Distant TeV blazars appear harder than EBL absorption permits, an anomalous transparency claimed at up to 4σ (Horns and Meyer 2012) and disputed since, with axion-like particle conversion proposed to let photons tunnel past the background light. The accounting clashes internally: New Horizons suggests more diffuse optical background, deepening expected absorption, while the blazar spectra want less. The standard model's photon bookkeeping pulls against itself.
The model computes opacity from one homogeneous EBL: a single background density at each epoch, accumulated from its galaxy-formation history, traversed identically by every sightline. Any transparency anomaly must then be new particle physics, because the assumption leaves the background no room to vary between sightlines.
SCT takes no position on the transparency excess, because the framework registers no mechanism for it. An earlier reading routed the excess through void-dominated corridors in a deposition-structured background (P33, P34); on review that over-reads those premises, which place matter and emitters, not radiative transfer: the background light at any point integrates emission over gigaparsec path lengths, so sightline-to-sightline opacity variance stays small no matter how clumpy the sources are. The honest SCT statement is thinner and cheaper: nothing in the collision framework requires anomalous transparency, and no premise is spent pretending otherwise.
What SCT does register here is the deep source ledger (P25, P46): more faint emitters raise the mean diffuse background, consistent with the New Horizons optical excess, the same reading as the optical-background entry (recid 167). If the blazar anomaly survives CTA-era spectroscopy it will need either particle physics or radiative-transfer work neither framework currently registers; if it dissolves into spectral modeling and EBL systematics, nothing in SCT moves.
CTA arbitrates the anomaly itself; SCT's stake is only the ledger. A diffuse-background census resolving the optical excess entirely into cataloged galaxies, leaving no room for the seeded faint population, cuts the one claim SCT makes here, shared with recid 167. On the transparency excess SCT holds no stake: the framework neither requires the anomaly nor takes injury from its resolution either way.