9RedWing19 wrote:Redwing, the strategy that was portrayed as bad was the 'outwitting and outplaying' kind. As he was shown to admit himself, Bob was only interested in the 'outlasting' part. And he did it by employing a 'doing what the others need' approach, even in the pivotal fake idol exhange with Sugar. We were beaten over the head with all of this, as early as the first episode.
As Kitty pointed out, they would do exactly that, if the rest of the editing told us that that strategy was a bad thing. And that anyone who professed to have any was consistently portrayed as arrogant - and wrong.Is it strategy itself that was a bad thing (which I don't believe for a second) or was it the strategies that certain contestants used that was portrayed as arrogant (eg Ace, Marcus, Ken seeing themselves as strategic masterminds) and hence bad?
Bob did have a strategy (going UTR) after all.
Interestingly, although the people you mention were good examples of scheming being equated with arrogance, the poster-person used to tell us what was happening with scheming strategists this season was probably Corinne. The editors used her as their mouth-piece to declare the folly of anyone trying to formulate Babel-like grandiose plans. It soon became clear with every occasion of her strategy shown to be spectacularly wrong, that this wasn't about Corinne's individual edit. There was a qualitative difference between the clueless predictions of James Miller in Palau and the spectacular predictive failures of a player otherwise presented as ruthless, clinical and part of a team supported by the editing.
Corinne's plight was actually a good example of the value of evaluating individual edits through the prism of more generic stories being told.
