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In-flight rewritten to the live training run (~150/1380, ETA ~00:45 PT) with the --save-total-limit finding that would otherwise have deleted the epoch-1/epoch-2 checkpoints both prior gates were decided on. Two decisions added: the next-seat ranking (Faulkner, Morrison, Chandler -- and the finding that the corpus size ranking inverts the voice ranking, with King and Christie as the two biggest non-candidates), and the romantasy register measured on the gate's own char-bigram instrument (Yarros is the cluster outlier we already shipped; Maas is the centroid and so the worst pick; Kenyon at 27 val units if the lane gets a seat). Auto-archival: 4 entries moved to archival-memory.md; 4 held back by the open-deferred guard.
72 lines
4.0 KiB
Markdown
72 lines
4.0 KiB
Markdown
# `[2026-09-17]` Romantasy measured as a register — it is real, we already took its best voice, and the obvious next pick is its worst
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Prompted by the operator pushing back on a one-clause dismissal of the lane as "depth behind
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Yarros". The dismissal was taste; this is a measurement, on the gate's own instrument.
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**Method.** Char-bigram Burrows's Delta, the same measure `voice_distance.py` gates on. ~120k words
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per author, sampled from the MIDDLE quartile of each author's largest works (front and back matter
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are not the voice), equalised so a bigger sample is not a different measurement. 400 most-frequent
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bigrams as the feature set, z-scored over 4,000-word chunks pooled across all authors.
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**Controls first, because a between-author number without a within-author floor is unfalsifiable.**
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```
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A-vs-A floor (two halves of the SAME author)
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Yarros 0.285 Maas 0.298 Armentrout 0.314 St. Clair 0.322 Cole 0.338
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Kenyon 0.375 Reyne 0.391
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McCarthy 0.303 Morrison 0.327 Brontë 0.209 Hemingway 0.454 <- worst, used as the bar
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positive controls (known-distinct pairs — the instrument must separate these)
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Yarros vs McCarthy 0.862 1.9x
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Hemingway vs Brontë 0.773 1.7x
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McCarthy vs Morrison 0.675 1.5x
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Hemingway vs McCarthy 0.655 1.4x
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romantasy, all 21 pairs median 0.537 1.2x floor (range 0.465 - 0.674)
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```
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**The register is real but tight.** 1.2x floor against controls at 1.4-1.9x. Only one pair falls to
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1.0x, so it is not seven names for one voice.
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⚠ **Sensitivity floor, stated because a result without one is unfalsifiable.** The 0.454 bar is
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Hemingway's, inflated by his own heterogeneous corpus (1920s-1960s, novels + stories + posthumous).
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Against the romantasy authors' OWN floors (~0.34) the same pairs read ~1.6x — control-grade. The
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truth sits between those readings and **this method cannot split it finer**. One sample per pair, no
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repeat draws: read the rank ordering as indicative, do not read small gaps at all.
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## Two findings that survive either floor reading
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⭐ **Yarros is the cluster OUTLIER, not a typical member.** Four of the five largest distances in the
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matrix involve her — Yarros-Kenyon 0.674, Yarros-St. Clair 0.644, Yarros-Reyne 0.637, Yarros-Maas
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0.567. **We already trained the most distinctive romantasy voice we hold**, so a second seat in the
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lane buys measurably less than the first did. That is the actual answer to "what about romantasy".
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⭐ **Maas is the centroid, so the obvious commercial pick is the least distinctive.** Maas-Reyne
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0.465 and Maas-Cole 0.470 are the two SMALLEST distances in the whole matrix. She is the biggest
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name available (922k words) and measurably the most generic of the seven in char-bigram terms.
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Picking by sales rank picks the worst adapter.
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## If the lane gets a second seat it is Kenyon
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Furthest from the shipped Yarros (0.674), so it adds the most new signal — **and 27 works means 27
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val units, the best-powered gate the line could build** (Hemingway 10, McCarthy 6, Brontë 4, where 4
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is the documented structural cause of an underpowered voice axis with no cheap fix).
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⚠ Two costs: the 27 are one series (Dark-Hunter), so the shared proper-noun space makes
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`--scope corpus` mandatory rather than optional; and a "Dark Hunter - The Dark Hunter Complete"
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omnibus sits in the catalogue rows, so the containment pass runs first.
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**Corpus shapes for the lane** (works ≥100k chars, deduped by title):
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```
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Sherrilyn Kenyon 27 2,368,396 w Scarlett St. Clair 11 1,133,067
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Opal Reyne 14 2,466,307 Kresley Cole 10 1,037,914
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Jennifer Armentrout 6 1,179,953 Sarah J. Maas 5 922,711
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Rebecca Yarros 5 820,425 <- SHIPPED on this
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```
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⭐ Worth noting for any future bar-setting: **Yarros shipped on 5 works / 820k words.** The corpus
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bar is lower than it looks.
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Instrument: `scratchpad/regdist.py` (screening tool, not the gate).
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Related: [[2026-09-17-next-voice-seats]], [[2026-09-16-lv-voices-line]], [[2026-09-17-lv-bronte-gate]].
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