#even in s1 without the outlier of the stabbening mat is still the second highest sorry-sayer after rand. baby boys 😭😭

[markantonys]

i was thinking about lanfear telling rand that the word "sorry" will lose all meaning if he keeps saying it, and out of curiosity i searched all the episode transcripts to see how often rand says sorry. i found that, just looking at total instances of the word and not specific characters, there's usually 1-4 "sorry"s per episode. got to 2x08 and went "damn 13 'sorry's in this episode?? what happened here?????" and i clicked along and realized it was because of mat and the stabbening 😭😭

anyway here's a good old-fashioned Chart Of Inane And Useless WOT Data!

my statistician's notes:

i only searched for the word "sorry", so this does not capture other ways of apologizing or expressing regret/guilt

i excluded all "sorry"s said to mean "what did you say?" rather than "i'm apologizing", and all "sorry"s which i deemed insincere (liandrin had a few of those lmao, and also things like elayne jokingly saying "sorry" after egwene says her homemade moonshine is very strong - some subjectivity here about what i considered sincere or not)

i did not include minor characters or characters who only said a sincere "sorry" once

repetitive "sorry"s were counted individually, and this accounts for most of our heavy-hitters: liandrin says "sorry" 5x after giving her son that herb and mat says "sorry" 7x after stabbing rand

rand has a few double "sorry"s, but never more than 2 in one sentence/exchange. so his 14 are because he really does say "sorry" a lot! 6 times in s1 and 8 times in s2

the absolute only time moiraine says "sorry" in the entire show so far is when she's pretending to be a frightened noblewoman with the whitecloaks in 1x02. siuan has never said it. queen shit.