Do Tribes Mean Anything Anymore?

Often when I watch the show nowadays, I wonder if the fact that certain tribes exist mean anything to the viewer. They probably still mean a lot to the players in the game. But I personally don’t know for sure whether or not they mean much to those watching the show anymore.

Too much of modern Survivor is about showing flashy characters and what they consider good moves. But I think that the problem that makes me wonder if tribes aren’t important anymore is the fact that they switch them around too often and too soon. I mean, we have a tribe set up in one way and by the time very few episodes have passed, the tribe is gone in favor of a new ones.

Still, what I feel is the problem for viewers with tribes nowadays is that we are hardly spending enough time on them. We see more of certain players and not others making time on each tribe more about time with certain players over others. We tend to not see as much dynamics out of the game regarding what all is going on in each tribe outside of the one that is always losing.

Does it make sense to have tribes if they don’t mean anything? Well, Survivor has always had tribes in it at the start and doing anything else would make little to no sense. You’d think that a onetime twist of a season without tribes could be a good experiment, but also wouldn’t really work. Would you do just an individual game the whole season? Would that work or make sense to people? Going without tribes might not work and be even worse than continuing something with little to no meaning.

Does anyone even agree with me about this? I just realize that as this blog has gone on, I have gone from keeping more track of who was on each tribe and keeping track of the tribes’ names to just not caring as much what will go on with tribes, typically calling them their color instead of something else entirely. This is because tribes just don’t last as often as they could in their original format. Then they tend to do another twist regarding the tribes changing yet again before the merge.

What definitely messed up the whole tribe dynamic is the Edge of Extinction. It wasn’t like the outcasts which was a temporary tribe yet was a sort of tribe. It seemed to make more sense in terms of what would happen with that disaster. But even without it, tribes just don’t mean as much to me because we don’t see much out of them like we used to.

I’m going to end the post here as I’m not sure what else I can say without repeating myself over and over again. Do you think that tribes are still important? They still exist and change a lot. Maybe they mean more than it seems to me in the edit over and over again. But I still think that they have lost their meaning and someone, maybe the editors or twist designers, should fix that. For now, this is Adam Decker, signing off.