Board Thread:Survivor 22: San Marcos/@comment-26864283-20170208011107

Hello all~ I wanted to start differently tonight and just say this point blank, in my opinion the whole idea and concept of Final Tribal Council is such a farce. I feel like a majority of the time we’re all just wasting our times here, whether we like to admit it or not, most of the time even before FTC we know exactly who we’re voting for, and our speeches and your questions don’t even matter in that decision making. If there’s a front runner, some may have decided their vote already, and some may be in denial or may even up in the air. But if you’re not that person whose been praised the entire game, why would people listen to you in a speech? Well, there maybe is a clear front runner here who we’ve all heard throughout the entire game what kind of a massive threat they were, and then there’s two others here who have been talked down to a majority of the game, and have been told basically that they were goats and that they really can’t win. So while I’m not sure what good it may do, my one job here is to shed light on things that happened this season that may not be as it appears, so regardless of how you feel about me before or after this speech, I hope you give it a read.

Coming into this game I kept telling myself one thing, and that was to stay out of the drama. In Socotra, my biggest downfall came from the fact that I had a big mouth and wanted to fight with people when I could and whenever I could, and it didn’t help that everyone else on that season wanted to fight whenever they could too haha. But this was my second chance, I realized that and knew that I had to keep my damn mouth shut, even if my tongue was severely bleeding a lot because of it this season. I tend to play games similarly, but seeing that was one thing I knew I had to change in how I was approaching this season as well, I realized I needed to adjust to a completely new strategy for me. Everyone plays this game with three main core aspects in mind, the areas of physical, social and strategic games. This may be true, but I don't think those are exactly the three aspects I used to navigate my way through the game, and relied my game on three different aspects that were strongly in place throughout my game:

1st Social: Since I was coming into this game not trying to make enemies, the opposite of that is obviously making friends. The difference between me and others is that I would never message people just regarding the vote. I made sure that each and every round I would check in with people from here and there just to chat. It seriously worked in my favor much more then just a game level, because I honestly believe I made a lot of friends through this game. There are so many people from this cast that I would actually consider good friends because of the conversations I had with people here. There's not a single person I dislike and I can see myself keeping in touch with a lot of you, which is highly unusual for me since I usually end up loathing my cast near the end.

My social game is what helped me navigate my way throughout the game strategically as well. Since I was able to develop actual relationship with people, people trusted me. I was able to use these social relationships and develop them strategic gain. This helped me be able to gather information because I was open to sharing my own information if I knew I could trust them as well. I was able to make genuine relationships with people that a number of people wanted to keep me around not only because they may have believed I would vote their way or was a number for them, or even because they believed they could beat me when the time came, but also because people may have genuinely liked me as well. Even out of myself and Sim, I feel like I had a more proactive role in securing our spots for future votes and dealing with the relationship side of our partnership. During the final 6 tribal, when it came down to only me, Nathaniel and Shea being eligible to vote for I was hearing that I was going to be the target. Nathaniel was a good shield for people and was at that point to all of us, being idol’d so it was either myself or Shea, and Shea was a clear goat so I should’ve been the obvious one to go. However, Shea ended up being so disliked and mistrusted, to the point where that level combined with the fear of him being taken to the end as a goat over anyone, that he was actually voted off over me. That was concrete proof that people actually saw me as someone who they wanted to move forward with in the game, again whether or not its because they believed they could beat me or because they liked me, its the reason I’m still here.

2nd: Consciousness I feel like throughout this game, there was never a time when I was "unconscious", but rather "woke". If you look through my voting history, there were only three times this season I didn't vote for the person who left, and all three of those times there was an idol played. Austin's elimination, Rhi's elimination and Shea's elimination. Those were the only three times I didn't vote correctly, and even then I still knew they were all going home beforehand, with the exception for Rhi. Once all the votes were locked at the Austin vote, I was told before results were up, because people were threatened by Austin and not me and wanted to work with me in the future, simply because Austin played an idol and I didn’t. We both had a large part of control for the entire pre-merge of the game of our tribes, and were a close duo throughout this game. And during Shea's elimination I only voted for Nathaniel as a safety precaution that, so that I knew for sure I was not going home in the event of Nathaniel pulling something crazy to save him. Which brings me to last aspect.

3rd: Caution Another issue that I encountered in Socotra was not being careful enough. This season, every round I made sure to be more calculated in all my moves, so that if someone was leaving I wouldn't become the target for the next round because of it. This was always a concern of mine since I never obviously wanted to be targeted so I wanted my foresight to be a big factor in my game. I was able to use Nathaniel and Austin as my shields coming into the merge because I knew people would go for them over me for their flashy games compared to my more reserved ones. Even once Austin left, I knew Claudia, Chris and Nathaniel would all be targeted over me since they were all obviously bigger threats, and had the perception of myself as a sheep help me in the case of why not to target me over them. That's why I wanted to keep people like that around, so the target was off my back and on there's. This caused the big threats to target each other, leaving me in multiple swing vote positions. Claudia's elimination, Chris's elimination and Jenna's elimination were all times where I believe I was the one who officially decided who was the one leaving, I never let anyone dictate my vote or decide for me, I made my own decisions throughout this entire game.

In Survivor, there’s one goal: get to the end. And out of everyone on this cast, I feel like not only did I have the best endgame set up, but I also had the best game to survive. Almost every round in this game my vote was necessary and crucial to someone, I voted differently many rounds of this game and yet I was never a target. No one looked at me because they all assumed they could easily beat me. This game isn’t about who played the best idol or won the challenge or even lied the best, at the end of the day it’s about surviving, and my whole game basically prevented anyone from stopping that. This is Survivor, the object is to do your best to survive and get to the end, and I feel like I did this exceptionally better then pretty much everyone from this season. I survived so many crazy vote flips, idol plays and blindsides, and I’m still standing because my game got me there and the work I put in to it.

Lastly, I just wanted to say that as the great Kristie from Australian Survivor said, “You don’t need to have a flashy game to be a good player”. Yes, this game has been played really hard by not just us three, but by everyone. This game had so many different idol plays and items it was extremely hard to keep up. I only had one item the entire time, which was my light pearl, it definitely helped me but I wouldn’t say it saved me. I did not have to rely on idols to help keep me alive, instead I played to survive. Heck, I did not even have to rely on immunities since I was only immune once and it was at final 4, and even then I had a situation with two people who were voting each other indefinitely so I wasn’t even in danger there.

So to end this on a positive note, thank you to all the fabulous hosts for hosting such an amazing season! This cast and twists was iconic, so thank you for helping us all participate on this rollercoaster of a season. Also, thank you to the jurors and perjurors for participating in this season because honestly we were all crazy. So with all this being said, I hope you guys have heard me out and are open to voting for me to be the winner of this game, and I look forward to your questions and actually being able to talk to a lot of you again. 