- Ellen in So a Date doubting her usefulness in figuring out the inhuman cloaked figure

- Ellen not realizing that she'd realized something important the other three missed

I wanted to get into methods of reasoning for sorting what they knew about royalty and “the case,” but there were inherent issues with Tedd being the expert.

Or, really, any of them being an “expert.”

Tedd loves to talk through reasoning and science. While Tedd has demonstrated reasoning in many forms, Tedd has not previously made reference to the terminology. If Tedd already knew the terms, we would have heard him reference them before.

Maybe I could have gotten away with that, but I would have known that Tedd had spontaneously gained knowledge that he logically did not have.

- If Tedd knew about P, Tedd would have previously said Q.

- Tedd did not say Q.

- Therefore, Tedd did not know about P.

So someone else had to unleash the power of reasoning (or, at least, the semantics of it). Ellen came to mind simply because she had meddling detective adventures with Nanase, and the whole reason I know these terms is because someone pointed out that Sherlock Holmes didn’t actually use deductive reasoning. That’s what got me interested in them in the first place.

I also liked Ellen having only a beginner's knowledge of it, as I am not an expert myself. Heck, I was scrambling to not mix up inductive and abductive reasoning just earlier this week.

If I get something wrong via Ellen (or Nanase), the character making that mistake will not be an expert, and I'll have options for addressing those mistakes.

So that’s all I initially cared about, but then I thought about Ellen’s canonical lack of confidence in her own intelligence. Suddenly, there was a lot more I could do with it beyond making sense of who knew what.

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- Thursday EGSNP