STOP RECRUITING NEW PLAYERS ALREADY! An Open Letter

While this is not being sent to anyone outside of being posted on this blog, I would thought that I’d do a quick (possibly) post on the terrible problem of Survivor casting: recruitment. Obviously, if these are returning players or all star seasons, then this isn’t worth addressing too much. It is when new players are recruited for the show instead of being applicants, there are issues with it.

Why applicants are better: you are going to get a ton of people who are interested in the show if you do applicants. Recruits may not care that much about the very thing that they are doing. Applicants might be seen in better light by fans if they are better players. I mean, we shouldn’t be able to have those who admit to being recruited always be the more controversial players.

There are a lot of various flaws with the recruitment of new players and it can be maddening. I am sure that a lot of people still apply to the show. Indeed, there have to be enough applicants to make up a whole season because there has to be more than 20 each season. Surely applicants are still being done even now during a long hiatus of Survivor.

Ultimately, the failure of recruits should be known best by Survivor: Fiji. While I’m sure that it has its fans, I don’t like it and feel that it had the weakest casts of all of the seasons (outside of any of them that are facebook friends of mine ;-) because they are good). The fact that all but one of the contestants that season were recruited might be one of the reasons why. Am I lead to believe that it is a coincidence that this happened? While there were other reasons that the season sucked, it would be hard for them to do much good with a season full of recruits who never saw the show before.

This leads to the biggest issue that I have with recruits that I might be willing to overlook and get rid of all of my hatred of them. If the casting department on this show is going to recruit people to be on this show, then they should at least recruit fans of the show. There is no reason why someone who has never seen the show should be on the show. You are screwing devoted fans by not putting those who are doing the hard work of applying for the show on the show and instead putting people on the show who have no idea what the show is even like.

You might have to wonder, then, what if Survivor producers read this blog of mine, track me down, and want to put me on the show, without me ever having applied to be on it? Honestly, I don’t think that I would say no. But I don’t even know if I should be on Survivor or not. I don’t want my thoughts on this show to be tainted by playing it and finding out that I’m just better off watching it. Besides, if I want to work for Survivor, I’d rather be a creative consultant than a contestant.

And that’s all that I have time for in regards to this post and the rest of the month of this blog. I wish that I could have gotten a post done on another Survivor episode, but this will not be the case. I doubt that you will see one again until January. We’ll see what Survivor seasons I might get on DVD as a gift for Christmas. Maybe Cagayan or All-Stars? I won’t need any for a while, but still want some. I got another one as I will talk about in probably two blog posts as you’ll see it in place of one of the current ones. I wish that I had more time for things this week and the rest of this month, but it won’t happen. I just wish that I could have shared another calendar of planned posts. But you’ll figure things out at one point or another. For now, this is Adam Decker, signing off.

50% People of Color- The New Survivor Rule of Casting

Supposedly, at least the 41^st season of Survivor and maybe the 42^nd season are already cast. But will that affect the new potential casting change? That, I don’t yet know. There is this new rule that is being implemented for future Survivor seasons. That rule says that any new cast of Survivor has to have 50% people of color. This has to be in response to some of the current racial unrest in this country.

One would have to think: is this a good idea? You’d think that it should be with no issues. But then there is the fact that Survivor has already tried doing more diverse casts in the past. This is despite the fact that around 80% of the applicants to this show are (or used to be) white. While they could ignore any applications to recruit new players instead, this is probably a bad idea. But I’ll explain more of why I don’t like recruits of new players in another post, probably the next one.

You see, in Survivor: Cook Islands, the casts were split into four tribes at the beginning and whatever race you were born into was the tribe you started on. Since this was considered segregation (despite the fact that no camp site was better or worse than the others, which typically happens with segregation), the show was decried as racist. They had a cast with only 25% white people, but this was too much of any issue since they couldn’t put the casts together originally. What was dumb about the twist was how they got rid of it early into the game.

Despite the controversy it caused, some of the players like the twist. It seems to some that this was going to be used again in the very next season. But a last minute twist left the cast with an odd number of players and I can’t even tell how this could have worked with four starting tribes. Plus, this season had only one applicant on the show while the rest were all recruited.

Still, one has to wonder if forcing half of the cast to be something other than Caucasian is a good idea. Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m okay with the idea. I’m just wondering if they are doing too much pandering to a side of supposed racial justice by simply hoping that making half of the cast not white each season is a good way of doing this or not. There’s another problem that needs to be addressed as well that I don’t think that casting alone can fix.

The edit of people would need to be fixed. Black men on this show are often portrayed as lazy. The black women are typically shown fighting with others or otherwise having attitude. The women of Asian descent typically are mistreated or otherwise hated by their tribe. While that might be more due to the way tribes are set or how friction takes place among contestants and not the edit, as long as we see the negative edits of these players, casting alone won’t fix the mess.

Honestly, I think that once we see more Survivor with these more racially integrated casts, we’ll see if this idea works well or not. I can only hope this is a good thing and not just some way of appeasing the so called social justice warriors (SJWs) who are not actually good people like you’d think they should be. Is intentionally trying to put in more minorities a good thing? I can only hope so. For now, this is Adam Decker, signing off.

Why It’s Harder for a Woman to Win Survivor

If recent Survivor seasons have proved anything, there seems to be issues that women keep having with winning the game in recent seasons. A woman has not won since Game Changers and a new player that was a woman who won her first time playing was back in Kaoh Rong. It is hard to know for sure why this could be, but is still worth exploring nonetheless.

The simplest explanation is that this is gender bias causing the problem. But is that true? One would think that it would have to be. Men get rewarded for playing a ruthless game while women are shunned for doing the same thing. It has been quite a while since someone like Vecepia could dominate the way she did and get a win based on her game play. While Sarah was like that when she won, why has no one else been able to do that since?

There was once a time when there were more women winners than male winners. I forget offhand what the current proportion is (if I’m using the right word). But there have clearly been more men who won this game. Of course, this does make you wonder if there have been unfair advantages that might be in men’s favor somehow, perhaps intentionally or otherwise.

The gender balance of a season is normally equal or close to it. But then there are times when they do a one returnee per tribe season and only one of those returnees thus far has been a woman. There was a plan once to put three women in a season again with one of them, Stephenie, returning this way for a second time. But this didn’t wind up happening.

Still, in at least Philippines, there were more new women playing that season then new men and one of those new women won the game. The same can be said about South Pacific where a new woman beat all the other players, including the two returning men.

Women can still be vicious players and rewarded for it. In Micronesia, women dominated the game and made the men look like fools. Sandra won the game twice by manipulating others and at least once getting the votes of those she didn’t help.

This can make you wonder, though: what changed? At what point did it become more difficult for the women in the game of Survivor to beat the men? Well, advantages haven’t helped as a lot of them keep being found by men over and over. The blunders of some men don’t prevent others from doing well themselves in the game. Women can often be overlooked as players despite playing good games for the most part overall.

The other aspect as to why women aren’t winning recently is because people know that they can and would win so they are voted out so this doesn’t happen. Their likability keeps them for making it to the end while those who don’t have as big a chance at winning are kept against the men who are more likely to win instead of those women.

Honestly, even though Lillian in Pearl Islands was facing another woman at the end, what kept her from winning is what prevented other women before and after her from doing that as well. They didn’t like her deceptive game play when they felt that she should not win as a result.

And there’s really not much else to say about this unfortunate trend in Survivor. There are numerous factors that prevent women from doing as well as men, at least in recent seasons. Hopefully these issues can be fixed somehow without changing the game too much if we are lucky enough to have this show return to the airwaves in the future. After the issues of the last two seasons, one can only hope that there will be more done to prevent issues while staying fair to everyone. We don’t want that great discussion that Sarah and Jeff had to not change anything. For now, this is Adam Decker, signing off.

How this blog would Change if Survivor Ended

Consider the hiatus of Survivor right now to be a trial run of future events. If Survivor either doesn’t return for season 41 or comes back and then ends at some point in the future, this blog would have to change as a result. How would it change? Well, let’s see.

This blog still is what I consider to be called the primary blogs of all the ones that I have. Despite not being the first blog that I did, it ultimately was given priority over all other blogs where it would be given the best update time and always be consistently given that time over and over again. Basically, the posts of this blog would be done later in the day after the newest episode of Survivor aired. At times when church would be given priority over watching Survivor live, this blog would be published on Thursdays instead of Wednesdays.

What other blogs could be the primary blog? Well, I have little to no other choices without messing up this blog and/or creating a new blog. The TV blog remains linked to this and other things in its own way when I decided that rolling a Survivor episode on DVD meant updating my TV blog that same day. I did change the rules some to do weekly updates of that blog, but it is subject to change at times.

There are now four blogs that I have that are all in the cast update stage where due to the show that it covered ending, I focus on what the cast of that show is doing now, if they are doing anything at all. Those blogs cover Madam Secretary, The Good Wife, CSI: Cyber, and Elementary. I also learned for some of them that having turnaround for a blog where I didn’t have to update it the day it aired was a good thing. All four of them had issues with episodes not being covered promptly for various reasons with CSI: Cyber perhaps being the worst of them all.

The only other blog that I have right now is about The Good Fight. I created it when that show aired its first season for free on TV. I’d have to get it on DVD or wait for it to potentially air more for free on TV for me to cover the second season and beyond. That second option is the only way that it could take over as the primary blog instead of this one.

Of course, I need to cover how this blog would change. You see, I don’t think that I would stop updating it entirely based on the rules that I have for other blogs. It would probably continue with the every Wednesday updates unless or until I decided not to do that anymore. I would want to cover a bare minimum of one post of this blog every month. There are a lot of past seasons to write posts about as I’m doing now. I won’t yet know which ones I’ll want or otherwise get. Whether or not they remain with the current strange day of the weeks that I pick for them (and haven’t even covered in their entirety yet, not even really needed to, although I’d be more than happy to put this in an introduction of a post for the future since I have the rules for myself written down) would remain unknown.

The point is, you should keep an eye out on this blog and I’ll keep covering all that I can or otherwise want to in terms of various Survivor related things. I plan to keep having this blog like I normally would unless or until I don’t update it anymore. I’d try to do a posts are ending update if at all possible, but only if I needed to do that by ending posts. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen yet. For now, this is Adam Decker, signing off.