God I wish I could complain about the nature of the challenge or whatever, but in this case I do kinda feel like we just got outplayed. I feel like I'm in a very good position on this tribe but even given that it's sincerely draining to go to TC just immediately back to back.
So Leon, bless his heart, is all rarin' to go about this four person alliance between me, him, Poirot, and Judy. He asked for an alliance name, I didn't have any good suggestions, Judy apparently came up with LL (Her)cule J, which is really inspired, so I'm in my first group chat of the game. Probably not the best decision to create the group PM while we were doing the challenge, but whatever.
A number of people I think have had their weakest interactions with Kate, so her name was brought up pretty quickly in our group chat, and I brought it up to Poirot too. Poirot feels like Kate trusts him and we all know this, and he's open to eliminating her, but brought up the point (which I think all of us have thought about) that Chase has expressed concern about this just being original tribes ganging up on one and eliminating them, a pagonging as it were, and if we were to take out Kate, Chase would really be alienated and feel on the outs. What people are kind of dancing around is the prospect of targeting Paul.
Honestly, I'd been thinking about this. I really thought maybe that going into the swap, Paul and I would get closer, more like Scruff and I were on our original tribe, and it really hasn't happened (and I'm not putting this on him, I could have made the effort to do so and didn't). If I'd really been committed to that idea I probably should have filled him in immediately on what went down on the Hannah vote, and how much Jake was pushing for him, but I wasn't sure if that was the right idea. I was hoping we'd win the first challenge and I could bring it up then but we went to TC and it didn't seem like the right time.
I trust in the LLculeJ alliance I think, and I very much trust Poirot and Leon, so I think I'm gonna be good no matter what, and this might be the time to let Paul go? I was pretty frank about these thoughts to Poirot, and I'm sort of hoping he can orchestrate this without me getting my hands dirty. He says that Cheddar is leaning that way, and I like Cheddar, our chats are arguably better than those with Paul, or at worst on par.
Anyway, ironically, Paul voiced the same "well I'd like to target Kate, but do we want to eliminate two original 12s in a row" sentiment. I honestly don't even know where he's going with that, whether he's got someone from the 99th in mind or if he's suggesting Leon or if it's just lip service because other people are saying it.
Also, weird thing, Kate was like "so it sounds like you and Chase are getting along" and I'm like "oh sure, I like chase, do you guys have something in mind?" and then she said she got confused and must have misinterpreted something he said. Whatever. I responded and said it wasn't a big deal and reiterated that I don't see this as being on tribal lines, previous relationships matter but we need to be open to new opporrtunities, blahblahblah. I feel like she made a mistake (not as in, something bad for her game, but something unintended) when she contacted me like that, and I want to defuse that.
(edit: below I digress into a thing about general strategy but I forgot to mention my actual response, which was "hey, I understand, no big deal. FWIW, I told chase that this isn't about original tribal lines and I mean that, of course previous relationships matter, but the swap is about building new bonds" roughly)
Anthony Douglas on BBCAN7 had a really insightful view on interactions with people, where he said he didn't want to put people in a situation to lie to him, and by that he didn't mean "I want to make people tell me the truth all the time", but rather that when someone is less than honest with you, it implicitly distances you from them in their mind. Some players see value in testing people by asking them questions where they would have incentive to lie, so you can see where they stand. But I think the point Anthony was making is that sometimes by avoiding those situations, you're able to keep lines of communication open in the future, so in responding to Kate like that, I was kind of hoping to ensure that we're still able to talk. This is one of those situations where she might feel self-conscious or wary and I hope I can smooth that over.
I'm kind of walking a tightrope here in that I definitely don't want to be like "hey guys, I'm fine with voting Paul out" too openly, because it can easily seem like I have no loyalty, but I also want people to be able to come to me and broach tough subjects.