SOTF Mini

Best Innovation: Marcel Duchamp, Wassily Kandinsky (well actshully Hilma af Klint did abstract art before he did-)

Best Realism: Well, there aren't any grounded characters, since the arena's floating on the ocean, and that means there's no ground or land, only water.

Best Heroic Character: Ivan

Best Villainous Character: Ivan

Characters

Best Character Development: Anthony Golden has come a long way that I am not even going to tell anything about.

Best Game Impact: I think if you look at the entire site as a whole, Luanne Grasset deserves this spot as the first escapee since years (apart from PV3P). Kermit put a lot of effort into her and it shows. I look forward to her epilogue and how her existence will be referenced ion future versions set in the TV-verse.

Best Innovation: Ivan Rodriguez was a character I took very long to warm up to for several reasons. But ultimately I think he and his gimmicks like the many oneshots or him talking with his weapon might be confusing, but have some really good pay-off.

Best Realism: Matias Juarez felt like a real person with some believable flaws. For example his fall-out with Luanne could easily be interpreted as an excuse to separate the two, but if taken his journey so far into account, it becomes clear that his failures to achive anything and the realization that the situation was simply way bigger than him resulted in his worst sides coming out.

Best Heroic Character: While she killed solely characters I liked (and almost would have killed my first kid) Kaya Robinson stands out for her deeds of walking the extra mile to protect her best friend. Plus the only time she shot first was for revenge on Amy. Every other time can be seen as self-defense.

Best Villainous Character: Fisk Bateman really earned this spot with his brutal torture of Gregory Miller.

Best Innovation: I've got no idea how to seriously answer this so I'll give it to Laurence Clifford based literally entirely on the cool and hilarious format of his death scene. I'm a sucker for people playing with mediums in weird ways. There's certainly more notable examples of doing that throughout a narrative, but this particular thread left an impression on me.

Best Realism: Another one I kinda struggle with answering. I think I'll hand this to Cory Cartwright, a rather subdued kid in a version full of theatrical personalities, whose storyline takes an equally subdued (but tragic) turn with his long, slow death and eventual betrayal by Gregory Miller. I know some of this was the result of unfortunate OOC circumstances, but it works really well IC and stands out from most of the other deaths of the version, which were usually highly violent and dramatic.

Best Heroic Character: There was someone called Lianne Grassely in the version, or something? I don't know her but I've heard she's cool. Did some escape stuff and actually succeeded, had some unusual formatting that was pretty cool, was pretty compelling and easy to root for? Love it, wish I'd RP'd with her.

Best Villainous Character: I've gotta give this one to our 10 kill winner, Seo-Yun Lee. A big part of what makes her so fun and interesting is how she starts off so cold and arrogant and full of herself, and how that mindset is left in ruins by the end of her time ingame, even as vestiges of it remain right up to the fight with Gabriela. That having her ego so thoroughly crushed doesn't actually stop her from getting 10 kills, but does stop her from really relishing in it anymore, adds a wonderfully pyrrhic element to her journey that actually would've been less interesting if she'd failed. She's also been the source of some great drama for a bunch of other characters; much like the Respects, Seo-yun crosses through a lot of different plotlines, and usually leaves a bloody mark behind (even as some of them return the favor). I'm genuinely pretty eager to see how things go in the epilogue for her, especially with the likely-inevitable death of her only real ally and friend.

Best Heroic Character: Jilly for his heroic saving of the land of Hyrule.

Thanks to Kermit for the reminder!
We now head into the Shakespearean pair of questions.

For tragedy, I usually look at characters who were doomed from the start, who were dealt an especially rough hand, or who suffered without any particular element of deserving it. It's for when someone's especially destined for bad things, or for when they come so close only to have everything snatched away.

Humor is of course characters who make me laugh. This was one of the most weaponized questions in ye olde times, which is why it to this day contains a warning to only nominate intentional humor. Basically what people would do is nominate characters they didn't like to insinuate that they were jokes or that their attempts at emotional engagement were humorous over the top failures. Luckily, we've come a good way since then.

[+] My take

Best Tragic Character: Whose sad and inevitable fate have you most enjoyed lamenting? I'm going to take a perhaps slightly unconventional pick here and nominate Beau Lively. Beau was an incredibly nice guy who did his best, even if his best was kind of goofy and not always that successful, and yet all it brought him in the game was punishment and suffering. While he tried to keep his chin up, the stress of being repeatedly attacked and of knowing his friends were turning on each other wore him down to the point that he threw in the towel, but in one final cruel twist of fate the friend he convinced to do him in was pushed—partially by this moment—into turning into one of the least justified murderers in the game, adding a dark tint even to Beau's exit.

Best Humorous Character: Which character made you laugh the most? (Intentional humor only, please. Be nice!) I'm kind of tired so good thing I left myself a freebie by not picking Gustavo Thicke last time. Gus' moment of method acting is incredible, especially due to how out of place it is with the arena we ended up using for TV3. His exit is equally fun, a callback to one of the wackier moments of TV1 (and one that actually fits the current zeitgeist quite well; Vinny was ahead of the curve with the posthumous stingers). RC is one of the funniest writers on the site just due to his sheer talent for originality, and Gus is another great example of this top to bottom.

Best Heroic Character: I've been wanting to shout her out in some way, so I'm gonna go for Pippi Bloodworth. Throughout her story, all she wants to do is escape, soon hooking up with Luanne in their quest to get out. From there, things go horribly wrong as Pippi accidentally kills a guy and then runs away; her penultimate scene portrays her heroism very well, as even when confronted with Anthony and RJ fighting, her first instinct is to try and stop them, and managing to talk Anthony down. Then after a short conversation, she gets beaten to death and dumped in the ocean. I would have loved to see her go on, but even as is, her legacy continues with Luanne.

Best Villainous Character: I don't think this can go to anyone but Fisk. He's carved his way through the cast with his delightful theatrics and band of losers, and now he's all alone; paranoid, armed, and ready to kill as many people as he can. A version without Fisk's gang and indeed, his own murderous antics, would be very different, and I just also wanna shoutout Toxie for doing so well with him; he's a character I love to hate, and sometimes even feel sorry for.

Best Tragic Character: I'd been eagerly awaiting Bethan's fate for quite a while now, just to see how it all ended (and it ended with tears). Pippi did a really good job of setting up a house of cards that was doomed to fall from the second it was constructed, and I really enjoyed reading Bethan's oneshots of her running around the ship and trying not to think about how her friends were dead. Then comes her death; a betrayal from someone she thought was an ally, and then a sad moment with her teammate before she dies. RIP, you little bean.

Best Humorous Character: Bit of a sell-out but I'm gonna take a raincheck on this one; promise I'll have something for actual Toasters!

Best Tragic Character: I'll give this to the duo of Kaya Robinson and Bethan Gayle. Bethan pretty quickly falls into the delusion that the game is all pretend and the deaths aren't real, and Kaya, unwilling to hurt her, helps her maintain that illusion despite the impossibility of it staying up forever. And indeed, it doesn't last, sending Bethan into a mental spiral that she only just starts bouncing back from right as she's killed. For Kaya, this saddles her with a great deal of guilt for the lie, and an equal helping of grief as she watches Bethan die right in front of her. Even as she's gotten her revenge on Bethan's killer, she's got a lot to deal with entering Final 10.

Best Humorous Character: I know this is probably an extremely basic answer but seriously, Gustavo Thicke. The sheer absurdity of his opening scene alone wins it for him, but the very next scene's also great, and even his death post's funny. It's a little tragic that he doesn't last too long, but he left quite an impression behind.

Best Tragic Character: Me and Volt because we survived and that means now we have to write epilogues

Best Humorous Character: jilly

Best Character Development: Me, Yona, the handler for going through this entire year of SOTF as I mentally break down over high school thank you for sticking with me I say to characters whom I've tortured and also encouraged handlers to torture lol

Best Game Impact: Jewel Evans

Best Innovation: I honestly enjoy Mariko and Jodi's formatting shenanigans.

Best Realism: Nadine- bless her soul.

Best Heroic Character: Takin' a leap here with Shoshanna and Jasper- morally unproblematic (mostly) and gone too soon.

Best Villainous Character: Now here's the thing- villany is inherently difficult to define even when we are not operating on a scale as vast and unbalanced as fiction is. With all that being said fuck Gregory and all he stands for (affectionate)

Best Tragic Character: Marion!

Best Humorous Character: Junji, or maybe Laura?

Now we get to one of the quirkier questions: Best Tactics. The thing here is, often folks kind of fall into the trap of justifying tactics based on results—Character X lived thus they played well. From a certain point of view I suppose you can argue it, but characters surviving is based on not getting rolled, and while that is a very potent tactic OOC, it's not really something that fits neatly into IC awards in my opinion.

I'm glad that Sympathy and Empathy fall in different cycles this time, because they often get conflated. For me, Sympathy is "Oh, I feel for them," while Empathy is "Oh, I can see feeling like them.

[+] My take

Best Tactics: Through elimination of the competition or a solid plan for survival, who's kept you interested in their struggle to make it back home? So I know I just said that success doesn't justify locking down this category, but I've got to pick Luanne Grasset here. There are tales to be told eventually perhaps, but the short version is that Luanne tried an incredible amount of really creative things en route to her success, and legitimately took me by surprise a few times... which is exactly where you want to be if you're pushing against the system.

The Sympathy Award: Which character did you feel the most for, and most want good things for? All of the would-be escapees fall into this one, but I'm going to especially highlight Rhonda Rollins here because she had an especially hard and fraught run. There were so many points where it seemed like she might be able to link up with the others and push things towards a happier conclusion, but time and again something would go wrong or someone would die and she just ran out of time. But she never stopped trying.

As I mentioned yesterday, I distinguish Empathy from Sympathy by focusing on a character whose thought processes I gel with, even if I don't necessarily favor a positive outcome for them.

Gone-Too-Soon tends to be tricky because it encompasses a whole bunch of characters. I usually focus on characters who were rolled out, rather than those who were sacrificed for Swaps or Heroes, because in those cases it wasn't handler choice for them to exit when they did. That's certainly not a hard and fast rule, though.

[+] My take

The Empathy Award: Which character could you most easily put yourself in the shoes of? So, very different mentalities and skillsets and such, but I find Akeno Kudo's struggle between morals and pragmatism, and her feeling pulled to help friends while at the same time knowing that doing so is against her ultimate self interests, very compelling and understandable. Fenrir has done an amazing job laying out her thought processes in a way that makes them pretty irresistible, even though she's far from a "good guy" if you zoom out a little.

The Gone-Too-Soon Award: Which deceased character should have stuck around a little longer? She made it a good long way, but I never ever got tired of Leah Hemingway and while I feel like she got a lot of mileage out of her run, I also think she could've done even more if rolls had been kinder. There are lots of great kids in TV3 who could've used some more time, but Leah remains a favorite.

Best Tactics: Emmy, because she expertly telepathically manipulated the producers into making her a mentor instead of sending her into the death game, and thereby ensured her own survival. The perfect crime....

The Sympathy Award: Mandy because she's emotionally manipulating me by wearing a dumb panda costume and im pretty sure she makes squeaky toy noises when someone squeezes her.

The Empathy Award: Which character could you most easily put yourself in the shoes of? Idk whichever ones have feet that are similarly sized to mine I guess.

The Gone-Too-Soon Award: obviously im heavily biased but pIpPiiIiIIIIiiiIi ;~~;

Best tactics: my daughter Luanne

The Sympathy Award: SHOSHANNNNAAAAAAAAAH

The Empathy Awards: cluster b bitches united so Seo yun

Gone 2 soon: …GISEEEELLLEEEEEEEE

Best Tactics: I think I'll give this to both Eric Cunningham and Akeno Kudo, for fairly similar reasons. They both had a tendency towards cold, clever pragmatism and getting the best out of any hostile encounter (most of the time). The specifics differ, of course; Akeno is more of a physical threat than Eric, who get by on sly cunning, and conversely Eric feels considerably less remorse and never takes the quasi-heroic turn Akeno does. But it's a fun parallel to draw, and seeing them strategize on the fly and throw a wrench in things is always a good read.

The Sympathy Award: People have probably heard me call Carol Hong an early favorite of mine, or at least picked up on that vibe. When your very first scene is an accidental murder and every scene thereafter is dealing with the mental fallout of that, combined with the stress of the game, you've got a pretty effective formula for sympathy. She's another kid who went out a bit early, but it was a good ride.

The Empathy Award: I'm actually kinda struggling to come up with an answer for this one so I'll do it later lol

The Gone-Too-Soon Award: I've tried to stay a little detached for these, but here I'm gonna go ahead and be totally self-indulgent. Pretty much any of the not-mine escape kids could've gotten this one, but I'm handing it to Jasper Suárez-King. He had a fun dynamic with Shoshanna and Gus, an interestingly pragmatic bent to his involvement in the escape, and was taken out far too early. At least his death scene was pretty cool, and had a significant effect on how things shook out for most involved.

There's an interesting story behind the He-Had-It-Coming Award: the question most like this originally was "Which character would you be willing to kill yourself?" This phrasing more or less ensured that nobody ever answered it directly, and tended to provoke a lot of "Well nobody *really* deserves it..." and such. Sometimes, though, it pulled a different sort of response: what character the handler wished they'd killed in-game with one of their own characters. This could also be a little weird in how ti played out, but was a lot more fun. But yeah, a question nobody ever answers is a worthless one, so we changed it to be more likely to garner responses.

I forget if we usually remove Destined-For-Great-Things for the final Toasters, but I think it's interesting so it stays for now. Granted, there's not that much time left, but it's never too late to make a splash!

[+] My take

The He-Had-It-Coming Award: Who best earned their (possibly still forthcoming) demise? I'm going to break the letter of the question in service of the spirit and say that Maddie did an amazing job setting up Seo-yun Lee to suffer consequences for her misdeeds that aren't just death, but are in their own way similarly painful and damaging. One of the hard liens to walk with a villain is what their presumed downfall will look like, and with Seo-yun she won the battle but the war is still up in the air, as she's been devastated physically and emotionally and come to the horrible conclusion that nothing about making it out of the game will be like she thought it would.

The Destined-For-Great-Things Award: Who are you hoping to see make a big splash in the remainder of the game? So I think legitimately everyone left is great and has a lot of room to find highlights, but i'm specifically going to shout out Mary Cheung as a character who's had a largely internal and kind of quiet game that has nevertheless built up some great tension and seems primed to bubble over in fascinating and cool ways here at the end.