Stranded for Revenge

Cassandra, Sarah and Yul. You three have come as far as you can on your own. The power now shifts from the three of you to the people you had a hand in voting out.

I will now turn over to Ozzy. Ozzy, you have until Saturday at 11:59pm c/12:59am e to address the final 3 and ask them for as much information as you need to cast your vote. They will then have until 9:00c/10:00e on Sunday to answer anything you have asked.

The floor is yours!

WHAT'S UP YOU THREE

IF YOU HAVEN'T POSTED YOUR OPENING SPEECH, KINDLY GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE. I WANT YOU TO WRITE YOUR SHIT AND COME BACK TO THIS.

First of all, congratulations to the three of you! I am simultaneously pissed off and envious and sad right now, but I'm glad it's the three of you sitting there if I couldn't be. I don't have a ton of questions, nor do I think my vote will change at this point. HOWEVER, I'm going to look over all your shit before I make my vote and I really hope I get some compelling answers from y'all. Keep fighting until the very end. Someone could lose it and another could take the crown.

Alright, let's do this.

Sarah
We didn't talk much throughout the merge and I'll take full responsibility for that. Like you told me, it was a shortsighted move. And seeing as I'm over here and you're over there... perhaps you were right! I did enjoy working with you premerge before the Sophie boot. We seemed to click well. My question for you:
- Were you actually willing to work with me at any time during the merge? If so, when and why? If not, why not?


Yul
It was a ton of fun playing with you dude. We may not have talked as much as these other folks here, but you were a nice rock whenever things seemed weird. You were calm, cool, collected and I appreciate that. I WILL say, I was shocked you didn't vote me out at F5. I assumed you knew the girls were voting me, but you stuck with me even then. My question for you:
- Would you have taken me to final 3? If so, why? If not, walk me through your plan from final 5 onwards (assume I stayed and Sarah left).


Cass
I hate that I gave you guacamole and a golden buzzer the night you were planning on blindsiding me. I can't be too mad at you (anymore at least) because here you are in the final 3. I thought we had something really good going on and I was BANKING on you taking me to final 4, knowing in my gut you needed another threat there with you as an insurance policy. I think I also just saw us as a powerful duo and why not go to F4 together, you know? My question for you:
- When did you decide I had to go at final 5 and, most importantly, why?


As a bonus and only if you feel up to it and/or nobody else has asked, here's another question for all of you:
- What was your best move throughout the game? I want to know, in detail, what it was, why it was important, and how you saw it through.


I'll check in sometime tomorrow morning as well for follow-up if I can. Again, I had a blast playing alongside each of you. Fight hard for this, it's not over until it's over.

Ozzy wrote:Sarah
We didn't talk much throughout the merge and I'll take full responsibility for that. Like you told me, it was a shortsighted move. And seeing as I'm over here and you're over there... perhaps you were right! I did enjoy working with you premerge before the Sophie boot. We seemed to click well. My question for you:
- Were you actually willing to work with me at any time during the merge? If so, when and why? If not, why not?

Well, I definitely wanted to work with you from the beginning. We tried that but it obviously didn't work so well. After that I feel like you kind of shut me out so I just didn't really factor you into anything. I did reach out to you at merge but it was more of the same distanced cold conversations so I figured you didn't want to work with me. I absolutely would have been open to it because like you said I think we clicked from the beginning and it's a bummer that we kind of disconnected because of circumstances.

I was absolutely open to working with you and that's why I threw out the possibility of a cass/ozzy/lil/sarah alliance. I thought it would be a good fit and I felt like we had a positive relationship at the very beginning. But I think once it became clear that you were closer to other people and I was never going to last with you, then I just focused my plans on Cass.

But if you had signed on at our first merge conversation I probably would have worked with you because at that point I had no one except for Lil.

Awesome. Thanks Sarah!

I just checked back through my confessionals. In Episode 13 (i.e. right after the Brenda boot), I bullet pointed some long-term plans, which are:

Cassandra wrote:- me/Yul/Rudy/Ozzy/Andrea/maybe Rory blindside Vytas
- convince people to separate Yul and Rudy
- convince people Ozzy's comeback story is very threatening, plus he could have an idol
- hit Andrea at F5 or so (everyone will realize she's the biggest threat to win by then)
- go to the end with a combination of Rory, Yul, Sarah, and Lil (maybe not Lil after last night's play but we'll see)

In Episode 14, I said that before FTC, Andrea, Rudy, and you needed to go home, "preferably in that order." The change in order was a result of Andrea's heightened profile post-Vytas blindside and my expectation that I could gather a majority that included you, Rudy, and Yul to vote her out around F7 or so.

By the time F7 rolled in, you and I had already begun discussion of voting Rudy out, and we were able to sway Yul after Sarah made him aware of the perception that he was a "follower" of Rudy. Andrea was willing to go along with the plan to please us, but Rudy started talking to me about how we should stick together because Andrea and Yul would probably vote us out down the line, so I used that tidbit to cement her vote.

After that tribal, I realized that Andrea was serious about wanting to go to F3 with you and me, but I knew that votes would be split between us more evenly than I was comfortable with. It was also becoming clearer that at least a fraction of the jury had soured on Andrea, so I figured if I went to F4 with her my worst case scenario was losing the challenge, having her force a tie for me, and (assuming I made it past rocks) losing some, but not all, votes to her. Contrast that to voting her out at F6 or F5, and going to F4 with you. I have a much worse shot at winning the challenge, and I wouldn't blame you for voting me out at that point.

So maybe it was projection on my own part, but I felt like, in your game plan, and consequently Yul's and Rory's game plans, Andrea and I would be the next to go at F5 and F4. Andrea was still hesitant to vote for you at F6, which is why I talked to you about voting her out. While I was telling you we should consider voting her, I was feeding quotes to Andrea so that she would vote for you over Sarah. Shady, yes, but I found it necessary.

Basically my answer is that I never decided you had to go at F5. I decided you had to go at F6. And when that didn't work out, I talked to Sarah and Rory about voting for you. Rory agreed, but he had also agreed to voting for you at F6, so I didn't trust him (hence the idol play).

TL;DR: It was THE move for you to take me out either at F5 or F4. So I tried to take you out at F6.

To answer your bonus question, my best move was telling every member of Tianguan 3.0, "I'm closer to you than to Ozzy, but I think he's someone we could use down the line, and I'm saying that as a personal 'we'." It's why Wigles was voted out over you. We were an amazingly powerful duo throughout the game and I cannot express how thankful I am to have had you as an ally from the very first round.

P.S. The guacamole was scrumptious, and I'll have you know that it went excellently with Tostitos® Hint of Lime Flavored Tortilla Chips.

Hey Ozzy

It was a ton of fun playing with you dude. We may not have talked as much as these other folks here, but you were a nice rock whenever things seemed weird. You were calm, cool, collected and I appreciate that. I WILL say, I was shocked you didn't vote me out at F5. I assumed you knew the girls were voting me, but you stuck with me even then. My question for you:
- Would you have taken me to final 3? If so, why? If not, walk me through your plan from final 5 onwards (assume I stayed and Sarah left).

Thanks for the kind words, man. So on the final 5 vote, I didn't know for sure 100% that Cass was going to vote for you. I was pretty sure that Sarah was gonna vote you, but I didn't know that Cass would. And even if I did, I had no idea she had an idol (and we all assumed the idols were done at six anyway).

With all that in mind, yes, I had every intention of going to the final three with you and Rory. I wanted to go to the finals not just with people I felt that I could compete against, but people I had worked with. So when I said I wanted to sit with you and Rory, that was legit. But, I was gonna go with Rory over you, so if we were in a situation where I had to choose between the two of you, I would have chosen to take him over you.

As a bonus and only if you feel up to it and/or nobody else has asked, here's another question for all of you:
- What was your best move throughout the game? I want to know, in detail, what it was, why it was important, and how you saw it through.

My best move was my relationship with Rudy. The creation of it, the way I handled it through the game, and my eventual detachment of it.

When I started the game, I was in a situation where I could do with Courtney and Rudy (new relationships), or Catalie and Katie (previous relationships). I chose to go with the former, but my intention was always that I wanted to play with Courtney. Rudy and I never got close until the first switch happened and we were alone in a big tribe with strangers (and Rory, who we just voted out). That was when we really started click, because we were in the same shitty situation and we had to trust each other (even when we didn't). That was the groundwork for us to work together for the rest of the game. When Candice left, it was 3 to 2. My relationship with Rudy was critical in me staying in the game. In Rudy's voting reason, he referred to me as his knight. That stuck with me.

Cassandra hinted in her answer to you that she had utilized Sarah calling me a follower to get me to flip on Rudy. You know that as early as the final 11, I was already talking to you about how we were going to deal with Rudy. This was way before anyone was vocalizing him controlling things, or him being voted as the mastermind or whatever.

In retrospect I wish there was a way we could have made the move faster, because by the final 8 I was getting all that flak for having not made any obvious moves. But when the move was set to happen, I had laid the groundwork down already. That's a big reason that I was even on the plan, and not blindsided by it, because at that point I had told people I was down already.

I respect Rudy for what he did in this game, and I appreciate what he's done for me. But I didn't follow him. I walked alongside him and when it was time to get in front of him, I did that too. My relationship with him was a huge part of my success, from the beginning. I won't run from it but I won't let anyone twist it into a negative for me.

@Cass - follow ups, was I a good final 5 boot because of my challenge strength or because I was coming for you at final 4? Also I don't know if I buy that your BEST move was telling people we were a duo. Maybe I'm not understanding but sounds like shit.

@Yul - Awesome. Thanks man!

Ozzy wrote:@Cass - follow ups, was I a good final 5 boot because of my challenge strength or because I was coming for you at final 4? Also I don't know if I buy that your BEST move was telling people we were a duo. Maybe I'm not understanding but sounds like shit.

You were a good F5 boot because getting your challenge strength out of the way makes the F4 immunity easier to win for me. If I had voted out Sarah with you, then Rory and Yul would have chosen you over me at F4. My guess was that you would join them in voting me if I lost immunity. But even if I was wrong, and you were willing to go to rocks to save me (which I wouldn't have guessed you were), or even if we convinced one of Rory or Yul to vote the other, I wasn't confident that I could beat you at F3.

I wasn't trying to say my best move was telling people we were a duo. I certainly didn't advertise it as that. On Tianguan 3.0 I downplayed our relationship, saying I was closer to Penner and Candice (which was probably even true at that time), so when the merge hit and they were gone you and I weren't seen as a duo like Penner and I or Candice and I would be. My "move" was telling Vytas, Brenda, Andrea, and Mia individually that I was closer to them than to you (which wasn't true) but that "we" (me and Vytas, me and Brenda, me and Andrea, me and Mia) could use you down the line. Obviously this wasn't the sole reason you stayed that round over Wigles. It was working in tandem with you opening yourself up and looking malleable, but that vote was definitely between you and her and I think downplaying our relationship while also hinting at its later benefit did contribute in getting your name off the table. After that we were able to become the powerful duo that I worked to convince people we weren't. Maybe not the flashiest move, or even a "move" at all in the sense that it was more drawn-out and subtle than, say, an idol play, but if we're talking things I did that allowed me to survive in this game, that, combined with your connections to Rudy and Yul and mine to Tianguan 3.0, probably helped me out the longest duration (from merge to F5).

Okay cool I understand it now. Thanks dude!