Number Obsession

"I count the spiders on the wall.
I count the cobwebs in the hall.
I count the candles on the shelf.
When I'm alone, I count... myself!"

— The Count, Sesame Street

An obsession or phobia regarding numbers and/or numerical order. Characters afflicted with this fixation tend to have a deep need for order and structure which might lead to them developing Obsessively Organized tendencies. They may believe that a particular number holds power due to superstitious beliefs surrounding numbers such as Four Is Death and 13 Is Unlucky.

Arithmomania (obsession with counting) in particular is often associated with vampires due to certain myths where vampires can be stopped by throwing a bag of rice to the ground. This causes the creatures to compulsively count each grain of rice.

This trope has a strong association with neurotic characters as arithmomania is one of the possible symptoms of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

Related to Good with Numbers for characters who are math whizzes and Mad Mathematician for eccentric or unhinged math geniuses.

Compare Clock King, a character who is good with time and makes plans according to strict schedules.

See also Numerological Motif for the symbolism associated with specific numbers.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You: Suu Hifumi has a deep obsession with numbers. She's introduced in Chapter 123 and has a lifelong love of numbers to the exclusion of all else. She's so obsessed with numbers that it even interferes with her understanding of mathematics—for example, to her 1+1 should equal 11, not 2, since she can't imagine where the 1's would go.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Golden Wind: Guido Mista is obsessed with the number 4, due to the stipulation that selections of 4 cause disaster. This is reflected in his Stand, Sex Pistols, being numbered from 1-7 with no 4 in sight, and in Purple Haze Feedback, he refuses becoming the Number Two of Passione due to 2 being a property of 4.
  • Stone Ocean: Enrico Pucci likes to count prime numbers to help him stay focused and calm, due to the numbers' indivisibility.
• Soul Eater: Death the Kid loves the number 8 because of its perfect symmetry.
• Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-kun: "The Cult of Numeral 2" is exactly what its name suggests: a bunch of demons obsessed with the number "2", to the point of worshipping it like a god. At first it sounds like a myth or rumor, with even the people that know about it doubting it's real, but later it's revealed to truly exist, with Ocho being a member. He was actually manipulating Orobas into becoming a false number 1 so that he could be a genuine number 2.
• Yatterman: Ai's speech pattern is marked by her speaking in percentages. For example, after being asked to kiss Boyacky while filming a movie, she complains that "this is 100% torture". She also encourages Gan to speak similarly, such as by asking "how free percent" he is going to be later that day.

Comic Books

• Batman villain Two-Face is famously obsessed with the number two and duality in general, wielding Guns Akimbo and planning crimes involving the number two.
• Preacher: Jesse, in a fit of anger at one of Herr Starr's underlings, used his Compelling Voice to order him to count grains of sand on a beach, telling him he could stop when he reached two million. Months later, the man is shown still on the beach, emaciated and out of his mind, finally counting the two millionth grain. He later encounters Jesse, who is genuinely remorseful for what was really an act of Disproportionate Retribution. Jesse uses his voice power again and tells the man to forget it ever happened, which actually helps.

Film — Live-Action

• Electra: Abby is shown to have a counting fixation by her counting windows early in the film.
• The Number 23: Walter Sparrow finds himself obsessed and fixated on the "23 enigma", a belief that all incidents and events are directly connected to the number 23, some permutation of the number 23, or a number related to 23. The in-universe explanation for the number's importance is that 2 divided by 3 is .666... i.e. the Number of the Beast.
• π: Max is looking for a mathematical formula that will allow him to see the underlying pattern of the universe. He's shown by a man named Lenny Meyer how the original Hebrew alphabet, which has alphanumeric value, can represent certain concepts mathematically, a concept known as Gematria, and suggests that the Torah is a code sent by God. It also coincides with a 216-digit number Max uncovered trying to write a program to unlock his theory, which Sol urges him to abandon, lest he become a mere numerologist. In the end, Max seems to find the secret he was looking for, which causes him to Go Mad from the Revelation, and he performs trepanation for a form of Laser-Guided Amnesia.
• Superstar (1999): Owen, who likes to do various things three times in a row.

Literature

• In Artemis Fowl: The Atlantis Complex, Artemis develops a mental disorder with symptoms that include a phobia of the number 4 and obsession with the number 5. As a result, he tries to carefully structure his sentences so that he uses a multiple of 5 syllables (but not 20) every time he talks.
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time: The protagonist Christopher Boone knows all the prime numbers up to 7,057. He is so obsessed with maths, he even uses prime numbers instead of conventional chapter numbers.
• Illuminatus!: Multiple characters are obsessed with the numbers 5, 17, and 23.
• Just After Sunset: One of the short stories in this collection is N., written from the point of view of a psychiatrist who is treating a patient with severe Obsessive-Compulsive disorder. The disorder centers around a ring of stones in a field that the patient believes to be a portal holding back an Eldritch Abomination from another dimension. If he can see all 8 stones, the portal is secure; if he only sees 7, the portal is in danger of breaching. He also believes that he can strengthen the portal by focusing on "good" and "bad" numbers — even numbers are good, especially if the individual digits add up to an even number; odd numbers are bad, particularly prime numbers.
• Thief of Time: The Auditors of Reality want to be able to count everything, as befits their role. When they experience humanity for the first time and encounter phenomena that can't be reduced to numbers, they suffer various types of mental breakdown and attempt things like breaking a painting apart into its individual molecules in a fruitless effort to determine where "beauty" comes from. (They also routinely attempt to destroy humanity in order to remove the problem.)

Live-Action TV

• All About Me: In Series 1, Leo is obsessed with maths, constantly reading math books and once desiring to go to a party dressed as the square root of 98. It's suggested as the series goes on that this is a sign of his Asperger's, with maths being his special interest. However, this becomes a case of Characterisation Marches On as he isn't shown to have any particular interest in maths in Series 2 or 3.
• Criminal Minds: In "Compulsion", the arsonist has OCD relating to the number three. She tends to repeat words and actions three times and is compelled to kill with fire whenever she encounters a trinity of threes. When confronted she admits what she is doing isn't right, but as Hotch explains the UnSub isn't killing because she wants to, but because she is compelled to.
• The Librarians 2014: Cassandra is a synesthete who can perform complex math formulas in her head. When under the influence of the Apple of Disord, Flynn tries to divert her with a Logic Bomb by asking her to calculate pi to the last digit, but she laughs him off, telling him she's not some computer he can just shut down. Stone has more success when he asks her about Eulers's Number and suggests the solution is "3", which causes her to pass out when she realizes what he said. Stone tells Flynn that Cass had been writing notes about it that he'd noticed, suggesting she was obsessed with Euler's Number.
• Odd Squad: Number hogs are people who are obsessed with a particular number and end up taking said number from various objects. The episode "Zero Effect" has Glenn, a cupcake shop owner, inadvertently become one in order to promote his "one million billion trillion" flavors of cupcakes. He steals zeroes from a mass variety of things, including Otto's 10th birthday invitation.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: In the episode "Cause and Effect" the Enterprise is caught in a "Groundhog Day" Loop. The Enterprise is destroyed at the end of each loop when it collides with another starship. The explosions cause the loops to reset and the Enterprise crew loses almost all knowledge of what had happened, but as more loops happen various crew members experience increasing sensations of Déjà Vu. Finally, in one loop they figure out they're trapped in a loop and Data is able to send a signal to himself in the next loop, which causes Data to develop an obsession with the number three, and give him the knowledge he needs at a critical moment to help the Enterprise avoid the collision, thus breaking the loop.

Music

• Kate Bush: "π" is about a man who has "an obsessive nature and deep fascination for numbers," in particular seeking to memorize as many digits of the titular value as possible.

Puppet Shows

• Sesame Street: Count von Count's defining character trait is that he loves to count things (hence his Meaningful Name), doubled with his Mad Libs Catchphrase of "[number]! [number] [noun](s)! Ah-ah-ah!". This ends up becoming a problem when he comes down with an illness that makes him faint whenever he counts anything or even thinks of numbers.

Theatre

• In The Adding Machine, Mr. Zero added up numbers for a living for two and a half decades, and he's so attached to his occupation that, during the trial scene, he mentions every number he can think of that's even vaguely relevant to his situation and catches himself several times trying to add them despite being off the job permanently (because his boss fired him and he then murdered his boss).

Video Games

• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: There's a character in Gerudo Canyon Stable known as Pirou who has a strange obsession with the number 55. He tells Link that he used to win races thanks to Rushrooms 55 years ago, but age took a toll on his vigor; he also rewards Link with a Diamond if the latter gives him 55 Rushrooms, but it has to be exactly 55 Rushrooms (no more, no less) and Pirou will proceed to count them one by one to be sure. Considering that he had begun to eat Rushrooms since he was five years old, so it's likely that his obsession with the number 55 arose from his Rushroom addiction.
• Call of Duty: Black Ops: Both Alex Mason and his interrogators later revealed to be Hudson and Weaver are obsessed with and repeatedly discuss with one another a series of numbers that keep popping up from both Soviet intelligence they capture and appear in Mason's thoughts, with the interrogators wanting to know exactly what they mean. It's eventually revealed that they're part of a Soviet Manchurian Agent program led by Dragovich, with the numbers themselves being a series of coded messages to launch a Deadly Gas attack. Mason himself was a part of the program originally, which Viktor Reznov successfully managed to sabotage and have Mason target the men behind the project, including Dragovich, instead.
• The World Ends with You: Sho Minamimoto, the Game Master of the second week, is absolutely obsessed with numbers, declaring that "the world is made of numbers" and frequently going on about calculations and equations. Even his strongest move is activated by rapid-firing the first 150 digits of pi.
• Jhin, a Serial Killer champion in League of Legends, has a particular obsession with the number four, implied to stem from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. In-universe, this leads to him carrying out his murders in groups of four, or needing to clean his weapon four times each night; mechanically, his abilities frequently affect targets for four seconds, and his gun fires four shots.
• As part of Gehn's obsession with D'Ni culture in Riven, he tries to invoke the Arc Number of five at every opportunity. As with many things, this only further showcases his ignorance and superiority complex. At one point his notes even show him observing a pattern of sixes, but still resolve to find a way to tie it to five, somehow.

Web Animation

• 8-Ball from Battle for Dream Island is obsessed with the fact that he doesn't have a favorite number. At least, according to him, since everyone around him insists that his favorite number is 8, to which he always tries to correct them. He also appears to contradict himself, since he says in BFB 10 that the number that's most important is 4... times 2.

Web Videos

• Critical Role: Campaign Two: Downplayed. One of the things victims of the Somnovem's influence may do is display a mild obsession with nine, with their first Nonagon's writings devolving into frantic scribblings of repeating patterns of nine. After Beau is exposed to the journal, she dreams of the entities and tries to write down what she saw, only to find her notes solely consist of the patterns.
• Kitboga is a scambaiter popular on Twitch and YouTube. In the scambait "52 Hackers Were Found On My Network (by scammers)," after his Granny Edna character is told as much, she becomes fixated on the number 52, finding it everywhere, such as a water bill for $52.52 and her Internet plan having been upgraded to 52 mbs. She is soon spinning a conspiracy theory worthy of QAnon and eventually tells the scammer that she thinks she needs to end the call, that she's been on the phone with him for 52 minutes and 52 seconds.

Webcomics

• xkcd features several of these. One specific example is the narrator of the strip "Alone" who describes himself as feeling distant from most people because he's always abstracting numbers and patterns, and falls in love with a woman because the pattern of her touches is the Fibonacci sequence.

Western Animation

• Oswald: Henry seems to have an obsession with number 2. As part of his rigid routine, he only drinks his cocoa with two marshmallows, although he previously preferred three. In the episode "The Broken Vase", he reveals that he has a cactus to which he gives two drops of water every day and he polishes his Polka Penguins music record twice a day.
• Total Drama: In Action, Trent develops an obsession with the number nine. This manifests as him doing everything nine times and forcing his teammates to say his name nine times in a row when they nominate him for a tie-breaking challenge. While Duncan suggests that it's because the number of letters in the names of Trent and his girlfriend Gwen add up to nine, Trent later reveals that it's because he had a beloved toy train as a child that lost one of its ten wheels.

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