In post 1123, Gamma Emerald wrote:
I'll break down the action on my side now
I open by j'accusing Fidget because I felt like her comment about doing blackjack and hookers with penguin felt a bit too sure the other side had scum, Fidget immediately posts like 7 times in a row in response to me. CSF enters kinda limply and votes Aisa. Loki posts stuff declaring Toog scum based on how they acted regarding the team selection. NAHA immediately goes for my throat calling my Fidget push "outing", Aisa comes in asking NAHA about their thoughts on Loki and Aisa's TRs on me and also addresses CSF's vote on her.
Aisa then brings up she wanted to find evidence NAHA was scum but just ended up with a TR there. To add some director's commentary, this feels like a weird stance to go with as scum since a) if you want to find reasons to SR a scumbuddy it'll usually be easier and b) if the goal was to just voice a TR Aisa could have just done that and tried to convince others rather than taking the position of the one to be convinced that NAHA is scum. I agree with Aisa's NAHA TR, she then asks me to explain it which puzzles me a little since it seemed like she was more interested in hearing logic the other way.
Fidget starts like, actually tryharding, which I did not see as towny in the moment. Loki says I've slipped in his reads for not having a narrow PoE which wasn't exactly true since I still TRed 3/5 of the other players in that thread att, but apparently no one bothers to track legacy reads when keeping tabs on what people's reads are at a certain moment. I bring up that my reads have stayed their course and Loki asks why they are what they are. I clarify my reads a bit and also ask Loki what happened to the meta TR on me. Aisa votes me right after as an attempt to sort me, also explains that the NAHA re-read ws motivated by NAHA being the only null on team 2 Aisa had with the others being townleans.
Loki clarifies which game his meta read on me was from and then starts drilling me on my reads. Loki also says my preference for team 2 didn't make sense (when I was highly confident Andante was scum but my Fidget suspicion felt more circumstantial), then attempts to say I should be SRing NAHA if I thought thinking both teams would fail was scum indicative (which was an absolute garbage-bin interpretation of my argument!)
I took some offense to the clarified meta because in essence it was saying in order to be townread I had to be a non-entity for the first part of the game, which is sucky. I also start shutting out Loki because I wasn't in the mood to argue with someone who very clearly had blinders on to actual sound logic and rational explanation. I also slam Loki for assuming my read on Andante changed because I was SRing Fidget after he did the same thing when NAHA hurt tagged penguin. Also I was getting tilted that Loki was acting like I wasn't doing anything to explain my Fidget SR when I was, it was just that because my reads are esoteric and can be formed on a whim based off something seemingly innocuous, it probably came off as nonsense. But I also think Loki had played with me more than enough to understand that was how I formed reads sometimes and the lack of comprehension of that pinged me. He also tried to construe me as TRing NAHA for expecting both teams to succeed which is NOWHERE NEAR ANYTHING I HAD SAID. I vote Loki in small part because the bad faith arguments were making me distrust him greatly but for the most part because I could tell he was emotionally charged so I knew a vote would likely result in a lightning-fast OMGUS, after which I attempted to hammer myself (NAHA and Aisa had voted before Loki). It's actually comical that the bait worked because right before I voted myself Loki said he was immune to my emotional manipulation when he feel into a different manipulation entirely to what he thought I was doing.
Fidget actually start breaking down my thought process for Loki a bit after my self-vote (tbf if Fidget hadn't gotten killed that would have made my read on her go very south upon seeing that again, it felt like it was deliberately held until after I had attempted to lock in votes). I start lolcatting a bit but then get serious and say to never eliminate Aisa because I was a bit worried I wouldn't get to read the thread after I had gotten voted out. Following that, CSF breaks the illusion and points out that no hammer occurred because the deadline was hard-set and asked why I self-voted, to which I explained that it felt like NAHA and Loki were pre-sorting me scum in bad faith so I wanted to try to lock them into misyeeting me as a sort of lesson.
Cat Scratch then dives into coalition theory claiming scum would want to send a coalition with 1 scum to reduce the pool (obviously untrue given she flipped scum and I believe was backing her own team) and suggests Andante is suspicious for voting team 2 while SRing 3 people there. She then proceeds to try to play good-cop to NAHA's bad-cop by trying to act in defense of me. It was a good plan foiled by necessity. I also ask NAHA why they TR Loki since, after the meta read Loki had on me turned out to be bunk, my opinion on him slingshotted in part due to me hard-defending Loki to ejji, which resulted in my outlook on Loki being in the negative since I was like "maybe ejji was right all along!". CSF asks me to clarify my position on how Fidget and NAHA's beliefs that both teams would fail differed, which actually made a dent in me because a) it wasn't Loki who I was pretty much not engaging on principle att and b) it actually was asked in a way that felt salient. I pull out the ThorHead card (using meta that's seemingly fair except for a key perversion of it that makes it way less trustworthy) on Loki and spell out for CSF my logic for what exactly pinged me from Fidget (for the first of many times).
I then exit tilt-mode and put my vote on Loki with actual meaning behind it. Loki starts trying to take a moral high-ground by claiming his questions are perfectly logical to which I retort they feel shallow and like I have to explain my reads in baby-steps in order for Loki to comprehend them (this gets called out later). I also note I answered similar questions from others because of the lack of a belief that the answers would take more effort than I thought it was worth. I also call out Loki for what I see as shitty gotcha logic because he said he hadn't seen Fidget's scumgame (despite allegedly knowing her main?) but still tried to claim Fidget's posting pattern wasn't AI, in a way that misconstrued me again (claiming I was reading Fidget on post length when it came down to more of a timing and structure issue).
Loki then starts to change tune a little bit, but not much, asking why I had been dodging his questions (which should have been apparent but w/e), complaining that I was answering the questions he was asking when others did it (see reasoning for why I wasn't answering Loki, btw this bit carried on for a while and got rather grating), added more clarification to the meta read (this was actually rather okay compared to the rest of what I was dealing with) by saying I was trying to force a certain leader in the other game (true, but in that case why the drop of the meta read when the TRs I had that Loki listed as reason to drop it, FB and Enchant, I was nowhere close to pushing to be leader here?), and addresses my Fidget read full explanation ( by getting pissed I didn't explain it to him directly). One problem with A LOT of what Loki brought up was it was couched in a lot of complaining; rather than be glad I was making strides to actual answer questions he was asking, he got offended I wasn't responding to him! That's kinda ego-driven and I don't recall too well if he was pushing me as scum for that but if he was that was not very sensible, he literally let his offense of me answering to others before him cloud his judgment (this is starting to feel a bit overly critical and brutal so I'll mention that most if not all of this stuff I'm writing is probably the work of 2 of the bluntest of my 8 facets. I don't normally broach this subject in mafia games but I think it's mandatory to establish I don't feel entirely right being this way about Loki but it's the best way to convey what went down after the fact, I feel like). My other issue was he posted stuff without really thought-matching the other stuff that was going on.
After the brief period of what felt like good-faith posting Loki goes off by doubling down on his "truthfulness", refusal to actually absorb the logic behind my Fidget and NAHA reads diverging, tries to act like me reversing course on Fidget is unreasonable after the astronomical effort Fidget put in to sort when it absolutely wasnt. Fidget then comes in with the mother of all good posts, which included actual effort to bridge to gap between me and Loki, bringing up a good point that Loki continued engaging me well after coming to scumread me. Like, Fidget's posting was phenomenal atp.
Following Fidget's big-damn-hero moment, Loki starts to process "wait, scum!Gamma basically NEVER tries to go against me like this, what gives?" and backs off for a bit. Fidget does start to post arguments for me being scum in response to Loki TRing me, which in honest retrospect feels kinda shitty, Fidget tried to bridge the gap between me and Loki and then goes into providing reason I could be scum? Anyway, I re-enter thread for the first time after the seeming tune-change, and start just tearing into Loki, including constantly railing on about him missing the one post I explained the distinction between my Fidget and NAHA reads in. This was a bit of a dick move alongside the baby-steps explanation thing because it kinda slipped my mind Loki has dyslexia so he called me out on it and I reeled back in response because I could tell I was millimeters from crossing the same moral event horizon I had in Slaughter Hour (...I don't rlly wannna talk about ti). Besides that though I expressed a lot of those parantheticals I put in this post in my breakdown of Loki's posting. Me and Loki go on fighting for a while, until I hit full-on explosion territory which is where the call-out happens. After which, Loki starts seriously thinking I could be town and I decide to stop posting and take a full on thread break for a couple hours because I needed to clear my head and determine whether I felt like my ability to distinguish game elements from personal conflicts was compromised.
I return a few hours later and post a few things in response to posts that occurred since I left. Loki then snaps back into pushing me because "there's no way I should be scumreading him" because I mindlessly left my vote on him, SOMETHING I AM VEERRRRYYY ESTABLISHED TO DO AS TOWN!!!! I retort by saying in order for me to unvote I would need to not feel like I was backing down from the push just to let myself die! I also took offense to Loki pulling the "I'm disappointed if you're town" card which I previously experienceds similar from a very slimy and manipulative player, that Loki should not be emulating.
Fidget flips back into defending me which, again, very concerning that Fidget was basically playing devil's-advocate to whatever happened to be Loki's stance on me at the time, @scum you fucked up by killing her off! Loki then brings out the actual point of me haaving left my vote on him, whihc like, by not actually trying to approach me with any sort of civility and instead hopping to "Gammsa!scum because he parked his vote on me and he know I don't playe like this" made it REALLY hard for me to want to remove my vote. I also bring up that I've never seen Loki play the sort of bad-faith game I'd seen from her this game so I had zero clue whether she would do it as scum, and told her to stop harping on a bout telling the truh because it was starting to appear self-conscious. Loki says she never re-assesses as scum like she did with me because there's no reason to, whihc prompts me to pull a turnabout card on her by saying that just as her townflip would look bad on me, my townflip would look bad on her. I do mention her play is illogical as scum on the base logic I was employing, but her too-quick jump to accusing me again felt like there had to be SOME scum motive to it, whcih I ascribed as being paranoid letting the wagon on me die would result in her becoming the boot in the end. This results in a sort of impasse, where I can't really talk any more sense in Loki because he's stuck on "I can't let go of pushig you if your vote is gonna stay on me" and I'm kinda in a similar position. AAt that point, I decided "fuck it, I can't get any MORE in the hole, let's provide an ultimatum I have no business proposing!" and try to strike the following deal: me and Loki both avoid voting each other for the rest of the first voting stage. I decided on such an ultimatum because it felt like strongarming Loki was the only way to prevent him from continuing to burrow into the same tunnel he'd beeen stuck on for the majority of the phase and hopefully redirect his effort to finding ACTUAL SCUM!
Loki takes a second and then decided to actuallt take me up on my offer. We start actually having civil conversation where he questions why I reassessed and I explain it was because I couldn't quite grok the scum agenda for reconsidering I put out because his play felt absolutely bass-ackwards to what I described. Loki says he has no clue who would be the infiltrator in the group, to which I looked over the activity overview and proposed it could be NAHA or Aisa based on the fact me+Loki had been squaring off for so long with what felt like NOTHING from either of them! CSF also was on the lower end of activity but because of the smattering of good-cop posting he did I ended up discarding the thought she could be scum. I specifically called out that NAHA's group activity was WILDLY lower than their main thread activity, which felt like trying to let Loki drive the MY on me. Loki suggests Aisa and Toog might be scum, which puzzles me a little because I had no inkling of a connection between them, so I asked about it.
Loki then starts questioning why NAHA had volunterred themself as the second vote-out if I flipped scum, which was kinda not the most airtight line of questioning but I think still rustled NAHA's feathers in the right way to get them to start properly alignment telling. NAHA says they wouldn't let themselves be miselimmed if there was still confscum to yeet which prompted Loki to ask who ws confscum from my townflip, which was honestly a completely fair question as while it was obvious to me NAHA meant there was confscum in the group rather than one specific person, it put them on the spot a bit and probably frazzled them. Loki asseerts it's more logical for NAHA to volunteer to be limmed if they're wrong on the SR on me vs. being right, which I don't think is entirely true but I think either that or Loki saying he was going to start fully backing the idea of gamma!town spooked NAHA off of voting me.
At this point I end up with a kick of new energy because my enchant TR I had from very early on that NAHA tried to call TMI I was finally able to actually back because my completed game sample size was large enough I could point to more then just the normal game enchant replaced me in and mayyyybe chromavolan for enchant meta (I never used chromavalon except to page Loki to back my Enchant read at one point). Loki also provided some ISOs of Aisa, 1 town game and 1 scumgame, from which I conclude Aisa's play just from a low-effort meta basis leans town in this game. Aisa comes in and actually pushes Loki a little bit based on Loki being different in squid game (which I think was already rebutted when ejji brought it up?). She also backs a point Fidget made where my fire-and-brimstone read on Andante was not something they expected scum me to be doing. She ALSO also addresses my concern about her lack of presence.
After that and some engagement between Loki and Fidget, as well as me later down the line, Loki drops the first vote for NAHA This results in NAHA dropping a blatant OMGUS on Loki claiming Aisa made good points. Loki and I both basically see right through it though. Fidget also is rightfully skeptical. CSF's posts at this time are basically throwing the softest pitch to explain reads NAHA's way. She also tried to put some extra pressure on Loki.In response to 2 votes being on Loki, I did the same for NAHA. Aisa then removes her Loki vote, causing NAHA to try a last ditch bus on CSF. This does not work out and causes the rest of the people not voting NAHA to vote them. And that's the first vote phase basically summed up!
The second vote phase was way less active. Everyone was under the assumption everyone else was town so theories to who was scum on the other side were kicked around until around the last 48 hours where I decided to vote CSF believing myself the likely pick if scum were to have the control over the vote from no one voting at all. Fidget and Aisa followed and CSF went out with basically no ceremony whatsoever.
I'll be upfront though, I could actually see Aisa maybe being scum. Still feel like it's highly unlikely given how things went down though. Suggesting I could be scum is fucking preposterous though because I feel like my involvement was rather key to getting both the scum yeeted. I will not abide a repeat of Gensokyo where because of people being absolute boneheads and thinking I led votes against scumbuddies twice in a row for minimal gain the trail of the last scum ended up getting completely lost!