Previously on... Survivor!
The Shadowsquid/Oerhaos post-merge dynamic seemed set in stone as the 9 remaining contestants moved into the jury phase. Magnen, Harmless, and Yurimaster found themselves powerless against a wall of 6 Oerhaos members. A Pagonging seemed imminent.
However, the game began to change when Blackyoshi from the Oerhaos, finding himself at the bottom of his alliance and fearing for his friend Yurimaster, offered himself up as the fourth member of their alliance. The gap was closing, but was not surpassed yet.
In lieu of a challenge, the Final 9 were treated to a Survivor auction, bidding on multiple different items. Among other items, Raz was given a secret item allowing him information courtesy of eliminated contestants, Nin10mode was given the option to exile one Tribe Member from one future Tribal Council, and Harmless won the surprise immunity necklace.
However, events would take a drastic turn when Harmless gave his immunity necklace to Magnen, a much bigger target than he was. His attempts to draw outside Oerhaos members off of Shadowsquids by leaving himself open instead of the Squid leader began to backfire when he was stacked with four votes.
However, a surprise blindside would happen when Venexis joined the four Squids to vote off brandobrawl, Raz’s second in command, making him the first member of the jury and leaving Oerhaos fractured.
Eight are left. Who will be eliminated… next?
SPOILERS: Avoid the Breakdown if you don’t want spoilers!
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Breakdown:
Episode 8: “Over and Out.”
Challenge: Gone in a Flash
Description: Players would compete in five flash games to get the highest score in each. They would be ranked first to last in each round and get points in a Mario Kart tourney style. Whoever had the most points would win, while the runner up would get the Exile Vilify.
Winner: RazRunner-Up: Nin10mode
Exiled: Blackyoshi
Voted Out: Magnen (4-3)
Other Votes: Nin10mode
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“What the fuck.” ~Raz
That was the first of only three confessionals I got that round, and it seemed to fit the mood properly. Even I was blindsided by the blindside: I was expecting this season to play largely by Borneo rules. This kind of power shift jumps three seasons forward to Marquesas: just like that season, two outsiders of a major alliance flipped in the F9 to help three outsiders. Add to that the fact that it was encouraged by an immunity giveaway and you’ve got some scarily advanced gameplay going on for people who have never played or even heard of Survivor.
Without his second in command, Raz and Nin10mode are lone wolves against the world. They obviously need to get as many numbers as possible to turn the tides, but they’d need two more just to tie the vote.
They start in the obvious place: Emelia Kaylee. Already voting for Oerhaos, finally claiming him for their group is the obvious move. It’s just a matter of how to secure him without letting him know he’s always been at the bottom, which he has suspected.
Raz handles it pretty well: http://i.imgur.com/OyfzqwC.png
He tells EmKay that Ven, Nin, and Raz have had an alliance that they were going to let Brando into until his blindside, so now they need his help. It’s a decent mixture of lies and truth that is enough to get Emelia Kaylee to officially side with him with no qualms. Despite, or perhaps because of, his rough start, Emelia Kaylee has played a very clean, drama-free game where he’s dodged every big hurdle so far. He follows the crowd and votes there, or at least stays out of the way. His core Oerhaos group seem to respect him or at least treat him well. That could work well for him, regardless of the fact that he is currently being lied to by Raz.
This gives Raz and Nin10mode 3 out of 8. They’ve still only got one member left to get just to force a tie. Clearly, something has to change for them to get ahead.
That would be the cue for the challenge to happen.
Challenge
For this challenge, I break out a tradition near and dear to our hearts on good ‘ol Runouw: flash gaming. Of course, a challenge around our flash games have already been done so I put forth a marathon of 5 games. Of the eight of them, whoever got the highest score would get the most points in a Mario Kart-esque tier of scoring: from 1st to 8th each player would get a descending score of 8 to 1. The winner would get immunity. The runner-up would get the Exile Vilify, which would outcast one member of the tribe for Tribal Council: They’d not be allowed to attend, but they also wouldn’t be vulnerable, turning this into a 7-Person Tribal should they use it this round.
Right off the bat we have two absentees: our swing votes, Blackyoshi and Venexis. Blackyoshi was dealing with some events in his life. Venexis we will get to shortly. They automatically get the bare minimum of 1 point per round, or 5 total.
The first game was Canabalt. To play this game, one must run and jump as far as they can until they die. When they die, they restart. Whoever got the furthest down the line would win. Here are the scores.
Canabalt:
(8) Raz: 21262m
(7) nin10mode: 5147m
(6) Harmless 3856m
(5) Magnen: 3696m
(4) Yurimaster: 2715m
(3) EmKay 2312m
(1) Blackyoshi/Venexis
Raz wins in a runaway victory with over four times the runner-up’s score. This is one of the few games where everyone gets involved.
The second game is Super Mario Bros Crossover, a fantastic recreation of the original Super Mario Bros where you can play as around 10 different NES classic characters. The goal here was to beat as many worlds as you could with as many characters as you could (and give screenshots). The highest score would be 10 characters, 8 worlds.
SMBC
(8) Raz 10 characters, 8 worlds
(7) Harmless 10 characters, 7 worlds
(6) Magnen: 8 characters, 8 worlds
(1) Nin10mode, Venexis, Blackyoshi, Yurimaster, EmKay
By a hair, Raz edges out Harmless to take another round.
The third game is Geoguessr, where you’re given a Google Maps Street View of any place in the world and you have to guess as closely as possible to the location. The highest scoring round would win again.
Geoguessr
(8) Raz: 36118
(7) nin10mode: 12535
(6) Magnen: 9025
(5) Harmless 8658
(1) Blackyoshi, Venexis, EmKay, Yurimaster
The third consecutive Raz win, again not even close.
The fourth game, Rollin’, is a cheap-as-fuck flash game that’s addictive as all hell. You must navigate a large rectangle through a course and drop it down an open chute without falling out the side. Bear it far as far as you can.
Rollin’
(8) nin10mode: Level 36 (?)
(7) Harmless: World 27
(6) Raz Level 26
(5) Magnen: World 23
The first round Raz didn’t win, Nin10mode takes it home here. I couldn’t tell by his screenshot whether he only made it to round 36 or beat the whole game, but it didn’t matter: he won regardless.
The final game is Level Up, an old-school flashgaming RPG that’s a real work of art. Their challenge was to get as far as they could percentage-wise with as many points as they could to break the tie.
(8) nin10mode: 100%, 1508
(7) Raz: 100%, 310
(6) Magnen: 100%, 252
(5) Yurimaster: 99.7%
(4)Harmless 56.9%
(1) EmKay, Venexis, Blackyoshi
The story of this competition was that Raz and Nin10mode, from the gaming-oriented Oerhaos, took this challenge home. However, it was ultimately Nin10mode’s failure to participate in SMBC that kept him from sniping the win from Raz, giving Raz immunity. However, this did give Nin10mode 2nd place, and the Exile Vilify, leading to the vote.
Tribal Council:
Nin10mode and Emelia Kaylee are on the hot seat. With Raz immune and the three of them having voted in the minority, they could be in the very same scenario that their enemies were in just the round prior.
“Things really are tense, and I'm starting to feel a little vulnerable. I'm sure I can make up for it, given a few more days.” ~Emelia Kaylee
Nin10mode starts off on the right food: utilizing his Exile Vilify to narrow the field a considerable bit and removing swing vote Blackyoshi from the vision. Personally, I think it could have been utilized better (if you remove Yurimaster or Harmless from the equation you could still target Magnen while leaving a guaranteed vote against you out of the game.) However, leaving an uncertain force that previously voted against you out of the game does give you less of a gap to overcome, and it also puts the other swing vote in Venexis on the spot, where he will be exposed no matter what he does.
The Tribal Council after the Brando vote shook the game up is one that is very tense and muted.
“I can't make heads or tails - I just know that things are getting a little more tense now.” ~EmKay
“A former Oerhaos tribesmen didn't want to see Harmless go. It just so happened that some alliance chose Brando, and either someone is a traitor, or that stray vote was by chance. I'm confident in the former, since there was still another Shadowsquid to choose from.
Of all the former Oerhaos tribesmen, BY is the odd one out in that he doesn't spend much time with us. With this, the votes seem more secure. No one has dirt on me, so I'm not really worried about being voted off.” ~Nin10mode
“I already know who both of them are. One of them already know that I'm disappointed, and don't appreciate them using my trust against me. The other one, I don't blame anything for.” ~Raz
“2) Do you think you have a path to the end?”
“Everybody does, or at least I think they do, so it's no big surprise I would as well.” ~Harmless
“2) What do you think caused the crack in Raz's alliance?”
“I don't know. Maybe there was mistrust, maybe somebody didn't like the leadership, or maybe somebody was planning to betray them from the start. I just don't know. Anything could have happened at that point.” ~Magnen
“If you do some huge mistake(s), then you are probably going to be voted out. Same goes otherwise, if you actually help people, no matter which tribe they were before, then people will most likely not going agaisnt you.” ~Yurimaster
That leads us to the vote.
The vote itself is very predictable. The 3 fomer Oerhaos members that didn’t flip vote for Magnen. The 3 former Squids vote for Nin10mode.
“get magnen out of this game already holy crap” ~Raz
“I vote for Nin. I have a feel that there's an alliance behind all of this... And that he's leading it.” ~Yurimaster
The vote is a 3-3 tie.
There are seven people in Tribal Council.
Where is the 7th person?
Medical Emergency:
I’ll time-jump ahead to Venexis’ post game interview as he explains it best.
“So, maybe an hour after the results were announced, I start feeling kinda strange. Lay down for a little, and I'm not really sure what happened in between, but suddenly it's dark out and we're rushing to a hospital. Everything's fine at that point (I get seizures fairly regularly, I've learned how to fight them, or even trigger them if I need to just think for a while; it's only really when they surprise me like this. I know that sounds terrible, but I've only had three that surprised me since I was like, five or something. They don't hurt me in any way, apart from being a little disorienting sometimes), but naturally people are still freaking out.
So I'm sent off to the city with a fancy hospital to get my brain scanned and stuff, make sure I'm not going to die. It's a lot of waiting around, so I visit some friends and book a flight home before laying perfectly still in a loudass machine that shoots me full of radiation. Science isn't always fun. I've been 100% sure everything's fine since the previous night at this point, and the tests confirm that, so I stay at a friend's and catch a ride into BC early the next day.
It's a several hour drive through the mountains, and even driving in shifts, we're pretty tired. This is where we split up, and I take care of the things I came here for (it's not related to the medical stuff in any way, just a personal trip) before sitting around in an airport for a few hours. This is when I'm informed through chat that the next challenge and Tribal Council has finished, and I make a tiebreaking vote an hour or so before I fly home.
And then I slept. A lot.”
Because of this medical emergency, I spared Venexis the self-vote as it was a perfectly valid reason to skip a round. However, since he didn’t have time to submit his answers, or play catchup, I called an impromptu tie and whisked Venexis off to a private chat to tell him to break the tie between Nin10mode and Venexis.
I didn’t get to record the chat segment before a spontaneous computer restart, but Venexis’ concern was outing himself as the traitor and taking out Nin10mode this round, earning the ire of his former teammates and leaving himself no safe place. On the flipside, he liked Magnen and the Squids and wanted to work with them.
Ultimately, however, old tribe loyalties and the fear of Raz in his heart led to him voting against Magnen, flipping the majority back in the favor of Oerhaos and sending the leader of the Squids home 4-3, leaving the Squids undermanned 5-2 and back on the bottom of the coin.
However, Venexis’ decision led to the most insane round of gaming this season will see. Stay tuned.
Post-Mortem
Magnen was the most unique player of the season. Beyond being the sole female, the fact that she was naturally able to adapt to a group of 14 people, most of whom she never knew, and get an entire tribe on her side to eventually accept her as the impromptu leader of her tribe. Like the rest of the Squids, I personally saw the “fairness” view she had on Survivor a definite relic of the Borneo era of Survivor and a bit annoying, but unlike NanTheDark never turned it into vicious, attacking behavior, and was able to be mature about her loss. I’m hugely impressed with how she did and would love to have her back on a returning season should I ever get that far (which I likely will not). From nobody to nightmare, Magnen left her mark on the game despite barely making the halfway mark in 8th place.
(I was too late to my predictions this week)
Next Time On… Survivor!
A Survivor classic challenge is translated to the internet, leading to interesting results.
The craziest round of this game takes place, with Harmless seeking brutal revenge, and multiple shifts in power leading to an unpredictable vote that nearly has half the cast eliminated.
