Throat bobbing in the works of Sarah J. Maas

My family discovered the Throne of Glass series a few years ago, and convinced me to read the A Court of ... books in 2017.  Maas is not a critical darling, but she writes characters I want to read about, she manages an epic cast without losing control of any of the subplots, every book in a series advances the main plot, and she publishes regularly.

Sometime during the second book of that series, A Court of Mist and Fury, I noticed that in moments of extreme emotion, Maas would describe the character's physical reaction to the emotion as a throat bob.  For example, Rhys is reliving a painful memory here:

His throat bobbed.  I could tell it was rage, and pain, that kept him from telling me outright -- not mistrust.

This is a slightly unusual physical description, but cool and somewhat unique to Maas among the authors I've read.  After I started A Court of Wings and Ruin, I noticed that the number of throat bobs had skyrocketed.  Being a data guy, I naturally had to start keeping count in this spreadsheet.

After recording 15 throat bobs in the 669 pages of A Court of Wings and Ruin, I was hooked.  I needed a more complete analysis of throat bobs in Sarah J. Maas's oeuvre.  Earlier this year, I finally started and finished the Throne of Glass series, went back through A Court of Thorns and Roses to comb for the last few throat bobs, and build out a dashboard of visualizations.  The highlights include:



The number of throat bobs by book, ordered from the books with the most bobs to the fewest.  Note that:

• Throne of Glass itself is missing, because there were zero bobs in it.  
• Empire of Storms has more bobs per page than Kingdom of Ash, because it's a longer book.

The number of throat bobs by character, ordered from the characters with the most bobs to the fewest.  Note that Aelin's series has 8 books to Rhysand's 4.  I'm kindof shocked how high Gavriel and Yrene are on this list, though this may in part be because the bob rate accelerated around the time they became important characters.  (see the following charts)




The number of throat bobs by year of publication date.  The x-axis is wonky; that rightmost bar is 2018, but appears centered around the middle of 2017. (sigh)




The number of throat bobs by quarter and year of publication date.  This shows us where in the publication history those books with high bob counts are, plus the number of books published each year. 




The best for last, this is number of bobs by cumulative page count of Maas's oeuvre.  You can see that the rate starts slow, then picks up just before the 2,000th page, then kicks into high gear from roughly page 3,800-4,800.  Finally, after that, it slows down a bit, but the rate of throat bobs per page is still higher than it was before page 3,800.

Hopefully, this project will continue for many more years to come.