Pau
Starts off by supporting D1 lynching in #315. Follows this up by voting
SalvaPot in #472. #595 is safe commentary about
goshujin and
kingkitty that doesn't contribute much. #696 is fence-sitting on D1 lynching that doesn't contribue much. Complains about no being responded to in #844, but to be honest, there's been very little for people to respond to - this seems much more like deflection than most supposed examples of it that have been pointed out. Her question is valid, though - it's exactly the same line I was using to pursue
Makai about what feasible reason you could have to delay to Day 2. He didn't answer her on that front.
There's a fairly redundant question to
SalvaPot in #950, which boils down to "who are you going to vote for?". #1058 has some slightly odd logic, in which Pau wants to keep
Rest and/or
CornBurrito around in case I am Despair, because they'd check me. The trouble is, we could both be Despair, or neither of us could be - it's quite a strong assumption that if I am Despair then both them must be Hope - particularly given other players, like
CornBurrito, thought the opposite at points. It's also missing the main point - the only check you need to curb a suspect player is yourself. Preserving other suspect players because you can't be bothered to do your own pushing is passive play at best, mafia play at worst.
#1065 contains a vote for
Rest and literally nothing else - no justification, nada.
CornBurrito rightly challenges her on this. The justification is then strange - apparently,
Hagi being a new player makes him more trustworthy. She seems to subtly insinuate that
Hagi is a power-role, too, by stating she finds it more likely
Rest is an ordinary town and yet nevertheless is content to vote for him. This didn't bear out and it's very difficult to understand the logic anyway. There's some reasonable musings on
franconp's death in #1294, but they're largely derivative of earlier posts.
She's still willing to press on
Makai in #1440. It's a valid point. Nobody answers her question, either, particularly interesting from those people who suspect me because I pressed on
Makai (implying they therefore must trust
Makai's claim). There's discussion of me and
kgtrep in #1510. It's thin - she finds me Hope for some unexplained reason,
kgtrep also Hope for some unexplained reason, and thinks that I am probably an ordinary villager, but nevertheless votes
kgtrep, which is... slightly confusing - her thoughts seems to dictate a conclusion that would favour voting me.
CornBurrito (again) calls her out on this, and she just states she finds
kgtrep more likely to be detrimental in #1521, but there's not much of an explanation why. Obviously, I agree, but I don't think, from
Pau's perspective, this was a sufficient response.
#1632 is probably the first *strongly* substantive post, which is worrying because it's very recent. It also only comes from a barrage of sustained attention from
CornBurrito and also
CzarTim. It also suffers from being a collation of her past thoughts rather than new ones. We hear about how she townreads
Rest again - although it didn't stop her voting for him last time, how I am annoying but probably town again, how she finds
Makai suspicious again. There is some new material - she calls out
kingkitty despite not having paid him too much attention prior to this - but not much. She's called out on this *again* and concedes she doesn't have many opinions in #1723. Goes back to
Makai in #1758. I agree, but it's just a little tunnelly for my liking, given her paucity of opinion on other players.
Verdict: I'm unsure. She's been largely reactive rather than proactive in the game so far, focused on a few specific issues, and often I can't quite follow her explanations for her actions. Regardless of her alignment, I don't think that, given her current state of play, she's a pro-town force, given she's serving more to distract than to contribute.
AbsolutBro
First thing: there's a lot of fluff here. He even makes a joke of voting
kingkitty for rather weak reasoning in #455, for "role-fishing". There's a lot of vagueries in subsequent posts, and the
kingkitty vote is retracted real easily. We get substantive material by #1042 (right at the end of D1), in which he follows my "mafia probably won't be in the wagons" logic to look at the key wagon avoiders, leading him to
SalvaPot,
kgtrep, and
Barrylocke... and then cops out of actually making an opinion on any of them. Gee, useful post.
In #1104, we get a push on
Makai for his bad roleclaim. There are three reasons given: a)
Makai's roleclaim might prompt a bunch of town PRs to unvote quickly because their role PM might be similar to
Makai's description so they back off. I mean, okay, I guess, maybe, but essentially every single person who had voted
Makai had already backed off at that stage and it seems implausible that they could all be PRs, b) he didn't see why
Makai had to claim at all (I agree with this), and c) he found Makoto Naegi too much of a coincidence. I have no comment on this except to say it's a flavour issue, I think there are stronger points to make.
I personally am deeply suspicious of
Makai, for reasons I'll go on to later, but I will say that
AbsolutBro's target of him seemed poorly put and a little strange - something that was called out by
Ty4on for very similar reasons.
#1439 is supposed to be a mega-post, but is really mega-nothing. It basically runs "tl;dr lol georgebush.gif" to
kgtrep, which doesn't help anyone, says myself and
kgtrep are probably Hope with little explanation as to why he thinks that, and continues to avoid commenting on many other players. He finishes with various questions about why
franconp might have died, but doesn't answer them himself. I'm also wary of people who only discuss nightkills because, if they're Despair, it's key WIFOM territory.
There's then more fluff/nothing posts until #1737. Here, he pushes on
CornBurrito, because
CornBurrito bandwagoned - this is actually quite fair in light of D2, where
CornBurrito changed his vote often, usually into following an already started vote. I'm dubious this is a scumtell, but at the very least I can see why others might find it do. However, his second part is to say
Corn is suspicious because
franconp died and
Corn pushed on him - this is exactly the sort of situation a Despair player can engineer by killing someone who was pushed on prominently and then going after their pusher. It also doesn't stack up - supposing
Corn was Despair, why would he bother to kill someone at night he might be able to get traction on during day?
Lots of the rest of this post then just becomes observations of what people have actually done, rather than a discussion of whether what people have done actually means anything. The only interesting observation is to note that
Makai might be the locus for Despair watchers trying to catch town protective roles. Otherwise, it boils down to "everyone might be Despair" which is useless because for town to act they need to know which people might be Despair more than others - to put it another way round, if everyone is Despair, nobody is.
In #1804 we find out he's voting for me (or at least, he more clearly says so than earlier), and the reasoning is terrible. It essentially boils down to "everyone is talking about
Crab, so we need to kill him so people will stop talking". a) having everyone talking about a person is good, as long as they talk about all the other people too, b) it's your (not necessarily directed at
AbsolutBro, but at all of town) job to make sure you talk about other people, not mine (although I'll have a go anyway), and c) you can prompt people to make sure they do talk about other stuff. Plus I guess d) if people only ever focus on one person ignoring all other happenings they're either bad players or scum so just lynch them. Lynching the tunnellee instead of the tunneller is just bizarro-land logic.
Verdict: I think it is probable AbsolutBro is Despair. Fluff, absence of content, non-committal posts, studied bandwagon avoidance, weak logic chains, largely non-confrontational, it's all classic scum play.
