at any rate im like 99% sure there's 3 scum in aqua/twg/skele/hk.
i trust tim a lot. if he's scum, he's done a fantastic performance. he feels very town to me.
i trust sessy because of her diary claim.
so then the scum should be in the remaining four players.
skele is a complete null read. he's barely said anything so i have nothing. so i dont want to vote him since it'd be a gamble.
TWG i could see as scum. his arguments against UNU on day 0 felt weird to me. sort of like, unusually 'dressed up' to be convincing, and had an unusual kind of 'showmanship' to them, and felt far too sure of himself because of it. like he presents his argument in a way that, to me, reads as though hes not doubtful at all about UNU's alignment. and yeah, there are a few fair points in his argument, but nothing that i think could give him
that much confidence, reasonably. if you want to see the post im primarily talking about, it's this one:
https://escaperestart.com/forum/threads/they-are-among-us-day-2.21395/page-15#post-448112
you'll notice he uses words that suggest he isn't that confident, like saying he's conflicted or having doubts and stuff, but its the
tone of the post that reeks of having too much confidence in himself to me. like he's just trying to make sure we think he's not sure, because obviously town wouldnt be, but in reality he's not worried about being wrong at all.
also, there have been several moments throughout the game where like, i get this visual image of him forcing this smile all the time. like he's frozen his face into a smile. like he's got this weirdly upbeat tone about him that feels kinda fake i guess. i dunno.
one thing that makes me resist thinking TWG is mafia is that i know in the past TWG would just bus his partners to look inno and didnt seem the type of mafia player to want to push a lynch on a townie since he'd worry it'd backfire. however, i think it's easily possible he's just adapted as a player and realizes that pushing on townies isnt necessarily something he's gonna get lynched over, because townies push on other townies all the time.
but also, im just not confident in him being scum at all. i could see reasons for why he presented his arguments in the way that he did if he's town - it's been a while since he played, maybe he was trying to put extra effort into seeming persuasive this time. i know i was putting effort into using proper grammar/capital letters etc for my first game back. and maybe the 'frozen smile' thing i keep imagining is BS.
anyways, moving onto aqua. im like 50/50 on this one. his backpedalling on what his safe does is kinda eyebrow raising. i could see him doing what he did as town but its eyebrow raising. the fact his item in his safe isnt detected by tim is also kinda suspicious, since that seems a weird design since surely it can backfire on the townie who uses the safe if the town-sided investigation role sees a contradiction in what theyre saying? but a mafia with the safe, then it makes more sense, since obviously mafia will be hiding items. it gives them a way of getting out of tim or myself finding them out. that would make sense, and arguably more sense than it being in town's hands.
aqua also came into the thread with far too much confidence on me being scum and the setup only being balanced if im scum for me to fully believe he's town. like i said at the time, his push on me felt agendary and biased as heck, like he'd decided to suspect me and then decided to find reasons for it rather than organically coming to the conclusion. his first points against me really werent very well thought out imo, and surely hed feel instinctively that he might be missing flaws in his notion that the game is unbalanced if im town, since he didnt seem to have thought excruciatingly hard about it when he originally made that post, i mean hed only just subbed in a few hours before. but he talked as if he already knew i was scum, and used phrases like 'inf almost had me fooled.' that suggests to me that he's fully confident in it. i just dont see it being that likely he was
that confident in me being scum legitimately. i brought this up with him and he was like 'maybe its because im right about you 90% of the time' but even then it just feels slightly too confident for me. town aqua, i think, would probs be a bit more worried about being wrong and potentially misleading town into mislynching. his confidence suggests he doesnt feel that way, to me.
his first few posts were also unusually flowery, he worded things real elaborately/flowery as if trying to make his post seem more convincing or something - that's how it felt to me anyways. like when he was describing how ive been playing, or how i am as town:
this is one example of it, but im pretty sure there was a second as well but honestly i cba to look thoroughly through the pages and pages of essays we did to find it, if it does exist and im not just misremembering.
i think its likely someone only does that, uses tactics like that to make themselves more convincing than just relying on their arguments alone, if theyre either a) town but super confident in their conclusion, or b) mafia. because if youre town and not super confident, you'd be worried about misleading people into a mislynch and losing the game, surely. i know i would at least. so to use manipulation tactics to make your argument seem more convincing isnt something id want to do because i dont want to accidentally mislead town into believing my arguments to be more convincing than they are and losing the game because of it. i want town to be unbiased when evaluating my argument so that it can be properly evaluated by everyone so that we have best chance of people lynching based on something reasonable and likely, rather than something that wasnt that reasonable and i was just biased/wrong about stuff but my manipulation led to people being more persuaded by it anyways so we followed through on a faulty argument and lost the game as a result. ofc if i was like, cop, or somehow knew that a player was scum but didnt want to claim how, then i might consider being a bit manipulative to get them lynched. but aqua isnt in a position where he can have that much certainty about me imo. he can say 'its unbalanced with you being town' all he wants but surely in the back of his mind thered be a doubt of 'what if the hosts just made a mistake and the setup is unbalanced?' he's played enough mafia games to know that having complete faith in games being perfect is unreasonable.
but, that last paragraph is a lot of me projecting how id feel about stuff onto aqua, which isnt exactly reliable, so i dont feel confident in it. and of course there can be other reasons for why he worded his posts in the way he did, like wanting to sound impressive as a townie or something.
so yeah, im not sure about aqua, but i do have some concerns.
and lastly, hk. ive already spoken about hk multiple times this game, but essentially, to me his posts lack any feelings at all to help him parse through possibilities and come to conclusions that feel right to his intuition. hk as a townie has always been feelings based imo, he relies on vibes and feelings and intuition, much like i do. his posts this game have entirely lacked that aspect of his playstyle. all of his contributions are just weighing up possibilities, never really indicating that he feels one of them is correct.
he's also barely scumhhunted at all. like, i dunno if hes just busy or something, or if me spamming the thread disheartened him, but i dont see a lot of work put in to questioning others or getting discussions going. even today hes unusually silent despite me saying im gonna vote him several times, which actually makes me uneasy, because like, what if hes a 3p or something that doesnt care about dying today. like why isnt he fighting harder when theres 1 day left, to change my mind on him or to push someone else into the spotlight? does he just think its not gonna happen? i dunno. but regardless, i dont see much game solving from him, which seems more likely to come from scum than town.
out of all the remaining people in my suspect pool, hk is the one who seems least townie, and most likely to be mafia, to me, so i think thats who im planning on voting. ive been sus of him for a while now so itd suck to vote someone else last minute and lose when i was on the right track all along, so thats also probably biasing my view on who i should vote.
anyways, big rant/reads over. i know it was a lot of just feelings/impressions and i know not all of it might be reasonable, but those are my thoughts and feelings as we enter the final few hours of the day (and hopefully not the final few hours of the game.)
