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| Let’s start with the fish. Mira, you’re wonderful. I’m shocked that you’re here, and I said I would vote for you at FTC back at F12. Make them come true. My question for you is, you were extremely reliant on items all game. Do you think that needing multiple items weakens your game in any way, shape, or form? |
That's a good question for me, it's definitely something I need to address at this final tribal.
First of all, while I had two real items in the game (both idols), I basically threw one away at F8 on a vote I was pretty certain would result in Angelina going home regardless. I was confident enough in my game without items that I felt I had a comfortable path to f6 without it and didn't want the extra threat status that another public idol would give to me. I needed my group of 4 to trust me and dumping the Slytherin idol helped make them comfortable enough to stick with me in the medium term. So I didn't really need that item, although I don't regret putting all the effort I did into getting it since it helped me make my case for why people should work with me to vote out Angelina at F9.
The Gryffindor Idol was linked to me for the first 8 rounds of the season however, and there's no doubt that me having it affected a lot of voting outcomes in the game. But I don't think the way I used it hurts my resume. Anyone could have tried to have that idol, but 15 out of 18 players declined because they didn't want the target that a public idol puts on you (or, in the case of Albus, they presumably forgot the url for the board). I took a risk by grabbing it, and it came with advantages and disadvantages, but it was a tactical decision and the results showed that I demonstrated strategic prowess in my handling of it.
How often do you see someone manage to openly hold a public idol for 8 consecutive rounds in an ORG?
I knew that I wanted to play a pretty bold game and would draw a target sooner or later, so I deliberately went for the public idol with plans to use it to make it as uncomfortable as possible for anyone to target me in a vote. It was a similar strategy to Yul Kwon's decision to make his idol public in Cook Islands, and while the special idol he had was more powerful than mine here, the premise of the gambit is to make others worried that they could go home if they try to rally votes against you. It worked against you when you wasted the idol nullifier on me in the Snape round, it worked against the big alliance that voted for Newt instead of me at merge, and it worked again when Draco got more votes than me in Angelina's boot round because of further idol worries. I used the threat of an idol more than I used actual idols to protect myself, and I could have used my various item bluffing schemes to create a similar threat without actually possessing items if I needed to (as I did at F6/F5).
I don't think having had items or not had items is by itself a positive or a negative factor when it comes to deserving a jury vote, I think it's more important to look at whether a player uses them intelligently to advance their game or not. I wasn't the only person in this game to hold two items (You had an idol and an idol nullifier and I believe Amos had an idol and a cloak, Maxime had an idol and a challenge advantage and Lily had a double vote and a cloak), but I was the only person who was able to effectively use my items to advance myself into a seat at FTC.
And finally, I would like to point out that both Ron and Draco had access to all of the potion ingredients for the Slytherin idol at exactly the same time as me and neither of them even bothered to attempt the recipe to collect the idol. They both had every opportunity I had to get both of the items I held in this game, and the fact that I got the Slytherin idol when they did not doesn't make me luckier than them. It just shows that I was willing to put in the extra effort to complete that strenuous list of potion steps when they were not.
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| Now, for all three of you. To me, the game looked BORING after Angelina’s boot. Multiple jurors have said the game was boring after either Angelina left. I want to know, from the three of you: did you think the game got boring after Angelina left? If you do believe it got boring, what did you do to try and make it more interesting? |
OMG I was so certain you would ask this question and I love you for it <3
I absolutely felt that this game got boring after Angelina left. Absolutely.
I think it's incredibly clear that there were four players in this game that were determined to liven things up, take risks, take initiative and do their best to entertain the viewers.
You, Snape, Angelina and Me.
All four of us put an incredible amount of time and energy into this game and were willing to accept the risks that come with being high-visibility in order to do some creative and ambitious things that would be remembered. And I have a ton of respect for that type of approach. I wrote a rather flowery eulogy for you specifically in my confessional because I feel like you played with the type of creative boldness that I am constantly striving to achieve. The biggest difference, perhaps, was that you were brave enough to shake things up in plain sight while my craziest antics were often things that couldn't be traced back to me, like the fake instagram account and the fake Ravenclaw Idol. I can't imagine how fun it would have been to watch twelve players desperately confessing random guesses about an instagram account that has nothing to do with the game, but I got a barrage of slack messages from people speculating about it and I was laughing for two days straight.
It was tragic that I didn't get to spend much time on the same side as the other three of you, but I can guarantee you that Mirabella vs. Snape will go down as one of the biggest and most entertaining arcs of the pre-merge and the Mirabella vs. Angelina arc would be right up there for rivalry of the season. Lockhart vs. Lockhart might be the best of all.
Unfortunately, all those arcs resolved themselves by the time F8 arrived, there weren't really many explosive rivalries left and to be perfectly honest I found myself in a powerful but precarious position that would have become a lot more precarious if the status quo got overturned too early. With the huge threat tattoo I was wearing, openly shit disturbing and shaking things up would have gotten me targeted pretty quickly. But that doesn't mean there wasn't things I could do to try and add some spice, and I still tried to be active doing things like:
- As I mentioned, I pretended I got a vote switcher from the Instagram account and I bluffed that I was going to use it at F6, then again at F5. This made a lot of people uncomfortable and the F6 round was by far the most interesting post-Angelina round because for a couple of hours before deadline, Cormac did a great job trying to scramble to protect himself and the vote switcher idea freaked a lot of people out. Pomfrey tried to take him up on the offer and attempted to get the vote on Fred and very briefly even on me. It ended up at the same result as expected, but it was a fairly wild round.
- I spread a couple of rumours of various teams being hatched, most notably trying to convince pomfrey that there was a Ron/Draco/Cormac F3 deal that I just made up out of thin air. This sort of thing made people a lot more anxious and uncomfortable I think, but even as I was able to make people suspicious of each other, most of the people still in the game were pretty reluctant to take the initiative to propose new vote targets, so things tended to stay the course.
- I spread rumors that me and you had had a big fight when you were voted out and had fun inventing taunts that we supposedly said to each other in the heat of the moment. I think my favourite was telling people you called me "the world's first and worst water-breathing rat." I even mentioned it in my public rites of passage because the other f4 players could see those. Yes, that served the purpose of trying to convince people I had an extra enemy on the jury and was less of a threat, but it was also a running joke I shared with the viewers and used to pass the time.
- Most importantly, I tried my best to confess like crazy and think of new ways to do funny things in there, like bringing back my drunk tarot readings and trying to get other players to say catchphrases that the PWs suggested. No one else was really scrambling much, and some people were even offline a lot during those rounds, so I couldn't always do a lot to liven up slack, but at the very least I tried to always find ways to make things interesting for the viewers, even if it had to be in my confessional.
There was some stuff happening in-game that you wouldn't necessarily have seen from Ponderosa, but it wasn't close to the same level of drama as the early merge rounds and I want you to know that I noticed it and tried to do what I could to at least make it fun for the audience as much as I could without putting my own position in the game at risk.
