User blog comment:Echowaffle8/SPARTAN-II Policy/@comment-1009967-20170624055726

52? Then who am I missing? Or are you counting Caleb-095 in that number along with. . . blast, tracking the last one will be a pain.

I've been quoted on a few occasions saying S-II numbers are a crapshoot, and heartily encourage canon expansion if you want an S-II character. Looks like Omega'd make for prime expansions at this point.

But looking at what these closing gaps mean for the site and policy, I'd say a newcomer creating a new S-II character is getting more and more impossible, and it was never easy in the first place to justify their survival of Reach (where what now, two S-IIs died? What a tragedy, John must be the last of his kind *sniff*). To me, 75 remains a hard limit, and whether it's 51 or 50 canon, the total of fanon and canon for any one universe can never exceed it (except I suppose Brodie's Sigmas getting a pass because they were the other 75, blast him). The next tricky part is figuring out where they went through the various splits and extinction events the S-IIs went through in the war. Had a nice clue about that a while back, though, in that Halsey'd said something along the lines of "only three Spartan casualties in the last decade of war", which we always took to mean three Spartan casualties ever--not that canon hadn't already blown that out of the water with Daisy and Arthur and Solomon and Cal (hell, that's Halo: Legends alone)--but actually can mean just three in those specific last ten years of the war, '42-'52. Or thereabouts, mind this is a very loose paraphrasing.

Regarding renumbering of fan Spartans, however, I support renumbers when it happens. It's happened before, like with Stel's Doug-103 when Ralph-103 became an official number. We do get rather attached to our numbers we pick at random, somehow--t'was murder changing my original characters' numbers to become Gammas--but we made a commitment to fall in line with Halo canon because it's the more challenging route, one which makes us have to adapt, and I think it's one we ought to stick to. It does make for hell trying to explain to someone new who just wants to make their S-II team, though.