Category talk:Pilgrims

How do we define what a Pilgrim is? Do we include Blair and Taggart in this category? LOAF mentioned something interesting in the forums on this, recently - something about a Pilgrim could be a follower of Ivar Chu McDaniel, a Human with the space navigation ability, someone who fights for the Pilgrim cause, or a combination of the aforementioned and others besides. - Wedge

Blair is half-Pilgrim by birth, a Navigator by trade and a Pilgrim by self-identification (he actually changes his callsign to "Pilgrim" at the start of Wing Commander: Pilgrim Stars, so I would (and did) put him in the Pilgrim category.

Taggart is more problematic. His writings and biography in the Confed Handbook put him as having been a brief student while doing undercover work during the Pilgrim War, but don't put him as being an out-and-out Pilgrim (and these are secret/top_secret documents, not the sort of thing I'd expect to be deliberately fudged). He was briefly involved with a Pilgrim woman named Amity Aristee, who later goes on to hijack the Olympus and run a rebellion against the Confederation.

His talk in Pilgrim Stars all makes him sound like he's a Pilgrim by birth as well as by (brief) association, but he's also a Commodore in Naval Intelligence at the time, so I don't know if that's meant as a deliberate smokescreen to hide his intentions, and at any rate the book ends before we get a definitive answer one way or the other. All we know about his biological parents (James and Bethlyn) were that they were killed by a terrorist attack on Mimas colony in 2613 when Paladin was eight years old, and that he was taken in by his legal guardians Mikal and Anhel Taggart in 2614. It does make a point of clouding the issue of his birth - "Due to the success of the 2624 Mimite terrorist attack―which, although famous for shutting down the colony's primary systems, also successfully deleted most of the official colonial records―there are no official records predating 2624." - Bob 17:24, 30 August 2010 (CDT)