Rewrites and Cul-de-Sacs

Looking back over her arc in the books so far, I think it's probably safe to say that there hasn't been any kind of judgment call on Dairine's specialty because she doesn't know for sure what it is yet. (And possibly she doesn't feel any need for there to be a hard-and-fast determination of what it might be. Or alternately, she may not see it as particularly important to make any such kind of determination.)

I should probably clarify the general landscape on this issue by saying (speaking ex cathedra, as it were) that it's not an ironclad requirement for a wizard to have a declared or recognized (or even recognizable) specialty. Lots do, of course: especially early on in their careers. But these aren't seen as any kind of limitation, then or later. A wizard can shift declared specialties with no problem if they find their interests (and the kind of errantry work they enjoy doing) have shifted focus with age or experience. The Powers that Be have no intention to force any wizard to do work in which they don't find satisfaction. The exercise of wizardry is difficult and dangerous enough as it is without adding any kind of expectation-fueled compulsion to it.

Dairine in particular is kind of an interesting case, as—almost uniquely among the major YW characters we've met so far—her own practice of the Art keeps getting knocked sideways into interest areas that look to be mostly of benefit to others and only less directly so to herself. (Though this might be one of those judgments that's best left to the Powers that reside outside of time.)

The connection to machine life via the ability to connect in very basic ways with unusual forms of matter, though, which was initially laid out in High Wizardry, has (to my eye at least) some resonances in her ur-matter work during A Wizard Abroad, to her connection to the Sunstone, and to the plasma-based and other high-energy stuff that goes down at the end of Games Wizards Play. So we might be able to make a case that Dairine is (at least glancingly) a specialist in exotic-matter and -materials technology.

(I note in passing, BTW, that the only reference to her in work that's closer to our own time coordinates, in Owl Be Home For Christmas, merely says that at that point [2020] she was doing some "computer work" on Carmela's new starship. [shrug] It's also entirely possible this reticence had to do with main-timeline continuity issues intended to unfold in YW 11 that I wasn't prepared to get involved with at that point.)

Anyway: the tl:dr version of this: Jury's still out on this issue... and it's okay for it to be. 🙂 ...Anyway, thanks for the question!

(ETA: off the note from @mikailborg: (per this earlier post): "A girl never forgets the day she takes delivery on her first starship." :)

Next up someone is going to claim that the Narnia series isn't kids books.

See, the context actually does matter there; while "lack of mechanical support for storytelling" is a meaningless criticism in the abstract because nobody can agree what we actually mean when we say "story", let alone what it entails for a game to support having one, with respect to Lancer I strongly suspect that they're saying "story" in the way that folks who've mainly experienced tabletop roleplaying via Dungeons & Dragons and its various imitators say "story" – which is to say, as a shorthand for "literally everything other than combat"; and by "combat" in this context we mean "things that happen when you're inside a giant robot".

(The problems with treating "story" and "combat" as disjoint sets are, of course, beyond the scope of this post!)

It's a frequent complaint regarding Lancer that the framework of play doesn't give a shit about anything that happens when you're not actively stomping around inside a giant robot, and it's not an unfounded one. Heck, one earlier first-party supplements straight up yanks out all of the non-giant-robot mechanics and replaces them wholesale with something more suited to that supplement's particular milieu and it basically doesn't affect the gameplay loop at all; that's how severe the disconnect between giant-robot play and non-giant-robot play is.