Graph of the day: Every aggressive act in all seven Harry Potter books

Via @MonaChalabi. Potter is a sociopath, apparently.

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26 Responses

  1. I’ve just looked at the data and yep, they count “expecto patronum” and “protego” aggressive, which I think is a bit odd. In particular the patronus charm counts for almost all of Harry’s aggressive acts in book 3 (18 out of 26).

    Also there’s a fair bit of double counting – someone saying the spell twice in quick succession but as far as I can tell the repetition is often because it doesn’t work the first time, so it’s only really one attempt to cast the spell.

    PS I’m so so sorry, I’m a massive Harry Potter fangirl.

  2. I’m sorry, I can’t resist having a nerd over this! I wonder if you could weight the aggressive actions – a disarming spell (Harry’s “trademark” expelliarmus is much less aggressive than the cruciatus curse. And do they count casting a patronus as an aggressive action?

  3. Still reading through this, but I would like to see this adjusted for the amount of “screen time” each character gets in the books. We see all of Harry’s aggressive acts but likely just a few of Bellatrix’s.

    That said, it wouldn’t make sense to just find the raw amount of time each character spends on-page and extrapolate upwards. Since the books are from Harry’s perspective, and a lot of people want to hurt Harry, we are often seeing (especially evil ones) at their most violent.