| Last Words; My actual last chance in this game | |
|---|---|
| Topic Started: Aug 31 2017, 04:55:00 AM (34 Views) | |
| Boudica | Aug 31 2017, 04:55:00 AM Post #1 |
![]()
|
Hey guys, It’s been a pleasure answering your questions, and now is last chance to address you all. For someone whose game has been built on making second chances for myself where I shouldn’t have had them, this feels a little weird. Cathartic, maybe. Anyways, I’ll leave you all with some parting thoughts, and I hope that I’ll have done enough to earn your votes here. First, I want to address a lot of what Theodora said about my game in defense of her own. I think that, ultimately, Theo’s points against me all come down to two points: I didn’t play a good social game What I did at 6 and 5 wasn’t impressive. That I was saved by others at those points in time, and only got here because I was lucky To address number one, she supports it primarily through the alliance we had with Gilgamesh and Alex through the early and mid merge. At those points in time, I was coasting, and she’s correct that I leveraged her relationships to improve put myself in a more favorable position than I would have been otherwise. But that’s a narrow lens on the social game. That was two relationships, and while they were two important relationships, those don’t make up the entirety of the social game I played. I think, in particular, there are two things from FTC that I want to highlight here. The first:
Okay, so this point requires reading the whole interaction between me and Alex, but I’m sure you can figure it out. The second:
What I’m trying to say is that, at a basic level, the purpose of the social game is twofold: Get people to do what you want Get them to vote for you at the end Ultimately, it doesn’t matter that I wasn’t the most bubbly person. It doesn’t matter that I didn’t become besties with everyone and get as close as possible. All that matters is whether I did these two above things, and whether I did them better than Theodora and Napoleon. Let’s talk about #1. Theodora may have been beloved enough to get herself involved in everyone’s plans, but she wasn’t good at leveraging these to get the things she wanted. At 8, she let Alex emotionally manipulate her into voting out Maria. At 7, she let Pocatello take the fall. At 6, she got forced into a decision between two people she didn’t want to go. Theodora was never able to translate the degree to which people liked her into actionable outcomes. Comparatively, there’s what I pulled at 6. I may not have had Alex invested in me personally. I may have just been pushing for Alex the very previous round. If I had won immunity, I may have very well been voting for him in that moment. But I was still able to figure out what to say to him to get him not to vote for me. I understood what he needed to hear to get him to save me. Theodora said:
I don’t believe this is true, because I don’t think Theodora understands how I was able to get Alex to side with me there. I don’t think she understands how much, from the beginning of this game, I was able to flip people who were against me to be on my side. From Liz to Harald to Maria to Pocatello to Alex, I took people who were gunning with me at various points and got them working with me right after. I did so by not being afraid to confront them and have honest conversations with them about why they were gunning for me, and how we could move past that and work together going forward. I don’t think Theodora is capable of doing that the same way I am. Nobody else in this game demonstrated the ability to shift a target off themselves nearly as well as I did. I was doing it from the second vote of the game, after all. And on the second point, it’s yet to be determined, and we’ll see who ultimately wins this game. Given the tone of the questioning period, my social game seems like it was better than Theodora believed. I may have been questioned a bit for not being as bubbly as her, but I had my advocates. We’ll see how it goes. Now, I want to talk with you all on a more personal level. Alex and Julius - you were both great competitors and rivals in this game. I respect you both tremendously, and I wish you the best. I appreciate the respect that you’ve shown me as well, especially over these past few rounds. It was a blast going up against you both. Maria, Harald, and Hannibal - it was great getting to know each of you. I think you three, more than anyone else, are the people by whom I didn’t do right. I chose expedience over our relationships, and in retrospect I could have afforded to let you guys know that I was voting for each of you, and why. Harald, I appreciate your advocacy. Maria, I understand if a vote for me would be more against Theodora. Willem, Augustus, and Washington - I feel like you all didn’t get to see a ton of what I was doing in game, since the early merge was when I was mostly biding time (and, Willem, we never really got to play this game together). I hope I demonstrated over these last few rounds and within my responses here why I deserve to win over the other finalists. I hope I can be a winner that you can be proud of standing behind. Pocatello - I hope I’ve given you enough sense of my person that you can vote for me here. Like I said, I definitely let the game get in the way of our relationship, and I should have stepped back a bit and just, like, talked. That said, I think you still got a good sense of who I am as a person, through the lens of how I played this game more so than me talking about what TV shows or video games I like or whatever other “things” we could have talked about. And Gilgamesh, that leaves you. I think that you, moreso than anyone else in this game, didn’t quite get me. And I don’t think I really understood you until now, either. During my callout at the F6 TC, I called you spineless and fearful, but I don’t think that was right. It’s not that you were afraid. It’s that you overvalue how bad a “mistake” is. I admit that I played a flawed game. I did not handle every situation, every encounter, every singular moment “correctly,” and perhaps I spent large swaths of the game handling things mostly “incorrectly.” But the thing is, and I think the thing that you don’t understand, is that there isn’t a singular, “correct” way to play Survivor. Everything is contextual. The ultimate winner of the game is the person who made the right set of decisions and did things correctly for the set of circumstances that the game created. Something that could be “right” in one context could very much be “wrong” in another. You want to vote for a winner like Kim Spradlin. Or maybe Earl Cole. Maybe even a rougher domination like Todd Herzog. Parvati Shallow would have been good. And you know what? This game has a player who could have been that. His name is Alexander, and he’s chilling with you on the jury. Because, at the end of the day, each of those winners could only play their games in the context of the people they were surrounded with. And you know who surrounded Alex this game? Who surrounded the person who was the most dominant throughout the course of the game, both strategically and socially? A bunch of people who realized they would lose to him in the end. Nobody in this game was going to be a willing goat. In the context of this game, the overt controller was always doomed to lose. Your definition of “best” here would have doomed anyone who couldn’t win challenges at the end of the game. And I get that you were trying to play something of a “flawless” game yourself. You wanted to wait behind Alex, to strike him in the final moment and go to FTC with 2 people you knew you could beat. In a lot of ways, what you wanted to do was very similar to what I wanted to do. The only difference between us is that, when shit didn’t go according to plan, I figured it out. I adapted to my moves failing and won people to my side when I should have been gone. You, well, lost as soon as anyone cast a vote for you. So when you ask “what did Boudicca do in this game. What strategic thing did she pull off?” Well, I ruined your game. And you can try to justify that it was Alex all you want, and it’s true that it wouldn’t have been possible without him, but I ultimately flipped him. Theodora couldn’t do it over the course of the day. I got to him with the right arguments before the TC ended, and I got him to flip to my side. You can pretend that persuasion doesn’t exist for people on the outs, but it does, and I did a fucking excellent job of it. Oh, and by the way, I knew Alex had 2 double votes from basically right after the auction. I suspected he had the idol (Theo tried to talk me down from this at one point), because my intuition is pretty damn good. I understand that there’s a good chance I don’t get your vote, because I simply don’t fit your model of what a “winning” player looks like. But there are a lot of winners who don’t. And maybe the fact that the person whose game played closest to how you think of a “winner” seems to intend on casting his vote for me indicates that maybe, just maybe, you’re the one who’s off base. That you need to open your mind. So, that’s my piece for each of you. Before closing out, I’d like to say one more thing: We spent a lot of this FTC talking about mistakes, about what we could have done better. I want to end on the inverse note, though, of what I did well: I survived an America tribe that lost 1/2 its people before swapping out. I survived that tribe with the vote tying against me the second TC. I survived every member of that tribe going down before the merge. And yet I pushed on and built new relationships and found a path forward. I survived a person who was gunning for me having an idol. I had just enough to dodge the idol, and then kept working on relationships with people who were against me so that they wouldn’t come for me the first chance they had. I survived by persuading the most dominant player in the game to change their vote in the last minute of the tribal council. I went from challenge zero in pre-merge to challenge hero post-merge. Top 2 in 7/9 challenges is pretty damn good in the context of me only having 25 gold come auction. I did this all with no idols or no items in my pocket. I had nothing to fall back on but the very fundamentals of persuading people and winning challenges. This scene from Rocky represents the game I played well: For every mistake I made, I got back up and kept pushing twice as hard. Every time the game found a new way to try to fuck me over, I persevered. That’s how winning is done. Win or lose, thank you for hearing me out. It has been an absolute pleasure playing with you. |
![]() |
|
| Boudica | Aug 31 2017, 03:26:51 PM Post #2 |
![]()
|
Hey guys, It’s been a pleasure answering your questions, and now is last chance to address you all. For someone whose game was built on making second chances for myself where I shouldn’t have had them, this feels a little weird. Cathartic, maybe. Anyways, I’ll leave you all with some parting thoughts, and I hope that I’ll have done enough to earn your votes here. First, I want to address a lot of what Theodora said about my game in defense of her own. I think that, ultimately, Theo’s points against me all come down to two points: I didn’t play a good social game What I did at 6 and 5 wasn’t impressive. That I was saved by others at those points in time, and only got here because I was lucky To address number one, she supports it primarily through the alliance we had with Gilgamesh and Alex through the early and mid merge. At those points in time, I was coasting, and she’s correct that I leveraged her relationships to improve put myself in a more favorable position than I would have been otherwise. But that’s a narrow lens on the social game. That was two relationships, and while they were two important relationships, those don’t make up the entirety of the social game I played. I think, in particular, there are two things from FTC that I want to highlight here. The first:
Okay, so this point requires reading the whole interaction between me and Alex, but I’m sure you can figure it out. The second:
What I’m trying to say is that, at a basic level, the purpose of the social game is twofold: Get people to do what you want Get them to vote for you at the end Ultimately, it doesn’t matter that I wasn’t the most bubbly person. It doesn’t matter that I didn’t become besties with everyone and get as close as possible. It doesn’t matter that I didn’t send 1000 word PMs talking about how my day was and how much I love such and such and how annoying that thing is. All that matters is whether I did these two above things, and whether I did them better than Theodora and Napoleon. Let’s talk about #1. Theodora may have been beloved enough to get herself involved in everyone’s plans, but she wasn’t good at leveraging these to get the things she wanted. At 8, she let Alex emotionally manipulate her into voting out Maria. At 7, she let Pocatello take the fall. At 6, she got forced into a decision between two people she didn’t want to go. Theodora was never able to translate the degree to which people liked her into actionable outcomes. Comparatively, there’s what I pulled at 6. I may not have had Alex invested in me personally. I had just been pushing for and Alex vote the very previous round. If I had won immunity, I may have very well been voting for him in that moment. But I was still able to figure out what to say to him to get him not to vote for me. I was able to get him to do what I wanted. I understood what arguments he needed to hear. I understood what his concerns in the game were, and I played to them. I tailored an argument. Theodora said:
I don’t believe this is true, because I don’t think Theodora understands how I was able to get Alex to side with me there (especially since she had failed to get Alex not to vote for me for the entire TC, despite her “superior” relationship with him). I don’t think she understands how much, from the beginning of this game, I was able to flip people who were against me to my side. From Liz to Harald to Maria to Pocatello to Alex, I took people who were gunning with me at various points and got them working with me right after. I did so by not being afraid to confront them and have honest conversations with them about why they were gunning for me, and how we could move past that and work together going forward. I don’t think Theodora is capable of doing that the same way I am. Nobody else in this game demonstrated the ability to shift a target off themselves nearly as well as I did. I was targeted the most in this game, from the very first TC (Saladin wanted me out!), and yet nobody could ever quite get to me. And on the second point, it’s yet to be determined, and we’ll see who ultimately wins this game. Given the tone of the questioning period, my social game seems like it was better than Theodora believed. I may have been questioned a bit for not being as bubbly as her, but I had my advocates. At least Augustus’s quote indicates I did a pretty good job here. Now, I want to talk with you all on a more personal level. Alex and Julius - you were both great competitors and rivals in this game. I respect you both tremendously, and I wish you the best. I appreciate the respect that you’ve shown me as well, especially over these past few rounds. I was fun. I hope you did as well. Maria, Harald, and Hannibal - it was great getting to know each of you. I think you three, more than anyone else, are the people by whom I didn’t do right. I chose expedience over our relationships, and in retrospect I could have afforded to let you guys know that I was voting for each of you. Harald, I appreciate your advocacy. Maria, I understand if a vote for me would be more against Theodora. Willem, Augustus, and Washington - I feel like you all didn’t get to see a ton of what I was doing in game, since the early merge was when I was mostly biding time (and, Willem, we never really got to play this game together). I hope I demonstrated over these last several rounds and within my responses here why I deserve to win over the other finalists. I hope I can be a winner that you are proud to stand behind. Pocatello - I hope I’ve given you enough sense of my person that you can vote for me here. Like I said, I definitely let the game get in the way of our relationship, and I should have stepped back a bit and just, like, talked. That said, I think you still got a good sense of who I am as a person, through the lens of how I played this game more so than me talking about what TV shows or video games I like or whatever other “things” we could have talked about. And Gilgamesh, that leaves you. It’s weird going back and rereading the TC where you went out, because you were tooting a very different horn than you have in this TC.
It’s weird, you’ve gone from this to saying that I did nothing strategically, and that I was saved by Alex because I didn’t position myself well at all in this game. I guess both can be true - you can recognize that I might win without personally advocating for my vote. Maybe you were just bullshitting here to save your ass. Only you can truly know. Regardless, I’m not sure how much you really got me in these final few rounds. And I don’t think I really understood you until now, either. During my callout at the F6 TC, I called you spineless and fearful, but I don’t think that was right. It’s not that you were afraid. It’s that you overvalue how bad a “mistake” is. I admit that I made mistakes. I made a lot of mistakes! The thing, and I don’t think you understand this, is that there isn’t a singular, “correct” way to play Survivor. Everything is contextual. The ultimate winner of the game is the person who made the right set of decisions and did things correctly for the set of circumstances that the game created. Something that could be “right” in one context could very much be “wrong” in another. You want to vote for a winner like Kim Spradlin. Or maybe Earl Cole. Maybe even a rougher domination like Todd Herzog. Parvati Shallow would have been good. And you know what? This game has a player who could have been that. His name is Alexander, and he’s chilling with you on the jury. Must have been a critical mistake! Because mistakes aren’t innately terrible things. Everyone’s going to make them, and you can’t let them paralyze you from trying to do things. I did a lot of shit in this game, too, because I wasn’t afraid of making mistakes. I took risks, and they paid off. I ultimately forced myself into an endgame that nobody really wanted me in. So when you ask “what did Boudicca do in this game. What strategic thing did she pull off?” Well, I ruined your game. And you can try to justify that it was Alex all you want, and it’s true that it wouldn’t have been possible without him, but I ultimately flipped him. That was all me, figuring out what would resonate with Alex’s agenda and putting it in front of his face with an offer too good to refuse. You can pretend that persuasion doesn’t exist for people on the outs, but it does, and I did a fucking excellent job of it. Oh, and by the way, I knew Alex had 2 double votes from basically right after the auction. I suspected he had the idol (Theo tried to talk me down from this at one point), because my intuition is pretty damn good. I understand that there’s a chance I don’t get your vote, because I don’t necessarily fit your model of what a “winning” player looks like. But there are a lot of winners who don’t. And maybe the fact that the person whose game played closest to how you think of a “winner” seems to intend on casting his vote for me indicates that maybe, just maybe, you’re the one who’s off base. So, that’s my piece for each of you. Before closing out, I’d like to say one more thing: We spent a lot of this FTC talking about mistakes, about what we could have done better. I want to end on the inverse note, though, of what I did well. Of the heights I was able to achieve because I was willing to try shit and, if it went wrong, figure out something else: I survived an America tribe that lost 1/2 its people before swapping out. I survived that tribe with the vote tying against me the second TC. I survived every member of that tribe going down before the merge. I pushed on and built new relationships and found a path forward. I survived a person who was gunning for me having an idol. I did just enough to dodge the idol, and then kept working on relationships with people who were against me so that they wouldn’t come for me the first chance they had. I survived by persuading the most dominant player in the game to change their vote in the last minute of the tribal council. 23 hours, 59 minutes of work, realized in a singular moment. I went from challenge zero in pre-merge to challenge hero post-merge. Top 2 in 7/9 challenges is pretty damn good by any standard. I did this all with no idols or no items in my pocket. I had nothing to fall back on but the very fundamentals of persuading people and winning challenges. If something I did failed, I had to bounce back on my own merit. This scene from Rocky represents the game I played well: Every time this game knocked me down, I got back up and kept pushing twice as hard. Bad luck, my own doings, it doesn’t matter. I never let a setback slow me down. That’s how winning is done. Win or lose, thank you for hearing me out. It has been an absolute pleasure playing with you. |
![]() |
|
| 1 user reading this topic (1 Guest and 0 Anonymous) | |
| « Previous Topic · Boudica · Next Topic » |








10:58 AM Jul 11