“I’m a very smart business woman”
-Something smart business people say all the time

The same people that think Sandra deserved her first win and Russell deserved to lose.

100% this. Olders absolutely can not stand a kid getting one over on them.

"Theyve still got a lot to learn"

Who is youngest ever winner? That Adam guy was pretty young.

https://screenrant.com/survivor-ten-youngest-winners/

Hannah got robbed. (She’s younger)

This sums it up well for me too.
The editors deserve a lot of the blame imo

Hannah took nearly 15 minutes to vote at the first tribal she went to and that likely contributed massively to people thinking she was a bad player and she was never really able to recover from that.

On this season, the reality is that Xander just didn't have a very good social game. Yeah it was always going to be very tough for him to win because of his age but he needed to form stronger connections with people other than Ricard and maybe Evvie. Also him not putting himself into fire making and beating Erika was a bad move. Erika played a smart UTR game and was up against two people who had poor social games and that's why she won.

I enjoyed this season, but they definitely cast a few too many bad players. Tiffany being the only player over 35 who had a clue how to play was a bit of a misstep by production, and hopefully the older people on 42 are better.

Based on the TV edit for Samoa I can see why you'd think that. But Russell got a great edit in Samoa and they hid how awful he was to people. He would laugh at people he'd just voted out when they went to grab their torch for instance and he was obviously pretty sexist too. No one wants to give the money to a twat like that.

Focused on woke survivor instead of editing it properly. Don't necessarily want to blame the editors since they were probably instructed to make it woke.

Been thinking about this and obviously is his best win equity option, but if it's still 100k 2nd, 50k 3rd and dust for the remainder, as an assumedly poor 20 year he mighta just wanted to secure the bag and get that 50/100 with a chance of winning, rather than risking getting 10k or whatever the give the rest.

Did Xander get 3rd place because he is a white male? Weak

Fyp

Some people have really watched 41 seasons of these shows and blame the jury on semi-close decisions. You don't understand the show after all these years....

Blame Canada

See, most of the support I saw for Xander on Survivor twitter was from people rooting for him to survive another week because he was on the bottom and Liana made that over-the-top comment about literally hating his face. It may seem silly, but I think anytime a player says something like that you will have a decent % of fans rally around the Xander in that situation unless the person is being a huge jerk to everyone.

And I realize you haven't been posting nonstop about Xander ITT- your takes on him just seemed overly negative/biased about someone who I think played a decent game.

*Oh, and I don't subject myself to Survivor facebook (shudders), so I can't speak to any discussion there.

Your post last week about being convinced that Deshawn would win unanimously felt a bit like emotional hedging to me. I know you were very confident about Michelle winning last season as well, and I'm sure you were disappointed when she got blanked. IIRC after Tony won you didn't say anything about him playing well, just posted something about how men had won 6 times in a row and gotten almost all the jury votes during that run.

*Erika did get an odd edit for a winner, though I think that's partly because Shan dominated so much of the screen time early on.

I was fine with Erika as the winner. Under the radar is not a terribly sexy style, but it's a valid method for certain types. If you can get taken to the end by someone else, and then crush that person in jury votes, you must have done something right...or the person who took you did something quite terribly wrong. It seems fire making glory is perhaps not that big of a deal on one's resume in hindsight.

I think this season highlighted how dumb 3 tribes are. Erika got dragged to merge without going to tribal once. Wasn't in on many votes beyond being a number. That person shouldn't win other than through a bitter jury.

Deshaun wanted to throw a challenge just to boot her (terrible strategy in itself). Being a petulant child cost him the $1M. Not getting along with Shan in the "for the culture" alliance when you are just arguing about the boot order is egregiously bad play.

Xander had to claw his way to the merge, play from the bottom, win challenges and use an idol. I can respect that game even tho he wasn't voting people out.

No good storylines out of this season so I understand the heavy Shan edit. Her aggressive play was at least entertaining.

I wish I could quit watching this show but I'll see ya next season. Drop the 4 keep the 2.

After the last three Australian Survivor seasons having an extremely telegraphed winners edit, I watched s41 thinking Deshawn would win on nothing but his edit alone.

As I said above i'm very happy I was wrong as I can now go into season 42 knowing a player can be invisible in the whole pre merge and still win. I want to be surprised and not have the result spelt out for me like i'm a child.

At the time I was never particularly confident Michelle was going to win. I was confident very early on based on her episode 1-3 content she would make a very deep run and she did.

I thought Tony's edit was too OOT obvious to be a winners edit and actually had Sophie down as my winners pick based on the edit, but it turned out that it wasn't and the obvious edit got the win.

This season definitely gets the award for most FPS play by non thinking players. It's like amateur poker players watching a big bluff get pulled off on tv and then they don't understand why it didn't work when they tried it at the table.

It really was hard to root for someone this season. There were a few players that got voted out pre-merge that I think had a lot of potential for good gameplay, or at the very least good entertainment.

Ye'p cant say I was rooting for or overly impressed by anyone's gameplay this season.

Enjoyed Sydney as a villain and Broccoli Brad as the wacky wild card but that's about it really

I also think the fact it was a much shorter timeline contributed to the lack of ability to game play as we usually see. Those extra days, especially premerge create sometimes stronger bonds between players. And there were so many gimmicks and things going on the actual strategy of Survivor was watered down quite a bit. In less than two weeks they had merged and voted out six people. It's usually about another week together in a regular season.

Outside of this season, would you say that clawing yourself from the bottom is a good thing?

You say Xander clawed his way to the merge but there's actually zero evidence that Xander knew he was on the bottom. It just happened because he won the challenges, that's why he was willing to save Evvie at the first tribal council. Also the same applies to Erika. I'm just not sure why one is perceived as "being dragged" and the other is perceived as clawing his way to the merge and nobody here has made a strong distinction. My view, which I feel is more consistent is that Deshawn definitely played better than both of them for the first half of the game and threw it away by being an emotional mess.

Also both Erika and Xander won the same amount of challenges, Erika more if you count from the tribal level and she had more influence over the game. Still yet to see the argument folks.

I would say it was edited pretty badly, for contrast imagine how season 40 would have been edited if they only gave us info to root for the underdog - Michele. It's not like anyone here is making a coherent argument saying that she should've beaten Tony based on having to claw herself up to the top.

Ye'p totally agree about both Xander and Deshawn. I actually really enjoyed Xander as a character, the boy was an absolute quote machine, but he was a goat and I don't know how anyone can argue against it.

Deshawn's end game reminded me so much of Ian in Palau. I think he got to the emotional state where he may have forfeited fire for Danny or Liana if they were still live

I imagine Erikas winning game will end up being seen similarly to Danni Boatwright or Sophie Clarke. Dismissed by many in the short run due to being an underedited character but appreciated more in the long run.