Lennie Briscoe - Fifth Juror

[Sherlock Holmes]

Shame you're here, hope you've enjoyed playing

[Scruff McGruff]

Well played! Sorry about any things I may have said about you here, was just giving the opinion of the character I was playing up of the character you were playing up. I mean absolutely nothing personal towards you, want to keep real life out of this, and I also want us to bury the hatchet and remove any potential bitterness from this jury as a whole.

[Jake Peralta]

Sad to see you here, Lennie. What went down?

[Scruff McGruff]

Also, Leon is now the only 27th player remaining. Pretty fitting.

[Lennie Briscoe]

Hey guys, definitely no hard feelings on my end, and I don't begrudge anyone having some on theirs.

This round I felt like I was basically not a part of Judy's game anymore, which was kind of confirmed by Poirot, who said that when she targeted Jake, she was suggesting I'd be next. She really made virtually no effort to talk to me during the round Jake went home, no attempts at damage control or anything. So I kind of prematurely started laying the groundwork to target her this round, which wasn't helped by the snafu with the challenge results, as once the first result was announced, it was like full steam ahead, and then we find out Judy's immune. Whoops!

So yeah, people told her I was targeting her, and it was difficult to really organize a vote otherwise. Out of desperation I tried to even flip it onto Leon because Poirot said that Lucifer and Rust might be receptive to that, but no luck. Leon is pissed at me, understandably, but tbh after he turned on Jake last round I had virtually no trust in any of his loyalties, and he'd repeatedly said things overtly and indirectly that indicated I clearly wasn't one of his top priorities.

To Scruff: FWIW, my apology was sincere, I just genuinely felt like it was an active move against Jake that first merge round because the whole miscommunication comedy of errors seemed so unlikely to me? But either way I shouldn't have been such a shithead to you. The problem is that while that was a huge mistake and I recognized it as a huge mistake later, I knew the damage was done and there was really no rebuilding that trust, which is entirely on me. Anyway, again, I'm sorry.

[Scruff McGruff]

You’re totally fine, don’t worry about it! The whole situation was me being a massive dumbass due to misreading a message from Rust and unintentionally hammering it down on Jake— which led to me flipping between trying to absolve from any blame or doubling down on it altogether, which clearly wasn’t effective. I did feel hurt that you turned a civil conversation into a slew of insults and like that bridge was burned, but it didn’t matter that much anyway because I had a lot of work coming up— so I decided to throw myself on the grenade to protect Rust and Penelope. Glad to see there aren’t any hard feelings!

[Lennie Briscoe]

Yeah I was far far too confident that this was like, some orchestrated plan, and so I felt like the explanation after the fact was just "oh, things didn't work out, now we need to scramble for some story". That was incorrect and I felt doubly embarrassed that I went off on you when that was a foolish thing to do even if I was mad at the time, but also because I wasn't even right to be mad. It wasn't my finest hour. Uh, don't read my confessional from that day.

Anyway, one thing I didn't exactly touch on that you mentioned above is not wanting bitterness from the jury, and I wholeheartedly agree. Like, I definitely butted heads with Judy this last round and it wasn't pretty, but I definitely don't really hold any ill will towards her, I'm totally open to voting for her (though I will need her to take ownership of course, which might be dicey)

[Lennie Briscoe]

Oh one thing I wanted to mention that I didn't earlier, Judy deserves a lot of credit for coming up with the one of the best alliance/group PM names I've ever heard back on SVU for me, her, Poirot, and Leon, LL (Her)cule J

[Scruff McGruff]

Like I said, not a problem at all. Just don't read my confessionals from that round. Or any of mine. Because after the first tribe they devolved into complete and utter garbage. I really want to make this Jury (and game) a good one, is all.

[Jake Peralta]

Yeah I started out trying to keep a detailed dossier on everyone and that fell apart before the first reassignment. I got better about writing stuff down post-merge, but still wasn’t very good about my confessional.

[Grouch Cop]

Am I the only one who was largely nice in their confessional? I have a post or two of annoyance over specific pms or whatever, but nothing is say people shouldn't read. Stuff that was likely to make people feel shitty about I kept to my modchat.

Also, this is a fun experience for me. I usually am aware there's a fuckton I'm not aware of going on around me, but typically I end up feeling like it wouldn't matter what I did. This time I actually didn't feel as useless, but turns out I might just have been even more not part of plans than i usually am as more of you talk about your game journeys. So this is fun and new.

[Lennie Briscoe]

I mean, I'm new to this stuff and probably should use it more as you suggest, but I definitely use confessional as a place to talk things out with myself and vent at times. I could definitely imagine a few comments not landing great.

Honestly Grouch, I could have seen us potentially working together, but yeah the preexisting dynamics going into the merge made things tough, as well as how the first two merge rounds went. If either of those had played out differently, who knows what it would have looked like.

[Grouch Cop]

Oh I know that. There was absolutely potential there, and that's a little sad atm. A lot of untapped potential was there that pre-existing relationships and unresolved problems prevented those from working out.

Also, you know, I've yet to have it explained to me why the vote was on me of all people yet. Or who started that either. I have a slight theory but well, nothing confirmed. I had a lot of open doors and not completely sure which I should have let close.

[Lennie Briscoe]

So basically in the group of me/Poirot/Judy/Leon/Jake, our options were you/Lucifer/Penelope/Rust, and we wanted to avoid hitting an idol at all costs. The thing is on the previous round where Scruff went, Jake (as you know) had really wanted to get you or Lucifer out, but Poirot basically said that there was no way he was going to vote either of you out on a round where he was immune (which I thought made sense). But as a result, he and Judy knew that it would seem like they were less than committed to the alliance if they tried to resist a former 99th for a second round in a row. The rest of us basically figured since it's gonna be you or Lucifer, we were fine letting Poirot and Judy decide who to target (or, well, I think I stated that and Jake and Leon were fine with it, Jake can correct me).

I can't speak exactly to all of what the reasoning was, but I got the impression Poirot felt like you would feel more betrayed by the flip than Lucifer would, because he'd be clearly going against that 3 person group of you, him and Penelope; like if he votes out Lucifer you're going to feel pretty burned (and rightfully so). I think also that you probably had better connections with people and were more capable as a player, and that probably played a part too. Since this was largely in the group chat I don't know if there was any additional reasoning.

Oh, also, on top of that, it was easy to put out Lucifer's name as a fake name to avoid an idol play, if he were the target and he had an idol it'd be harder to make him feel so safe he didn't play it.

[Jake Peralta]

That matches my recollections. It was very process of elimination.

There was a lot of anxiety about the prospect of the former 99th coalescing into a unified voting bloc.