So I was digging through chatlogs from last year and found some number crunching I'd done for fun and meant to post but never got around to doing so, so here it is.

The common refrain is that agents are horrendously overworked. To be sure, this is an incredibly demanding job, and in the middle of a badfic explosion it must feel like the missions have no end to them, but is it really as bad as some stories have made it out to be? For sure, we see a lot of stories about agents on their off time nowadays, which implies things have slowed down a good bit from the days Jay and Acacia were swinging swords at all things glittery, but I was curious and decided to test things out with a basic model I drew up. This is by no means totally comprehensive, there's too much missing data and too many variables for that, but there is enough here that the results are pretty interesting, I think.

Bob and Alice are two agents in a Generic Action Department, we could assume they're in DMS LOTR Division or Department of Floaters I suppose because of the specific category I'm drawing on for example numbers. Let's assume Bob and Alice get three missions a day, every day, in one year of working for the PPC; I consider three missions daily to be a minimum marker for "overworked"/a generally stressful workload, mostly because I personally don't consider much less than this to be all that great a workload - I'm sure some would disagree, it could be argued that even one a day is a very high workload considering the incredibly demanding and time consuming nature of a PPC mission. I will be including alternate calculations for one-mission-a-day. Three missions also seems to me to be as many as an agent pair would be able to take on in a day while still allowing them to meet sapient needs for food, rest, social time, and the like - that would be, say, one mission in the morning, one in the afternoon, and one in the evening, or all in one block at one time of the day, depending on when they arrive.

So we have our agents, and our rough workload. Bob and Alice kill three fics a day, every day, for a year, tallying 1095 missions performed by the end of the year; the Lord of the Rings section on fanfiction.net has 54,000 fics in it, most of which were probably written in the great fanfic boom of 2001-2004. At this workload, it would take Bob and Alice 49.32 or so years to kill every fic in LOTR, and even longer if you merge the Hobbit (11K) and Silmarillion (4.7K) sections with LOTR under a general "Tolkienverse" banner, at which point you're looking at 69.7K fics ahead of our heroes.

However, Bob and Alice would not be the only agent team in their department. This is where the second part of my model comes in: the fourth largest Action Department, DAVD, has at least 50 agents. Ignoring questions of why so many other Action Departments have fewer than 50, this seems like a good benchmark because not only is it a large number of agent teams all working at once, but the three most prominent Action Departments - Floaters, DMS, and Bad Slash - are implicitly or explicitly much larger. It's implied in several places that many thousands of agents work for the PPC after all, and depending on how literally you take a speech made by the SO in Reorg ("If any Guards are listening, I urge you to heed my words. You may think yourselves a match for any Assassins, and that may be true, but the DMS outnumbers you ten, a hundred to one.") the DMS might have had up to 40,000 agents in 1999 (the DIS, when they became the Black Cats, had about 350-400 members, this including outside recruits, and the formation of the Black Cats is after they retreated from HQ having taken, in Nendil's words, unsustainable casualties in the fighting against the PPC; this means their effective strength immediately before the civil war must have been above 350 Guards, and 350 * 100 = 35,000), though this would be modified by taking into account agents who have since died, changed departments, left the PPC, and the like. I doubt in the span of 1999-2015 the DMS' numbers have dropped from, say, 40,000 to 400 though. Thus, 50 agents is, for the Big Three that would be getting most of the missions, most likely a very small percentage of their effective strength, and at any given point they are very likely to have at least 50 agents able to perform missions.

Most agent teams consist of two agents, so 50 agents is 25 teams. Let's give Bob and Alice's 48 coworkers the exact same workload, three daily missions all year. 25 * (365 * 3) comes out to 27,375 fics killed. At this workrate, the Generic Action Division would wipe out the entire LOTR section of the Pit in about two years, and if you include the entire Tolkienverse (6.7K fics) as one category, they will take about two and a half years to wipe out all three sections. At this workrate, they would have cleansed the entire Hobbit section of the Pit before the badfic explosion was even finished. Now, let's take into account that not every single fic would be considered worth a mission by Upstairs - some wouldn't be damaging enough to canon, and some would be outright good. In this hypothetical, if we take LOTR and say half of its entries in the Pit are deemed not in need of a mission, that's 27,000 fics up for killing, all of which would be dead in this first hypothetical year.

Now, that's a very harsh year, but it's a period of "argh, agents are so overworked" that would be over quite quickly, especially when you consider there are much more than 50 agents out there and these missionable fics would be being distributed all over the place, rather than staying in one specific department. If we take into account there being more than 50, let's say 100 agents, these 50 agent pairs with the same workload as before have killed 54,750 fics in the first year. If we go even higher, let's say 2000 agents, 1000 agent pairs have killed 1,095,000 fics in one year (hey, they're millionaires!). Needless to say huge swathes of the Pit, including the entire Tolkienverse many times over, have been gutted by such a ravenous onslaught, and I would dare say most of the non-Pit sites have taken a beating too. Even at the height of the 2001-2004 badfic boom, I doubt there were a million fics in any continuum to kill.

Because I said I would, here is how these numbers come out for just one mission a day:

Bob and Alice: 365 (duh)
50 agents: 18,250 (this would take about 3.82 years to wipe out the collective Tolkienverse section on the Pit)
100 agents: 365,000 (duh again)
2000 agents: 730,000

Obviously, far fewer fics than three missions a day are being killed, but that's more than enough to wipe out most sections in short order. It's still quite a heavy workload, too, but again, not one that would last a long enough time for the badfic supply to be sustainable. In a major badfic boom, maybe fics are coming in faster than they're being killed, but booms end, and then the remaining fics are still there to be killed off. When even a somewhat modestly sized department of 50 agents can wipe out a whole fandom's badfic in a year's work, can we really say agents are still overworked? At any workrate that would qualify for the term, the question seems to be just how there's any badfic left to kill, especially since it's taken as a given that the missions we see agents do on page aren't the only ones they do; it would be patently absurd to suggest only a couple teams have ever done 50 missions in universe, for example.

BUT EKYL...

I know, this is a simplistic model that leaves several variables out, either due to lack of data or just to avoid this whole thing becoming an incomprehensible mess (read: for my own sanity's sake). Let's run down a few of them:

A lot more places than the Pit post fanfic: There's adultfanfiction.net, AO3, Quotev, people's blogs, independent sites, forums, etc. etc. etc. - however, this model uses the Pit because it's the easiest to get data from, AND by far the most popular: the majority of fanfics for a given canon are almost certainly going to be posted on FFnet, even though AO3 is picking up a lot of steam in recent years. If you add on the fanfics in these places, yes, there's a lot more on the pile, but the agents are still killing a huge number of fics yearly, and when you take my point above that not all fics posted will be deemed killable, the numbers will be dwindling fast.

Authors will keep writing fanfic/badfic: Yes, true, but how many? At what rate? To sustain a workrate like in this model, fics would have to be written and updated faster than the agents could kill them, and fandom momentum doesn't sustain that kind of pace for long. The LOTR and Hobbit booms lasted for years but eventually petered out; people still write fics for them, and for Harry Potter, but at nowhere near the rate they used to. Factor in the time it takes for Intel to find fics and determine if they need killing, then to send them to an agent team, and this would see the PPC workload start to slow down immensely.

Your data is full of assumptions!: By necessity, unfortunately. There's a lot of stuff here where gathering conclusive data would either be impossible (there's no way to say for sure exactly how many people are supposed to be in each department, in-universe, for example, just that the PPC as an organisation is much, much larger than the people actively writing characters in it), or more trouble than it's worth. As such, I put together a reasonably plausible hypothetical and fed data I could get into it to make a point.

Not every agent would get this many missions: Of course not, though I'd say if you don't even get one mission a day you're not that overworked. But anyway, there are agents who wouldn't get this many missions daily, who wouldn't complete them quickly enough to stay on top of the pile (or at all, deaths/accidents/failures/snappings-in-actions do happen) or would be unavailable, but the key is that enough agents would be doing these missions to make this impact. If a department has 1000 agents and this workrate, 5% of its effective strength would be killing 27,375/18,250 fics a year. PPC work is demanding enough and dangerous enough that this would easily count as overworking agents, but for how long?

What about missions that take more than one day: This is tricky, and I'm not sure I have an answer for it now - there's not really much in the way of data to figure on how in fic time relates to out of fic time, or how long your average agent spends on a mission. There've been people who've vanished for years doing missions, people who've been in mission for a long while then come back at the end and it's the same day as when they left, and in between; I remember something about Jay saying she'd spent years in missions but came back to HQ not having aged and finding time not having passed, or something like that. It does seem that time outside the Word Worlds moves more slowly than inside, so I consider it possible at least a minority of agents would be able to do three missions in an HST day, although to them it might feel like more or less than that period of time.

What about reposts: In cases where a fic is reposted, or posted in multiple places... I'm honestly not sure, but I think there might be precedent for this. My personal theory is it stays dead; whatever problem the agents go in to fix serves as the sort of anchor of the author's influence, and with it dead the word world sort of collapses and/or becomes inaccessible - so the text would still exist but it would be unable to affect the canon any more. This is why fics killed by agents don't just get deleted, by my estimate. It's midnight now as I type this so I might not be explaining very well.

In the PPC multiverse, wouldn't fics come from more places than just World One: This is actually my (super meta) preferred explanation - surely the LMSF and other Sue-creating organisations make badfic happen too, plus there's how many alternate Earths out there in this setting? Plus canons that have fictions that people would write fanfic about? A simultaneous fanfic boom from two Earths could produce a terrifying amount of badfic if timing ended up working out. Given what we just calculated for a small percentage of the largest departments, the PPC could handle this, but I could see them getting swamped if there's enough of it out there. Still, overwork would be a temporary situation, I'd think, because they'd be chewing through fics at an alarming rate given how many more agents there supposedly are than I have included in this model. It could well be that things are slowing down in-universe, though, possibly in response to how much fic has already been killed - the Flowers probably don't want all their agents to suddenly be out of a job.

I'm tired now and starting to lose track of all my points, I believe I had more but this is probably good for now. I'm sure I'll remember more tomorrow and over the weekend in general, but I thought this would be interesting stuff for the Board to chew on! It certainly does give some food for thought.

...Now I sorta wonder what the PPC would do if one day they ran out of badfic to kill. Which, in an entropic multiverse, I suppose they inevitably will one day. It could maybe be good material for an AU or "the day the consoles stopped beeping" short story.