Jen is bored

[jen]

The GIF above captures how I felt for the entire game except for Final 8 when something FINALLY happened. Sadly (for me) I left as soon as things started getting interesting. Oh well.

Congrats to both you bitches. Good job. Well played. Etc. etc.

My vote is totally up in the air. I am not HEAVILY leaning one way or anything. Nope. Not at all.

I don't have a personalized question for you. I didn't know much of what was going on in the game besides my own conversations so I'll ask you a personal fave question of mine that I see in most Survivor FTCs.

Power rank the jury in terms of who played the best game. This is your opportunity to critique the games of the jury in a constructive way. Be as honest and as objective as you possibly can. Don't kiss ass.

Good luck.
xoxo



(damn Jen is smokin hot)

[porsche]

1. 
Mark scared me a lot. He was dangerous in competitions and a strong social player. I was very impressed with how he handled the final 8 round, after he got accused of making deals with everyone. Instead of telling everyone he individually had a deal with that he was only loyal to them, he said the same thing to everyone (loyal to Cody/David/Sarah, targeting Jen) and that made him look more trustworthy. From there, he rebuilt his game and when Austin won HOH next and had every reason not to trust him, he almost didn't put him up, even as a replacement. That's not to say that Mark was perfect though. When Mark did get nominated during Austin's HOH, he rolled over and didn't even attempt to campaign.
2. 
David was a strong player. He was likable socially, won a lot of competitions (at least for the first half of the game) and wasn't afraid to make moves. Part of the reason I voted for him at the final 5 was because I couldn't say for sure that I would win a jury vote against him. Him making the final 4 despite obviously being a strong player is impressive. However, his disastrous HOH reign where he put up three people and they all stayed, plus some room for improvement in his social game (nominating Louise without even talking to her) meant he became a big target.
3. 
First things first, you look very hot in your picture You were a powerhouse in this game. If it wasn't for your HOH reign, I think you would have gone very far, and it wouldn't have surprised me at all if you were sitting here. Even during David's HOH reign, when I was ready to accept that you were going on the block and that my best option was to simply pull you down with my veto, you talked to him and convinced him to keep you safe. If you had just smoothed things over after evicting Will, you would have been close with everyone in the house except for David, and I do think it was possible to smooth things over (I never felt close to Will, sorry for not making that clear. Let's work on our communication). The problem, and I know you realize this, is that you didn't. You lost Sarah's trust, and when you talked to Mark and Cody, it became obvious to them that our four player alliance was dead, and that made you a huge target.
4. 
I was very happy to have Austin in the game. He was loyal, and he was my #1 after you left. I feel like he played a better game than he got credit for. He was in a great position early on, with the alliance with me/David/Marvin and the alliance with you and Sarah, though that wasn't a real thing (you, Austin and Sarah all told me about it within a day of it being formed). The people on Austin's side all trusted him, and he was even getting closer to Mark. The problem was that the people not on his side didn't really care for him. Sarah in particular was itching to take him out. This left him in danger in a round where someone he wasn't aligned with won HOH, which is exactly what happened.
5. 
Louise was a difficult player to place, mainly because I feel her game got cut short, and she could have easily made it to the final 4 at least if it wasn't for me   Louise was a sweetheart and was very well liked by everyone, even the people she wasn't directly connected with. She was in a very strong position after Will's eviction. Of the Marvin voters, she was the smallest target by far and she had strong ties to me, Cody and Jen. I do see some negative aspects to her game that put her this low, though. The first was her connection to Cody. She never made any attempt to hide the fact that she and Cody were close, and with Cody being such a big target, when he saved himself during the fast forward round, it meant Louise was evicted in order to weaken him. The second issue is that (and this is just speculation since I can't see the jury forum) I think it would have been tough for her to win the game, just because there wasn't really any big move she could point to for why she should win.
6. 
I was tempted to put Cody higher, just because he was an underdog who I saw as a threat. I also thought he had a very good shot of winning if he made it to the end. However, part of the reason for this is because he was a target and to be honest I saw that as his fault. There were a lot of times where he came very close to getting evicted, but the competitions worked out in his favor. True, that's part of the game, but him surviving at the final 8 because Sarah got a DPOV thanks to the dice is just luck, since he was out for sure if Sarah had gotten anything else from Pandora's Box. His social game was good with the people he was working with, but I thought it could have been better with the people on the other side. It was very frustrating having Cody tell me he was loyal to me and that he had no other alliances while David and Sarah were individually coming up to me telling me Cody was in an alliance with each of them. And when I won the final HOH, Cody didn't even attempt to campaign, and I don't know why.
7. 
I like Marvin and I feel bad ranking him last, but if I'm looking at this objectively, I feel the other six jurors simply played stronger games. Everybody else was never really in danger of not making jury, and Marvin almost got evicted over Will. His shtick rubbed people the wrong way and when he was put up on the block, the house wanted him out. Even after he survived, and even though I wanted for him to stick around, I knew it was only a matter of time. Almost everybody wanted him out, and even David and Austin had lost trust in him. That's not to say that Marvin was a terrible player though. When Mark won HOH he was considering nominating Marvin, but Marvin was able to talk him out of it. When Jen won HOH she broke the tie to keep Marvin safe and wanted him to stick around in the future, even though he had nominated her two weeks earlier.

[sarah]

Yeah, Jen looks alright. The REAL babe of the season wants a word with you, tho.

SPOILER: Click to show

Anyway. Hi, here are the rankings. I'm going to try and keep these as free of crazy hypotheticals as I can so they're as reflective of the reality of the game as possible.

 1
David
David played a game that I believe was similar to mine in nature -- playing the middle in a lowkey social manner. He succeeded where I failed in that he really did look like a middle player for the entirety of the game to the majority of the players, whereas I was widely perceived as being grouped in with Cody and Mark after I used the DPoV to save Cody. Though he had proven competition ability and was well-liked by pretty much everyone, he managed to keep his threat status under wraps (something other strong players here were not able to do) by remaining unattached yet friendly with everyone, so that bigger targets would continue to war against each other as he snuck through to the endgame. He managed to recover well after a disastrous F8 HoH reign, offsetting the blame for his nominations onto bigger targets. He was not nominated at all until very late in the game, and was a pawn his first two times on the block. His sole downfall was the fact that I had used my middle status to make alliances with people on each side of the house and felt I needed to keep them both in order to ensure my spot in the F2. I found our methods of communication meshed really well and in a game where I found it very difficult to trust anybody, David's open and direct nature had me willing to talk strategy with him despite the fact that we communicated relatively sparingly. I strongly suspect he may have had the same effect on others. 

2
mark

There's a reason he was nominated repeatedly until he finally met his demise. He knew how to gain people's trust quickly and navigate himself out of sticky situations in ways others were not able to manage. He won two consecutive PoVs to save himself and buy himself time to re-establish connections within the house. Mark was probably the best example of a triple threat in this house.

In saying that, the fact that people recognized pretty early on that Mark was playing a strong and masterfully duplicitous game made him a consistent target from early on in the jury phase onwards. If others perceive that you are playing the best or most powerful game and attempt to get rid of you for it, it does unfortunately suggest that you may not be playing the best game overall. Visibility and perception are both huge in ORGs.  

3
louise
I'm not the kind of person who will ever argue that Survivor is a game that is won by big moves, and I believe Big Brother is even less strategy-inclined. Both Survivor and Big Brother are social games at their core. The only two time winner of Survivor was a player whose strategy relied almost entirely on social manipulation and advancement. She made no hugely creditable "big moves". Natalie White beat Russell Hantz solely because she treated the jurors with respect and was socially malleable where he was not. Sarah beat Godfrey, someone who had navigated through the game without alliances and was arguably the better strategic player, in BBCAN3 despite having her back against the wall for pretty much the whole game because she formed the emotional/social bonds necessary to plead her case at the end effectively. These are just a few examples among many, too.

All of this has relevance to Louise's game in that she may not have made any "big moves", but she was so damn likeable that if Porsche had not had the DPoV (SORRY about the hypothetical but this one is necessary), I think we'd likely be seeing Louise at the end right now, and I think she may have been able to lay claim to Porsche's record of never being nominated. She was seen as far less of a target than I think literally everyone else in the house throughout her time in the game, but she was certainly not a goat, and nor was she perceived as one. She was not a comp threat, didn't talk a lot of strategy unless she really needed to (so she avoided making false promises, oversaturating conversations with Game Talk, or double dealing, things that got others in trouble), she came across as very genuine, and had amicable relationships with everyone. I never heard anyone say a negative word about Louise, which is not something I can say for anyone else on the jury. Sometimes, that is all it takes to win, depending on the jury you find yourself in front of.

4
cody
Cody was very much in the same boat as Louise in that he was well-liked and was not a huge talker when it came to strategy or The Game. However, Cody found himself with a massive target on his back from early in the jury phase because of his comp threat status and, more relevantly, his association with Mark, who he had apparently been making a bunch of alliances with. He falls lower than Mark because Cody's refusal to shoot straight about his allegiances in a strategic way, something Mark successfully managed to do, got him labelled as shady and turned half the house against him. I think he would have had an uphill battle in the F2 against almost anyone, but I have faith that he would have had a good shot at pulling off a win. I have to admit that at some points throughout the game even I thought Cody was shady, but honestly, I now am almost certain that his likeable and laidback nature and ability to bond with people effortlessly naturally lead to overlapping relationships and alliances solely because of his personality, not because of any sneaky strategy. 

5
jen
I felt from pretty much the very beginning of the game that you were going to be a strong social player. You sucked me in with casual flirting and conversations about food (I love both flirting and food), but it immediately occurred to me that you'd probably manage to charm others in similar ways, especially since you seemed to talk so much to everyone. I remember writing in my DR around Marvin's eviction that your game was becoming messy and transparent, and I don't think that that's an inaccurate assessment. I have always felt like offering to go on the block is a dangerous move, because it projects a message of overt and extreme confidence in your social relationships. That on top of the fact that you had an "alliance" with me and yet had just saved someone who was against me really dashed any trust I had in you. You were a queen bee, but it was way too obvious that you were a queen bee, which is a trap I myself often fall into. I feel like it's possible that you just got bored (like your original post suggested) and started going a bit ~crazy~ and getting a little too ~loose~ with your words and emotions leading up to your eviction, which again, is something I find myself doing sometimes, too. So -- I understand your plight, and in our last conversation before you were evicted, you made it clear that you understood how you had been behaving towards me and how it was probably perceived. Had you not been so DONE with it all and had instead managed to keep your cool, this game would have turned out very, very differently.

6
Austin
Austin said himself on numerous occasions that he was not a threat and that he felt he couldn't win (this was his default go-to argument when he felt he was in trouble, I think). At the beginning of the game he constantly acted scared of being out of the loop and made transparent attempts to form alliances that everyone then told each other about. Self depreciation works as a strategy to an extent, but he undersold his connections, his understanding and his game as a whole so much and so often that even if he wasn't entirely accurate in his assessments to start with, the perception he put out into conversations with others eventually became reality. I think he was just way too negative at times and reacted poorly when things didn't go his way instead of employing the ~smile and wave~ technique, which would have allowed him to potentially foster & repair relationships and trust and regain his footing in the game. 


7
marvin
Marvin was the first juror and was surely the most polarizing character of the season, even though his time in the house was cut relatively short. His Pandora's Box prize allowed him to make the jury phase, but it still stood that the majority of the house had attempted to evict him the previous round, and so he was put up on the block again the next round and evicted unanimously. I am sure Marvin is actually a good player, but the nature of his schtick got in the way of strategic communication with him for a lot of people, and I think if he had proceeded further in the game, it would have most likely been only as a shield for those who saved him during his first stint on the block.

[sarah]

I ALSO just want to add that I don't think crediting Cody's longevity in the game to "luck" because I rolled the dice and won the DPoV is fair when you rank Austin two spots higher and make no mention of the fact that if you had not got "lucky" and had instead won a bad prize from your get out of HoH card instead of the special veto, he would have gone a round earlier. Both Cody and Austin built relationships with the two of us that influenced us to use our items on them. That's not "luck". That's playing a good social game.

[jen]

Apr 13, 2016 5:10:35 GMT sarah said:

Yeah, Jen looks alright. The REAL babe of the season wants a word with you, tho.

SPOILER: Click to show

Whoever that is is NOT hotter than Jen.

Please.

Just look at this

SPOILER: Click to show

But thanks for your answers, bitches. I have what I need.