My first instinct here is that Appearance is scum. I have to temper it some because there's a degree of I just don't want to lose to Appearance if he is scum here but I still have never found much that he's done townish. The gob kill was the really only thing I was clearing him off of and fire flipping scum does mitigate it somewhat particularly since it's possible that fire picked the kill and Appearance was just sort of along for the ride.
kyouko's play is less interesting for me since I know I'm town but there's still differences between how DV and Appearance d1 that are relevant. Joint ISOing kyouko + dragon (since Dragon was leading the rhetoric for what it seemed like the coalition would be, though this isn't a perfect science and I'm leaving out many details): Dragon gave his first long-standing "solve" in
133 (containing DV and Appearance) and kyouko still doesn't really do stuff for a while. Dragon later unheals Appearance and, in chatting with Klick,
floats an option that is 4 flipped town + DV. Shortly after that Dragon expresses some paranoia about DV and then
heals Appearance, presumably in response to the prior post Appearance made, bringing him back to the first solve. Throughout all of this kyouko mostly isn't posting, eventually she makes
360 shading DV which is interesting. The next post, Dragon unheals Klick+DV based on paranoia that I am scum and that if I am scum that one of them is my partner (and he also says that if I'm town he still thinks there's scum in the coalition). He then immediately heals kyouko quoting post 360. Before kyouko ever posts again, he makes
432 going back to the coalition from 133 that he had supposedly paranoiad off of because of thinking about me. And *that* is the moment that kyouko starts to come alive in the thread.
This all kind of reads to me like kyouko just didn't have time/energy before and now she did; the dominant thread narrative had been what it was for a while. She may not have even been trying to get on the coalition; in
447 where she heals herself + 3 town, and says that she'd like the fifth to be T3 or Appearance, I think it's entirely possible that she just doesn't actually think what she's doing is a politically viable coalition, but she's saying it because she generally needs to do shit at some point to look town. She says she wants me/DV/Klick off coalition because she thinks that list contains 2 scum. That line does make a lot of sense with DV scum at a base level but I think it makes even more sense as scum who already has a scumbuddy in the leading coalition (whoever it is), who is mostly trying to muddle things, and who included Appearance-scumbuddy as a possible 5th so as to hedge on whether or not to include a scumbuddy. I'm trying to get in her headspace to some degree but I started writing this like two hours ago and then had to go to a meeting and so my train of thought is kind of derailed and now I'm heading out again soon but will probably say more later today
In essence, I think kyouko fought the status quo because, well, why not fight the status quo there as scum. The status quo was sort of muddled but it had been that coalition for quite a while earlier; I think kyouko just had a surge of will to play the game and rode that, possibly off the back of Dragon liking post 360, because anything scum can do to obfuscate things in that phase is good for them. I kind of think kyouko might not have even wanted anything she was saying to be listened to in the ideal case but she still found it worth saying, if that makes sense.
