theorigamiphoenix

A look at Eridan’s cursing

Eridan speaks a modest 4,540 words, but his cursing rate is more unusual at 2.18%, about 1 in 46 words. This is the seventh most for non-mind controlled characters whose cursing can be accurately determined (I’m looking at you, Damara), less than Dave and more than Roxy.

This is a concordance plot of his cursing by the order of his conversations in the comic. For the sake of consistency, the order of the dialogs in the Alterniabound segments were taken from the transcripts on readmspa.org. Each thin bar means one curse word, while thicker bars mean more of them.

We see that there is variability in the cursing, and that his cursing rate decreases over time as he becomes more serious, grave, and desperate. This is easier to see by taking the cursing rates for each quarter of his dialog.

There’s actually a spike in the second quarter, but we need to look at the data by character to gain a better understanding of why this is. The following is similar to the concordance plot at the start of this post, except it is much larger (each pixel is about 3 words), there is white instead of black for each curse word, and the background color is according to what character he is talking to. The color key is obvious except for the narrow violet band at the very end of the final part: that is actually when he talks to Cronus during Ministrife (I have chosen to include Ministrife because his dialog maintains the same patterns and he stays in character). I had to break it up into parts so I could preserve the horizontal scale so the white lines would be obvious. The black lines indicate a separate conversation or response.

In order, we see conversations with Kanaya, Feferi, Gamzee, Vriska, Terezi, Rose, Jade, Karkat, Kanaya, and a series of exchanges in one conversation between him and Sollux and Feferi where he addresses them separately each time, plus the tiny strip of Cronus at the end.

His conversations with Gamzee, Karkat, and Vriska on line two are what cause the quarter two spike. With Gamzee, Eridan bugs him to get him in contact with Karkat and then criticizes his juggalo practices. With Karkat, he critizes Gamzee’s exposed horn pile and says that at least his wand pile is hidden. With Vriska, he criticizes the former black relationship and then tells how rude Rose was to him; note that his conversation with Rose actually occurs a little later in the comic. In summary, in these segments he is ticked off by a highblood’s behavior that does not suit his caste, the lack of romance, and being shown that his weaponry/violence is not supreme.

Now let’s look at a character-by-character break-down.

Observe that he did not curse to Cronus or Terezi at all, although this is mostly because he spoke to each of them just once. Also note that his use of cursing is not connected to his irritation with the person in question; see how he curses more to Kanaya than he does to Sollux. I would recommend to Eridan roleplayers that they should weigh their amount of swearing based on whether Eridan is more comically annoyed or desperately serious. He does not curse in every line.

Let us now look at what specific curse words he uses. The below chart graphs them by the specific form of the word.

“Fuckin” is by far his most favorite curse word. Simple “damn” is about as half as popular as “shit”. However, his most unusual curse word is “bloody”, which is used twice as in “you are slingin around such a bloody mess of slander”
and “theyre [the angels of LOWAA] not gettin any less bloody piss is the thing”. This word is indexed with Britishness or foreigness, as both Calliope and Jake use it as an intensifying curse word roughly equal to “damn” in intensity. Don’t overuse it, though. “Fuckin” is used as an adjective while “fuck” is used as an exclamation like “oh fuck”. “Shit” is used a noun and “damn” as an adjective.

Here is the cursing by the roots (stems) of the words.

Fuck is the true winner followed by shit. As Homestuck characters go, this is an unusually high “fuck” to “shit” ratio; this suggests that Eridan mostly curses in order to suggest the intensity of his emotions or intents rather than for comedic effect.