Thread:BarBar/@comment-1734566-20150409013113/@comment-25214396-20150413201315

Let's be clear: Philippines is one of the best post-HvsV seasons with great characters, SJDS comes cloes with an amazing merge, Cagayan comes near with a nearly flop end and then we go on with the EW seasons and... I'm going to answer your lame answers to everything because NOTHING ELSE MATTERS ONLY EDIT.

Natalie A. sucks because she didn't have a character until the merge... what is this TD where you need a character to be great? There is a reason she won the game with 0 votes and by a 6-1-1 vote (Reed's bitter vote for Jaclyn is disgusting). Plus, she screaming at Rocker exposed him.

Candice and Marissa's hate for Brad Cuntpepper wasn't at all without reason: Candice got mad due to her boyfriend being sent to RI and Marissa because she knew Brad was the mastermind for her elimination.

RANT MODE FOR THE SOPHIERCE G.ODDESS:

From Day 1 to Day 39, Sophie was the player on Upolu best placed to take home the million dollars; and, as soon as Upolu gained the majority at the merge, Sophie became the favourite to win. She began the game in a solid alliance with Coach, Albert, Brandon, and Rick, and had good relationships with Mikayla – whom she and Albert had convinced that the three of them were close – and Edna, whom she was able to bond with as the only other female presence on Upolu (disregarding Mikayla). Within that group both Rick and Edna thought that Sophie wanted each of them in her F3, and she had a loose agreement with Coach and Albert which later developed into a formal F3 pact. She was distant from Christine and Stacey, but so were the rest of the tribe, as shown by everyone’s willingness to boot them early. As a result the premerge was without incident, with the exception of the Mikayla boot: after discussion with Coach and Albert she settled on booting Mikayla, but the choice was largely irrelevant as Edna and Mikayla would play the same role in the endgame anyway.

After the merge, the Pagonging of Savaii was predictable and correct: although Albert made many appeals for her to shake up the game, she trusted in the relationships she had built with her tribemates enough to know that she would be well positioned in an all-Upolu endgame. Similarly, she knew that any possible marginal benefit that would accrue to her from keeping Cochran and/or Edna around would be outweighed by the difficulty in dragging them to the end as goats – their only real purpose. Going into the F5 everyone knew that Brandon and Rick were the biggest jury threats left in the game; so if Sophie could realistically hope to beat Coach and Albert then she was set up perfectly, as the natural outcome of that F5 is a F3 in which she wins. When Brandon won immunity at F5 her position became precarious, as anything other than a Rick boot would leave her unable to win the game and Brandon was now targeting her. However, this stroke of bad luck was balanced out by Brandon, at Albert’s prompting, deciding to give up immunity. Ozzy reentered the game from RI and won the second F5 IC, making Rick the consensus boot. It was here that Sophie broke down at TC, which fortunately ended up helping her as it served to humanize her in the eyes of the jury. She then managed to win the F4 IC, preventing Ozzy from sneaking into the F3 and giving her another achievement that would be appreciated by the jury. These two factors combined to make her more popular with the jurors which, in conjunction with an excellent FTC performance (both in relative terms and on its own merits), gave her the win.

To return to an earlier theme, if Sophie could be sure of beating Coach and Albert in a jury vote, she wins the game very easily (assuming that the ICs went her way); however, this was by no means certain. The events that helped bring about her win only happened after the point at which she needed to start making her endgame decisions. This meant she had to rely on a lot of things outside her control going the way she needed in order for her plans to come together properly.

It’s a mistake to describe Sophie as an UTR player in the same way that the term is often used of people like Natalie White. There’s a clear and important difference between maintaining the status quo as a conscious strategy and inertia for a lack of other options; I’d argue that Sophie is an example of the former, and Natalie one of the latter. The strategy that Natalie is best able to employ happened to be the one best suited to winning Samoa, but if circumstances demanded a different approach I’m not convinced that she could recognize this and adapt accordingly. She is the sort of player who doesn’t necessarily think ‘strategically’ but rather relies on her excellent social skills to guide her through most situations. By contrast, Sophie thinks about the game theoretically at a higher level than a lot of winners, which goes a long way towards compensating for her comparatively weak social skills. She also doesn’t seem results-oriented about her win, which is an excellent quality for a player to have. She seems like she could do very well if she were to return for another season, and would likely do well in a random season (the best yardstick for judging a player’s overall competency).