Oohhhhh kay continuing on.
F11 A.K.A. The fucked round
This was the real start of merge. Just before this round, an alliance of Hapi/Lorenz/Raphael/Petra/Myself was established. In my head, I didn't see Raphael as someone that would stick with this for long. I also knew that Lorenz viewed Hapi as a threat to win and would want to make a move against her eventually but I expect this to be several rounds later. We as a group worked together to force out Claude and establish that we were a team.
During F11, Hapi and Shamir had their own disagreement that I was not apart of. What I was busy focusing on was building a relationship with Caspar/Felix and preparing what I wanted to be the majority of F9 and F7. As long as I could maintain myself in the majorities and keep people I trusted in them, I didn't care too much who went. Felix/Caspar fit into that for me. When talk of the Blue Lions being a threat started to circulate, I instantly knew this was fear mongering to push a blue vote. There were several rumors flying about on who said what with Hapi vs Shamir but the biggest one was that Hapi wanted to target a blue, specifically you Ashe. This was never true and I doubted Hapi wanted to push anyone at all. She was likely just compromising.
In our talks with Petra/Hapi/myself, Hapi was just trying to figure out how to get out of the situation and only wanted Shamir gone for spreading misinformation. I attempted to rally our alliance to stay the course on Shamir but once word got back to me that Lorenz leaked the alliances existence, I knew it was over. Sure enough... Raphael ditched and was voting with Shamir which is where I expected him to end up all along and now we have Lorenz to deal with. I thought it was better to cut our losses and target Lorenz so that I could keep Hapi in longer but unfortunately, he had an idol. There were too many unknowns and too many players for me to put my foot down on anything so I searched for compromises that would benefit my F9 and F7 vision. Ideally, we should have stayed the course on Shamir but that wasn't possible after Lorenz was being pinned for leaking information to everyone.
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The Idol Theory is a bit easier to explain. Early in the game, Edie approached me about the hidden idol hunt she found in a spectator's account. This was my first warning sign that Edie was observant and thus more likely to find an idol. She name dropped Raphael as another person she told about this and I kept a mental tab on them. Raphael then proved to be decent at challenges through our time at Black Eagles.
By the time Merge hit, Shamir and Edie had been together for a while and I figured they would be close. If Edie did have an idol, Shamir would surely know about it because of how quick Edie was willing to share information with me. I had two other hints, one being that Shamir panic'd with me during F11 attempting to confirm there were no votes on her and two, a more obvious hint, was how good she was at the cartridge hunting challenge. That's EXACTLY the type of skill set you need to be good with idol hunting. So I discussed most of my idol fears with Petra/Caspar/Ashe as I expect that to be the F7 majority alliance at some point. But in order to maximize our success, we NEEDED to pull idols out somehow. I tried several times to get Caspar/Petra to consider voting Shamir in a blindside but each time was met with resistance.