Board Thread:Virtual Tribal Council/@comment-2049739-20160104053550/@comment-27933088-20171208060026

Ivanornels wrote: It'll be interesting to see where your rankings stand when you watch the other seasons. Also it's weird that it seems like you let Redemption Island off the hook a bit despite being more at fault for some of the flaws you pointed out about Micronesia. Redemption Island had the most obvious winner as soon as Russell left the game. In Micronesia, Ozzy, Cirie, Amanda, Parvati, and an outside chance of Natalie and Erik seemed like potential winners throughout the season. I'll post my list once HvHvH ends.

To my mind, both had their share of painfully gullible players who hadn't really come to play and were basically just fodder. Both also seemed really predictable from about two episodes after the merge until the end. Before that, RI's winner still seemed potentially vulnerable due to his obvious status as frontrunner and the actions of the player returning from Redemption Island. Early in the game, Ralph was a fun character and he and his alliance actually looked like a potential threat. In Micronesia's case, the editing made it pretty obvious starting just after the tribe swap that the two big physical threats among returning players wouldn't make it especially deep, which hinted pretty strongly at the eventual game-winning alliance. The winner played a somewhat low-key game early on and wasn't a dead giveaway until she made that second alliance, at which point, I knew the outcome. That big move at the second post-merge council completely locked things down. After that, the writing was really on the wall.

With both seasons broadly similar to that point, the main difference, for me, was that at least RI had some memorable and interesting characters who stuck around towards the end of the season in one form or another (Phillip, Matt, Andrea), and they made the finishing stretch bearable, whereas anybody really worth rooting for was gone from Micronesia's cast at that point and it was mostly just textbook mean girls being textbook mean girls. I subjectively find that at times either boring or slightly repulsive.

In terms of winners, RI's winner, while villainous, has at least always been kind of funny and charismatic, so I could deal with his preordained victory, while Micronesia's winner doesn't have much personality outside of being devious and manipulative.