Hm. Two recent insances of Crystal being referred to as "Crystal Dallon" rather than "Crystal Pelham" (one in Dying 15.a and the other in Sundown 17.4). The first I dismissed since it's by Tristan and Byron's parents, who could easily have not known and extrapolated from Victoria's name, but the second is Narwhal. And after *also* calling her by the correct name in the same chapter.

Wildbow mistake or deeper significance?

me: hm, i am kinda having more trouble finding decent worm fic to read lately. maybe i've scraped the bottom of the Ao3 barrel and need to look in like, spacebattles or some stuff, that sounds bothersome

the other version of me, which exists for the purpose of this dialogue: you could do that, yes. however, what if i told you there's a post-canon, *not* altpower!taylor, long-running, well-written fic by an author you already like?

me: that sounds amazing, where exactly did you learn of this fic, other me?

other me: here's the best part: you've already started reading it!

me:... you want me to get back to Ward, don't you?

other me: just do it and stop whining, you baby

me: ugh. fiiiine

current arc of Ward is good, i approve

previous arc was not bad but i had to work my way through it

oh hey i am up to date on Ward again, nice

i've been on a Silmaril re-read and that kinda ate up my 'reading stuff on my phone' time

one of these days I need to re-read the actual Silmarillion and form opinions on the canon Fëanorians

I have somewhat more free time now so I've been catching up on Ward!

latest few chapters have a lot of Victoria going over the typical personality traits/trigger circumstances of different classifications and it feels increasingly... personality-horoscope. humans certainly have a tendency to look at random factors about people and try to match them to personalities, whether it be the stars when you were born or your blood type, and also to overfit descriptions to people (see also the Barnum effect )

one thing I wonder about it is second-or-later-gen capes, who are inheriting a shard from someone else. Was Aiden ever gonna be anything but a Master, with Taylor's shard? Or the Heartbroken, whose powers are all different but all clearly variations on a fundamentally Master-like power (some are arguably Thinkers or Strangers but it's not like any of them was gonna be a Changer or a Tinker)

I am reminded a lot of Dr. Wysocki's reported opinion in 18.y:

"I… I wrote a paper a while back about how Masters tend to have loneliness as part of their trigger events, and how maybe that was why Masters tend to be villains. Because you need support and social pressure to be more of a good guy. My professor then, the guy who I work for now, Dr. Wysocki, he tore me to pieces. Too many other parahumans have it as part of their history. Isolation. It wasn’t enough to suggest a correlation. He said you could call it a common theme for nearly all of the trigger events out there.”

my headcanon is that parahuman scientists are cherry-picking correlations based on plausible narratives where the fact is that natural triggers are just messed up in a dozen different ways and there's enough noise there to pretend there's a signal.