Audit written to `output/critiques/claude/chapter_12.genericization.md`. Full audit text follows.

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# Regression-to-the-Mean / Genericization Audit — Chapter 12

Pre-revision: `output/drafts/claude/chapter_12.round_01.md`
Post-revision: `output/chapters/chapter_12.md`
Revision orders checked: `chapter_12.dialogue_repair_memo.md`, `chapter_12.comedy_repair_memo.md`, `chapter_12.positive_prose_repair_memo.md` (rounds 1–4), `chapter_12.characters_wrong_repair_memo.md`
Watch counts: gate PASS, open=0, WATCH=53 (incl. `tells-2.1-hands-body-watch` ×2)

## 1. Concrete details — REGRESSED (2 instances)

**Instance 1 — the Coney Island kite.**
- Pre (round_01 line 5): "There had been a kite, a red one with a tail his cousin had made from a garbage bag, and it had never once gotten airborne, and the whole afternoon had been windless and good."
- Post (chapter_12.md line 3): "There had been a red kite made from a garbage bag, and it had never once gotten airborne, and the whole afternoon had been easy."
- Lost: the cousin (the only other person in the memory); the fact that the *tail* was the garbage-bag part — a kite with a homemade garbage-bag tail is a real, particular object, while "a kite made from a garbage bag" is a vaguer one and a silent factual mutation; and "windless," the physical reason the kite never flew, swapped for "easy," a mood word that fits any pleasant afternoon. This is the textbook specific→generic trade. Criterion 6 check: positive-prose order 1 sanctioned removing the check-voiding simile, and round-2 order 1 sanctioned replacing the verdict fragments ("Charming. Round at every corner. A memory with the pit taken out.") with the omitted-material sentence. No order touched the kite facts. Uninstructed smoothing. The discarded memory is the chapter's calibration object — it must read as true-but-pitless, and its truth lived in exactly these particulars.

**Instance 2 — the Riccis' cat.**
- Pre (round_01 line 49): "The Riccis' window with the screen bent out at the bottom corner where their cat used to push it."
- Post (chapter_12.md line 43): "The Riccis' window with the screen bent out at the bottom corner."
- Lost: the causal, idiosyncratic fact — *why* the screen is bent. No memo orders this cut. The "no family-history dump" guardrail does not cover it: one clause, the neighbors' cat, no family. Continuity escalation: this clause sits inside the memory June takes custody of and paints in Chapter 13; if her painting renders the bent screen, the reason it bends has been deleted from the record she carries. Mild continuity hazard, flagged as such.

Examined and cleared: "with one thumbnail" → "without opening it" and "her hand" → "her arm" are uninstructed but defensible under the binding packet rule against foregrounding hands (the gate still shows two hands-body WATCH hits); not flagged.

## 2. Images and figuration — REGRESSED (1 instance)

**Instance — the paint deciding.**
- Pre (round_01 line 81): "there's maybe twenty minutes where the whole right side of the wall is this dead salmon color, like the paint is deciding."
- Post (chapter_12.md line 73): "There's maybe twenty minutes where the whole right side of the wall is this dead salmon color."
- Lost: the chapter's single strangest scene-grown image, in June's own mouth, doing exactly what the packet licenses figuration to do — clarify the custody/risk of the memory (her erasure rendered as a process that could still go either way). No repair memo orders this cut. The Ch08 personification cap does not apply: it names the hidden portrait, memory card, and room, not paint in dialogue. Uninstructed smoothing of an unusual image into plain report.

Examined and cleared (riskiest legitimate cuts): the shim simile ("the way he could feel where a frame wanted a shim") rode out with the ordered deletion of "fully formatted" and was built on the banned "the way he/you" recognitional template; the wallet simile ("like a man making sure of his wallet in a crowd") was stock-adjacent and hand-foregrounding, and its replacement ("rode the rest of the way home without taking it out again") is restrained custody behavior, not a generality; the mooring simile and the lamp/blank-cards beat were cut by explicit orders (round 3 #6; rounds 2 #8 / 3 #1).

## 3. Character texture — HELD

Riskiest diff examined: June's "That was the job. That was me doing the job well." cut by positive-prose round 2 order 4. Because the packet states the memory "should hurt because June participated in the practical erasure and knew how to do the job well," this cut looked like thesis-flattening. It is not: the fact survives in harder currency — "I'd done paint-backs for other people all year," "I did clean edges," "I billed zero hours because it was my own room, which was my own genius decision" — and the cut enforces the packet's own instruction that June gives an exact image instead of naming the wound. On Theo's side, "an announcement with a correction attached" became the typed-and-deleted "Just to clarify" / "Not that it matters" texts: his neurosis got more particular, not less. The unflattering facts (zero billed hours, two days of blank cards, three repair-questions disguised as help) all survive. No motive was abstracted upward.

## 4. Dialogue particularity — REGRESSED (1 instance)

**Instance — the orphaned "I know."**
- Pre (round_01 lines 105–109): "'Tomorrow,' June said, standing, swinging the tote up. 'Don't get there early and arrange the easels. Or do. I can't legislate your whole life.' / 'There's a chance I arrange the easels.' / 'I know.'"
- Post (chapter_12.md lines 95–99): "'Tomorrow,' June said, standing, swinging the tote up. 'Seven?' / 'Seven.' / 'I know.'"
- The thinning itself was ordered (positive-prose round 4 #3: functional exchange, joke out, water line kept) and is defensible under the style sheet's rule that at least half of ordinary dialogue be functional. But the order was executed past its sense: "I know." answered "There's a chance I arrange the easels"; it now replies to "Seven." — a non-sequitur. June's last voice-marked beat in the chapter is an interchangeable time-check plus a dangling line that no longer has a referent. Lost: the line's meaning, and with it the compressed dramatization of Theo's early-arriving tell.

Examined and cleared: the slop-sink rewrite was the riskiest dialogue diff in the chapter — pre: "until the water ran clear, which is a lie, it never fully runs clear, you just decide a point at which it's clear"; post: "until the water ran almost clear. It never fully runs clear. I gave it ten more minutes and packed the tray." It removes a June self-correction tic, but it executes positive-prose order 5, kills an aphorism, and replaces it with *more* procedure, not less. The "somebody's cousin" outlet-taping joke was cut by comedy order 3; "Nobody needed it. It wasn't for school, it wasn't for anybody, it didn't fix anything" was trimmed by round-2 order 3, enforcing the packet's no-speech-about-the-lost-artist-self rule.

## 5. Inflation accompanying the fade — HELD

Checked every replacement passage for added significance language; the revision moved deflationary throughout. Riskiest candidate examined: "came with the other two, fast enough to pass for help" (new, replacing "that one wasn't even a question, it was a closing argument"). It is not inflation — it names speed and disguise, not depth, and it discharged order 3 against the legal figure. The Tuesday-forecast paragraph lost its arc-summary epigrams ("Three weeks ago the performance had been a schedule"; "the harder kind of acting") and gained particulars: DEAD SALMON added in the margin, FINE written on a packing slip and crossed out, "June's outlet plate was under his pen, and his own airshaft was under her rubber band." Nowhere were stakes restated bigger, emotions deeper, or moments more pivotal. The chapter still ends on action, not a profundity sentence.

## 6. Legitimate edits screen — HELD

Every candidate loss was checked against all four repair memos and the packet guardrails before flagging. The largest sanctioned detail loss in the diff: the Tuesday-forecast compression dropped Ruth-as-watcher and "stand next to June while she set out greens" (a forward seed for the green field). Cleared because rounds 2 #2 and 3 #2 explicitly ordered the forecast compressed to present action, and the replacement carries the same load with more specificity. The desk/worktable "transaction/deposition" captions, the Odile-card "chosen to be insufficient" intent caption, and the hidden-panel abstraction were all replaced by *more* concrete matter (staff-side lamp blocking; the crowded "- O."; "unlabeled, painted side to the wall") — these edits are the opposite of regression and were used as the baseline for judging the four flagged instances, none of which is covered by an order except the category-4 instance, where the order was executed beyond its sense.

**Focused checks.** The chapter has not flattened into generic vulnerable-memory romance: the exchange is conducted in craft questions ("How many coats do I tell you it took?"), and the materials remain non-portable — Key Food circular with chicken thighs at eighty-nine cents a pound, six-or-seven unevenly spaced clothespins, Decorator's White / Benjamin Moore / Flat with the formula taped inside the supply closet door, the outlet plate with its two screws on the floor. Each does story work: the clothespins are named as the painting, the outlet plate is "the true part," and the DEAD SALMON margin note arms Chapter 13. The repairs preserved the spine of Claude's specificity; the regression is at the edges — kite, cat, salmon image — which is exactly where uninstructed smoothing accumulates if unflagged.

## REVISION ORDERS

1. (Cat. 1) Restore the kite particulars at chapter_12.md line 3: "There had been a red kite with a tail his cousin had made from a garbage bag, and the afternoon had been windless, so it had never once gotten airborne, and the whole thing had been easy." Keep the following sentence ("It left out the fourth-floor kitchen window...") as is; the ordered cuts to the check-voiding simile and verdict fragments stand.
2. (Cat. 1) Restore the cat at line 43: "The Riccis' window with the screen bent out at the bottom corner where their cat used to push it."
3. (Cat. 2) Restore the image at line 73: "...the whole right side of the wall is this dead salmon color, like the paint is deciding."
4. (Cat. 4) Repair the orphaned "I know." at lines 95–99. Either give it back a referent in compressed, non-joke form — e.g. "'Seven?' / 'Seven. I'll be in early.' / 'I know.'" — or cut "I know." and let June go straight to the gate beat. Do not restore the legislate joke; its removal stands under positive-prose round 4 #3.

No category-5 strip orders: no compensating inflation was added anywhere specificity was removed.

OVERALL: REGRESSED (4)
