Finished my Grendel reread. Next up is Dierfire. As always, I've tried to keep it short to keep it readable-ask if you think something needs more explanation.
I went into it with a pretty heavy scumlean on Grendel. I'm a lot more sold on it now, looking primarily for interactions with LUV. His opening game with LUV is incredibly awkward, in
#215 and
#232 he basically just calls LUV "lynch bait" as town and says he doesn't know how to read him. He had a big stretch Day 1 of encouraging people to think of who's scum with Gamma, and that it couldn't be LUV so they shouldn't really vote him as he's lynchbait when he's town.
The biggest red flag Day 1 is that he directs questions at LUV but then never actually follows up or interprets their answers:
Grendel wrote: ↑Wed Oct 05, 2016 1:15 pm@LUV
Lets chat a bit:
How do you feel about the two leading wagons, as well as the individuals on them?
And if this were EoD which wagon would you join?
In this hypothetical situation where would you look next if the one you picked flipped scum? if they flipped town?
I want you to take more active stances. Your note taking, and your otherwise low key posting is not helping me get a hold on your alignment friend.
This was the last he had to say about LUV for the day.
Magically, day 2, he forgets LUV is in his words "lynchbait":
Grendel wrote: ↑Mon Oct 17, 2016 2:47 pmLuv looks worse in retrospect then I first thought.
This is
exactly what he should have expected
as town given his own meta. If it's comparatively worse to that bad baseline, I would at least expect further explanation given the emphasis Grendel has placed on it, but this never happens.
Before the Gamma wagon takes off:
Grendel wrote: ↑Tue Oct 18, 2016 1:08 pmLuv is all over the place and I'm having trouble pacing him. I definitely didn't like his hammer, or the unnatural transitions in his reads. I can't help feeling like it is all to easy though.
I might try to look into Gamma first. There is something he has not been doing that I have been expecting him to do for a while now. And that is bothering me.
After this he winds up hardshoving Gamma, then just kind of flops onto the LUV wagon with no explanation, the only reasoning is what I quoted and that was hundreds of posts before the flip.
Aside from his interactions with LUV, I think his approach to this game has been really suspicious in hindsight. He's prided himself on taking a very ambitious, intellectual approach to the game, but regularly stops at the most basic level of speculation. He said he looks forward to matching wits with us, and made ambitious statements like RQS working him but not "for the masses" and that he tries to pin the whole scumteam Day 1 collectively rather than focus individuals. Simultaneously, his night kill speculation on Maria's death was "boring wouldn't make that because it implicates her" despite that being
exactly what you would expect a scum defense to be.
Several of his stronger townreads have been for things as simplistic as "draws attention to themselves". It seems really strange to take pride in taking a "deeper" approach to the game yet settle for assuming the other players are incapable of more than one level of WIFOM.
With all of the above in mind, Grendel has shot up to #1 on my scum list. boring is a lot more likely to be town now. My reasoning for voting her has largely been based on PoE and not liking her attitude. The biggest thing that flags me to her being scum is Grendel's hesitance to vote her, and that says a lot about what I think about Grendel.
UNVOTE:
VOTE: Grendel