Post by mikayla on May 19, 2014 2:49:05 GMT -5
~ Mikayla's Opening Statement ~
Hello, all you wonderful folks!
Before I get into the nitty-gritty of my opening statement, there's something I'd like to get off my chest.
Lame jokes aside, I think it's time to come clean about some things.
I think that there's been a lot of misunderstandings about me, especially with regards to Phillip and how loyal (or disloyal) I actually was to him. So, this is my attempt to try and correct some of those misunderstandings, and hopefully prove to you guys that I had a bigger stake in a lot of what went down than it might appear from the outside.
So, why should you guys believe me? Why shouldn't you just assume that I was a pawn who didn't do anything? Well, it may interest you guys to note that Phil was a last-minute addition to the cast. He agreed to play after the original fourth monster decided that they weren't interested in being targeted for how they'd played in the past.
How do I know this? Because I was the original fourth monster.
Ordinarily I'm firmly against people revealing aliases, but in this case the aliasing was so entirely bound up with my strategy that there really isn't a way that I could defend the moves I made and the strategies that I pursued without defining them in that context.
So, here goes. I'm not Kayla Norton, a recently-graduated high-school student from the northeastern States. I'm really a Canadian university graduate, a very good speller, and one of the oldest veterans of the CYS series. Those of you who played or PWed last season would recognize me as Cohost Emmy, anybody who played The Island will recognize me as Brianna, but any CYS regulars would probably find me most familiar as my Japan representative.
I was strongly considering returning as Monica, but I had a sneaking suspicion that the monsters were liable to be huge targets from the get-go, since newer players would want to prove their worth by taking out the veterans. So, I opted to play as Mikayla instead, and went in as a deepcore alias. It was a tricky decision, because I knew that I'd have to work harder to prove my worth without a previous reputation to fall back on, and that there would be a lot of prior friendships that I wouldn't be able to use to my advantage. (Aside from all four of my fellow monsters, I also knew who Malcolm, Allie, Yve, Brice, Sherea, and Whitney were - as well as whichever one of you was Randy in Venezuela; for the life of me, I can't remember who it was now!) With the exception of Whitney and (much later in the game) Sherea, I kept my identity secret and didn't use it to gain an advantage, because that just seemed like a cheap way of gaining an advantage. Phil also guessed me out eventually, but it took him a while.
Ultimately, I think I made the right call. The monsters wound up being huge targets, Andrea, Corinne, and Rob all went out right after the other, and Phillip was targeted continuously for almost the entire game. I already went through a similar experience in All Stars, and I had no desire to go through that again. If I had gone in as myself, I can virtually guarantee you that, barring an amazing Immunity run, I would not have been able to get to where I'm sitting.
But, let's be real. Just because I aliased decently well, that doesn't mean I necessarily deserve your votes. That's not why I'm revealing myself. The only reason why I wanted to explain my true identity was so that you guys would understand where I was coming from when I made the decisions that I made.
I'm not going to pretend that my strategy was perfect. It wasn't, and in looking back there are a few things that I'd do differently. But I do think that I played a reasonably solid game, if not a terribly visible one. I don't want to go into a huge amount of detail about my strategy, because that's what the questions are for, but I would like to say that although I may have flown under the radar for a lot of this game, but that doesn't mean that I wasn't actively pulling strings behind the scenes. I was the key player in several big moments of this game: I was the one who alerted Phillip that he was about to be blindsided, and helped shift the target to Rob; I convinced Morgan not to vote for me and got her to turn on her old tribe, which gave Napaco a definitive majority and allowed us to remove a lot of Sibiu's numbers later on; I also came up with ideas that helped get Yve on board with us, which ultimately helped us get rid of Allie's idol and secure our numbers. Each of those events drastically changed the face of the game, and helped me get into a better position without exposing myself as a definitive threat.
There's also the matter of my relationship with Phil. Without going into an unnecessarily large amount of detail, our relationship was nowhere near as one-sided as it might seem - and neither was my loyalty. I made several moves to distance myself from Phillip and to make sure that he wouldn't run away with the million for a fourth time. Unfortunately, for some reason a lot of people got it in their heads that I was completely devoted to Phil, and that made it hard for anybody else to be willing to step up to the plate when I tried to pitch the idea of getting rid of him until it was nearly too late.
So, with all of that being said, I hope that you guys can see now that I wasn't just coasting along and letting people make decisions for me. I flew under the radar fairly well to hide the threat factor, but I still made moves and decisions on my own to try and advance myself to the finals. That might not want to make you vote for me, but I hope that when you're making your decisions you'll take another look at my game and see it from a new perspective.
Thanks for a fun game, guys, and I look forward to your questions.
