"Taly is going to be a hot mess all game and I am entertained" ~ Gammagooey
"The human race is bad at reading Taly." ~the worst
"Taly I knew your slot was scum and I still struggled to find arguments to SR your play lol" ~Infinity 324
"Taly wins for the most fence-sitty reads in a game ever" ~Battle Mage
You have replaced the divine mandate, so you're now in the position to lead us all to greatness!
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Also idk how i'd tl;dr this game. There's quite a lot that has happened.
I guess the most important things of note, Meuh made a case against implosion, implosion responded, your predecessor called it the scummiest post ever and went against Meuh, I sheeped him, then Ari stated a scumread on implo, your predecessor and Dann, then your predecessor exploded, argued with Ari, things escalated and both replaced out.
And Alisae has been absent the entire game.
There's other things that have happened but those are the ones i have the most fresh on my memory.
i think mandate is kind of obvious town if you are familiar with how the player approaches the game, but I will try not to use meta in my case too much out of respect for the player.
frankly, I just don't think mandate is playing to a scum win condition. I don't think he needs to start and then derail wagons on multiple slots to win. I don't think he needs to derive an incredibly complex town read on me that exists to do nothing besides pocket me when I'm pretty sure Mandate could keep me in the scum pool all game long and I would happily live in his pocket all the same. I think Mandate's inclination to scum read Ari for being "against" him is probably towny even if I'm skeptical of Ari making sense in his solve. I think the way Mandate went from "taly and keyleth" are always partnered here early game to having them both as top town is incredibly towny. meta wise I think them getting mad at merlyn for merlyn's reads on me and implosion is towny. I think that the way they've tried to establish a town block is town indicative because it really puts Mandate in a corner when I really don't think Mandate is the type of player to trust his teammates to not put him into a corner to that degree.
idk I can talk more about this if needed but the scum reads I've seen on mandate (i guess mostly Ari's but also Merlyn) seem aggravated by personality or play style more than anything
I reread sakura and i think she's obv town
mandate said earlier they couldn't pinpoint a specific reason intellectually as to why keyleth is town and then everytime they read a post by her they are reminded of it. This about sums up my read on keyleth and while I could force myself to explain it intellectually i really think I'm just tonally town reading her. I think the way she's approaching the game is pretty pure. Like she has a pretty performative posting style by default but if you look at what she is concerned with, it doesn't seem like she's concerned with how she looks optically. she just has a really pure tone and this is a kind of a read I can't really explain very well but I feel very confident in.
after that it gets muddier but I think there is 1 scum maximum in [taly, implosion, beeboy, aristeia, dunnstral], hopefully 0
I think the way beeboy responded to pressure was pretty towny. I think the assumption that 2-3 scum were pushing him is unbelievable but I think it's pretty obviously unbelievable and scum!beeboy would be a little more concerned about reacting in a way that wouldn't be immediately seen as scummy. I think unless they are a very specific type of aggressive player that scum is usually pretty antsy about being seen as OMGUSy and the fact that beeboy wasn't concerned with that at all feels towny. They just generally feel relaxed despite the pressure so unless their team is like mandate/sakura I doubt they are scum
taly i feel I've already explained and my read hasn't really changed much there. tonally there's some energy coming from taly that i can only define as like... presumptuous? it caught me off guard at first but i think overtime I've thought the energy is more likely to come from town.
aristeia I just don't have any particular reasons to scum read and I think she's been generally towny. contrary to popular opinion I don't really think her gameplay makes intuitive sense if she is teamed with any of the popular scum guesses. I don't think it's like impossible for Ari to be scum and I've definitely seen her play reserved and more like a puppetmaster before in a previous scum game but I'm not really getting the vibes Ari is specifically trying to manipulate the gamestate. Even in her beef with Mandate it kinda feels like she's willing to give Mandate room to steer the game if he's town and she only really outed her scum team guess when I bugged her for it which feels pretty natural and I think Ari would've been all over that before someone specifically interacted with her for it in order to get town read
dunnstral I think is kinda town from a gamestate perspective, but he also just feels a lot less mechanical than I am used to as scum. this read probably bears revisiting day 2 but I don't specifically want to waste a bunch of brain power on it today
i think implosions insistence about there being things he's done this game that he couldn't or wouldn't do as scum is pretty towny. I think him pretty blatantly chaining his vote to his town read on mandate earlier in the game is pretty towny and I would point this out to Ari as indicative that these two slots aren't partnered? implosion has just felt pretty relaxed whenever he has entered the thread and i feel like his goal when he enters the thread is to pick out things that will enhance his understanding of the game (the most recent example being him randomly calling my concern post about brown eyes towny) - rather than trying to look town himself. idk I also just read the coalition game where implosion rolled scum and I felt he generally felt a lot more performative and aware of his own optics there whereas here he feels much less concerned with how he's coming off.
ummmm lazy shirou I should definitely have a better read on. I disliked their earlier posting and kinda glazed over their back and forth with Mandate. I don't feel like I can make an informed read on this slot yet. I thought something in their tone over the last few pages was kinda towny but not in a way I feel especially good about. sorry for the trashy read shirou!
brown eyes i don't think has actually posted anything outside of her scum range and i am worried that her falling off so quickly is scum indicative. i hope this is not the case and she comes back and resolves because i can't remember the last time i rolled town with her.
alisae I think is likely to be scum by PoE and the fact that e's had to keep making excuses about why eir not in the thread instead of just bearing that with confidence. im thinking back to Swinger's Hall where Alisae lost motivation very quickly once a town block formed and this feels like a similar scenario.
I don't particularly like Merlyn's read on me. I feel like she is kinda avoiding having to sort me and while I understand some degree of paranoia immediately after seeing me as scum. It doesn't quite jive that she describse my play as towny this game, but doesn't try to draw any comparisons between this game and the game I just finished as scum that Merlyn cites for paranoia. Like, there is no real attempt to figure out if I'm the same type of towny here as I was that game, or if there are any other similarities/differences to point out. implosion seems to be in a similar boat where merlyn is just sidestepping giving that a read altogether and I think town would tend to take slots like that as more of a challenge to read than just call them essentially unreadable?
i also did not like merlyn's push onto mandate earlier in the game after mandate was cagey about his read on me. it felt like merlyn did not want to commit to it when I asked merlyn about it. she backed off almost immediately and just said she wanted to see what would happen, but I feel like the context of the vote makes it seem like merlyn thought mandate was suspicious for his posts?
uh meuh is the slot in the game I would classify the most as "trying to get town read." I think the implosion case was kind of out of place in a way that I don't really understand why town Meuh got to the point where they felt confident enough in the read to make such a huge case. When I read the case I also don't get the sense meuh is genuinely that confident about it. Mandate said something like it being a bunch of reasons as to why implosion could be scum, and it's for that reason I don't really understand the town!meuh headspace where she felt the need to suddenly hard case implosion
i feel like her posting since then has been kind of treading water in a way i wouldn't really expect from town who had a confident scum read like that
"Taly is going to be a hot mess all game and I am entertained" ~ Gammagooey
