Something weird happened on the Survivor season finale tonight.<\/p>\n
This post may require some knowledge into the history of Survivor winners and also some general Survivor knowledge.<\/p>\n
Generally, two types of contestants win the game: maniuplators and robo-Survivors. Manipulators do very well in the social game and either fly under the radar but still pull the right strings or take alliance leadership reins from the get-go and never let go. Robo-Survivors just keep winning challenges after the merge and never give people a chance to vote them out.<\/p>\n
The rest of the cast is filled out by those who can\u2019t walk the fine line between being aggressive and being bossy, those judged too physically weak to help win challenges, those judged too likable to be a threat in the finals, and coat-tail riders.<\/p>\n
Russell, on this past season, was one of the most blatant and cocky manipulators I\u2019ve ever seen. He managed to, from day one, convince people to trust him when they shouldn\u2019t have and sway and dictate votes for nearly every tribal council. He went into the finals with two allies of his (but, really, who wasn\u2019t an ally of his at one time or another?) and he ended up losing.<\/p>\n
And not even to the charismatic handsome bro-date-worthy doctor who managed to win an immunity challenge and consistently get votes against him because he was a threat!<\/p>\n
This is the first time I\u2019ve actually seen a coat-tail-rider win the game for no other reason than the fact that the person who actually played the game better was too obnoxious and dislikable to vote for.<\/p>\n
Which makes me wonder: is this a one-time thing? Was this just the people the jury was composed of this time, or has there been an actual ground-level shift in the thinking of Survivor? Does \u201cOutwit, Outlast, Outplay\u201d no longer actually tell the whole story?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a bit like running a perfect political campaign, only to find out after the votes come in that the people are now basing their votes off of your congressional voting record. Sure, it\u2019s a valid criteria, but that\u2019s not how the game has been played<\/em>. Who would have guessed that basing your play style off of the winners of the past 18 seasons was actually a bad idea?<\/p>\n Certainly not me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Something weird happened on the Survivor season finale tonight. This post may require some knowledge into the history of Survivor winners and also some general Survivor knowledge. Generally, two types of contestants win the game: maniuplators and robo-Survivors. Manipulators do very well in the social game and either fly under the radar but still pull […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[57],"class_list":["post-671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-year26","tag-tv","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}