[Jeff Probst]

This is Loveita's Final Tribal Council Thread.

All other Jurors should remain in their own threads.

Loveita, you have until Sunday at 12c/1e pm to post your statements/questions to the Final 3. Remember not to take up too much of their time as they have 10 other jurors to get to. Please no listing or questions requiring novels for answers. You should post all of your statements/questions in your opening post in this thread.

[Loveita]

I guess I'll kick this off to give you maximum question answering time.

Alright you three, congrats on making it this far and stepping on many of us to do it. This was a hard ass game, and I know you all put in the work. My vote is assuredly undecided.


Although I talked up the fact I’ve been teaching statistics this semester, I also successfully defended my comprehensive exam during this game and got approval to move forward with my dissertation proposal. The research I do focuses on interpersonal perceptions, persuasion, and impression management. Considering a main tenet in Survivor is, “perception is reality”, I think my obsession with this game is fitting.


So, partly because it’s my research interest, and partly because I think the other jurors will ask questions more focused on strategy, those social topics are what I want you to focus on. I have the same general question(s) for all of you. And like any good college professor, I wrote my question in parts:

• First, when you agreed to play this game, how did you want the other players to perceive you (and how does this match/contrast with your personality)?

• Throughout this game, how did you work to manage that perception, or the perceptions others had of you in general? What communication strategies did you employ to manipulate the perception people had of you?

• Finally, the meta-aspect – how do you think the jurors in this game perceive you? How well does it align with your original intentions? And if it doesn’t, how have you worked against (or with) these perceived perceptions, even into these FTC statements and speeches, to turn our perceptions of you into winning votes?

[Russell]

Question 1

I wanted other people to feel like they were getting to know me. I’ve tried so hard in the past to cover up the less desirable aspects of how I come across on the internet, and the change I wanted to make this season is being more real and adaptable. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t lie or plan on lying, but in the moments that weren’t inherently strategic, I did want to do my best to let myself out of my shell a bit more. It might not have worked, I can’t be sure how well you each think you know me compared to others, but I know it’s a vast improvement from my past performances.

Before the game, I think it’s a little void to try to go in and control how players will perceive you without being so cagey you’re closed off. And, frankly, I’ve played plenty of games to know that how I’m perceived in one game- even with the exact same set of skills- can be entirely different than another game. The Russell you know can be adored in a game and he can be entirely loathed, because we are creating our own social structured as a group when we start getting to know each other and strategizing.

In that same vein, I’ve won being disliked. I’ve lost being loved. I’ve been playing these for a long time and I’ve experienced every combination in between. Trying to control how you’re perceived is futile, the real challenge is in reacting to it appropriately. If you’re beloved, how do you minimize your threat level? If you’re loathed, how to do you earn trust and respect? How you respond to your perception is a thousand times more important than the perception itself.

Questions 2 & 3

I’d like to answer these together because the themes of my answers kind of intertwine.

I didn’t try to manipulate anyone. I think some people might have that impression, because I did lie a good bit. I don’t believe that I duped a single person here. 80% of the time I was lying in this game it was because I was trying to avoid someone from knowing the truth, because I didn’t want to be caught in one of those carousels of loose lips that some people got caught in. The other 20% of the time I lied it was because I felt as though I had to keep up a “ruse” with the person I was talking to. The most insane part of this game was that, in every combination of two people, there was a different set of information that you had to operate on. I did feel as though I had to lie in these situations to hold the pretense of my connection with each individual.

Whenever I told a lie (or anyone else), the person listening had a very solid idea that I could be lying. We all had to take calculated risks based on the information we were receiving. For example, when I got Kim and Cass to throw their votes on Cat during your round, Lov, I had no pretense that Kim fully trusted me and believed me. In fact, she had JUST caught me leaking that information to Cat. She knew the risks and just took the best one possible and it didn’t pan out for her. It doesn’t mean her decision was bad and it doesn’t mean I played her. It just means I came out in the best position because the weighted risks worked out in my favor.

My goal in the game was to show people the side of me, outside of the strategic conversations, to show just how unserious I take myself and how little I really value the common Survivor ideals of manipulation and agency. I think this is definitely a weakness.

However, I will stick up to myself. People wrote me a LOT in this game to an almost comical extent. I cannot tell you how many conversations I was the first one to start. How many people I had to double message, triple message, or quadruple message. And this wasn’t deep into the game. I remember on our first tribe constantly having to push through messages, I remember on the swap tribe that the Fenrir majority would continually drop our conversations, and after the merge when people started hanging to the people that they knew. I do think that I deserve more social than I got credit for throughout the game, because if people didn’t get to know me, it definitely wasn’t for my lack of trying. I know the conventional wisdom is that, if there was a disconnect between a finalist and a juror, the responsibility lays on that finalist, but I think I want to push back on that wisdom a bit. Looking at the jury now, the only person I really believe put in more effort into getting to know me than I did them was Melinda.

In terms of managing my perception, I do think that I was consistently self-aware about my perception in the game throughout and used it to my advantage. Again, I wasn’t really necessarily concerned with changing these perceptions because, if I had, I wouldn’t be here and I wouldn’t have been given the opportunities to make the moves I did.

I think I had plenty of conversations with people where I referred to myself as a goat from probably like the Cristina vote on. I think one of the largest mistakes people can make in a game is letting competent people get a goat label attached to them, because you’re pretty much giving them a free pass to slide by and slit your throat when they get the chance. It’s like an implicit blessing. You, Joaq, Cat, Cass, Tammy, Penner, and many more knew this but still enabled me and Yve to slide by. Everyone who loses survivor is implicitly setting up the game for the person who wins. I do think I maximized this over-the-top goat level because I was able to offer myself as a shield to Joaq and Cat for the early part of the game, it allowed me to get the vote off of me when it came to target me/Joaq/Tammy by going to you, Loveita, and proactively suggesting we vote out Tammy. The Tammy/Joaq split is your move, but I do deserve a bit of credit for removing my parma-target that round.

I think my success is a combination of two strangely opposed perceptions: people underestimated my ability to be socially effective while simultaneously believing that I was strategically savvy. There were so many times in this game where someone, despite having ignored my IMs for days at a time, would message me “so you know you gotta blindside Joaquins soon right???” and I’d be forced to play the “oh yea totally I know!” bit. This weird dynamic made people believe that I was always someone they could come to if they wanted to get a vote together, but they didn’t necessarily expect me to turn whatever was happening into my favor.

In terms of jury perception, there’s mixed feelings. Joaq said people are struggling with my self-awareness and I want to make it very clear that I am not going to sit here at this FTC and pretend I duped any of you, ran the game, or am some sort of mastermind. I recognize that I was propelled here through a goat status, but that doesn’t mean I coasted. I took advantage of my perception and took action even when I didn’t have to. I have a lot of strategic, socially, and competitive aspects of my game that are worthy of your respect and your vote.

Let me know if you need any more Loveita, this was very cathartic to write and I hope it covers everything. Can’t wait to hear about your proposal after the game <3

[Loveita]

I'm glad writing it was cathartic, because now I feel bad about how much you wrote. Thank you for your answer!

And to the other two finalists - I know there's a lot of questions in my "question" - you don't need to be exhaustive. Should have mentioned that up front (I'm not trying to make you all write me real essays)

[Yve]

• First, when you agreed to play this game, how did you want the other players to perceive you (and how does this match/contrast with your personality)?

When I agreed to play this game, I had been away for seven years and truly lost perspective on who I used to be in ORGs. I played from the years 2002-2013, and by the end I was being targeted at the beginning of games for who I was. In open ID games, the dynamic of working with the same people over and over again meant you either had to work with them now and forever, or risk never being able to work with them again. In closed ID games, folks would recognize my personality immediately, and target me for that as well. It stopped being fun.

If this was 2013, I'd say people saw me as a fun time. Someone who was open to working with everyone for an opportunity. Catalie and Melinda have known me the longest, and Catalie openly called me opportunistic, and someone who tells people what they want to hear. I could see where she was coming from with both of those things, and I'm sure she's felt that way for over 10 years now, because I remember hearing it before.

Since I knew this would probably be my last game, I wanted to just put myself out there 100% and be my authentic self throughout the process. I wanted to be seen as real person and player people would play with. Someone who could be both saved and savior. A person who you could count on paying you back if you helped them, but then never ask for anything in return if they helped you out.

• Throughout this game, how did you work to manage that perception, or the perceptions others had of you in general? What communication strategies did you employ to manipulate the perception people had of you?

This was easy for me, as everyone had a very similar opinion of me and it was easy to get a group perspective on how I was perceived. In my answer to Joaquin's question, I mentioned how I was universally listed as a negative answer in the "Who sucks/Is great" challenge. Instead of genuinely feeling down and giving up on my game, I decided to project the feelings other people would expect me to have onto them. In the interest of coming up with another example, I won't delve too deeply into that one.

Whenever you have an opportunity in this game to manipulate the perspective of you, you have to take it. When Melinda got me to vote for Russell in the Tribal where Cristina left, I was in trouble. I had broken so many promises to so many people by trusting Melinda with my life and my vote. I was immediately seen as someone who would vote however THEY wanted to, not how their alliance wanted. What was the complete opposite of this position? Giving your vote to another player.

I went to Joaquin, Tammy, and Russell offering my vote to them. I told them I would go to the hosts and ask them if I could give up my vote for the round to them all. The correct move for me to play that round socially was to vote with the three of them, anyway. So I might as well make a big show of how sorry I was, otherwise I was going to be an open target from both sides. If they knew I went to the trouble of going to the hosts for confirmation, they knew it was true and they could "use" me for their cause, even if I had openly voted against it in the tribal council beforehand. For the record, Danni said that she "didn't know and had to talk to Jeff" and that she didn't think it would happen, I told her to not worry about it, then copy/pasted the part of our conversation to make it look like she told me no outright.

Whenever I'm conflicted about a strategy, I take a step back and look outside the box, but still within the limits of the game's rules. If you can hit a group with a strategy with little to no precedence in this situation, they're more likely to follow you.

• Finally, the meta-aspect – how do you think the jurors in this game perceive you? How well does it align with your original intentions? And if it doesn’t, how have you worked against (or with) these perceived perceptions, even into these FTC statements and speeches, to turn our perceptions of you into winning votes?

I think the jury thinks of me as someone who had to fight my way from the bottom to here. Almost every single member of the jury attempted to vote for me at one point or another with the intention of my removal from the game. But, "somehow," another threat always took the place of me. Or when my name stuck around long enough to head to tribal, I worked hard to show one or two people my value to their game as compared to the other target.

I attempted to make sure my game was well seen and documented throughout. Of course, being the de facto go-to vote when no one wanted to bring up their actual target was never going to be a good look for the winner. Because of the position I was in due to Tammy's flipping on Cochran at the swap (a great move for her that I respect completely), I was on the outside of every possible groupthink alliance. From that point on, I knew my game would always be about surviving each round as it came by any means necessary, and once the endgame hit I would make my moves. And if possible, work to set up a contingency plan for the next round based on two things: if my plan worked without a hitch, or it barely got me by. If it worked and I wasn't a target, I would focus completely on getting out someone who I felt would be a threat to me if I made it to the end. If I was unsuccessful, I focused instead on making sure I would be able to stick around the next round.

In short, I believe the jury sees me as a fighter who never gave up. This is true, I threw every single situation at the wall for any possible advantage to move forward. After Melinda was removed, my game started to gain steam. Outside of when you were voted out, I feel like I played a very successful game once I was able to work on my perception of being someone who could be easily eliminated. It's simple- if you keep trying to vote someone out and it never takes, you eventually move onto another plan. I was un-killable. In removing me as a threat to be voted out, I became the biggest threat to all of the actual threats in the game. I don't know how more meta you can get than that.

[Yve]

I know there's a lot of questions in my "question" - you don't need to be exhaustive. Should have mentioned that up front (I'm not trying to make you all write me real essays)

Ooops. Just saw this.

[Loveita]

Thank you for your answer! You're pretty too <3

[Stephanie]

Congrats on all the accomplishments with your comprehensive exam and dissertation proposal! You know this as we discussed this early on in the game, but I was a psychology major myself who graduated just last year and we discussed some aspects of the field, so these types of questions and your research in general is right up my alley. Less so the statistics aspect, as I told you that was my least favorite part of the degree (would gladly never see SPSS' face again!!), but you get what I mean! Like you I definitely see the psychological aspect of ORGs and Survivor in general, and how they're interrelated, so it's not surprising in that sense that my passion for both is intertwined.

When I agreed to play this game, I wanted others to perceive me as someone they could trust, confide in and open up to, both on a personal level and in a game sense. I wanted to be perceived as someone people could work with, but not someone who was a threat to their games and at the same time someone who was a key component to their games and their own success. I strived for that balance because in my eyes there are two main reasons people would vote you off in these games and they are i) they don't see a place for you in their games ii) they see you as a threat to their games. I knew if I could keep those two aspects and the perception of me in check then I was extremely confident coming into this that I could make it to the end, and lo and behold here I stand.

I never wanted to be perceived as being too much in the spotlight for reasons which were good or bad, and to attribute it to the F10 survey I'd say I'm someone who wouldn't want to be answered for the negative qualities that Russell/Yve had thrown at them and be perceived as easy to beat in that sense, but at the same time never wanted to be seen as the qualities that the likes of Catalie/Joaquin had thrown at them which made them seem most threatening to beat. I knew either end of the spectrum was a recipe to get a bunch of votes thrown my way which for obvious reasons we all want to avoid, and I do believe I effectively achieved that better than my fellow finalists given there was never any real threat of me being eliminated, with just Cassandra and Courtney voting for me alone.

I'd say this matches with my personality to some degree as I am in general more laid back and a listener than a talker who enjoys learning about other people than necessarily talking about myself, and someone who wants to seem approachable rather than someone who pushes people away. There are a few reasons why I pursued a psychology major and looking at some of the other jurors' questions I may talk about other aspects elsewhere, but the one which I believe applies here is that I do genuinely enjoy learning about what makes other people tick, also why I am the way that I am, and I did consider myself going along the career path of a psychologist, and am currently in a "gap year" of sorts (need some time off from writing research papers!) while I decide whether or not I want to complete the further studies next year in order to obtain that, because I do want to make sure if I spend the next forty years of my life in a job it's one I find rewarding and has just as much of a positive influence on me as I'd hope it has on those around me. So I do think there's a link between how me as a psychologist would try to make people feel at ease to open up to me and trust me to better their lives in terms of how I'd want to be perceived in this game, being someone who people could open up to without feeling threatened by, and trust to their benefit.

I think one negative jury perception of me from the jury might be I was someone who was a bit under-the-radar and seen as the less dominant figure in my duo with Catalie. I can't blame anyone for having that perception, obviously we'd played the entire game together and she was a social and strategic force and I'd never take her accomplishments away from her, but it was obviously a perception I was actively trying to shake in the game, and I brought it up in my opening statement, how I was making moves (e.g. against Joaquin) which benefitted my game even if they hurt hers.

In terms of communication strategies employed to manipulate that perception people had of me, I did bring up at times that I wasn't afraid to vote separately from Catalie or make moves behind her back, and I was serious about that and actively proved it. I know this is something I brought up to you and also Penner, the weekend of the F10/9 double round, in terms of making a move against Joaquin whether Catalie wanted it or not. I was very determined for people to take me seriously and perceive me as my own individual player rather than me and Catalie as a pair, and I followed through with that in terms of my Joaquin votes at final nine and seven, and even if they hurt her I knew I'd have a viable path to the end without her.

Catalie openly told me she was annoyed at me after voting out Joaquin at seven and siding with the Fenrirs because it screwed her chances of making the end, which I definitely understood and told her as much. I told her point blank that I knew it was bad for her game but I made the decision based on what was in my own best interests and ultimately that's how I was playing this. I did communicate this to the rest of the players in the aftermath so they knew I wasn't afraid of upsetting Catalie to make my own self-serving moves even if they were ultimately to her detriment.

Perhaps the timezone thing on certain nights created a perception I wasn't as invested as I'd like to be as some mornings I had work commitments I couldn't get out of, but really relished the opportunity for the final four challenge to actively prove to the jury and also myself how far I'm willing to myself for something I want extremely badly, and I think that can not only be applied to this game but my goals I'll lay out for myself in life in general. When I want something bad and am facing hardships, there isn't going to be anything or anyone who'll stop me from achieving it and I'll carry that with me forever.

To tie it all in together and address your final question, I think my perception now I'm sitting in the final three is a player who was underestimated and I was able to turn any negative perceptions into positives (playing for my own best interests and against Catalie's when it mattered, putting in more effort into the final immunity challenge than the other three players combined to prove I how much I want this if there were any doubts), and that's what I'm actively conveying in my opening statement and jury responses to turn them into winning votes over my opponents.

The perception I strived for was one where I never wanted to be seen as someone who was "unlikable" like Russell or the "biggest goat" like Yve, because that'd make me into an easy target as happened to them in the early merge especially where they very easily could've been eliminated because they were easy compromises, and on the flip side I didn't want to be perceived as the most liked or the biggest threat to win because that'd backfire on me in the long run too, so overall I think achieved the perception of somewhere in the middle I strived for in order to make the end, and any negative perceptions which might hinder my chances of winning I was and am able to effectively counteract and spin into positives, and I have faith you and the rest of the jury will see the merits of that.

[Loveita]

Thank you for your answer! Can't wait to see how you answer the others' questions.

As my final comment - I think all three of you really are great players, each with unique pros and cons to your games - which is why this vote is going to be so difficult. Best of luck!