Board Thread:Season 12 - All-Stars/@comment-4190137-20140219130014/@comment-5051226-20140219153421

Ḡwẵine Ḹٍٍkƨ Ĺiĸe Ͼềлȑềd wrote:
 * Andrei, that Final 5 Tribal Council was a very very dramatic, I hate to make your pretty fingers type a lot, but could you talk us through that Tribal Council in depth?

TL;DR: that round sucked. If I was to perform the Seven Wonders, this would be my Survivor-ORG descensum. The good thing is I came out of it alive, so... Maybe I'm the next Supreme!

Long version: Well, there was some build up leading to that moment. Between F6 and F5, Taylor revealed to me that he had found 2 Idols, and had given one to Gerda. Lloyd had more than likely found an Idol, so basically, the only vulnerable people were going to be me, Taylor and Ben, and I was definitely not looking forward to that, especially because at the time, I didn't expect Lloyd and Ben to be so close, so I thought that Ben was doomed if he didn't win Immunity.

The IC happens, Ben pulls the clutch win of the century, and Taylor and I are like "shit it's one of us". Gerda pretty much went ahead and told everyone that Taylor was the only realistic option, so I'm like "well, my ideal F3 was going to be with Gerda and Ben anyways, so... if Taylor leaves now instead of next round, it doesn't make a huge difference to me."

I cast my vote before I have time to feel remorseful about that decision, notify Gerda and Lloyd that I voted for Taylor to stay clear, then I go to bed. When I wake up, all hell broke loose: Taylor is on Bad Girls Club levels of anger, Gerda is on a Dawn level of distress, and at that moment, all Gerda can think about is she's glad she made the decision to vote out Taylor because his behaviour was unacceptable.

But then Taylor apologises and I'm not sure when, but a rumour emerges that Lloyd does not actually have an Idol... Which both Taylor and Gerda seem to believe. Gerda decides that the right thing to do is save her friendship with Taylor and throws Lloyd under the bus, then casts her vote. This is also when Gerda decided to tell me that Lloyd was going to vote for me and there was no way around it.

... Then of course, it turns out that Lloyd did in fact have the Idol, so Gerda goes into panic mode and tells me she has no choice but to vote me out. She tries to change her vote, we talk and I tell her that I've been her rock the entire game and she can't do that to me at this point, but I feel crossed and when that episode happens, I immediately message Ben and tell him to vote for Gerda just in case, but he was way ahead of me. It turns out that Gerda's vote for Lloyd was locked anyway, so we're both on an even ground and I have to convince either Taylor or Lloyd that I'm the better choice for them.

I offer Lloyd a F3 deal thinking "well, I wasn't gonna go to the F3 with Taylor, and at this point he'll probably save Gerda because voting her out after she gave him back the Idol would look way too bad". What I had no idea about is Lloyd had been Ben's closest ally for a while, so I go into "let's play out the scenarios"-mode and tell him he has a better shot of staying if I'm in the F4 than if Gerda is... which I know now was ultimately useless. Lloyd tells me he'll come back to me when he's made a decision, so I avoid nudging hi because I felt like it just would've been rude and desperate, but apparently I should've been on his ass the whole time.

For good measure, I still approached Taylor to see how he reacted to the idea of losing a jury to Gerda, but his loyalty to her mattered to him more.

A few hours later, Gerda announces that she won't vote against Lloyd or Ben, which surprises me to no end considering as far as I knew, he tried to campaign to get her out and had voted for her twice already. Lloyd approaches me to tell me he was going to vote for me, at which point I'm like "Really? She just threw you under the bus and you're gonna save her now?", and that's when the whole "She begged me more" thing came up, which makes me even more furious.

The votes are read, it turns out the vote is actually unanimous, and I realise that Ben threw me under the bus for a deal with Lloyd+Gerda. As I said in my opening statement, I was pretty disappointed in that until I read his Rites of passage.

That round was basically a nasty roller-coaster of hope, despair, intense stress, confusion and disappointment.