Board Thread:Survivor 40: Annihilation/@comment-5480706-20190802220306

Hello there, so the game has reached that point where I can slip back into relevance for a couple of hours whilst I critique both of your games and try to reach a concensus. Before I proceed to exhaust my limited perception of both of your games, compared to the information I've gathered from my fellow jurors and the way you've depicted your games in your pleas, I'd like to congratulate both of you for making it this far, and whilst I've had my issues in following the season from the jury bench, I do believe that the two of you (and Grace, who definitely deserves a shout out) are probably some of the more deserving people to have made it to the end of this All-Stars season. Now, because I do think that this is the only way to crown a landmark Sole Survivor, I will proceed to heavily deconstruct both of your games and weave in questions in the form of statements that you may refute, corroborate, or whatever you consider appropiate. It is up to you and only you to pick out which of my talking points you want to take into consideration, I suppose this can be considered an extended exercise of close reading for both of you. Best of luck.

*** To begin with I would like to put forth an aspect of this season that I find very important, and that is dedication and the respect to a landmark season such as this one. I could highlight the fact that Linus does overlap me in the dedication we both displayed in challenges, and whilst I am by skill weaker than him on certain challenges it was definitely nice to know he spent a similar amount of time on challenges as I did. In this aspect of dedication and respect for the season I do feel that Linus does have you beat, Rob, as I immediately think of the fact that both you and Grace abstained of the gruelling manga challenge that I fought so hard in during the round I went home. It was not improved by the fact that the previous round you had on paper turned your back to your "allies" in order to save yourself from rocks, and Grace had similarly been on a dicey position after being in the wrong side of the vote twice. It wouldn't be strange to interpret this as nothing but being complacent. It is no secret that the manga challenge was designed to be a bitch by the sadistic mind of Nuno Lúdico Manao, but in a sea of barely-attempts, you and Grace abstaining did not stand out as islands (those were me and Linus), but as some sort of double set Mariana trenches parallel to one another. I am aware (and have had to experience in a rather harsh way myself) that life runs on at the same time as this game does, or that sometimes it is best to hide your strength/dedication at challenges at first, but an abstaintion in an All-Stars season only looks slightly better than a strike, especially after such a critical landmark move of yours, a move of which you undersold in your speech (as in didn't even mention), which makes one have to make assumptions about your game.

That opens up a new sort of dedication and respect that I believe Rob struggled far harder than Linus did (despite him not being exempt), and that was respect at creating a story out of this season. Albeit how this argument might come across as self-righteous or pompous, but I believe that All-Stars more than any other season is about creating a story, and yours as it stands now is obscured, nebulous. As a juror your plea has underwhelmed me, I still do not undestand a lot of the things you did, and whilst Linus has done a better job and projecting a roadmap, you merely suggested the thesis statement for your Annihilation experience and you barely, if at all, backed it up with evidence in a speech that came across as rushed. You seem to have improved in your answers to other jury speeches, but you are still one step behind from Linus if somebody is going to ask you about a particular point or move in the game, as your answer will come across as potentially ungenuine since by that point you will have already been hinted at what the juror wants to hear back. Additionally, if I am to remember correctly, at the point I left the game you claimed to have not made a single confessional in this season in which there has been an apparent confessional drought. Linus is part of that drought, as is everybody else present in this Final Tribal Council, since I was apparently the only contestant to write a confessional in a round when there was still more than a dozen of us. I can draw two assumptions from this. 1. You did not care to help the hosts create (or even simply witness, as that is part of the joy of hosting, and also for viewers who want to know the specific points of view after the season is over) a narrative. Or 2. You did not have a story to tell for a big chunk of the game. Rob, your narrative at this point has been shaped by what others thought and said of you. You actually came into this final tribal council with a head start over Linus, since Grace had set you up rather well whilst trashing Linus and that was our latest and perhaps strongest narrative. But that did not hold through your jury speech, as now I can't help but think of Moby Dick. One of the most writed topics (and perhaps my favourite passage of the novel to analyse) about that novel is 'The Whiteness of the Whale' as it offered a plethora of interpretations that all could be correct, ranging from white supremacy versus a multicultural America, or the stark absence of God on Earth. It is a great passage and I do encourage anybody who wants to read or listen to it if they feel brave enough to brave Herman Melville's brutal encyclopedic writing. Here's a link: https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/42/moby-dick/702/chapter-42-the-whiteness-of-the-whale/ Anyways 'The Whiteness of the Whale' would be a good way to describe your game from an outside perspective, both to the jury, and to the viewer if you really did not end up making confessionals. Your whole narrative has greatly been shaped by what others have said about you, and the picture is conflicting, and you have not pushed forth enough evidence to prove what you called an overview of your own game. And whilst you are white, you are not a whale, or have been dead for over a century, other people should not be shaping up your significance or narrative. I could go on to explain my own perspective of your game for most time as both a juror and player, how I viewed you as not as good of a player as Grace, Linus or Zach, but not as self-disadvantaged as Mihai, Aromal, Augusto or Nathan. But that would negate my previous point, so I'll leave it at that since it does slightly prove my point on how others could easily mutate your narrative from outside.

Now the last point linked to respect and dedication that I would like to present would be that of respect and dedication to others in this game. Before heading deeper into this I would like to contextualise how an apology ultimately represents the admission of guilt regardless of justifications, whilst doubling down on the treatment of somebody unless the argument is impregnable will probably just worsen the sentiment of who can be viewed as the victims of both disrespect and undedication. Doing both is a cop out. Perhaps the most evident example of the lack of said respect and dedication would Linus' behaviour with Grace on Day 38. I believe that Grace has adressed that in her jury speech and I have to agree that I must agree with her in how upset she is. Linus, I was surprised to learn how Grace had been such a big ally of yours, and the fact that you had played an idol on her twice, it certainly was a smart move, she was the best shield you had after I was gone and she wasn't as good at challenges unless they were niche flash games in relation to you. However, with such an important relationship that the two of you had, the crashlanding of an ending we witnessed before this tribal is doubly sour when considering who you left behind in favour of her. You have already pointed out elsewhere that had you stuck to me, Zach and Aromal you would've been able to perservere off immunities and the two idols but would've been out of the loop. It wouldn't take a mathematician to figure out that we were one round away from gaining a majority with Mihai, or at least the threat of rocks that both Mihai and Rob probably weren't going to risk. You were one or two steps away from becoming the loop, instead of becoming dependent upon it. You found your first idol with the help of Aro and Zach, the second one with me as a third helper. I get the irony of me pointing this out, but I do believe that the Ouani idol incident is different from the second merge idol one, as I had not had the opportunity to build enough trust with Vivor (or Grace, who he suddenly brought up into the loop which doubly turned me off). I think that me and Aro had shown more than enough respect and dedication to our alliance in the first two rounds of the merge for you to not hide your second idol and turn on us. I would've passed the location of the first merge idol to you just as I had passed it to Zach, I wasn't playing favourites when I found out about the split. In fact, the reason I had to share the idol location was because you were not keen on wasting your own idol on Zach, which put me, a "recent" ally in that our alliance had only just crystalised in the past few hours, up ahead from you who had been a close ally of Zach's since before the merge. To make things worse when you ended up playing the Moya idol you sent Zach home as a result, it was a miserable blunder that cost you who you've listed as your second closest ally who had your back for longer in this game than your first closest ally. Now going back to a dissection of my own boot, you claim that you voting me out helped you out, yes I was probably the only other person that at that point of the game was really braving out challenges, and it ended up being a success for you given your immunity run stood out starkly due to not having to face flash game beasts such as Vivor and Drew, or me, a dilligent person. However, my boot was apparently triggered due to me saying both Rob's and Grace's names, as the split and later on my plan to have the vote screw over Rob, only took place because I thought the second merge idol was in the other side and I didn't want me, Zach or Aro to get idolled out after what I felt was our first real success as an alliance with the previous vote. Again, this narcissistic rant about my elimination doesn't negate that it did do some good for your game, but it ultimately substracted agency from it, as your well-reasoned paranoia about me trying to potentially get you and Zach out near the end, would've deflated once I understood Mihai had betrayed me again, and was already out there since I was annoyed at Rob's turncoat tendencies as a middle player, as his flip only after the tie exposed his self-interested tendencies as opposed to respect and dedication to the people he had voted with in the die after our alliance had specifically targeted Drew to pander towards him. With the fact that Grace and I had gone radio silent to one another in order to avoid the other twisting each other's words, and with my conversations with Nathan and Augusto being summed up to talks about their retail jobs and their hesitation to work with me, I believe you did not fully consider with who I was going to be able to work with was I to try and eliminate you from the game. You say that you attempted to manifest your own destiny by taking me out of the game, your meatshield, but what ended up happening was that you shifted your dedication to Grace who kept you in the loop whilst limiting your influence in the game in exchange of her idols. You went from hiding behind me and Zach to hiding behind Grace, albeit with a better shot at immunity, only to end up disrespecting her in the very end.

Whilst I am aware that the preceding dissection of Linus' relationships in this game may overtly display most of the flaws of his game, I do have to point out that in my own perception, Rob also failed to show respect and dedication to others. He was not particularly that great at showing dedication when talking to me and some of the other jurors, but this might become negligible when you consider that Linus did not really talk to Vivor and Vivor is very upset about that. I was told that you had hour long voice calls with other contestants when other jurors tried to prove that you were socially active, and you did offer to call with me once (I sadly could not since I had personal stuff going on that would've interrupted it). Whilst this method does show dedication to take a slice of your own time, the fact that it often happened whilst you commuted takes away from the impresiveness of being dedicated to others, it's more time consuming to text, and in an analytical context it displays how you were not going to write anything on paper, to comprise and dedicate yourself to anybody. You sacrificed the players you had made promises to as you wrote down the name of people who had tried to work with you, and most of them entered ponderosa believing that you had trailed behind Grace's will, which means you were either Grace's follower or you had been willing to break a bond of respect and dedication without signposting how it benefitted you, so the only assumption was that you had a severe lack of agency.

As I am a few minutes over the deadline I am now forced to stop writing, I have enjoyed writing out this essay, and it is now up to you to do something out of it. I have not come up with a conclusion due to time restraints, so that is your job not in a conclusion, but an answer to no question. There is really no wrong way to approach this, other than those which will grant you not my jury vote. Once again, best of luck and congratulations on making it this far. 