1% of the total pages. To be quite honest, the small section that I’ve given to him could belong to someone else, but Kopil is the only person named in it and it’s not clear that it’s from somebody else’s POV. Instead of giving the page to ‘nobody’ like in previous books I gave it to Kopil. My site, my rules.
My copy of Wicked Problems is a proof, so I’ll need to double check numbering when the paperback is released in the UK; this copy starts on page 1 and has 450 pages of text. Like most of the other books, the number of POV pages tracked appears to have lost about 20 pages, totalling 430.8. Again, this is miscalculations, blank pages, and a handful of super short chapters.
Full Craft Sequence
Based on the numbers above (not the actual pages of the books!), the full Craft Sequence currently stands at 2,947.3 pages. The breakdown of every character POV from every book can be seen in a table below, but a few highlights include:
With her solo POV of Dead Country, Tara overtook Kai as narrating more of the series than anyone else
Tara narrates 22.44% of the series so far, with Kai following at 17.68%. Caleb comes in third at 12.71%. His domination of the Two Serpents Rise narrative clearly paid off, and his reappearance in Wicked Problems stopped his demotion further down the list.
With the arrival of Wicked Problems, we have almost doubled the number of characters reaching triple digits: Elayne, Izza, Zeddig, Temoc, Dawn, Abelard and Cat are all comfortably above 100 POV pages.
There are 44 POV characters across the series so far.
32 characters have less than 1% of total pages in their POV - Chel and Mina slipped out of the over 1% group after the past two books. Raymet Haaz and Matt Adorne are barely holding on to their ranking at 1.24% and 1.05% respectively. They’re so much further behind than the rest in the list that I nearly took them out, but that would mean I had to redo every calculation and quite frankly I couldn’t be bothered. Perhaps after Craft Wars #3.
And the full table breakdown…
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