OPENING STATEMENT

Sorry it took so long for the opening statements to get posted, but I was on a train with bad wifi and got delayed. As per usual, Ron will follow close behind me and Draco will show up 30 minutes before deadline.

First off, thank you hosts, and thank you players for making this a memorable season. From Lockhart's idol play, to the meme of non-consensual alliance chats, to the entire character that was Snape, I feel like there were a lot of iconic things this season that will hopefully find their own treasured places in Enchanted lore.

Now Draco, Ron and I all have a chance to prove that we deserve to be cast as the protagonist of the Enchanted 2 story and to be a large part of the lore from this season. And as a huge Harry Potter fan, I can't help but be reminded of a thought exercise I used to do when I was young and reading through the Harry Potter series for the 4th or 5th time while home sick or at 2am in the morning with a flashlight under my blankets. I used to look at the entire Harry Potter universe and realize that regardless of how big or small a role they had in the text in front of me, every character had their own story of what they did through the timeframe of all seven books (or in the case of Cedric, 4 books). After creating the rich Wizarding World that we see in the books, J.K. Rowling could have chosen any character to follow and the way we would experience all the events as readers would have been entirely different.

Now some of these would be fascinating stories.

Lord Voldemort and the Sorcerer's Stone would be a heist story of desperate man trying to regain his lost power by stealing a treasured item out from under the nose of his arch-nemesis Dumbledore. The scene where the Weasley twins throw snowballs at Quirrell's turban would be a frantic near failure instead of the throwaway line it is in the Harry Potter version.



Ginny Weasley and the Chamber of Secrets would be a dark story of the internal struggle of a lovestruck girl in a new environment who faces fears that she is losing her own sanity as attacks happen around her and she begins to believe she may be responsible.



Neville Longbottom and the Deathly Hallows would be the story of an unlikely emerging young leader in a political revolution who bravely defies authority figures in a noble quest to defeat evil and injustice with a ragtag team of followers.



All of these stories would be compelling and deserve to be told almost as much as Harry's stories do. Like Harry, these are complex characters who are completely invested in solving the problems they encounter, and ambitiously trying to defeat incredible obstacles head-on. They play a pivotal role in the most important events that occur at Hogwarts in their respective years, shaping how everyone else experiences the school year. If you removed them from the narrative, the story of Harry Potter and the wizarding world would have gone very differently.

I think Mirabella deserves to be a main character too.

So without further ado, I present the plot outline to



I want to say that I worked my fins off pursuing bold and creative strategies to advance my position in the game from day one, but that wouldn't be the most accurate statement.

The most accurate statement would be that I worked my fins off pursuing bold and creative strategies to advance my position from Day -14.

Because the first thing I did after applying to this game was start making fake item plans. I think most of you would have already seen the Instagram account (thank you Angelina for spreading the word), but if you haven't:

https://www.instagram.com/enchantedsurvivor2/

I made this a week and a half before the game started with no plans on sharing it with anyone until merge. I wanted to put three weeks between the upload date on the photos and when I actually started sharing it around so that no one would suspect I had just made the account to bluff people. I also had some backup options for item bluffs involving a crypto (I had to throw this out when the Ravenclaw idol was a crypto puzzle), a jigsawplanet link and a twitter account, but I think the Instagram one was the most convincing, so I went with that and I never had to use the others. This instagram account will show up again later in the story so this paragraph is basically the prologue. The Fish Who Lived.



Check-ins start! And open communications check-ins are a headache, but they are also a huge opportunity that I take advantage of to create social bonds. In particular, there are six people who I manage to build a good relationship with before tribes are made: Pomfrey, Fred, Maxime, Lockhart, Rita and Hagrid. The first three names on that list end up becoming three of my closest allies after merge even though pomfrey was never on a tribe with me pre-merge and fred was only once. Lockhart and I have an exciting and unpredictable relationship and the last two are probably not going to be relevent for the rest of this FTC.

When Cedric posts the twists, and I find out the Ravenclaw idol is hidden somewhere with instructions saying "go back to a familiar land, " I instantly suspected tribe camps. But we didn't have those yet. Then I thought of last season's board and nothing was there. I wanted to use the last few hours of open-communications to test who I could trust so I figured I might as well plant an idol. But it was too soon for my recently created accounts. So I made a profile on the old board called "Ravenclaw Idol" and far too many people fell for it.

http://www.ndimforums.com/survivorhogwarts/profile.asp?memberid=48

The goal here, other than to have a lot of fun pointing people away from wherever the real idol was hidden, was to see who would trust me enough to mention the idol to me if they found it on the old forum. The immediate answer was Fred and him sharing that information with me was a crucial building block of our relationship in the game. I also had a great conversation with Hagrid about it and Angelina would bring it up later correctly pointing out that the word "phoenix" was spelled wrong. I was really paranoid that I would spell phoenix wrong in my conversations with her again at some point and give myself away.



Hours later, while I was grabbing the Gryffindor idol, the tribe camps were posted along with the real Ravenclaw clue. I found that cryptogram as soon as I stopped celebrating my Gryffindor idol snatch and I think i was too amped up because I spent over an hour on that cryptogram and Amos must have grabbed it before me. I proceeded to share the cryptogram clue with Fred after I realized it had been taken and Fred solved it in about 5 minutes. I'm not sure what 3 idol Mira would have looked like but we were pretty close to finding out.

These are just a few of the things I did before tribes were assigned.

This post is going to get even more incredibly long if I go through every round in that much detail but my point here is that I worked hard at every stage of the game to create the foundations I would later use for future success.

For the sake of not drowning you in words, I'm going to have to do some skipping around to highlight five key chapters:

1) The Snape Vote

This was a round where my social game was crucial. Snape had hand-picked our tribe and made it very clear I was his target, so I needed to be able to create solid enough bonds to get a majority of people to turn against the person who chose them to be on his tribe. Thankfully I was able to reconnect with Newt pretty quickly. I already had a good relationship with Draco as I had made pains to connect with him when he was the odd man out on my first swap tribe. And, I had never been on a tribe with Ron but I was able to launch a charm offensive so effective that Ron stayed by my side for the rest of the game.

Ron told me about the idol nullifier but i was still worried about snape or amos having an idol so we split the votes and acted like amos was going home, ultimately getting amos to play an idol when he wasn't our main target. By the time the vote tied, newt Ron and Draco were loyal enough to me that they were willing to keep me with an idol over snape without an idol on the revote.


2) The Merge

I think the auction was a pretty good example of me taking advantage of every opportunity I got to improve my position through any creative advantage I could find. I already had a reputation as an item searcher. So I knew people would be worried about me if I bought the item finding Niffler. But I instantly bid on it because I knew I had the perfect excuse to use the Instagram account. I was able to go to more than half the players in the game and build trust with them by appearing to openly share the secret account that Whiskers the Niffler had found. It was important for me to tell all my key allies about it to assure them I was still loyal to them at merge and it was importa t to tell Angelina about the account so that she would think I still trusted her. I knew at that point that she was looking to avenge snape and figured she would spread word of the account with her alliances.

While other people were rewatching the chamber of secrets movie looking for clues about the account, the real Niffler prize was a map of which items were in which chests on the forum for the slytherin idol. Eventually I would make a alliance chat with Ron and Draco, tell them which chests to open and get them to pass me their prizes so that I could search for the idol. I offered to share so that each of them would also be able to attempt but unsurprisingly, neither of them wanted to commit the time to do the lengthy day long potion recipe required.

At the end of the merge round, it was pretty clear my large merge alliance chat was fake, but I knew I had enough votes that the other side couldn't vote split. With everyone on the other side being quiet towards me and not trying to mislead me about the vote I correctly assumed people were hoping to spook me into using the idol and I held onto the idol for a second consecutive tribal.


3) The Lockhart Vote

This was a crazy round and Lockhart deserves most of the credit for the result, so I don't want to claim i was the mastermind here. I want to discuss it anyway though because everyone is going to be talking it for a long time. You can't plan for Gilderoy to give up his immunity necklace or give his idol to someone in an opposing alliance, you can only adapt to that information as you learn it. But Gilderoy's target was Fred, and I wasn't going to let that happen. I pushed hard to get the vote on someone more important to the large alliance like Pomfrey or Lockhart and Ron backed me up. Eventually the vote fell on Lockhart because he had told Maxime the idol pass had to be a secret between the two of them, and then he told Ron, Draco and myself about it.

30 minutes before the votes were due, Draco came online for the first time in 20 hours. We told him to vote for Fred and he did that without questioning it.

And in the end, it was my idol play that actually eliminated lockhart when a 5-3-2-1 vote became a 3-1 vote after idols.


4) The Angelina Vote

Without a doubt, this was the most important vote for me. It completely changed the game dynamics and instantly put my in a power position that I never gave up. And I can take credit for the entire plan.

I knew Ron would go along with any plan,


(He told me he wanted to use this gif but he thinks it makes him look bad so I'm using it)

and I knew Pomfrey and Fred had wanted Angelina gone the prior round until Angelina caught wind of it through Maxime and they became worried the plan was too risky. I needed to approach them with a plan that I could guarantee would work, would give us an indefinite voting majority, and would only involve people who were trusted not to leak any details (not Draco). So I revealed my idol to Pomfrey, Fred and Ron and asked for the four of us to vote as a block. With four votes, the other side couldn't successfully do a vote split and I could nullify all the votes if Pom and Fred could ensure I was the target. If the other side did insist on splitting, we would try to push the second target on to Draco so that even if votes not in our alliance were united, it would be a 4-4 tie between two people not in our group of four. We would have a majority in the re-vote and still vote out Angelina.

Then, the plan was to use Fred's heir advantage to petrify someone at F8 so that our alliance would have a 4-3 majority for that vote and a straightforward path to the F4.

I pitched that entire plan to Ron, Pomfrey and Fred, got them all on board and then we executed it perfectly. When the vote split target fell on Draco, i knew my idol would almost certainly not be necessary, and I faced a tough decision. But if I held onto the idol, I would have to explain why I did so after setting up the plan by revealing it and promising to use it. It would risk losing the trust of my alliance and it would guarantee that my hyper-threat status would be amplified to the point where I could be targeted at F7 or F8. On the other hand, playing the idol would reduce the target on me a bit, and there wouldn't be any reason for my group of 4 to turn on me until they would think they would still have a majority without me. I knew I wouldn't be targeted at F8 or F7 without an idol and I knew I had something up my sleeve for F6 (the final round that I could use my idol). So I intentionally used an idol on a round where I knew I wasn't being voted out.


5) The Cormac Vote

The F6 vote was the next opportunity for anyone to try and get me out, but immediately after the F7 tribal council finished, I started the F6 round by revealing to my group of four that I had solved the Instagram account! I had a vote switcher!



Cormac tried to scramble pretty well. But people assumed I had the vote splitter because someone must have gotten an item from the Instagram page and no one else had claimed success. Plus I had found other items! And I was the one who had the first chance to look at it! That devious fish!

So instead of needing 3 votes, it looked like 4 of 5 non-Mira people on the tribe would have to vote for me just to force a tie! Ron wasn't going to vote against me so they needed all of the rest to co-ordinate. I knew Pomfrey and Cormac were interested, but Draco and Fred were offline for pretty much the entire round so they couldn't tell for sure if either of them would be willing to vote for me. Instead, Pomfrey and Cormac had to try to push the vote onto fred and try to get me and my powerful vote switcher on board. I blocked that too and Cormac ended up being the default vote even though almost everyone had him in their ideal end-game plans.

As soon as the vote went through, I revealed that my vote switcher was actually useable at F5 and that was why I didn't use it. I won that live immunity challenge, so I can't be sure that everyone still thought the switcher was real. But Fred and Ron weren't going to vote for me that round anyway, and they seemed pretty convinced about the switcher, so I didn't really need the immunity that round either.

***

Overall, I think I played a good game by pretty much any measurement. I used my social game to create strong bonds that got several people to be loyal to me beyond when it was in their best interests to vote me out. I outwitted everyone who targeted me by finding ways to flip votes or make them uncomfortable enough about my items that they put the vote on someone else. I read game dynamics very well, figuring out who I could trust, sharing real and fake information to people depending on who I knew they would tell, and figuring out where the votes would land so I could hold onto or play idols at the right times. And I won the two most important immunity challenges for me at F10 and F4 (I also won a somewhat less important, but still anxiety-reducing immunity at F5).

I expect the most common criticism that I will get from Draco and Ron would be that I played with too much visibility, making myself a target too often. And it's true that I was considered a threat by most of the cast for most of the game. And yet Ron and Draco never made a real move to try and vote me out as a threat and were content to let me get to the end.

I want to challenge the conventional wisdom in ORGs that you have to mute your game, lower your visibility to a moderate level and avoid making flashy moves to make it to the end of games. I was unashamedly high-visibility and instead of trying to hide behind others, I did my best with real items, fake items, alliances, rumors and anything else I could think of to make everyone else feel as uncomfortable as possible about the idea of putting my name on a ballot because they knew it could backfire on them. I scrambled from the bottom of the merge tribe to the power position and kept scrambling to stay there until I got to FTC.

So if there's one main lesson to learn from Mirabella Plunkett and the Chamber of Secrets I hope it is the lesson that you can use creative strategies and take risks and be high-visibility and still have success in these games. I would love to see more people throwing caution to the wind and giving the viewers some drama by testing out new and unorthodox strategies in the next game they play.



***

Would Ron Weasley and the Chamber of Secrets be a compelling story too?

I actually think our Ron compares well with the Ron from the original Chamber of Secrets book. Ron is a likeable character who serves as a loyal friend to the main character in the Chamber of Secrets, often tagging along three steps behind as Harry goes on adventures. But Ron doesn't accomplish much on his own or really take the lead at any point in the Chamber of Secrets. It's Harry who finds the diary, talks to the snakes and wins the quidditch matches. And it's Hermione who makes the polyjuice potion and discovers what the basilisk is. All the while, Ron is around but he can't accomplish much with his broken wand and even though he survives until the end, he is hanging out in the lobby of the Chamber of Secrets while Harry deals with the monster and the Dark Lord. I love Ron as the sidekick, but he isn't the hero to this story.


Would Draco Malfoy and the Chamber of Secrets be a compelling story?

I'm not going to compare our Draco to the Draco from the book because book Draco is actually a pretty present character in the book who might not be fully clued in to what is going on in the castle, but at least acts as an interesting antagonist who is invested in the main plot of the story. Our Draco is a bit more like Ernie Macmillan and the Chamber of Secrets. Ernie shows up from time to time as a background character and makes some incorrect guesses about who is doing what around the castle, but he's never right. Then he disappears for a while and re-emerges when some other interesting events transpire, makes some more inaccurate guesses, acts kind of loyal to some people but not all of them really trust him. And then he disappears again. I'm assuming one chapter of this book would be devoted to him and Hannah Abbott comparing their chocolate frog collections in the Hufflepuff common room while Harry and Ron use polyjuice potions to try to shake things up in the Slytherin common room.

Now, Gilderoy Lockhart and the Chamber of Secrets would be a great story, but I will leave that to the Enchanted fan fiction writers to flesh that out.

***

I look forward to answering all your questions! But for now, I will leave you with an excerpt from the climactic chapter of Mirabella Plunkett and the Chamber of Secrets:

Quote

‘Organizing writing utensils,’ said Mirabella softly, ‘is my past, present and future, Harry Potter...’ She pulled Harry’s wand from her pocket and began to trace it through the air, writing three shimmering words: MIRABELLA COD PLUNKETT Then she said: "I have a pen, I have a pen Uh! Tall pen! Tall pen, bucket. Uh!" Then she waved the wand once, and the letters of her name re-arranged themselves: I AM LORD TALL PEN BUCKET