So there was a last minue push for both Ted and Rob :o

More in the morning. It's ridiculous o'clock already.

Yes, please. I have no idea what you are talking about.

Do you want to do the meet & greet? I need to sleep.

meet & greet?

Wrap up on the last Episode before the merge - yesterday's boot was all about two things;
-Shawna and how she's mismanaged her position
-Rob jumping back, trying to throw, and putting the cross-tribal F6 deal to Christy and Joanna

I feel like I'll never finish this ranking, I have to adjust it again after last night's event. But I absolutely will post it before I open a single Merge Tribe PM (I can't anyways, till Jeff tweaks the permissions :P)

Yesterday the ranking was;
16 Daniel < 15 Butch <14 Ryan < 13 Ken < 12 Jan < 11 Jake < 10 Jeanne < 9 Helen < 8 Christy < 7 Brian < 6 Rob < 5 Erin < 4 Ted < 3 Penny < 2 Shawna < 1 Joanna

But what we're really interested in here is Shawna. Saved draft from yesterday said;


***
These are mostly notes for myself for later, because there was a lot of shit went down yesterday, so excuse if this is a weirdly formatted.

Dan vs Jeanne
And indeed, Shawna overplayed like fuck. Her main motivations is to try keep Jeanne alive, because Jeanne is a predictable pocket vote for Shawna specifically (where Dan & Ted aren't), and secondly to get Ted booted pre-merge because she is afraid of his connections/challenge strength/true intentions.

To 'test' the loyalties of Daniel, and to try assure Christy/Joanna of her own true loyalties, she tells Daniel that the majority alliance is Dan/Shawna/Jeanne/Ted is now running the show. She tells Joanna that if Daniel doesn't come running back with this info, then they need to drop him instead of Ted. She neglects to tell Christy this before the fact, making her seem even more shifty to Christy.

Daniel knows which side his bread is buttered on and indeed comes back to Joanna & Christy both with the info that Shawna is being fishy. This combined with J/C's mistrust of Shawna's powerhungry plays has helped Dan climb the totem a little. Dan is loyal to these two more than to Shawna, and Christy holds the power on this tribe - not Shawna - doubly so when Rob returns. Dan has cockroached his way into being safe yet again.

Rob's Return
Rob jumps back and immediately tries to get Christy/Joanna to throw the challenge. They flat out refuse to do so without good reason. They don't even allow him to play. After they lose, they discuss the possibility of booting him there and then. Who knows what connections he's made? He may be too powerful right now. And the votes are there too, if they want them. Jeanne would love it. Shawna would do it to keep Jeanne safe, Dan is their bitch now. Ted is playing for Ted.
Rob fully lays out the F6 deal to C/J and that Erin has an idol that would be used against them. Christy/Joanna decide to keep him for now to at least see where this deal leads. It's a good thing thy kept it to themselves, because Jeanne/Shawna were discussing the possibility of booting Rob too and could have run with it to Dan/Ted if they were faster thinkers.

In the end the vote defaults to Jeanne, with Christy again being the thrust behind getting a united vote together just before the PM block deadline. Without Christy's leadership, no doubt this vote would have settled on Ted, since his name was the one most players were happy with earlier. Part of the reason she pushed the target off of Ted was because he has undoubtedly some connections that might assist them with this new possible cross tribal arrangement.



A few quotes to match the above;





All is not lost though Shawna fans, she knows what she did was foolish and she promises to try lay a little lower ..for now..

Shawna (Confessional): Well my position is much worse now than it was before the merge, right now my destiny isn't in my own hands so i have to lay low, or at least try lol. My post-merge strategy would be to gun for whichever of the immunity threats doesn't win immunity, but i'll have to follow the lead from my allies and hope my name doesn't come up.

Daniel gets bonus points for this; "She needs to fucking cool her tits"

All this stuff I already saw and knew and its certainly interesting. I think things look much, much better for Helen and Brian, but not so much for Erin and Penny. Their fate really comes down to if a Helios wins immunity and Ted wants to force a tie and work with them.

The Asteria TC was embarrassing. I'm so annoyed with the bulk of them. They are so boring in public, but so scattered through PMs. Ryan and Jeanne's boots could've been interesting in retrospect but they just never panned out because both are deadbeats.

I forgot to mention how much I laughed at this in the BBL thread after Rob's mutiny

Before I even start, can I just say that I'm pretty amazed at how correct the casting is here. There is very little schtick or in-character acting at all, yet everyone is pretty much spot on.

Let's see now; Brian is cold and unnattached, Helen is overly complicating everything (and both solid players), Jan is a loveable ditz with one or two solid connections, Ted is self-absorbed, Penny is full of herself, Ken is getting a forced positive edit, Jake is as caring and selfless as you could want & Erin is a sweetheart with no idea where she actually lies in the grand scheme of things.

From Asteria's stable; Shawna's a flirt, Jeanne is ever so slowly getting to grips, Joanna is fierce as fuck, Chrsty is a complex positive force (but secretly a bit of a bitch), Butch is just a touch loopy, Daniel is godawful and I can never remember Ryan. Rob was the only one not doing it for me, but he's done a full 180 since the mutiny in terms of character - and he was a last minute replacement - Jeff, you have a gift.




Pre Merge Boots

#6



Butch would have frustrated me as a player for the exact same reasons Christy made him the first boot. Type in proper English please! Yet at the same time, the way he writes one long run on sentence and is iphone autocorrecting (I hope) all over the place is giving him a very distinct kooky personality, which I'm enjoying as a host.

Still, he became a very easy boot amongst some terrible competition once he revealed he was posting from his iPod. Missing TC sealed the deal.

ButchCrazyDance.gif









#5



Ryan had a hint of a head on his shoulders. His later confessionals & PMs indicated that he realised he was on the bottom of the Asteria totem, and he planned to use the day between Challenge & TC to talk to the people at the bottom (that didn't know they are) and band them together. But why did he wait a full week of the game?? Nobody will cut a deal with a scrambler if they can avoid it - they will always stick with the people they've built a bond with unless you have a huge carrot. The carrot was there in that all of Jeanne/Ted/Daniel were on the outs, but he needed a bigger picture than he had to know this, and he hadn't done enough talking previously to know where he needed to put the pressure.

So Ryan had a little potential, but he's also suffered from the same 'not PMing enough' factor as the other pre-merge boots, and by the time he decided to do something about it, it was always going to be very hard for him to get into the game at all.










#4



IDK what to make of Ken really. I think he came into the game with an overly cautious approach. Every time he tried to fly the flag for tribal unity, it came off as more and more suspicious. Only Jake fully trusted him I think, and was toying with the idea of a all-male alliance but didn't get it together in time. He probably would have survived the night of his boot at Jan's expense had he not tried to oust Ted - ironically he was suspicious of Ted taking the clues, and people were happy enough to write Ken's name down for pretty much that exact reason

Plus again, very little PM activity, he nearly talked exclusively with Brian & Ted at the start. By the time he added Jake and Helen to his chatmates it was already too little too late. He tried to argue his case against Jan, who replied that she was more social than Ken, and I laughed at the time. Yet now I think of it, it was really Jan's bond to Erin that may have saved her - the same Erin that Ken neglected to PM even once in the game - so Jan may very well have been right.




That being said, I love his continued interest in the game and his activity levels in LL is the driving force thats pushing the rest of the pre-jurors hang around so big time kudos for that.






#3


Shock boot

Jan had some wonderful moments in this game - trying to suggest Ted for every answer when he wasn't eligable for any, 'starting a fire' with her granny glasses, mixing up Ken & Ted for her vote, wanting to vote for Ted even though he was on the other tribe etc, - but for me she just didn't do anything much strategically to deserve a higher ranking. I have to presume she is a fan of Survivor, so she really should know that a one-on-one deal with Erin, and a loose bond or two elsewhere is just not going to be enough to get far in this game.









#2


Two words for Jeanne - learning curve - and boy did she pick it up fast. Strategically she was kept in the dark, but afask she had played herself into a sweet spot.

Decent enough in the challenges when the rest of them allowed her. A laffo's feud with Rob. That strange quirk, of putting, inappropriate commas into her, sentences gave her a spot-on 'Jeanne' board presence too. I got a kick out of how she embraced her sneaky side for the Ryan vote, Slowly built a bond with Shawna, and was working how she could on the rest. And like I said in her goodbye thread - a true team player for Asteria - maybe the only one on that beach?

If only she had made the merge, we could have found ourselves with a bridge-burner on our hands. And she nearly did too, if it wasn't for Rob's flip back I believe the vote would have stayed on Ted. Ultimately though, she was just a little out of the loop to the true goings on of anything.









#1


Strategically, Jake ranks above Jan because he was at least trying to make some moves, it's not really his fault he was both hoodwinked by Brian & sent Ted packing with a misread message. But again, like Jan & Ken before him, he simply wasn't doing enough socially - to all but ignore Penny and Erin even when his tribe was down to five players standing just isn't going to cut it on a tribe that small.

What Jake brought to the game emotionally was pretty beautiful I have to say. It's a rare thing to see a player so torn up over a vote - and then that heartfelt apology to Helen followed. I believe that was truly written from the heart, where other players might have written it as a 'tactic' which is simply adorkable. Again, credit to your casting Jeff, Thailand's 'Erin's Boot' episode was one of the truly touching moments in Survivor, and Stranded Jake was every bit as empathy-driven.

I have to say he's the one boot so far I really regret, watching him struggle ethically with his decisions if he got into the later rounds would have been a emotional rollercoaster. Watching the confusion set in when he rejoined with Ted would also have been laffos.

I'm also quite glad he got to prove himself as a challenge contributor in the counting challenge.






There is one piece of advice that stands true for all six pre-merge boots they should take heed of if/when they play again, and that is that they all need to PM more. PM everyone you can, as much as you can. Only by having the most information possible can you hope to actually maneuver yourself around the game, and without the fullest picture available, you are handicapping yourself before you even start.

Ted is insane. He may not realize it, but he can easily win the game out of his position.