Board Thread:Season 51 - The Caribbean/@comment-30202274-20190225194223/@comment-30289320-20190226065911

Wadddduuuup Elmo. I've got to say, I feel kind of dumb hearing you didn't like me that much on Chang even though we were aligned with each other lool. I personally loved having someone around who would be active when I tended to be most available during the early part of this game and then during midterm season when I was up at like 3am after finishing some assignment. Of the Chang 1 group, I did indeed think you would be my ride or die #1, but alas.

I want to make this statement now in case my other attempts got buried in my questions, but I truly didn't mean for anyone to feel like I was ghosting them or being avoidant. For the first half of the merge I was working on my midterms while also trying to work and help out in my other community, and all of that doesn't really go super well with having to do 10-12 good conversations each day. It was not my strategy to just not talk to certain people every day, but it was a strategy to try making the best out of something I recognized would be a weakness in my game. If that hurts me now then that's fair and my own issue, but please don't feel like I did it because I just didn't want to get to know anyone. Some of my favourite parts of this game were just me talking to people about their lives, and sharing stories with each other. That's sort of one of my favourite things about these in general - meeting other people weird enough to play ORGs LOL.

I hope I've been going into enough detail about my exact thought process behind votes so far this final tribal council! It's been difficult because I feel like I have a lot to write, but not everyone wants to read a college thesis so it's been difficult to balance the information I give out and still having people want to read what I say in these replies. Let me know if there's any vote in particular you want to know my thoughts about - I do have all of my confessionals stored and can tell you exactly what I was thinking lol.

Q1) What is your biggest mistake or regret you did in this game?

Not doing my research on Ethan LOOL. I guess I just figured if he was well known as a challenge beast in this community someone would tell me before we got too late into the merge, but it honestly never really came up much with me as a topic of conversation until it was already like Final 7. And coming from the alias community, I'm not used at all to things like past seasons or whatever having an effect, and I'm actually not a huge fan of that aspect? So maybe there's some subconscious stuff going on there, but that's my mistake. Funny enough, Yousef showed me another game where it was Su winning half the immunities at merge, so honestly who knows when it comes to looking at game history. But it definitely would have been a good idea to check up on him whether people spoke about it or not. Would that have changed the way my endgame went? I'm honestly not sure, it might have depended on how early I looked it up. It doesn't sound realistic to have gotten the vote off of Hunter and onto Ethan, since both you and Bradley seemed to want to work with him at that point. It really comes down to whether I vote Ethan instead of Natalia, and yeah, at that point I had no clue he was known to, like, go on streaks or whatever regularly lol.

Q2) What makes you worthy of winning rather than the other two finalists?

Let me start out by saying any finalist is worthy of winning - it really comes down to one's personal preference on what they consider worthy, and if they just happen to be casting a jury vote. For this question I will be basing what I say off my own opinion of what I'd like to see as a juror.

With Ethan, I think I proved myself as a gameplayer more than he did. We know that he was social, and I'm not going to sit here and say he's a dumpster strategically, but...the problem I would have with his game is that he never made use of these things and just won challenges instead. That's fine if you're into that, but for me what I want to see in a winner is that they were able to stay in the game even if their plans went to shit.

I would want to see somebody win who can show that they were constantly thinking about the game and preparing rounds in advance so that they could stick around even if they maybe shouldn't have over some other people, more than once. I think I did these things fairly well, even if Ethan didn't end up going at 4 like I'd wanted. One of the most impressive things I've seen in an ORG (twice actually) was someone who was a huge challenge threat GIVE someone else their immunity necklace and still manage to stick around. They ended up winning, and I was more than happy to give them a vote because this showed me without a doubt that they deserved it. To win a lot of immunities and then basically demonstrate to the jury that you didn't need to rely on that, it's badass. My game doesn't even come close to that shit, but my point is that Ethan didn't and couldn't have done this, in part because he relied too much on hoping to win out and just slapped all the other people who might have gone before him if he screwed up an immunity. He WAS a big part in the moves made in the middle of merge, but they resulted in him basically having two options afterward: Win out or be voted out. To me, while winning many challenges is impressive, putting yourself in a hole where you're forced to win out is not. My opinion. Even if Ethan being here is not my plan, I still felt at the time that I had an argument against him for if the worse happened. My worst case scenario is a harder fight at FTC, Ethan's is being voted out at 5 or 4. I made sure mine would be a little more manageable, and it seems I was at least somewhat right even if he still ends up winning. It's been very nice to see that I have some shot.

For Andrea, I just don't think she really did all that much herself. She participated in the moves and this means she was in the majority for the whole merge, but so was I. One difference is that I was always doing extra outside of the alliances I was in, and trying to uncover new options for myself. An example of this is deciding to work with Karsten/Su and hoping to bring you into that at 7. Another is being the one who actually went to each of Karsten/Su/Andrea and starting talking to them all about making a Final 3 with me. I may not have had a true #1 in this game but it also means I was attached to nobody's hip. If I wanted to make a move, I went for it. If it didn't work out, I made sure I had a Plan B and a Plan C ready to go. And I was always trying to win. I wasn't and am still not here looking to grab second place. For me it's first or nothing. As much as I enjoyed Yousef, I was never about to throw the game to give him the win. Not to be dramatic, but to me throwing a game like that is disrespectful to everyone who spent days or weeks playing in it and hosting it.

I'll get to each juror's downfall in a bit, just want to answer the bulk of another question before bed! Hope that's cool