Custom pagination numbers aren't lining up

Akenefick yeah in testing more I'm sure the if statements aren't the problem either. There just seems to be something overriding either the total items or total pages fed to the pagination component but I can't seem to find what is overriding it. If I click anything beyond page 8 it just refreshes the page back to page 8, despite the pagination component showing pages beyond page 8. Incidentally, the first if statement section in my first code example above (where tabParam = "latest"), that content ends at page 8 and works correctly. It's almost like the pagination for the second, longer section is retaining some data from the first section, but I can't figure out if that's the case or why that would be happening