Top Ten Survivor Frenemies

Frenemy: A sometimes friend, sometimes enemy. You see a lot of these on Survivor. They started in the very first season and you see a lot of these people from time to time. Maybe they are normally people who don’t like each other. Maybe they normally do. But they normally form interesting dynamics any way that the game goes. Let’s get to mentioning all of them. I’ll forgo rules and honorable mentions as I feel that any could spoil what does wind up on the list.

#10 Ozzy and Coach from South Pacific- They started out as random returnees in a one returnee per tribe season. While it made no sense that they returned, they did form an interesting dynamic on their season. They sort of worked together at one point, but this didn’t really happen. While it was a forced rivalry, this is what happened sometimes although they worked together other times.

#9 Brenda and Dawn from Caramoan- First they were nice to each other especially after Dawn had a breakdown at one point during the merge. But then everything changed when Brenda sacrificed her and Dawn’s family reward so that everyone else could experience it themselves. Dawn infamously turned on Brenda which lead to fireworks with the fans and at the final tribal council.

#8 Dreamz and Yau-Man from Fiji- It was the most controversial deal in the history of Survivor by its very own promotions: Yau-Man gave his car to Dreamz in exchange for possible immunity in the future. It was so controversial that they got rid of cars as rewards, although that might have been since Dreamz couldn’t pay the taxes on the car and never got it as a result. Dreamz immediately tried to vote out Yau-Man before his would have had to hold up to his deal. When the situation that Yau-Man agreed to came up, Dreamz didn’t hold up his end of the deal and their rivalry was cemented even though it started out due to a very friendly gesture of a free car.

#7 Jonathan and Yul from Cook Islands- First Jonathan betrayed Yul’s tribe by choosing to join the other tribe. Then Jonathan betrayed the tribe he switched to rejoining Yul’s tribe. Yul ending up helping to vote out Jonathan yet still gave him his hat back as a gesture of goodwill. Jonathan voted for Yul to win and that proved interesting as Yul only won by one vote. This was a huge back and forth and it ended well for Yul.

#6 Randy and Bob from Gabon- I’m not entirely sure what all went wrong with their relationship. Maybe Randy just hates too many people. But Bob didn’t help the relationship by giving a fake idol to Randy when Randy was voted out. Bob was about to make amends and get Randy’s vote to win the game. They much have had at least some good will between them.

#5 Peih-Gee and Denise from China- While I’m not entirely sure myself if they were friends, I’m pretty sure that’s how it started out in the beginning. But their relationship deteriorated as it went along as Denise kept treating Peih-Gee worse and worse. And that is why I think that they fit for this.

#4 Tony and Spencer from Cagayan- This relationship went back and forth a lot between them working together and them trying to get each other voted out of the game. Tony wound up being a finalist and Spencer was a jury member with Spencer putting aside any possible hatred between them by giving a good speech as to why Tony should win.

#3 Jenna and Christy from Amazon- You might wonder to yourself: were they friends? That would seem unlikely throughout the season. Yet Christy still seemed to like Jenna compared at least to Matthew since she voted for Jenna to win. There must have been some goodwill between them.

#2 Sue and Kelly from Borneo- The original frenemies, these two were in an alliance until Kelly thought that she was better off without one. Sue felt betrayed by Kelly abandoning them. Kelly tried to make herself look better to the Pagong members, but she still fell short one vote to win. Who cost Kelly the win? It was Sue herself after her speech about why Richard should win.

You might wonder what number 1 would be. Well, there were a lot of good rivalries between friends or friendships between rivals that I thought of when I come up with this list. Between all of them that I thought of and didn’t mention, I decided that one didn’t work with this one player since I wanted to put down their complicated relationship with another player instead. You might wonder then, who do I think were the best frenemies throughout all the Survivor seasons? In my mind, only one of them could possibly come out on top and that's why the number one choice is

#1 Sandra and Russell from Heroes versus Villains- They wound up on opposites sides on their original tribes and Sandra was soon the only person left from her original alliance since everyone else flipped or was never part of it. Then she started manipulating Russell into getting rid of other people in hopes of making it seem like certain things were happening to the heroes that weren’t. She tried to work with the heroes but stayed with Russell. He was too overconfident in his ways and thought that there was no way that she could win the game. He thought wrong and his best frenemy beat him.

Well, that’s all I can think of for this blog post. Did I miss any good ones? The one that was almost in this list that wasn’t was Sandra and Johnny Fairplay from Pearl Islands. I don’t think that there were any other notable ones missed as I felt that they either weren’t friends enough or weren’t enemies enough for the true combo that I was looking for ended up working in the long term. For instance, I don’t think that Terry voting for Aras made them enough friends in the end. I also could have picked Adam and David from their season, but thought that it wouldn’t work either. I guess someone can let me know in the comments if they thought a different frenemy should have belonged here. For now, this is Adam Decker, signing off.