it took me more searching than i feel i should have had to do, but i found a guide to attempt the fedora 43 upgrade from a terminal, so i'm doing that over SSH right now.
turns out that, going by advice i was given by someone else last month, it *WAS* due to wine being installed (terminal was throwing "inferior architecture" warnings and aborting). removing wine-dxvk* with dnf and starting over seems to be progressing.
@wildweasel this machine hates prime numbers I guess?
i previously attempted to upgrade from Fedora 42 to 43 on this computer, and found that upon reboot, it was still on Fedora 42.
nothing has really changed here but I'm gonna try it again for no reason.