School is in session

[cody]

C O D Y ' s  J U R Y  S T A T E M E N T

Guess who's back? I know it must have been hard for you all to spend that twenty four hours without me in the house (You could both try act a little sadder to be honest). I feel like it goes without saying that you both deserve a huge congratulations for making it to the finale. I'm far from bitter and I honestly don't have anything negative to say about either one of you. Which I guess makes this final decision a little harder. Ultimately I'm hoping that your statements in conjunction with your responses to the jury will give me some sort of clear direction. 

My request as a juror is possibly a little unconventional? It isn't so much to demand insight into your game (I feel as though your statements + the other questions are more than enough) but instead on our own games. 

Ultimately, all of us did something wrong that lead to our own demise and spot on the jury and everyone always has room for improvement. So what better time than the present, right?! What I want from you both is to pull out your chalk and give us each a quick lesson on what we can do to improve ourselves as players. Feel free to be as detailed or brief with your responses as you see fit. It also might be handy to tag each juror so they can get a little bit of constructive criticism from you both. 

I think I'll keep it at that, short & sweet like me ;3 

Good Luck Ladies! 

[porsche]

Oh god I feel so condescending. Here goes:

marvin Your biggest problem was your shtick. I didn't have a problem with it but you rubbed people the wrong way and a lot of people just disliked you. When you dropped your shtick and we just had a strategy talk, you were likable and I know other people (Louise) felt the same way.

I also think you could work a little bit on maintaining connections. When you were on the block against Will, I approached Mark to try to get his vote. You two had a good talk a round earlier and he had already kept you off the block, but it turned out you hadn't even talked to him since he pulled your key.

There was also the whole deal with our alliances. I'm offline and I log back in and you immediately tell me Amy and Austin have each approached you for an alliance with us and David, and then I talk to Austin and he said you approached him. I wasn't sure what was going on and it was weird.

jen Jenchanting! I love you but you could be very hotheaded, and I think you realize that. There were so many times when I wanted to tell you to keep your cool and play nice. It just took a couple awkward interactions with Mark, Cody and Sarah for them to realize you were coming after them, and you became target #1. Anyway, I'm going to keep this short because I talked to you before your eviction and I know you realize where you went wrong.

mark You were a strong player and you scared me in this game, but that just made you a big target. You were nominated three times in a row after Will's eviction, and I'm sure you understood that you were going to keep being nominated until you were evicted. I can see why you felt like you didn't have a shot, but you should never give up!! You never know what can change. You had already won Austin's trust, and all you needed was an HOH win to get out David (though that would not be easy with my veto) and suddenly you're not in a bad spot.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I always saw you as shady. There would be times when you would ask me questions and it felt like you were just going to tell everyone what I said. There was one time where you asked me who I saw as a threat, and I got a bad feeling so I let David know what I was doing, and then told you David was a threat. Sure enough, you immediately told David. I think you being seen as a strong social and physical player who couldn't be trusted really did you in.

louise I admire your loyalty to Cody but it was really obvious. Everybody knew the two of you were close and that scared a lot of people, including me. When Cody won the veto, you became the next target. If you and Cody distanced yourselves while still working together (kind of like me and David), that could be deadly.

I know I'm about to contradict myself, but you need to be more open about your plans. Whenever I talked to the others and your name came up, they always said, "oh, she doesn't talk game with me." During the fast forward, you were telling me that I was really your closest ally and that you wanted Sarah out and were going to turn on Cody. The thing is, I had NEVER heard you give any hint of this and you were campaigning to me when I had five minutes to cast my vote. If you made me believe you wanted Sarah out and that you would choose me over Cody much earlier (even if you didn't), maybe the fast forward works out differently.

Austin I think you had many of the same problems as Jen. You were well liked and trusted by your allies but the people who weren't on your side didn't like you. You went from seeing Sarah as an ally to being done with her, but you made it obvious that you didn't like her. She was telling me she thought you hated her and I kept telling you, "Austin, you've got to make nice with Sarah" and you kept telling me "I'm not going to be fake." That's admirable in life but in Big Brother, you have to kiss ass.

David You're a very strong player, but you can come off as a little shady sometimes. I feel like after your HOH failed, you wanted to make sure you were in good with everyone, and it meant nobody trusted you 100%. I kept hearing you were telling people me and Austin was a pair, and that really freaked me and Austin out. Austin was considering nominating you over Marvin and I had to make sure that didn't happen.

Other than that, your social game was pretty good, but I think it could have been better. I know you were busy, but Louise never forgot that you nominated her without giving her a chance to talk to you.

cody You were a very polarizing player in the game. The people you were working with all loved you, but everybody else disliked you. I heard my share of rants about you :/ I liked you a lot in the beginning, but I was seriously turned off when I confronted you about being in multiple alliances and you denied everything. Meanwhile, David and Sarah were selling you out to me. I think if you had played it off like Mark did instead of just telling everyone the same thing, you would have looked more trustworthy.

I also was really confused during the final 3. I win the final HOH and I'm expecting you to campaign, maybe even sell out your final 2 deal with Sarah. But instead you refused to campaign, even when I gave you openings and I don't get why. I have the same advice for you that I do for Mark. Never give up. Sarah can confirm that I was considering evicting her. Would it have changed anything if you campaigned? Probably not, but what did you have to lose? Your loyalty to Sarah is admirable, but you or her had to go, and you have to be selfish.

[sarah]

I too feel super condescending! Keep in mind that these recommendations are entirely based on how I saw the game unfolding, and so they might be a little biased.

marvin - I think you're perfectly aware of what your major fault was: your schtick. In saying that, I guess it's kind of hard to call it an overall FAULT, because you obviously came in wanting to have fun with it and I hope you achieved that. From a gameplay point of view, though, when people play a character hard, I'm always instantly wary of them because I know it kind of adds an extra way for them to hide their real intentions. It can also sometimes be really hard to break through a character someone might be playing in order to establish trust with the actual person behind it, which might cause people to just not bother and instead seek out relationships with people who are more forthcoming and genuine in the first instance. 

jen - I addressed this in my jury ranking segment for you, but I think you just needed to chill a little. I am fairly sure I was not the only one who thought you were a pretty major social force early in the game, and offering to go on the block and expecting me (and others) to think nothing of it was I believe a pretty big blunder. You also did not recover well when things failed to go the way you had hoped, instead choosing to go on a bit of a passive-aggressive rampage @ me that kind of sealed the deal when I was considering backdooring you and then when you asked me to consider voting Louise instead of you. I know you were perfectly capable of salvaging relationships with everyone and restoring balance to your game, but you chose not to for whatever reason. Like Marvin, I'm sure you're already aware of this.

mark - You were nominated three times. The first time was as a pawn, and I don't think it had any negative impact on your game. It actually made me trust you a lot more and that was when our relationship really started to solidify. However, the second time you were nominated was what did you in, I think. From my perspective, your ultimate undoing was something very simple: you didn't sell Jen & Porsche out fast enough to David, and they beat you to the punch, outing you as someone who appeared to be making deals throughout the house and causing a lot of people to lose trust in you and begin targeting you because of your threat status, which they had probably previously mostly ignored due to their relationship with you. If during David's HoH reign you had thrown the two of them under the bus before they could do it to you and Cody, you would have retained trust with the majority of the house, I think we would have seen Jen and potentially Porsche go up on the block, and as a result the eviction order from then on likely would have changed pretty significantly. Oddly enough, #MysticMark, I think lack of foresight-based action is the best way to describe what ended your game. My advice for you is that you try to become more familiar with the playstyles of the people you choose to align with so that you can more accurately read their motives and predict their actions and therefore beat them to the punch if they're about to blow your game sky high.

louise - I think you and Cody had a similar problem. While you were very well-liked and everyone had only positive things to say about you and your personality, you seemed unwilling to invest strategically in anyone and did not really offer your ideas or opinions on game events or people unless explicitly asked. This was a sentiment echoed by many people. When it came to things like your relationship with Cody, I remember questioning why neither of you ever mentioned each other to me, and your lack of openness made me trust you a little less than I would have otherwise. Still love you tho!

Austin - 

SPOILER: Click to show

(lol I picked that one just for you <3)

Honestly. I think your paranoia, negativity and self-deprecating attitude made things a lot more difficult for you than they might have been otherwise. You also needed to measure your reactions more and be more aware of the way you were interacting with others so that your behaviour did not alienate people who could help you in the game. I had a lot of great conversations with you that I really liked, but I also found you very transparent, and I feel there were some parts of your personality that you needed to reign in in order to solidify/recover trust and bonds with people.


David - I think you were around a lot less than other people which may have impacted your social game a little. I LOVED you, and that was based solely off only talking to you every few days. If you had been available more regularly, who knows what could have happened? I also think your relative social absence might have cost you a lot of trust with some people -- I'll use myself as an example. During your HoH reign, you initially told me you were "definitely" nominating Jen and "probably"Louise in a show of supposed confidence in me, and then I was blindsided by you nominating Cody/Mark mere hours later, I instantly lost a lot of trust in you. The way I saw it, you had either lied to me in the first instance, or you had just not thought it worth it to communicate to me that you had changed your mind in the hours since we had last talked, which didn't inspire a lot of confidence.


cody - I heard the same thing about you constantly throughout the game from a myriad of different people: "Cody is nice/I like Cody/I would love to work with Cody, BUT he doesn't ever want to talk game, and it sketches me out". Even I felt that way about you sometimes, honestly. It made me wonder often whether you were hiding things from me and I felt very wary of you from time to time, despite the fact that we had our final 2 deal. I think your unwillingness to open up strategically pretty much across the board weakened the potential of a lot of your in-game relationships. I now understand that game talk just isn't really something you do unless you're forced into it, I guess because it's just not part of your personality. My recommendation for you is to employ a little more adaptability. In some casts, being an adorable bae like you were is enough on its own to have people trust you, but this cast did not have a lot of players who were easy to appeal to emotionally, and they were kind of starving for strategy. It's key to get a read on the kind of people you're competing with so you can alter your approach accordingly. That's all!


Thanks, Cody! <3