Are there any strange confluences or patterns in your worldbuilding that arose by chance and you ended up embracing?

I have a few. There’s a meme in the Civilization community about immortal leaders. Basically if you pick the Americans lead by George Washington, George will be leading his American empire from the dawn of agriculture into the space age. I wanted to reference that in my conworld. I already established that metabolic suspension exists that both extends lifespan while allowing a degree of interaction with the outside world, so I decided Firefly the Apostate, the leader of the Partisans will be permenantly sealed in a modified suspension capsule called the Eternal Womb, where he’s been (nominally) ruling most of the Outer Belt for the past 33 millennia.

Since their inception the Partisans have been more or less space tree doggo commies, so I also wanted to reference the almost literal cult that has arisen in North Korea around the Kim family, especially given that, as a nominally Communist nation, one would expect NK to be officially atheist. So there’s a cult of personality surrounding Lichlord Firefly that has developed into a literal cult.

So taken together, Firefly is an immortal, incapacitated, tyrannical atheist leader being worshipped by his subjects. Hmmmmm.

Another coincidence, maybe due to laziness on my part, is the large immigrant population on Hearthside consisting of Sweetwater surface dwellers. Sweetwater was originally terraformed as a sort of planet-wide gated community for the ultra wealthy. The rich live in palatial underwater cities while the descendants of the workers who built those cities eke out a living on the surface in grinding poverty, plying the planet-wide ocean as peaceful fishermen, miners, and traders, or plundering passers-by as pirates.

As with any poor community, many leave to seek a better life elsewhere, and for various reasons Hearthside seems to be their destination of choice. Maybe they resent the Allied Worlds for allowing their poverty to continue so they don’t just move to Yih or Newhome which would be easier given Sweetwater is an AW member. Maybe they’re just sick and tired of all the water and want to move to Hearthside’s nightless desert.

The Doylist explanation is that I had already named the anchoress from the Farspeaker’s Apprentice Seabreeze and had to think of why she would have that name, so I made her from a immigrant family. I used that backstory out of laziness for a few other characters as well. Then I came up with the idea that Sweetwater surface dwellers tend to have more body fat because it helps them swim. Yinrih are naturally swole (see pics of hairless chimps for a good idea of what I’m thinking). Monkey foxes are arboreal and need to pull their own weight against gravity. The side effect is they’re too dense to swim. But Sweetwater has been around for dozens of millennia, plenty of time for a distinct phenotype to evolve. So now Calmwind, who was otherwise just a portly Hearthsider, is also an immigrant or a descendent of such.

So voila, now there’s a distinct ethnic minority living on Hearthside.