Statistics #3: The Seven Elements of Harmony · 1:36pm Apr 19th, 2017
It started with cocktails.
To be specific, the infamous Masked Ferret publicized the result of the collaboration with Horizon regarding the names and blurbs for mixed drinks at Babscon.
Which I can’t go to, so you can imagine my annoyance.
Fortunately, the Ferret provided me with an easy outlet for vengeance. The post ends with this phrase:
Apparently the Element of Courage is actually the most common seventh element.
Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha. Nope. 
Let’s put this statement to the test using my database and some coding!
Just give me a moment…
Methodology
- Select all stories using this search string: ‘“seventh element” OR “seven elements” OR “new element” OR “lost element” OR “missing element”’ – which should, in theory, find every story mentioning the idea of a seventh element of Harmony.
- With the full text of each story found this way, using regular expression based search, find every occurrence of the phrase “element of <something>” and then extract the unique “somethings.”
- Normalize the results by removing every mention of the canonical Elements of Harmony, certain spurious hits like “Element of Brutal Honesty,” and common typos.
Count what’s left!
Results
There were only 1328 stories fitting the search criteria, which is considerably less than I expected. Filtering things took longer than I expected too. For a taste of this, here are some of the things that were not counted:
# With common typos.
CANONICAL_ELEMENTS = [
'harmony', 'harmonies', 'barmony', 'harmoney',
# Not really canonical, but should be filtered out like them:
'disharmony',
'friendship', 'frienship', 'befriendment',
'magic', 'magick', 'magical', 'magically', 'magics',
'm-m-magic', 'magic-or',
'laughter', 'laugher', 'lsughter', 'laugther', 'luaghter',
'laughtery', 'laughther',
'kindness', 'kindess', 'kindenss',
'loyalty', 'loalty', 'loyality', 'loyalties', 'loyaltiy',
'loyaltyon', 'woyalty', 'loy-al-tee',
'honesty', 'hnosty', 'honestly',
'generosity', 'generocity', 'generousity', 'genorosity',
'genurosity', 'genereosity', 'genreosity',
]Initially, I kept stumbling into newer and newer perversions of Rarity’s element, but Rainbow just had to win this competition. Likewise, I merged certain synonymous, or nearly synonymous element names into one where applicable. Notably, I had to do this to courage and bravery, because on their own neither was anywhere as prominent. Other items removed as spurious included the classic elements like air/earth/water/fire, which probably aren’t what we’re looking for. Most of them were relatively far down the popularity ladder, anyway.
After all the filtering, only 542 stories contained any description of the purported seventh element. I wanted to do a pretty time-series graph plotting the popularity of different elements over the years, but with this kind of volume, it doesn’t feel like it’s worth the effort.
The resulting list of top 10 is as follows:
- surprise: 123
- love: 64
- courage/bravery: 48
- chaos: 30
- hope: 27
- forgiveness: 21
- deception/lies/deceit: 19
- honor/nobility: 16
- trust: 16
- darkness: 15
Yes, the most common seventh element appears to be surprise, with a gigantic lead. While it is possible that many of these stories just use the phrase “the element of surprise,” without implying that it is an Element of Harmony, most of the time, “surprise” is the only element found by the search remaining after filtering out the canonical elements. And I remind you that I selected the stories which already mention there are seven of them. Love is the next most common match, and likewise, is usually alone.
Courage is third, and only when it’s counted together with bravery.
1. I officially don’t recommend reading them.
Notable oddball elements include nitrogen, bacon, dubstep, wubs and umami. One particular author1 is responsible for at least 10 entries in the total list of newly discovered elements which are not singletons, because they all occur in different stories by the same author.
Incidentally, the Element of Protection as described in Not the Hero only turns up five times.
Most of the remaining list is taken up by the variations on the idea of the Elements of Disharmony, in which case the story will usually mention at least seven new elements, and occasionally a lot more. I’m still wondering about love, though.
Anyone up to checking out the stories with the “Element of Love” and telling me if there’s anything in common about them other than the word usage? The full list of matches as well as the elements found within can be seen in this pastebin.
What can I say? Surprise.
The top contender might be partially my fault.
(By the way, my bits are on forgiveness/redemption. That's totally the missing aspect of friendship.)
4501835
1 out of 123 is not much fault. :)
I suspect this is normally counted under the auspices of kindness.
4501849
Perhaps, but kindness is just being nice to ponies. Forgiveness is allowing bygones to be bygones, and it's essential to keeping friendships alive.
I actually have a story ready for publication soon which uses that as the seventh. It's not part of the storyline, but it's implied by Starlight Glimmer being the Princess of Redemption.
Now do a statistical analysis on how many of them induce cringing in the audience.
4501947
Doing that would require exposing an audience to each and every single one of them.
I’m a mad scientist, not a crazy one.
The main question still remaining unresolved: Is the Element of Courage vodka or bourbon? Testing must be done.
Twilight Sparkle carefully measured two more doses with a graduated cylinder, then pass them over to her two experimental subjects. Big Mac chugged his down, but Caramel looked cross-eyed at his and blurted out, "What are we doing again?"
"I told you six times already," huffed Twilight. "Seeing how much alcohol it takes to overcome your fear of asking Fluttershy out for a date. Now, drink up." She turned to Big Mac, only to find him muzzle-down on the table and snoring, a pose which Caramel adopted a few second later.
"Darnit," she muttered, wadding up her observation notes.
4501953
The element of courage is obviously applejack, lowercase A, product of the namesake of same.
Are you aware of the Bruce Willis movie The Fifth Element?
holy guacamole sidebar pushes the comments field to before half!
Hey, how much for courage and bravery alone, since they would fit individually into this ranking?
4502587
Yes, and? You think that most of those stories are actually group shipping stories and don't introduce a new character? But who's going to read them all to prove that conclusively?
Well Sunset's got some kind of Orange Element thing going on, and the Rainbow of Light had 7 Beams in it so there's something out there alright. I feel like the 7th Element might be Equestria's Higgs Boson.
4502620
It looks like AJ has the Element of Orange.
(…that rainbow bugs me)
Very fun!
Next question: How many Elements of Pancakes, Road Signs, Stream of Consciousness, Peanut Butter, Toothpaste, and Toe-Stubbing? It looks like your initial search queries might have been just a little too restrictive, though I'm not sure what other actual terms to add.
But they might have been over-broad, too - my guess is that a whole lot of those Elements of Surprise are not actually part of the Elements of Harmony. I suspect Love is genuine, though, with Cadance as the obvious Bearer.
4502676
Lots. I think the highest number of elements was introduced in this story:
http://www.fimfiction.net/story/98568/mlp-time-loops {‘ambition’, ‘cupcakes’, ‘inquisition’, ‘deception/lies/deceit’, ‘trust’, ‘disco’, ‘terror’, ‘suspicion’, ‘elegance’, ‘endurance’, ‘cunning’, ‘ruthless’, ‘disloyalty’, ‘speed’, ‘nocturnal’, ‘darkness’, ‘flair’, ‘fear’, ‘dubstep’, ‘presentation’, ‘wubs’, ‘convincing’, ‘endearment’, ‘treason’, ‘sorrow’, ‘tempo’, ‘timbre’, ‘pitch’, ‘devotion’, ‘conversion’, ‘scheming’, ‘customer’, ‘dynamics’, ‘rhythm’, ‘ferocity’, ‘muffins’, ‘curiosity’, ‘savagery’, ‘haste’, ‘ruthlessness’, ‘style’, ‘advertising’, ‘surprise’, ‘confidence’}
"Customer" is probably an "Element of Customer Service" or somesuch. It’s not the only one to introduce the Element of Muffins either.
Someone actually wrote a story containing the words “element of” relating to {‘rape’, ‘buttsex’, ‘euphoria’, ‘orgy’, ‘bukkake’, ‘bondage’} but it does not make the initial search.
Quite possibly. I’m all ears, it’s trivial to redo the count if anyone can offer a better initial search string. You can use SQLite MATCH query syntax. The units searched are individual chapters, so an AND will fail unless both the left and the right side occur within the same chapter, but the results are returned as whole stories, and the element extraction is done on whole story text.
That does seem like it might be the case.
I'd expect to see more Empathy up there since it's the closest to a canonical seventh element we have. Huh.
those last two remind me of a chapter of the notoriously crazy "MLP time loops" collab, where the elements were music based, Rhythm, Tempo, etc.
"brutal honesty" was also in that, Gilda Griffon was the Bearer.
oh yeah, also at least one with Reversed elements, like Greed.
those are possibly contenders for most obscure...then again, they were all sets of 6, not 7th.