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"A Dream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes"; Episode 15: Do Dreams Come True?
Topic Started: Aug 30 2016, 08:02 PM (66 Views)
Kelly
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Haschel Cedricson
Ugh, I attempted an FTC speech, but I'm not sure if I'll use it. Uploading is taking forever, too. :-/
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Kelly
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Haschel Cedricson
Hey, mystery solved; my new phone was automatically set to record video in 1080p HD at 60 frames per second! I will not be uploading a 2GB video, sorry.

It's probably for the better; Kathryn kept interrupting and I lost my train of thought several times.
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Kelly
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Haschel Cedricson
Hello, ladies and gentlemen of the Jury. I made a video speech for all of you in front of the closest facsimile I could make of a fire in order to simulate a real FTC. Unfortunately apparently my new phone was set to record in 1080p HD and I'm not going to subject you all to a 2GB video. So instead you will have to settle for this screencap and our collective imagination of what could have been:

Posted Image

Anyway, before I get started I want you all to know that this game has been a very interesting experience for me. On one hand the non-anonymous nature of this game has allowed me to make a ton of new friends, and whatever happens tonight I will always have that positive experience. At the same time, though, it was that positive experience that made voting all of you out very difficult on an emotional level. There were a lot of Tribal Councils where I found myself extremely conflicted, torn by the twin desires to not betray my friends but also to not put myself into a situation where I would be eliminated next. After all, there can only be one Sole Survivor, and it would do a disservice to the mods, the players, and myself if I didn't do the best I could to not only make it here tonight, but convince you all that I am worthy of the title. I expect there to be a lot of emotions tonight*, and I promise you I am feeling them too; I've been looking forward to this game ending so that I can finally speak with all of you again and continue building upon the relationships that all of us have built over the course of the last month and a half.

But before we can do that, I need to tell you why I am the Sole Survivor of this game.

This was not a normal game. This game was not a traditional "alliance" game; the key unit here was the voting bloc. In the second half of the merge we saw different blocs moving in different directions, and there were several votes in a row where the majority in one round was not identical to the majority in the next. But looking back at those TCs you will find one constant- I managed to be in the majority bloc every single time. I had a hand in voting out every single person on the jury. In order for me to successfully float back and forth between the various factions and unbroken partnerships, I had to be extremely careful not to burn my bridges in case I needed to float back in the future. And I pulled that off perfectly. When I voted out LLD without telling Lia, I was able to patch things over with Lia afterwards. While Shadow was shocked that I broke ranks with her to take out Jess instead of Lia, I was able to make her understand why I did the move when I did, and Shadow then trusted me to work with her in later rounds. Dan and Jess were as tight as could be, and despite a day of profanity-ridden messages sent my direction, we were still able to work together on the LLD vote. This was a testament to how I was able to manage my relationships in this game.

And I had a lot of relationships. Remember how part of the reason Rory got voted out was that he was too friendly with everybody? Well, I was in a similar position (a position bolstered by the Monorail Challenge allowing my relationships with LLD and Lia to blossom), only nobody noticed until it was too late. I'm aware that from your perspective a lot of you probably think I was just lying to you all the entire game. But that isn't accurate; I was always willing to work with everybody and if a few Wheel of Fortune rolls had gone a different direction or if the so-called "Underbitch" fiasco hadn't happened, I think that I still would have been able to leverage my relationships to make it to the FTC.

I came into the merge with specific goals in mind. I wanted to both find a new partner to replace Malkon, and I wanted to eventually split up the pairs. I accomplished the former by teaming up with Rory, and when he went, Bella. I went about the latter in different ways, and admittedly for the first few merge TCs I found myself powerless to persuade others to go along with my wants. However, while Past-Kelly would have been frustratingly oblivious of this fact, I was able to recognize the problem and take the necessary moves to correct it. I established bonds with LLD and Lia with the knowledge that the two of them would be able to help me split up Jess and Dan. I knew that LLD and Lia were both too dangerous in the challenges for me to take both of them to the end, so I intentionally did not tie up the F6 vote. And my plan for splitting up Bella and Shadow was accomplished by building up my relationship with them so that they each would at least consider going with me instead of the other. This was most visibly seen in the F7 vote, when Bella was persuaded to break ranks with her partner.

I also had a ton of contingency plans that never came into play, but were still there in case they were needed. Jason's fake idol turns out to be real? I had myself set up to be a part of a bloc with Jason and Cody. LLD never finds out about Lia's plan to betray her? Instead of being booted at F5 as per the plan, I was prepared to wrest control of that TC with Radja and Bella. Xof doesn't get voted out of New Coronado and makes the merge? I had a plan on to stick with her/Shadow/Bella while still actively looking for a landing spot if it turned out I was the low man on the totem pole. In previous games I had a tendency to decide "There are the people I'm working with, and I'm gonna just assume that this situation is going to stay the way it is and maybe I'll get lucky." Here, I wanted to make sure that didn't happen, and I did not allow it to.

Lastly, while I know that I'm in the minority when it comes to believing that challenge performance should be a factor in your decision, I feel it's worth iterating. I won three individual challenges outright, got Wheel immunity in another, and was within wheel range on all of the rest except for the Eye Test. Survivor is not just a social game, it's also a physical game. And I feel I was exemplary at our forum simulation at that aspect of Survivor.

This is getting pretty long and I know there's a lot more that will come out during the questioning, so I'll wrap this up. But I believe that if you apply the classic Survivor criteria of Outwit, Outplay, and Outlast, you will see that my gameplay has been an excellent example of all of these things. In an unpredictable game with uneasy supermajorities and a Wheel handing out different amounts of immunities that couldn't be planned for, I was able to execute a strategy where every move put me into a better position than I was in before. It is for that reason, and the reasons listed in the preceding paragraphs, that I have earned the title of Sole Survivor.








*That's a Survivor night, not a literal night.
Edited by Alex, Aug 31 2016, 07:38 AM.
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Kelly
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Haschel Cedricson
Ugh, the anticipation is killing me. My chest feels as heavy as it did during the TC when Cody went home, when Inwas convinced I was going home.
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Kelly
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Editors Note: I am not going to type a long-ass wall because even though jury questioning ended at 5:00 AM, I spent most of my day having the ṣhittiest day at work and then immediately drove 300 miles to California. Now it is super-late and I am exhausted as hell, so please bear with me.

Before I get started, there are just a few more things I wanted to address from the Juror threads:

Lambdadelta's thread


Rory's thread


Jess's thread


Well, it all comes down to this.

I am not the most eloquent person in the world, and I acknowledge that I did not answer every question in the smoothest manner or make the greatest opening statement. But that's okay, because I think that if you look back at the last month and a half, my game speaks for itself. The instant I understood what my position in the game was I set out to change it, and I succeeded in the greatest fashion. Every move I made improved my position, and I was able to keep moving until I found myself here in the Final Tribal Council, against a player of my choosing. I don't mean to disparage Shadow at all because she certainly played an adequate game, but Shadow merely reached the Final Tribal Council. I, on the other hand, earned my spot here tonight.

* I was able to convince people to make the moves I wanted with me. Whether it was hyping Jess up as a threat, convincing Shadow to vote for Dan instead of me, or talking Dan out of targeting Bella hardcore and instead voting out LLD, players were willing to vote out the players whose absences best affected my game, not theirs.

* I connected with people. By the time the monorail challenge was over, I was on good terms with every other player in the game. I don't want to put words in your collective mouths, but I get the sense that post-monorail none of you ever thought "I definitely can't work with Haschel. When I voted out LLD, Lia was still willing to work with me. When I left Dan in the dark and voted out Jess, he came back and proposed a Hucklemint alliance and he was serious enough about it that he was willing to vote my way. And when Shadow saw me poach her partner for that same vote, my close connection with her made it so that she not only forgave me but then became one of the numbers on my side.

* The moves I made were smart moves. I've talked before about how it was important to elimate Jess in order to separate her and Dan, but it's worth noting that a side effect of that move is that Lia remained in the game to be a target that Shadow and Dan had to worry about before they could think of going after me. Choosing to eliminate LLD instead of Shadow at F6 meant that a major challenge threat was eliminated before the Wheel of Fortune started to lose slots and make it less likely that a losing performance could still win immunity.

* I took an active hand in advancing my game, while to large degree Shadow had to sit back and hope that things worked out in her favor. Obviously things didn't work out too poorly for her because she's here, but she's here because I wanted her to be; voting out LLD instead of sending her to a tiebreaker challenge against a major challenge threat was my decision, and I made that decision based on what I felt was best for my own game and not because of any argument that she made. The same goes for the FIC; as much as she says "I knew Haschel would abandon his ally", if I had felt that Bella was a better matchup here then Shadow would have been the final juror.

Shadow has mentioned several times that I didn't have any power in the early merge. And I don't dispute that; if you jurors think that those are the only rounds of the game that matter then yes, she should absolutely win. But those rounds were merely prelude to the rest of the game. You don't declare the winner of a race based on who is ahead after the first lap, victory belongs to the racer that executes the best over the home stretch. And I think the evidence suggests that it is I, not Shadow, who is in that position.

Here I post, I can do no other. Thank you all for making this the most enjoyable game of Survivor I've ever played, and I look forward to denouement with all of you postgame.
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