That means that I might never have to communicate with Snape for the rest of my life, and that's a big positive for me and my game :)
Okay now pull out your tina time turners cause we are going to go way back for this recap.
IMMEDIATELY AFTER SWAP
According to Angelina, Snape picked me first overall to be on his tribe! Apparently just so he could try to vote me out!
This is a good time to point out that Snape got to pick his own tribe and was the first person voted off of it. That seems almost impossible to pull off, you have to be really disliked to not be able to pick enough people who don't want to vote for you to survive one tribal.
THE CHALLENGE
This is gonna get lost in everything that happened in the rest of the round but that challenge was an absolute mess on our tribe. I put down a solid strategy for all of us to immediately identify each other through unique phrases we would each post in the chat and everyone copied the list so they would instantly know who each other were. Everyone except Draco acknowledged that they had written down the list and memorized it.
People barely went online during the challenge but it was enough so that everyone except draco posted their key phrase and draco not going on anonymous made it pretty clear that he was the one who didn't check in.
But yeah, after saying he would be around to participate, Draco never signed into the discord group and never made a guess. And then right after results went up he showed up and was like "damn that was close" and joked a lot about how we could just permanently rep our ghosts and criticized some people for not having slack reactivated by the time results were announced because they weren't around. And I'm thinking dude you disappeared for 24 hours after promising you would be here and you never explained why or apologized to anyone even though it cost us the challenge.
Newt didn't submit a guess either which is just unexplainable. He was online. He continues to float.
And crazier than the rest, SNAPE GOT 3 OUT OF 12!
He acknowledged that he knew our code words and was online on discord and saw all of us post our code phrases. It's literally impossible that he could have gotten worse than 6 out of 12 unless he was trying to fail. And considering everything that happened after I think he may have actually tried to throw this challenge to vote me out. If so, he booted a challenge and got voted out and I want that on the record to discourage people from challenge throwing in the future because that's not a fun tactic, especially when it's only being used out of spite and not to protect allies.
MORE TO COME, I just need to take a brief break to lie to maxime about idol stuff and get her to distrust Devillina (painting someone as a threat is all about branding and angels are innocent).
Fixed the gifs, if you can delete the post above that'd be great
CONTINUED
AFTER THE CHALLENGE
So Snape immediately went after me and told me he was going after me.
That should really have been a lock for him. He picked the tribe and you would imagine he could get 3 people to vote with him on the tribe he picked. But immediately people are sending me chat logs of snape trying to get them to vote for me. Which goes to show a couple of things:
1) Snape's social game vs. mine made all the difference here. No one wanted to even reluctantly go along with him or wait to see how things played out - they were immediately telling me things.
2) Wow Snape really misplayed this strategically. There were a lot of ways they could have gotten rid of me, especially with an idol and an idol nullifier. What they did was so reckless and belligerent that it was bound to divide the tribe along hard lines. I really am stunned by how they managed to not pull this off when they were motivated to do it at any cost. Like sit back, quietly go along with a consensus boot and then idol the targeted person and put your votes on me. Or like a million other scenarios. Just a terribly played round in every possible way for Snape here and I'm glad the reasons he went home revolved around his determination to be as vicious and unwilling to even begin to talk to many people. That's not what ORGs are about and it goes against the spirit of a social game and I'm glad he wasn't awarded by making merge and being a goat that goes to the end. I'm glad he got voted out at the first tribal he went to.
SCRAMBLING
Snape was after me but Amos was claiming to be after Draco at the start. Gilderoy was running around telling everyone everything so Draco knew pretty quickly that Amos was after him. So Draco wanted to go after Amos and I obviously had interest in splitting up Amos and Snape, although I wanted Snape out.
But Draco got a little aggressive in his targeting of Amos, largely because he felt some kinship with Snape and he trusted Gilderoy for some reason. So he told both of them he was trying to get Amos out and Amos found out.
That obviously tipped off Snape and Amos that the votes weren't there for voting for me so they claimed to turn their target onto newt. They were being very aggressive and Snape and Gilderoy apparently started making some group chats without people actually consenting to be in those group chats where they shouted reasons to vote out me and newt pretty relentlessly.
Ron was sending me chatlogs of those groups pretty instantly, but Draco never told me they existed. Most notably, Snape admitted that he had gotten into the room of requirement with lily. Angelina had mentioned this to me before very sketchily without telling me what she got. But Lily got a double vote there and Snape said he got a idol nullifier. I bet Angelina got a vote nullifier. Ron and I are miffed that Draco never brought this up to me all round - if nothing else he was told it in front of Ron and should have known that Ron would tell me.
In fact, Draco became a bit protective of Snape in discussions so I suspected he wanted to have eventual access to a idol nullifier and was hedging his bets a bit.
And Ron hated lockhart from the round before so he wanted to put all the votes on him although he grew to hate snape the more he talked to him.
At some point Gilderoy solidified as on the side of Snape and Amos, claiming they would be voting for newt (but probably already planning to vote for me at that point). And they were pushing very hard to get Draco and Ron on board. Ron was still sending me chatlogs but Draco was not so much. It was looking like a 3-3 tie with Draco in the middle.
So I stayed up way past when I should have been awake, waiting for Cedric to plant a heir clue. I saw him switch to anonymous so I knew something was coming and i was able to be the first to run to quote the tribal council post and claim the heirship 8 seconds before Snape.
I definitely thought Snape would still be voting for me at that point if he had the chance so I was open to other options but wanted to petrify him so that maybe there wouldn't be so much pressure for them to choose me as their target.
Newt came on in the am to probably a barrage of messages letting him know he was being targeted because people were saying it very openly so he instantly was with me despite us not ever being close at all before. Gilderoy had been spreading rumours that Newt and I had a F2 or something which is honestly hilarious.
I grabbed a tooth from my basilisk and destroyed Gilderoy's horcrux diary (the first of 3 items to go this round). Mostly for giggles but it feels really satisfying right now. Then I petrified snape and kidnapped PW Mandrizzy so that he couldn't be cured.
BANANAS SPLITS
After the basilisk attack, Draco jumped on board with both feet and I mostly began to feel confident that he would be with Ron, Newt and I, so we started a group chat to decide how and if to split the vote. Rough decision to make but we settled on a 2-2-2 split while trying to get lockhart to vote amos and amos to vote snape to add a safety cushion and make it 3-3.
Mercifully we waited until minutes before the deadline and told gilderoy near the deadline, told amos minutes before. Gilderoy definitely tipped off snape and amos and they may have switched their votes with 20 minutes left. Or maybe they were gonna vote me instead of newt regardless. But Amos wasn't online at the deadline and missed my message that he should vote snape. At the time i was really worried it would end up 3-2-1 and snape wouldn't go home because there wouldn't be a revote, but it's probably a good thing that Amos didn't check it because he likely wouldn't have burned his idol.
As for my idol, I was very certain that they would use the idol nullifier if they were voting for me so using it on myself would be a guaranteed waste. Wasn't gonna use it on newt because even if the vote was on him i'd rather have an idol than newt moving forward tbqh. So i tried to make a tc discussion post that would look to my enemies like I was going to use the idol and force them to use the nullifier if they were voting for me, but not make it so over the top my allies would think I lied to them about me playing it.
RESULTS
So the votes drop and it turns out the other side lost an idol, an idol nullifier and a diary and all they got for it was a tie vote where they were outnumbered.
Snape and I went and played a game of chess on game board arena.
Gilderoy and Snape started going around and demanding that people vote for me on the revote rather impolitely, eventually culminating with Lockhart making his case openly in the tribe chat. Interestingly he was saying that everyone needed to vote out me to get rid of an idol then and less than a hour after the revote happened he was telling everyone that Snape left holding the Hufflepuff idol and that he meant to vote for amos.
Anyway, I went to my bananas splitters and let them know that if they did want to get rid of an idol i could give it to snape right before they vote him out. Sadly the hosts were against that drama, but I also offered to just chuck it in the fire. There was no chance of people being convinced that having a (possibly) idolless snape hanging around would be more enjoyable than having an idolless Mira around so it wasn't very dramatic - Ron, Draco and Newt just had to withstand a prolongued period where Gilderoy and Snape were calling them stupid and demanding their allegiance. Gilderoy in particular was very adament that Snape was more trustworthy because he was openly trying to vote us all out and we could trust him to do that.
Anyway, snape went home having cast the same number of votes in the entire season as Albus, although Albus will of course be remembered more fondly.
MERGE
So we merged after 1am after I'd been through all that and I wasn't really eager for that. I haven't really slept more than a few hours in a few days partially due to the olympics and work but it was also the second day in a row where i needed to be on the board after 1am after finding the heir thing was planted in the early morning the day before.
Looks like my draco-fred-mira-maxime group is emerging as the group with the most initiative so far. Maxime seems to want to pull in lily, angelina and pomfrey on one side and id grab newt and ron from the other side to hopefully collect a majority group right away.
But I worry a lot about maxime pulling towards the angelina/lily group so I just led her discover that the hufflepuff idol is gone and angelina lied about it. Hopefully she is a little more cautious about sharing stuff with angelina since angelina does appear to love talking to everyone.
Ever the dramatic actor, Gilderoy is already publicly and privately pursuing voting for me. I tried to mend fences and he said he has no reason to dislike me but then he started posting in the group chat that he's voting for me so its a continuation of the mysterious fishing trip that Amos-Snape-Gilderoy appear to have embarked on for no reason with no hopes of ever returning home again.
I got really lucky and then kind of unlucky in that challenge so its hard to tell if my score is spectacular or merely above average. Some people will probably throw so that could help.
Just time for a quick comment here before I go to sleep. But it's eerily quiet so not much to say.
Feels like I should be very paranoid here after how busy the last tribal was but it's possible we have a lot of people not willing to rock the boat in this group. Angelina maybe takes the most initiative usually out of this group (excluding Lockman) but she's immune and content to chill. Some quiet chatter about Lockhart and Amos being obvious targets but that's it.
I think I should elaborate on idol strategy now. From the stary I've absolutely not intended to use the idol at any point before at least f8 if I can avoid it. This changes if I get the slytherin idol but that's a long way away. Someone got laceflies and if it's Angelina she may be going for making the potion tonight - I will keep an eye on that.
But especially after making merge there are some Yul Kwon advantages to having a public idol. Unless people are confident they can trust a vote split, it's very risky to put votes on me because they know it could backfire.
I'm not trying to be under the radar so I'm going to be seen as a bit of a threat regardless of whether I hold the idol or not. May as well make them scared of voting for me.
I'm going to try to win all the challenges so I don't have to bluff that I might use it every round and create some mistrust around that.
The reality is that if people gang up on me with enough votes to vote me out right now and I don't use the idol then I probably didn't have a great chance of lasting much longer had I played the idol. People willing to risk their safety to vote me out with an idol are scared enough of me to vote for me again at the next tribal.
The problem is Gilderoy and the hufflepuff idol. If gilderoy is really going to vote for me every round he's going to be forcing people to target me if they want to vote against my alliances. And if someone uses an idol I can be idoled out without getting a majority of votes against.
Amos is a challenge threat to me trying to win every week and gilderoy is a threat to me surviving tribal so let's hope they go home.
