“I used to have a lot of explicit fantasies about you.”
Jim picks up his head from behind the laptop. “Did you, now?”
“Yeah, back while you were still being a cocktease, so, admittedly…”
“One, I was no such thing, and two, tell me more. What kind of fantasies?”
Fandom: Sherlock (BBC)
Characters: Sebastian Moran/Jim Moriarty
Rating: Explicit
Warnings & Tags: Sadism, Dubious Consent, Violence, Roleplay, Identity Issues, Humiliation, Unhealthy Relationships, Canon-Typical Violence, Physical Abuse
Word Count: 2468
Summary:
“People do love fantasising about what they can't have.”
Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare (1601-1602) // "The light of the street fell full upon his face." Sidney Paget, The Strand Magazine (1903) // The Tyger, William Blake (1794) // Tiger's Head, Abbott Handerson Thayer, oil on canvas (1874) // The Sniper, Liam O'Flaherty (1923) // The Killer, David Fincher (2023) // A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller (1932-1953), Anaïs Nin (1987) // Tiger and Snake, Eugène Delacroix, oil on canvas (1862) // Seduction, Frank Bidart (2006) // "Professor Moriarty stood before me." Sidney Paget, The Strand Magazine (1893) // Rattlesnake, Stanley Vestal (1928) // Inferno, Franz von Stuck, oil on canvas (1908) // How to Maintain Eye Contact, Robert Wood Lynn (2021) // Ripley, Steven Zaillian (2024) // Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare (1601-1602)
TVD & FiF Comparison Using Computational Linguistics
When I opened my inbox back in December 2025 and saw the notification that @pasiphile had published the very first chapter of Fast In Fire, I - like so many others alongside me - was absolutely elated! After all, it had been 12 years since These Violent Delights, the first part of This Life Is A Trip (When You're Psycho In Love), had been published, dutifully offering a gateway into mormor for many, and stealing hearts right, left and center.
As a fan of pasi's writing and with my first semester at uni studying computational linguistics under my belt, the 12 year gap piqued my interest in particular. How would the writing differ? Would you be able to spot differences in regards to the average word or sentence length?
All that accumulated into me asking pasi for permission to analyze their texts, and then went to code. This post now aims to share/document the findings of this endeavor.
Disclaimer: The findings may be a tiny bit inaccurate - while I am absolutely having fun and enjoying this project immensly, I am still very new to this skill set,,
That being said, the findings are as follows:
TVD Word Count: ~168,318
*is slightly inaccurate due to a process of tokenization - which consists of splitting a text into its several parts (e.g. "Sebastian's boss doesn't smoke. -> "Sebastian", "'s", "boss", "does", "n't", "smoke") - beforehand -- I needed to work around having multiple tokens that made up one word (e.g. how "doesn't" is one word but is made up of "does" and "n't"), which I tried my best to account for but some tokens may still slip past
TVD Average Word Length: ~4.25 characters/word
FIF Word Count: ~365,069 words
FIF Average Word Length: ~4.39 characters/word
TVD Sentence Count: ~18,926 sentences
TVD Average Sentence Length: ~8.89 words/sentence
FIF Sentence Count: ~42,250.5 sentences *the .5 possibly stems from a forgotten quotation mark
FIF Average Sentence Length: ~8.64 words/sentence
-> This indicates a slight change in sentence length, with TVD having slightly longer sentences on average than FIF
The fics TVD (11,268 tokens) & FiF (19,031 tokens) have this many tokens in common: 7,493
The fics have an overlap of 24.73%
The Type Token Ratio for TVD (0.05) and for FIF (0.04)
*The Type Token Ratio (TTR) refers to how versatile a text is in its choice of words. It compares the complete Tokens (as already mentioned above) of a text with the overall Types in a text, which basically mean the occurrence of one unique Token [e.g. "Sebastian's boss doesn't like Sebastian's cigarettes" -> the types "Sebastian" and "'s" occur 2x, every other type exactly 1x; the overall sentence has 9 Tokens but 7 Types]. The closer the TTR is to 0, the more variety a text has to offer.
-> The TTR for both TVD and FiF are very close to 0, which is an indicator for their varied choice of words. However, FiF has a minisculy larger TTR, but this can be chalked up to its length being so much bigger than TVD. I'd say TVD and Fif are overall pretty varied with ca. equal levels of different choice of words.
Most frequently used Tokens:
TVD: TOKENS - FREQ | FIF: TOKENS - FREQ
1 you - 9,953 | the - 14,439
2 the - 6,651 | you - 11,791
3 and - 5,205 | to - 8,857
4 he - 4,401 | a - 7,885
5 to - 4,051 | and - 7,564
.. … …
96 how - 268 | head - 661
97 hands - 267 | some - 647
98 way - 264 | looked - 641
99 right - 263 | into - 641
100 want - 263 | Moriarty - 639
-> Note how the ranking of "you" and "the" switches places from TVD to FiF,,, that was so funny to me.
Most frequently used Bigrams:
*A Bigram means a Token Grouping of 2 that occur right next to each other in a text. "Sebastian killed him", for example, would consist out of the Bigrams "Sebastian killed" and "killed him".
TVD: BIGRAMS - FREQ | FIF: BIGRAMS - FREQ
. “ - 3,475 | . “ - 8,179
. ” - 2,220 | . ” - 6,621
You 're - 1,818 | ” “ - 6,178
? ” - 1,480 | ? ” - 4,087
” “ - 1,399 | , ” - 2,490
.. … …
96 again , - 142 | Sherlock said - 294
97 for a - 140 | he 'd - 293
98 there 's - 139 | you 've - 291
99 one of - 139 | ” he - 291
100 back . - 139 | “ Yeah - 291
-> Particularly interesting to me is the frequency of ” “, which marks how often a closing quotation mark was followed by an opening one. Or: how often was a quote directly followed with another quote without any dialoge markers?
Most frequently used pronouns:
TVD: PRONOUN - FREQ | FIF: PRONOUN - FREQ
you - 9,953 | you - 11,791
he - 4,401 | it - 6,257
your - 3,182 | I - 5,898
it - 2,823 | he - 5,263
his - 2,425 | she - 4,533
-> Note how the existance of white hat chapters is clearly noticable in the pronoun frequency - especially with "she" making it into the Top 5 :')
Honorable Mentions:
In the overall Token frequency, in TVD "Jim" came in 26th place (Freq.: 916), which just happens to be lower than the frequency of "Sherlock" in FiF - with 2,087 mentions, it took 25th place… I know Jim's fuming over that somewhere lmao
"men", "sex" & "bedroom" all share one place with 55 mentions, and "fucking", "gun" & "home" all share one place with 54 mentions - if that isn't mormor in a nutshell, I don't know what else is haha
When I grouped the words into word classes, "Jim" took the first place of the TVD nouns with a frequency of 916 occurrences; a mention of "Moriarty", however, occurs 237 times and takes 7th place.
The first 3 most frequent nouns in FiF were Sherlock (Freq.: 2,084), Mary (Freq.: 1,146) and John (Freq.: 1,014).
Moran is mentioned 722 times (-> he's in 5th place) and Moriarty takes the 9th place with being mentioned 632 times.
The really interesting thing to me (and I'm absolutely not saying this to make you actually do this, it's already such a massive work!) would be to compare the seb-chapters in fif to tvd, given that they're about the same length and written from the same pov. There's still a whole lot more introspection than interaction, I reckon (I remember struggling with that in the first few chapters) so I do wonder what kind of effect that had.
Another thing is that I got the impression my writing has become a bit less diverse, so it's funny seeing that reflected in the tiny difference in repetitive text.
I also noticed the bigram quotation thing, even before I read your comment! I do feel like I often write a lot of dialogue without dialogue tags (the "he said"s etc), more than average, so it's not surprising to see it ranked that high.
And finally, everything about the nouns & names frequency is hilarious. Like the fact that "Sherlock" has almost double the frequency of the second most frequent noun? Very in character. Also with the "Moriarty" and "Jim" thing in tvd, given that he doesn't get to be Jim in Sebastian's pov until chapter 5 of 11, that sort of reflects in that ratio. Very pleasing to me.
We, who imagined we saw off death, but there was, for us, no true resurrection. We have a course. Now we we’re bound to the reeking purgatory of these streets, more cursed than the dead, who at least know their peace. For with us, there lingers like a whore’s perfume the dream of a life. Here, there is a hell of its very own for the dreaming dead.
i’m a mama lion and these are my cubs ♡ jedediah shine
