A
QUESTION OF LEADERSHIP
These are posts from a thread at Voted Off
that I started. You will see that the
very nature of this thread required feedback in order for me to demonstrate my point,
so I kept the posts made by other but deleted their names (protect the innocent
and all that). Those posts are in
italics.
This thread ran when there were seven players left in Survivor Amazon
and it pointed to the winner. This is
not a coincidence as a similar analysis done in each Survivor (I’m writing this
after Survivor Pearl Islands) would have pointed to the eventual winner six out
of seven times (the exception was Vecepia), though admittedly it can be tough
to make the connections through the heavily edited show.
The point is that the players in the game should be able to identify who
the favourite is to win and the last couple of seasons have shown that they are
not very good at doing this.
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It's interesting how often similar patterns come up in this
game. By this stage we always end up with a dominant alliance that is made up
of either three or four players intending on taking each other into the final
four. This alliance has always had one and only one leader, which is
interesting as the game structure itself allows two people to enter the final
stages of the game. |
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Heidi would take
Jenna. |
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I agree with erika...
Heidi & Alex would both pick Jenna. |
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In reply to:
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Alex would take
Jenna. |
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I'm not convinced the
A/R/J/H alliance is solid. And, its not about support for the final two, its
who you think you can beat. In that case, I think anyone would want Matthew
since they've all expressed what a fruitcake they think he is. |
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In reply to:
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Matt is the leader.
He's made them all think he's nuts and totally beatable. They'll all want to
be with him in the final two. Surprise, Matt wins. |
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It's certainly not beyond the realm or reason. |
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A completely self serving bump. |
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But why did you put
Jenna first in that alliance? |
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I didn't (though I would have). The folks in this thread did. |
Now I’ll be the
first to admit that defining support as the person that you would take into the
final two is not quite correct, though often it is. I just wanted to simplify it for purposes of
this thread. It is true, though, that
players tend to drift towards one player to draw support from and to support in
turn more than the others and it is really who that person is that I’m talking
about.
A good place to do
this for the first time is when there are nine players left. This is the point in the game that I like to
call the beginning of the middle-game and players will naturally find
themselves in one of three groups: dominant alliance, weaker alliance and weaker
tribe. Support, of course, is liable to
change and the dynamics of the game with it.
I think a better way is to draw a diagram, connecting players with
arrows, while at the same time splitting them into the three groups. I’ve taken the liberty of doing this for each
season. I’ll apologize in advance for
anyone having bad Venn Diagram flashbacks from school.
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Although Sean
was voting alphabetically, he never did vote for his own tribe, showing he
did have loyalty to the Tagi alliance, and the later stages of the game as
well as his final jury vote showed that this loyalty tended towards Richard,
putting Richard on top of the heap.
This hardly left Kelly and Sue defenseless though, as they could have
easily gotten support from the weaker tribe to remove Richard at a later
stage, but they never did. In the end,
the mutual support between Kelly and Sue broke down, leaving Richard, without
argument, in the cat-bird seat. |
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Austraila: |
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Keith’s
support of Tina was the difference here.
What was especially done well was how Tina and company dismantled the
opposing pairs, especially when it came to removing players, like Nick, Amber
and Roger, that may have been more drawn to Colby than to Tina. |
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Kelly’s
support over Kim Johnson, and in turn Ethan, gives Ethan a slight advantage
over Lex here, but of course Kelly was the next to go, so it never factored
in. What definitely did factor in
however was Lex’s increasing paranoia that eventually even led him to
question Tom’s loyalty. By the final
four, Tom was no longer supporting Lex, he was supporting Ethan putting Ethan
in the definite driver’s seat. |
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Marquesas: |
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I always considered
Zoe’s support to this four person alliance just one of convenience and, I
think, rather weak. Before the swap,
she seemed closer to the trio in the weaker alliance and I always thought
they could have made better use of her, especially Kathy. The key thing
to notice here is that Paschel has almost as much support as John, the current
leader. All he had to do was realize
it, and realize it he did as they pulled in Sean and Vecepia and
systematically disposed of the former dominant four. All through the rest of this game, Paschel
was the definite front runner until Vecepia won immunity at four and forced a
tie vote. In a new tie breaking
format, Paschel went even though he had no votes on him what-so-ever. No one ever said there were any guarantees
in this game. |
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Through
whatever methods, Brian and Penny were elected the unquestioned god and
goddess of their respective tribes.
Despite the obvious foolishness of the situation, the loyalty lines never
faltered and Brian slept-walked his way into the final two. |
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Amazon |
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Definitely the
most complicated situation as the combination of all male and all female
tribes with a pre-merge swap, collapsed many of the tribal loyalties. Jenna has the edge here because of the
strong mutual support between her and Heidi (unusually, the only such pairing
in this game) and the chain of support coming from Alex. What is really interesting is the support
that is going to Rob, but that he is not reciprocating. I believe he thought he had that support
from Alex, but it should have been fairly obvious to him that this was not
the case. Eventually Alex let Rob know
exactly where he stood in the dominant alliance, but by then Deena was
already gone. Rob did turn the table
on Alex and then Heidi, but Matt (perhaps taking his cue from Rob himself) no
longer was loyal to Rob and began playing solo. Ironically enough, the game went to Jenna,
the person originally in the cat-bird seat.
I guess this should be a lesson that you shouldn’t expect loyalty if
you are not prepared to give it. |
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Ah, the
symmetry. Christa and |
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Quite reminiscent of of Thailand, but The origins of this is a bit different. The original alliance appeared to be Rob, Amber and Tom, but when Jenna and Rupert came over when their own tribe was dissolved, Rob used the opportunity to make a final four deal with them. A rather strange thing to do in normal circumstances, but with these folks being friends before hand, this was a rather strange game. The apparent spark for this decision was a rumored pre-game pact between Lex and Tom that threw doubt into Rob's mind as to where Tom stood. The Alicia link began when Amber was the only player to go to the other tribe in a swap. Figuring she was gone, Alicia used the opportunity to nose into Rob's alliance. Perhaps not a bad idea, but when Amber came back I really cannot understand how Alicia could possibly believe her alliance with Rob was going to hold true. Personally, I don't think she did and was likely just planning on playing the hurt diva roll.
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