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Ugh, god. I don't even know where to fucking start with these three. I know that this is probably a pretty cliche choice, but that's because they were fucking awful and defined why the season sucked. For starters, this could not possibly have been a more obvious outcome. As soon as Matt gave his confessional at the F12 about how he was going to do the right thing and go with Rob, anyone in the world could have predicted that Rob was going to win the season over Phillip and Natalie. They tried to build up some suspense at the end that Ashley might win the final challenge and win the game as a jury threat, which is... almost insulting. Like, come on. You've made Ashley completely irrelevant for everything besides trimming her armpit hair with Natalie (or whatever the fuck it was they did) for literally the entire season, and now suddenly she's this Immunity-dominating threat for jury votes? Somehow this girl who has been portrayed as completely useless is going to win over Rob, the awkward combination of "world's greatest dad" and "absolute fucking cult leader"? Yeah, alright, editors. We're all on the edge of our seats over that one. As a group, this final three was just so awful because it could not have been more obvious if they had put spoilers for it in the preview.

Obvious outcomes aren't necessarily a bad thing all the time, though, so it goes beyond the fact that a blindfolded monkey could have picked this group of three out of a line-up. There's also the fact that RI Rob, Phillip, and Natalie are all... horrible. I'll start with Natalie, because there's barely anything to talk about with her. She's quite possibly my least favorite finalist of all time, because she did nothing. She had no strategy. Yeah, following Rob got her to the end, but it wasn't as a strategy -- it was because Natalie was so useless that she would have committed seppuku to shine Rob's shoes if he had asked her nicely enough. She has the lowest confessional count of any finalist ever, but I wish it had been even lower. I swear to god, listening to this girl talk actually killed my brain cells. She was so vapid and uninteresting in everything she did that I actively disliked her just for how uninteresting she was. Then there's her completely insufferable FTC performance, in which she started at Rob after every other sentence, because she is apparently incapable of coming up with independent thoughts and still was playing for Rob to win. Everything about her just makes me want to shoot myself in the face whenever she's on-screen, and I really wish Rob hadn't been on this season so that she could have been voted out first and saved me a season worth of.. herself. It is worthless, spineless, subordinate people like Natalie Tenerelli that give the occasionally legitimate strategy of coattail riding a bad name. I really dislike Natalie, is the point I was trying to express. In case it wasn't clear.

And then, there's Phillip. Oh, god, there's Phillip. There's wacky, kooky, kraaazy Phillip.  Has there ever been a more forced character in the history of Survivor? Jane might come close, but Phillip has to be up there. He was painted as the next Coach (and I think referred to as such in Probst's blogs numerous times -- which, incidentally, completely spoiled what was already a predictable season), which makes about as much sense as saying that Shannon Elkins was going to be the next Hunter Ellis. The key with an unintentionally funny character -- Judd, Coach, Jimmy T, Frank, whoever the hell it is -- is that it has to be.. you know, unintentional. So we have Phillip created as this zany, unpredictable lunatic who we've never seen before, when he was absolutely none of those things, because he was actively trying to be all of them. It's blatantly obvious that Phillip was forcing every single aspect of his character throughout the entire season, which gave us a single amusing moment in "Francesqua", but absolutely nothing else that was even remotely bearable. But despite the fact that absolutely nothing about him was even remotely funny, we still got him jammed down our throats like crazy every single week as if he were the second coming of Coach, which is heresy. Speaking of things that are like crazy, he's also pretty much a disgusting person for the rice/race wars garbage. Being an obnoxious, camera-hogging attention-whore is one thing, but doing that via accusations of racism against an innocent guy on national TV is another entirely. There are very few Survivors whom I hate as much as I hate Phillip in that episode, and he actually managed to make Steve my second-favorite person of the season simply by virtue of how awful a person he was in that episode. Then combine that with the false hope that they built up, with Phillip talking about his "secret plan" to take out Rob. It was pretty obvious that he was full of shit, but absolutely any false hope that Rob wouldn't win was worth clinging to at that point, so I'd be lying if I said that I hadn't gone into the FTC expecting Phillip to whip out some "I was making myself into his goat, everything I said was for a strategic purpose, I'm sorry for the way I treated you" shit. Instead, we got him intentionally doing what Natalie was unintentionally doing -- flat-out telling everybody to vote for Rob. Phillip was annoying, horrible, low, forced, and still somehow a disappointment. I take back what I said about Natalie being my least favorite finalist, actually; Phillip is easily the worst, because he's in my bottom two contestants of all time. I'm just happy he got a vote from Ralph so that it wasn't 9-0-0, because Rob is an overrated enough winner as it is.

Speaking of which, we now have Rob "FAMILY ON HIS BACK!" Mariano himself. Out of all 54(?) incarnations of returning players that we've had over the years -- and that's even including the clusterfuck of legacy assassination that was All-Stars -- Rob is easily my second least favorite. (We'll get to who the worst was in a later write-up.) Rob had a fucking amazing storyline going the way it was. He starts off in Marquesas as this punk-ass kid who somehow manages to dominate his clusterfuck tribe as a gangster-ass mob boss, but ends up going down right before the jury because he's too threatening. Incredibly unique character, and a sensible choice for All-Stars. They bring him back there, and everybody forgets how he played the first time, instead arbitrarily assuming every player who won (plus Cesternino) is a big threat, and leaving Rob in. (Fun fact -- every single one of the first eight boots made the final four in their original season.) Rob plays the game almost identically, executes his mob boss strategy perfectly, sneaks to the end as the greatest villain Survivor has ever had (next to Fairplay), and then loses the jury vote to his future wife, all of which I'll re-iterate when we get to the ASS write-up. He's more of a lock than anybody for HvV, and there we see one of the greatest villains of all time, one of the greatest strategic juggernauts in the history of the show... morph into a hero? Rob turns into a hero in HvV, leading his clusterfuck of a tribe, and is one of the most likable guys that season. He was also in opposition to Russell, which makes him about five million times better because this was during the high point of "holy shit fuck russell hantz"-dom. Then he has a great, tragic ending -- because of the stupidity of his right-hand man and because the old dog can't learn the new tricks of Idols, the star of the pre-merge and the person everyone was most excited to see goes down right before the jury. You cannot write a better storyline than what Rob had going into RI. Easily the greatest story arc in Survivor history. Hands down.

But now, he comes back, which is a little.. strange, because he already has a great, concluded storyline in "punkass kid--->uber-villain/robbed strategic mastermind--->hero". But, hey, there's still hope, right? This might not completely ruin the amazing Boston Rob story we all know and love, right? Guess again. RI absolutely destroyed Boston Rob in my eyes. He was one of the most popular Survivors in history after HvV, and one of the most controversial after ASS. After RI, that incredibly polarizing, dynamic character shifted to absolute, unilateral hatred and boredom. There was nothing compelling about Rob anymore after RI, and that was because he got my least favorite winner edit in Survivor history. Like I said, his win was completely obvious from the F11 onward, and the editors didn't even try to disguise it. Instead, we got confessional after confessional about how he's absolutely running the show, to the point where his edit was so blatantly obvious that I thought someone else had to pull a Natalie W and beat him. It became apparent that that wasn't going to happen, though, and Rob ended up winning, and there was never even an ounce of suspense behind it.

Why did the editors give us such a lame storyline? Why did they decide to negate all suspense by ignoring such endgame threats as Ashley and Grant? Well, because apparently, the worst (IMO) storyline in Survivor history is more important. And what storyline is that? "Boston Rob comes back for a fourth time, and finally wins." We were supposed to be happy that Rob finally pulls out a win on his fourth try, which... is easily my least favorite Survivor storyline ever. It's so awful because the whole "Rob comes back and finally wins! It took him a whole decade to do it!" mentality fucking disgusts me. First of all, it implies that every single person watching the show was waiting for Rob to win -- that none of us could really be satisfied with Survivor history until the hole that was apparently left by Rob's three losses could be filled. Barely anybody felt this way. Rob being a three-time loser is exactly what worked for him, and it gave him an amazing storyline with a downright tragic ending in HvV. Rob wasn't ever supposed to win Survivor, because the fact that this all-star titan had never won was about half of the appeal. But now that aspect of his original three-season story arc -- the aspect that I believe is the most important one -- is completely destroyed because Rob has won. And we're supposed to be happy about it? We're supposed to feel satisfied now, like there was some hole in Survivor that couldn't be fixed until Rob finally won? That sure as hell is the implication that I got, and like I said -- it's a disgusting one. Rob isn't on a fucking pedestal above all the other contestants; why should he be more entitled to "finally" getting his win after a decade than anybody else? Why shouldn't we bring back Cesternino or Kathy or Cirie or all the other greats who were cut short until they win? Oh, right, because that would make no fucking sense and be downright disrespectful to the former losers who weren't brought back. Because bringing back one player until they win and then treating it like it put Survivor at peace is horrible in that it implies that every other player who has lost the game is inherently less deserving or important than the player who has now won. But for some reason, Rob is an exception to this. I don't know if it's because Russell beating Rob gave Probst blue balls or some shit, but for some reason, there was this idea that Rob absolutely had to win Survivor in order for the game to have any validity, so he was brought back under a forced repetition that never panned out of a past rivalry, predictably won, and was treated like fucking Jesus for it. Nobody needed Rob to win Survivor before they were content, but for some reason, we were supposed to be happy that the guy "finally" won for his family after a decade of trying.

Not to mention that it led to Rob being a completely overrated player. His win is the most overrated of all time in my opinion, because it's fucking lavished with undeserved praise by Probst, David Murphy, casuals, and even a lot of online fans as the "best strategic game in Survivor history". Even beyond the fact that it took the guy four tries against a cast of worthless noobs to win the game, the game in and of itself wasn't perfect and isn't even in my top ten winning games due to how poor his decisions and targets were at the endgame.

I went off on a tangent about Rob, but he's not even the entire reason why this final three sucks. It was predictable, it was boring, it was three incredibly unlikable people, and it was a microcosm of everything that made RI the worst season in Survivor history -- overrating of Rob, obvious victory by Rob, horrible twists like Rob vs Russell, forced characters like Phillip, and spineless sheep like Natalie. Every single thing about this final three is awful. It's such an obvious choice for #23, I know, but that is because it fucking deserves it, between the obviousness, the horrible people, the horrible storylines that brought them there, and the complete legacy assassination that was Rob's win. This final three was the worst one in history by a mile.

In case my point wasn't clear, let me just say it one more time as loudly as I can:

I know that I sort of droned on for a while here (to the point where I spent nearly an hour writing this without even noticing it), and most of my write-ups won't be quite that long, so don't be dissuaded to stop following this if you're not into such long-ass walls of text. The hatred that I have for every aspect of this final three is just so overwhelming that there's no way I can adequately describe how much I fucking detest it without going on a hate-rant against every player who was a part of it. naphro22

Hint for the next one: