#meta me

*types 6 words* 

Wait, what color is this character’s eye color? *opens tumblr to find the picrew* ooh new posts* *spend 45 minutes re-reading drabbles I’ve read literally 50 times*

Oh CRAP I was writing. 

*Pulls up the picrew.... and the eyes are black.* oh, ah okay. I guess I’ll decide now. I feel like every red head as blue eyes, tho. *remembers I was going to text my hairdresser to see if I can get an appointment to dye my hair red* *texts hairdresser* *gets notification from tumblr* *cries because a new friend is LIKING ALL OF MY NIK POSTS* 

Part of me just wants to squee about the awesomeness of Tilly, but I think a more interesting topic is how the show focuses on themes of identity and personhood.

Our main character, Michael, is someone who was literally raised in an alien culture, attempting to live up to standards and values that she is ill-suited to as a human in a Vulcan world. When she joins the Federation as an adult, she is likewise not fully comfortable with her largely human crew, as she has learned to comport herself largely as a Vulcan would. 

After her mutiny and sentencing, things become even more difficult for Michael, as she is now surrounded by people who view her with suspicion and anger. She is no longer a ranked member of the Federation, and is unsure how long her stay on Discovery will last or when she will be returned to her lifetime imprisonment.

So right off the bat, our main character is a conflict of identities of all sorts. 

Now, of course the mirrorverse stuff is a major source for digging in to issues of identity. How does the world we live in affect who we become? Do we retain any kind of core selfhood despite having lived very different lives? Nature vs. nurture, how trauma affects our personhood, how long does it take to become our darker selves when we take on that role, etc. I’m not even going to touch all of that. It’s a big topic and probably better left to a bigger trek fan than myself. 

What I would like to write about a little is the situation of Ash Tyler/Voq. Because that is some terrifying, terrific, traumatic stuff right there. The entire arc of Ash was incredibly difficult for me to watch, as someone with PTSD myself. 

When we meet Ash, he is already so fully traumatized. We learn he was tortured and raped while he was imprisoned. When he is rescued and reintegrated back into the Federation, it is a rough for him. His relationship with Michael is often a beautiful salve, but can also difficult due to his struggles with his trauma.

And then comes the realization that he is not who he thinks he is. He’s supposed to remember who he is when he gets the trigger phrase from L’Rell, but he resists. His entire personhood is in conflict.

Is he Ash or is he Voq? Are his memories of the surgery that his brain remembered as torture, or of the consensual relationship he had with L’Rell that he remembers as rape, any less traumatic once he realizes that he chose those things of his own accord as Voq? I think they become even more traumatic. 

What is real? The relationships he had, his goals and values as a Klingon? Or the relationships he built as Ash, and the goals and values he took on after he purposefully superimposed the real Ash’s personality and memories on to his own? 

And now that he has the memories and traits of both, who gets to decide which relationships and goals he pursues? What values does he align himself with? Is it really a free choice now, either way? 

And what of the real Ash, and the people he knew in his real life? Do they get a say in how Voq!Ash gets to be treated by the Federation? He has the real Ash’s memories and personality traits, but he’s not actually him. He did, in fact, play a role in the real Ash’s death. So how can any of that be reconciled? 

Like. Okay.

The whole idea of the Federation and the Klingons attempting to make peace after all of this mess is tricky enough, right? Without adding this whole other symbolic layer of merging identities to the mix. But here we are, with Voq/Ash going to work on the tricky peace-making business. 

How will he fare? Which personality will become dominant over time? Can he successfully overcome the trauma and confusion of the things he once freely chose but that became a nightmare for him? Can he hold these two very different souls within himself and make peace with them both? Will he choose to seek out Ash’s family or friends or old co-workers? How will they receive him? How will he relate with L’Rell and the other Klingons he’s working with now?

This could all become a very beautiful metaphor about the merging of cultures and how to grow peace out of war and be a beacon of light showing how folks with very different cultural values can come to understand one another.

Or ... it could just be more trauma piled on top of more trauma. Personally, I’m a little bit scared to see where they might go with it all. Not because I don’t trust the show to do it respectfully, but because it could all get darker before it gets better. 

(CONT) Or not only Fitz I guess also May and Coulson. The show overlooked the responsibility of those two in all of it because they were basically enablers of an evil empire and like I know we all are capable of doing bad things but they were playing in another level. All you want to write about the subject I'd love to hear :)

Thank you so much for giving me a meta request! And I apologize about how long it’s taken me to get to it. 

I have to say that I also felt disconnected this season. I’m not sure what it was, exactly, but the whole mysteriously being sent into the future and stuck on the space station thing just didn’t work for me, I guess, and being thrown into this whole new world with new characters and situations sort of confused me for a time. Like WTF is going on? And not in the good-fun way of “I can’t wait to figure out what’s going on!” but more in a just lost and disinterested way? 

I feel like they were maybe trying to make some parallels between the Nazi/Hydra conditions of the Framework but with our characters all scrambling together to fight the powers that be instead of being made to work against one another? Maybe? But I feel like that might have worked better if Fitz had been with them in the future since he was the main one they had to fight in the Framework?

Plus, all of the prophecies causing the things that affect the future circularity of it all just got be a bit too much for me. Perhaps if I had binge watched it all once vs. watching week to week it would have flowed better. I wonder if anyone who watched it that way felt differently about it??

Like, I’m reading a recap of the season to remind myself of everything that went down and I’m like - wait who was that character again? And what was the relevancy of this plot point to the overall arc? And whoa - wait - how did that even happen anyway?! It’s confusing. I like a good mystery in my fiction, but not outright confusion. 

I do feel like the way the show has decided it has to become a whole new entity every season or half-season gets to be a bit much. AoS works better, imo, as a character-driven show. We don’t need all of these complex and ever-changing plots to be interested in what our heroes are doing. 

They can have conflict and drama and climaxes and resolutions without these massive shifts where our characters never even get to take a breath before the next big thing happens. Some of the best stuff is what happens during those breaths, those beats, in between the action itself. And we rarely get to see that stuff anymore. We get a rushed confession here and a quickie kiss there and five seconds of emotional discovery and release before running off to do the next insane thing to save the world from something it turns out they caused in the first place and ENOUGH already, yk? 

It just becomes really difficult to relate emotionally to the characters, and to understand the emotional motivations driving their actions, when we only get maybe half a minute per episode per character of actual character development. They want us to understand and connect with our group, but I feel like they are doing more telling than showing these days. 

Quite possibly, a major reason for all of this extra extraness and convoluted plot twisting is due to their need to be linked with the movie franchise. So the writers of the show have these great ideas, but then they’re being controlled somewhat by what the movies are doing, but likely also aren’t getting all of the info on exactly what happens in the movies, so they just kinda slide around trying to fit it all together in ways that feel less than ideal when it all actually plays out on screen. But that’s just a guess. 

I’m trying to recall, now, if I felt differently about the finale than the season as a whole, but I’m not sure. I did like the installation of Mack as the leader. That felt really called for and well deserved. 

As far as the Fitz always having been capable of being a Nazi, or least Nazi-like, there is a shitton of problematicness going on with that whole deal that I don’t feel qualified to touch on. 

But I did actually like the reveal that it was Fitz himself - and not some fictional other!Fitz - that was making the choices he did in the back half of the season. Because while he didn’t literally become the head of a genocidal fascistic regime, he did make some very immoral decisions. And they were decisions we didn’t think our Fitz was capable of. But he experienced that Framework world, and while he was ashamed and horrified by his role in it, it affected him as any experience would. And it led him to making a terrible decision that hurt a lot of people. Yes, he believed it was for the greater good - where greater good means the literal survival of the human race and the planet earth and all life upon it - so there were some heavy stakes attached there. But they were still immoral choices. 

And we saw all of the team making some weird, and sometimes horrific, choices all season. Which, again, I guess, was trying to make some kind of parallel or at least connection to the Framework world. And these are characters who all, in their own way, already carry the burden of the world with them; and who in this past season were literally carrying the burden of the survival of the world with them. And I suppose the crisis of that burden could cause anyone to make some rough choices. 

But I still have a lot of serious problems with the whole Hydra-Framework-Nazi thing. I mean, the agents aren’t Clark Kent - they don’t have to be perfectly decent and good at all times. But they’re still supposed to be our heroes, you know what I mean? 

And heroes make heroic choices. And heroic choices don’t involve taking other people’s freedom or autonomy away from them. Not in any moral universe I want to take part in, anyway. 

So yea, it’s tricky. I feel distanced from the show not just from the standpoint of the plot being overly and unnecessarily convoluted, but also from an emotional view of just not being sure what they’re trying to say about these characters that we’ve grown to love. 

Since I’m no good at taking notes while actually being on a panel myself, I send you to check the # where folks at the panel were livetweeting if you want an overall picture of what my amazingly thoughtful panelists had to say over here.

What I’m gonna do here is just riff off my own pre-panel notes and maybe dig in to some of the stuff I didn’t get to at the panel since I was more concerned with letting my panelists get their say in.

My interest in suggestion and then volunteering to be on the panel, and about it specifically being about the themes of the movie, and about focusing specifically on The Last Jedi itself, was threefold. First is the controversy around the movie and why so many people had a bad reaction to it, secondly my interest in trilogies themselves and how difficult the second part of a trilogy can be, and thirdly just digging into the narrative themes of a story in general is exciting to me. 

So, firstly, let me get into my opinion on how TLJ fits into the wider SW universe, because I think a lot of the criticisms of the movie fell into this category. 

There absolutely were parts of the movie that felt off to me? Some of the humor didn’t feel SW-ey to me, and the fight choreography was a little strange (that whole red room scene just kills me - IK SW is always a bit extra but that was extra squared MIRite?), and even the theme music felt ... different in ways I still haven’t been able to really contextualize. So I sympathize with people who didn’t like the movie or just felt it wasn’t good AS a Star Wars movie even if they did like it generally. 

But I also disagree with them. Because while some of that stuff felt off to me, those were small things in comparison to the overall narrative. And I feel like a lot of the complaints about the movie were ~about~ that narrative and how they didn’t feel like it fit within the SW framework well. And I disagree wholeheartedly with that. I think if you compare TLJ with the second parts of really any trilogy - not just SW ones - you’ll see that it’s doing what it’s supposed to do.

So what is the second part of a trilogy supposed to do, you ask? It’s supposed to crush you. It’s supposed to crush the spirits of the characters. It’s the big awful climax before the reversal of fortune that starts to set things to rights again.

Think of it this way: 

Part 1 is all about setting up the characters and the world, introducing us to what the struggle is about, showing us how our protags are going to fight back, etc. It’s going to be hopeful by it’s very nature because why tf would we care about the story if we’re not invested in the outcome being favorable to the main characters in the end, right? 

And Part 3 is all about the resolution. We’ve finally figured out how to actually win the good fight, the romantic arcs are coming together, families are reuniting, whatever themes the narrative has set up are coming to fruition, etc. So this one is also full of hope and optimism. Even if it’s not an overall happy ending, there will be some kind of ray of light at the end - a coda showing how the characters might someday recover from their trauma perhaps, or how the human race might prevail because of the sacrifices of our protags, whatever. Something to show it was not in all vain. 

So what is Part 2? Part 2 is the shitshow. Part 2 is everything falling apart for our heroes - especially at the end. I think about another of my favorite trilogies - The Hunger Games. And at the end of Catching Fire, we have Katniss confused, angry, betrayed by one of the few people she ever allowed herself to trust, one of the other few captured by the enemy, and her entire home district burned to the ground. Super dark ending. There’s a little slip of hope there - her other trusted friend is alive, her little sister is alive, and they’re all safely underground with heretofore unknown allies. But it’s still pretty bleak.

And it’s bleak because it’s not the end. There’s still an entire book (or 2 whole movies whichever way you look at it) of fighting left to do. We need Katniss motivated to stay in the fight, so having someone she loves to save is a good thing to give her. And we need her to remain conflicted about the fight, hence her continued and quite reasonable distrust of ... just about everyone and everything. And we need to be, as the audience, a bit confused and conflicted about what’s going on because - here’s the crux - we need to remain invested enough to pick up that third book (or go see those next 2 movies). 

Same with a Star Wars trilogy. If we could see from episode 8 how the resistance was going to save the day, how invested would we be in episode 9? I mean, yea, lots of us will watch anything SW gives us to watch, so they wouldn’t necessarily be hurting for movie sales or anything. But to really keep the fandom truly invested, truly glued to our seats waiting anxiously to see how the story unfolds, episode 8 has to end on a fairly bleak note. 

Compare it to episode 2, Empire Strikes Back. Luke has just found out who Vader is to him, he’s lost his hand, they’ve lost Han in the carbon freeze, Lando has betrayed them, and they have no idea how they’re going to pick up the pieces and move on. All they know is - they’re going to try.

And here we come to the end of episode 8, TLJ, and the resistance is down to minuscule numbers, we’ve lost Luke, we the audience know we’re gonna have to lose Leia (I’m not crying - YOU are), and it all feels bleaker than bleak.

But then. But then. We have Rey asking Leia - how do we do this, how are we going to build a resistance out of this? And Leia smiles softly and says “we have all we need.” Does Leia know some secret strategy she’s not shared with the others? Does she have a cache of weapons and other resources stashed away? Has she somehow heard that their allies from far away places are coming to their rescue? Eh, we don’t know, but likely not. 

What Leia knows is that even their small band of rebel fighters has the ability to overcome the terrible odds because she’s seen it happen before. She knows that even if this group of fighters in this generation don’t win, the resistance will live on and eventually the tyranny of the First Order will be brought down. 

And what do we see in the very next scene? The little slave boy who Rose and Finn met at Canto Bight has Rose’s ring, and he’s telling stories of resistance and hope to his fellow slaves, and ooop - what else? He’s force sensitive. He might not even know that about himself yet, but WE see the broom fly a few inches in the air towards his open hand. This is a kid who is going to join the fight as soon as he’s able. And he won’t be the only one. 

Where ever there are downtrodden, there will be a spirit of resistance. THIS is what Leia knows. And this is the small light of hope we the audience are meant to take with us into the third part of this trilogy. 

Our heroes in TLJ, like our heroes in ESB, have no idea how they’re going to pick up the pieces and move on. All they know is - they’re going to try. And that’s enough to keep us engaged. That’s enough to keep us wanting more. So did TLJ do it’s job as the second installment of a trilogy? My vote is yes. Yes it did.

So what of the themes of TLJ themselves, and how they fit in to the SW universe? Hope is a major theme of any Star Wars movie, and as a panel we found that TLJ was indeed about hope, but it was also about failure. And more than that, it was about how the two interplay with one another.

As far as failure goes, we have plenty of characters who have failed or felt as if they have failed or been failed by someone.

We have Luke feeling he failed Ben, Rey telling him she thinks Ben failed him, Rey feeling she failed at getting Luke’s cooperation, Luke feeling he’s failed Rey as yet another student, Yoda talking about the failures of the Jedi and explaining to Luke how failure itself can be a lesson, and a teacher. 

We have Rose and Finn failing to find the codebreaker, but finding DJ instead, and all of the reversals of fortune that happen with that story back and forth. We have Poe failing to learn from his mistakes, finally learning at the end just as he fails to impart that wisdom to Finn. We have Rey and Kylo failing to turn one another, Kylo failing to enact revenge on Luke, and Luke failing to get through to Kylo even at the last. We have the resistance failing to get through to their allies. We have Holdo failing to save her people even as she sacrifices herself. 

But we don’t only have failure. We also have Luke finally deciding to get involved again, and making the hard choices to sacrifice himself for the resistance. We have Rey letting go of the idea of saving Kylo and rejoining the resistance efforts, saving them all on Crait with the Jedi rock moving trick. And to be fair, we had Rey and Kylo fighting together to kill Snoke. And we have Rose saving Finn with her message of love. 

But mostly, I think, we have Luke back as a *symbol* of hope. He’s always been that for us. One of the most difficult parts of TLJ for a lot of fans (and seemingly for Mark Hamill himself) was how hopeless Luke had become. Luke not only felt like a failure, he felt as though his failure was the cause of everything bad happening. Going further than that, he felt that any interaction he might take in the world would only make it worse. 

Rey coming to him on Ach-To terrifies him. He can’t be her teacher - look what happened the last time he had the audacity to teach! He can’t save anyone, all he does it make things worse. He may have held his father’s dying body in his arms in an act of redemptive love, but he still acknowledges that the evil Vader was capable of runs in his veins. He’s absolutely petrified by the very idea of being a symbol of anything to anybody at this point.

When he was young, he may have messed up a lot, but he always got back up and dusted himself off, and kept trying. He knew he could do great things in the world and he did - he did them. He blew up the death star, he allowed his father a redemptive death, he stopped the evil Empire, he became a Jedi. It took, well, it took arrogance to do those things. It took hubris to accomplish those things, something the young are good at. 

As an older man who has born witness to more failures, who has failed his beloved sister and best friend’s child in the worst way possible, and who has sealed himself off from the world and the force within himself as well - he is no longer filled with hope. He is now scared of the very hubris that allowed him to do great things in the world. So when a new youngster, full of the force, full of the kind of hubris that says “I won’t fail you!”, full of the arrogance of the young who know deep within themselves that they have the power to beat the stronger forces opposing them? He fails once again, through his fear.

He fails to step up. He fails to take on the teaching of Rey. He fails to come back to speak with the nephew he’s failed. He fails to reach out to his sister and his friends and his allies. 

And so he also fails the audience’s expectations of him, as our great hero, as our symbol of hope and willingness to fight back against the monsters who face us. 

Does it make all the sense in the world for Luke to feel the way he does? You betcha. Does that ease the sense of disappointment that Rey, and R2, and us in the audience feel? Not really, no. But that’s all part of the narrative of TLJ. Reversals of fortune, failure and trying again, hope and hopelessness, light and dark, and finally, maybe, hopefully - balance? 

Luke does finally step up, though, right? He gives comfort to his sister and the other rebels on Crait. He takes a stand against Kylo. He makes it clear that he knows he can’t save him, but instead is going to fight against the evil that he helped to create with his own failure. It’s his job to give the world that fighting chance again, and so he does it. He does it with all of the drama and panache of a Skywalker. And he uses up all of his force strength and energy in the process.

In the end, we lose Luke; but we also get him back. He’s our hope again. He shows us that it’s not too late, it’s never too late, to take a stand and fight for what’s right. He shows us that we can stand and face our mistakes and do our best to make them right. He shows us that even if we can’t make them right, we can try. See Yoda? Sometimes there is such thing as trying, and sometimes that effort is what counts the most. 

Also, of course, we know we haven’t seen the last of Luke. We’ll see his force ghost, I’m sure, before this story concludes. And now that he’s regained his own sense of hope and strength in the face of failure - he can pass that on to Rey, and anyone else who might need such a message.

Luke is not the only character who regains some sense of self and hope in the face of oppression, of course. We have the iconic moment when Phasma tells Finn that he’s just a bug in the system, that he’s always been scum. Her intent is to weaken Finn’s sense of self. But Finn has found, through his journey with Rose, a new resolve to fight back against the First Order and those who enable them. So his reply to Phasma telling him he’s scum? “Rebel scum.” 

Finn’s journey from the first moment we see him has been about reclaiming his own identity. He’s struggled with it, though. He wants to fight back, but he wants to escape the First Order more than that. What he ends up wanting even more than escape, however, turns out to be the safety of his new friends - Han, Rey, Poe, and now Rose. He cares for these people and abandons his quest to get as far away from the First Order as possible when he finds that any of them are in danger. 

And finally, in Canto Bight, he realizes that it’s not just these few individuals that he’s come to know and care for that are in danger. It’s worlds full of people who he was, unwittingly, a part of oppressing as a stormtrooper. And when he and Rose ride the fathiers through the corrupt city, tearing it apart and freeing the abused animals, he feels enough satisfaction that even though he feels sure that they’re about to get caught - he says it was worth it. 

Finn, whose only goal since we met him was to be free of oppression himself, looks around at how he’s upset the applecart around him, knowing himself caught and about to be jailed or possibly killed for his actions, and he says: it was worth it. Damn. That’s powerful. 

Add that to his reply to Phasma, his claiming the title of “rebel scum”, tying his identity to the resistance, and deciding once and for all to truly fight against the First Order, and well -  I think we have another great symbol of hope here. That Finn immediately goes and tries to sacrifice himself in the battle on Crait, and is then saved by Rose who tells him we won’t win by fighting what we hate but by saving what we love, just gives us even more hope and light to see by. 

So we have:

Luke’s sacrifice and re-imaging as a symbol of hope

Leia’s soft promise that the resistance has all it needs already

Rey saving her friends with her force strength despite her lack of training

Poe learning his lesson about listening to his superiors and how that impacts his own leadership

Finn claiming his identity as part of the rebellion 

Rose’s message of love

Yoda’s message of redemption through the acceptance of failure - for individuals as well as for the Jedi religion

Holdo’s big sacrifice 

The hope that some of their allies are still out there and coming to help

The hope of future generations, as seen through the slave boy on Canto Bight

Was The Last Jedi a hopeful movie? I’d argue that, ultimately, it is. Was it also bleak as fuck? Yup. The two can exist together. Just as Luke can symbolize failure and success, hope and hopelessness, hubris and disgrace; TLJ can be a bleak movie with a hopeful message. 

So, I know most of you have probably forgotten whatever you once knew about me, but if anyone feels like giving me a meta challenge or two, I’d love it.

My last Meta Me request (at least in this cycle - hopefully I’ll do this again, and hopefully folks find my writing interesting enough to want to give me more topics in the future) is a second one from @c-l-ford​ (which is why I’m doing it last since I started with her other Star Wars-related one).

This one was to write more about 300 Fox Way from The Raven Cycle books by Maggie Stiefvater, which is great since I recently made a new book-friend via someone finding that first big post I made about them! That post was mostly just a disorganized squee of feels, questions, and requests for more fandom content about my personal favorite parts of the series.

I just recently did another thorough re-read with note-taking (expect more posts in the near future), so this gives me a fantastic opportunity to dig in deeper.

There is a lot that I love about the 300 Fox Way household.  I might write about any or all of those things at some point.

But first I want to focus on my favorite character in the books - Calla Lily Johnson. 

That was a stupid long intro, but please click through for the actual Calla meta if you’re interested. (It’s also stupid long, but it focuses primarily on Calla’s personality traits, her love for her household, and her similarities to Ronan)

I know I’ve been gone all summer, and I owe a few meta requests, but right now I’m gonna take some time out to write out a meta that literally no one is asking for, or probably wants. Because it’s gonna be about my summer obsession, Big Brother. But maybe if some of you all read this meta anyway, you’ll understand some of the reasons I’m so into this ridiculous reality show. (And yes, tag regulars, I’m mostly a lurker here so don’t hate me for sharing my long-winded opinion out of the blue lol)

What got me thinking about this meta was player rankings, and how incredibly different they can be based on who is making them, or what the culture of a website is that is asking for them, or even how the question is phrased. 

There are three basic criteria for ranking players of BB. One is just the totally subjective - who I like best. We all make these from pre-season through post-season and they often change from week to week, and it literally only has to do with who we enjoy watching, whose values seem to align best with ours, who we think is most like us and the people we choose to be around, who we find to be the funniest or the smartest or the most attractive, etc. 100% subjective and wildly variant from person/site to person/site. 

The second criteria is similar, but with some important differences, and that’s most entertaining. This is, after all, a television show based entirely on entertaining audiences. Often the people we like the best are also the ones that entertain us the most, because we like entertainment. 

But sometimes we find people really entertaining who we don’t like personally (sometimes the douchiest guy is really funny and good for starting drama *cough*Brett*cough*). And sometimes the people we feel the most affinity with personally aren’t as interesting to watch on TV, or the feeds. It happens. This one is still quite subjective, but if folks are honest with themselves and take feels out, this one won’t have quite as many wild variations (beyond feedsters vs. casuals anyway).

So one are two are very subjective, but the third is based on the best gameplay. And everyone likes to think that their rankings are based primarily on this criteria, but, let’s face it, that’s not true. Because here is the thing. The only way to really rank gameplay is to wait for the game to end, and then rank the houseguests down from winner to second place, and then on down from there to the most recent evicts. 

The entire point of this game is to stay in the house the longest, and if you manage to make it to final two, convince the jury to vote for you. That’s it. And there as many ways of getting to that point as there have been winners.

Big Brother has many components, and therefore many paths to success. You really can’t look at someone mid-game and proclaim that they’re playing the best game, because anything can happen to get them evicted in a snap. You can maybe gauge who is playing good, decent, or bad games - but how often has someone whose gameplay seemed ridonk to you made it to the end, or someone who seemed to have it all in the bag end up in the jury at the last minute? So, yea, I’m arguing that you cannot rate gameplay until the game is over, and then all you can look at it is order of evictions and who ended up with the big W in the end. 

Now, when I say there are as many ways to win as there have been winners, let me be clear. There are a lot of different strategies, but there are also a lot of different moving parts to playing, and winning, Big Brother. 

One of the more obvious routes to getting to the end is competition wins. But I think if you’ve been following BB for more than a couple of seasons, you’ll easily agree that this has less of an impact on the game than it initially seems. Yes, you have to win some HoH’s and PoV’s in order to stay safe if you’re a target or don’t have a big alliance to protect you, and yes racking up comp wins is a great part of the so-called resume to win if you make it to F2. 

But comp wins don’t win the game by themselves, and plenty of winners of the game have skated by with very few comp wins. If throwing comps is part of your overall strategy, like Dan in his first season; or if you’re part of a large alliance and have been able to spread comp wins out among you to keep a target off of your individual backs, etc. But no doubt, competitions do play a big role in the game.

Another big component is, of course, the social aspect of the game. You have to get along with a lot of different kinds of people. You have to be able bond with a bunch of strangers right off the bat in order to form connections and eventually alliances. You have to be able to be friendly with members of opposing alliances and enemies, people you’d maybe punch out, or tell off, or just ignore in your regular daily life. 

You also have to be prepared to be constantly putting your best self forward so as not tick people off, since you are all trapped in a fairly small space together for so long. You have to be able to suss out who you can trust, and how far you can trust them for. You have to be able to figure out when someone is lying to you, or using you for information or a vote, or is secretly controlling things behind the scenes, etc. So to say “the social game” is to actually say many things, in and of itself. 

Then there is strategy. This is often conflated with the social game, but it’s different. The social game is about reading people, getting along with people, and getting people to trust you. Strategy is what you DO with all of that.

For example, how do you organize your alliance if you have one (or more)? Who gets to collect and relay information and how do you keep them from getting caught out or sharing too much or going over to the other side? When is it important for you to personally win a competition vs. letting someone you trust win it for you? How do you deal with comps that you’re not good at - do you make sure someone in your alliance is good at puzzles if that’s not your thing, and how do you suss out who that person might be? 

Obviously, there is a lot involved in strategy and a lot of different ways to go about strategizing. And of course, strategies do - and in most cases should - change throughout the game. What works in week 1 probably won’t work in week 14. Twists change up strategy, how alliances begin and later shake out affects strategy, gameplay getting outed should cause a shift in strategy, pre-jury vs. jury starting often requires different strategies, etc. And should a player get so lucky, deciding who to take to the end is a big part of strategy. 

But going back to jury strategy, I’d call the oft talked about jury management it’s own component of the game that combines the social and strategic aspects. Because once the jury starts, the gameplay does shift a little bit. 

It matters how you send people out that door. It matter if your gameplay is visible or not. If you’ve been laying low, playing behind the scenes, or throwing comps, now’s the time to shift things up a bit. Jury management is going to mean different things in different seasons, so that ability to read people matters here - are the people hitting jury likely to make emotional decisions, are they superfans who enjoy strategic gameplay even if it cut them in the end, will they respect cutthroat play over niceties? These are all things that have to be judged. 

Sometimes jury management is as simple as making sure you’re on good terms personally with everyone who leaves. Sometimes it’s making sure that the strategy you’ve used all game is clear so that if you make it to that all-important F2 you can easily convince them that you deserve to win. Sometimes it’s something really creative like using those goodbye messages to your advantage Josh-style. Whatever it is, it has to be something. You can’t just keep playing the same game as week 1 and not do anything to show the jurors that you should win, and neither can you wait until that last week to start making up that F2 resume. 

Some of these components of the game overlap a bit, but here’s one part I don’t think a lot of people consider as part of the game - and that’s production. I know “you are not allowed to use production as a strategy.” BUT. Production is totally part of the game. 

Dan is an example of someone who started playing the game during casting by portraying himself in a specific way to fit an archetype that he knew reality shows liked to fill. Scottie, this season, has admitted to doing similar. So casting plays a role, because as much as they say they aren’t, they surely are looking for certain types and you also have to seem interesting to them in order to get cast - and obviously you can’t win if you don’t get cast in the first place.

Now, I don’t buy into the idea that production plays favorites in the sense of caring who wins or loses. But I absolutely believe, and have always believed, that they care about making an entertaining show. Because, obviously, that’s the whole point. So being entertaining, and therefore good for the show’s ratings, is a good way to make sure you at least stick around for awhile. It can’t keep you in the game all it’s own, but if you don’t think the producers are trying to help out the more entertaining, controversial, and/or biggest personalities, I don’t know what to tell you. Obviously, having some respect for production is gonna be a plus, as well, JC this season notwithstanding. 

Another aspect of getting far in the game has absolutely got to be not letting production get into your head. The game is designed to make you paranoid and keep you on your toes. And we know that those DR sessions get them worked up and worrying about things in order to make better TV (it’s more fun if no one is too comfortable, if people are constantly questioning the people in their alliance, if the house gets divided into two sides that don’t like one another, etc.). So if you’ve got the kind of personality that doesn’t let that kind of thing rattle you, that’s also gonna take you farther. 

And then, of course, there is just good old fashioned luck. A lot of the competitions are more luck than skill. Who you end up in the house with to begin with is pure luck. Whether those people are more inclined to like or trust you or not is gonna be somewhat luck no matter how sociable you are. There’s a lot of the game that is just not controllable in any way. So you have to be adaptable, you have to have plan B and further for any situation, and you have to be able to roll with the punches and keep going no matter what happens.

We’ve seen the nicest player in the house (Jordan) win, and the meanest player in the house (Evil Dick) win. We’ve seen master strategists like Dan and Derrick win, and master strategists like Vanessa lose. We’ve seen comp beasts win and lose. We’ve seen members of large alliances win and lose. We’ve seen players who disregarded how the jury worked lose (twice - lol Paul). We’ve seen villains (like Maggie) win, and heroes (like Kaysar) lose (twice). We’ve seen a rat floater (Andy) win. 

The only thing that can be said for sure is that there is no one sure way to win. Anyone walking into that house who is trying to pattern their game on someone else’s is gonna lose. Anyone going in thinking they can conjure up and stick to one solid strategy from beginning to end is gonna lose. And plenty of incredible players on several of the fronts mentioned above have still lost the game in the end.

Because it’s not a sport or card game or even game show with a sound set of rules and regulations and a cookie cutter way towards victory. It’s a reality show that is constantly evolving to provide the most entertainment to audiences with a catchphrase of “expect the unexpected.” It’s the one show of it’s kind that is done live, with livefeeds showing what’s going on between episodes, and that doesn’t have months to edit their narrative into neat little weekly packages. It comes on three nights a week, with a live aspect once a week, and anything can happen - from the rules changing half-way through, to the human element of total chaos and ridiculousness, to even the narrative that the producers are trying to set having to change because of factors beyond their control. 

That’s what makes it exciting. And so yea, I can rank any season you like of my favorite HGs or the HGs I personally found most entertaining, but if you want a ranking of best players - it’s always going to be the winners and then on down. Folks who have played multiple times would get their rankings combined, so Dan has to be considered, objectively, the best player as the only person to have both won and come in second, since no one has won the game twice. 

This is all why I don’t listen to complaints of bitter juries (jury management is an important part of the game), or robbed queens/kings (no one deserved the win but the winner), or production interference (playing production is part of the game), or anything mid-game about who is playing the best or who deserves to win.