Thank you very much, I’m flattered. <3

The Pattern Recognizer in my head is kind of a newly identified power of mine and I do love it. I grew up with all the complexes of a “gifted kid,” since there were certain things I seemed to have effortless skill at (and some other things that I effortlessly developed skill at, because I was somehow blessed with a fascination so intense that all the effort of learning about them didn’t feel like effort at all).

But when you grow up being treated like The Absolute Best at some things, you get problems.

Like “easily frustrated by anything that you don’t have either effortless talent or effortless obsession for.”

And of course, “despair, as soon as your horizons widen enough to notice that even in the case of Your Special Skills, there are others out there who are better at them-- lots better, and sometimes even having gotten there without the advantages you had.”

An identity so deeply wrapped up in having The Most Magical Savant Superpowers will start to freak the hell out at that sort of realization, I can tell you. I’m a freakishly egotistical creature, but I was worse about it when I was younger. And learning that I wasn’t even close to the absolute best at My Things was quite a blow to that ego.

But then, along came the realization that my strongest talent isn’t actually any of the fields of study I’d built skills and knowledge in.

It’s the connections between them– between all the fields of knowledge and study where I’ve built up dense little mental databases– and being able to find those connections between them and use them in all sorts of deranged ways.

Mostly puns. Sometimes MacGyvering. And a hell of a lot of fan headcanoning.

Not earthshakingly useful. But still. This is a thing I think maybe I actually am among The Absolute Best at.

So, for now, I get to keep my obnoxious ego, and I get to postpone having to analyze what it means to my value as a person if everything I can do could also be done better by lots of other people.

Probably still not the best in existence, but I’ve never met a Pattern Recognizer quite like mine.

And I get to use it on Tron, every day.

Because it’s my weird brain, and that’s my pleasure at the moment.