(May 8, 2016 at 10:16 pm)Cthulhu Dreaming Wrote: This is your first season, right? There's a lot of grudges that players take to the final tribal council. "Good gameplay" also has to consider the social aspect of the game. There have been times when the winner was the player who pissed off the least number of people - even at times when they rode coattails the whole time (Natalie won season 19 by virtue of the fact that she was not Russell Hantz, a strategically brilliant player who completely failed at playing the social aspect of the game).
Exactly - Russell is quite possibly the most ingenious player to play the game and should have won his season simply because he dominated so much of the game (luck not withstanding). But he was also a righteous, arrogant prick who pissed off everyone who wasn't riding his coat tails.
When people refer to a "bitter jury," the season 19 jury is the single best example of that phenomenon.
I was actually thinking about this the other day with Jason - how his edit differs from Tony's edit from BvBvB1, and Russell's edit from Samoa. Russell made it to the end but was clearly shown as a deceitful, conniving player all along, got to the end and lost. Tony played a sort of similar conniving game but was shown as more clownish and kooky, got to the end and won. Jason was clearly being shown in a villainous light all season in terms of his game play, so I was suspecting that he wouldn't win - but whether he was a finalist I had no idea
Teenaged X-Files obsession + Bermuda Triangle episode + Self-led school research project = Atheist.