BR, what a wonderful welcome and the same to you as well. I knew I could count on you to start things off and thank you for the information on Brad. Far be it from me to presume anything on these contestants so this confirmation helps. I see that the recruitment process was in full force

KO, I fully expect your Nash perspective along with all your other wonderful observations and this season, as you say, adaptation is everything; within their own little circle and then the big picture. Race relations is just another nugget in this social game and it will be interesting to see if this has more impact when the tribes are with their own race or after they are integrated. What will be interesting is ferreting out those with the mentality of wanting their initial tribes perhaps to “prove something” or those who, in the spirit of this show, know that the ultimate goal is broadening their adaptation to get to the end. This has occurred before with gender issue involved and/or just original tribe mentality. Those stuck in that “rut” may end up on the losing side.

Pretty_Kitty and dreamerbeliever - so nice to see you and I am looking forward to hearing from you this season; it is very heartwarming to know that other posters are lovers of the story telling of this show and how it all comes together.

RudyRules - unfortunately my posts haven’t gotten any shorter and I have a feeling with what this season entails, they may cause a state of inertia lol

michel - always a pleasure to see you and your insights. I’ve added that additional commentary about Yul to the initial post. No doubt we will see many of these contestants fit that mold that we see often in the other seasons which just confirms that the story ultimately is about the individuals and race, gender, age, etc. are only potential catalysts.

The first episode may be full of some “muck” to weed through since a lot will be focused on the division of the tribes but we certainly can hone in on some clues as to the longevity of these players and naturally over the course of the show we should hopefully establish some of the clues we look for in the end game players

Three dimensional vs. one dimensional (the winner is not a cookie cutter cut out, there are different facets to them even if one personality trait, etc. is magnified)

The longer term players (and winner) will not only be heard from but we ultimately hear about them from others (and quite often what we hear is worry that this person may win and consequently the winner may discuss their worries about not winning)

A larger than life character typically does fairly well but usually does not win

The “final two foil” will at times tend to make the audience doubt the authenticity of the winner since the show does want to create some element of a climatic ending

Under the radar is not necessarily someone who is just coasting along quietly; one can be UTR in the sense that the other players would not imagine that person would be a threat to win

Let’s not forget how typically alliances revealed generally do not succeed en masse (there may be a subset of that alliance that will succeed but vocalization of an entire alliance usually falls by the wayside)

Numbers, numbers, numbers; those pesky things! Listing of boot orders, listing of pecking orders and the like usually result in failure.

What ISN’T said sometimes can be as important as what IS said. If you watch a scene and question why was something shown when it didn’t have to be, that may be helpful. In the same token, if something wasn’t shown and it was left out, this too could be helpful.

Confessional and face time IS important; it is just a question of discerning what is “fluff” and what is meaningful.

I will pose one pre show question to whomever wishes to respond. Again, this is not designed to cause people to be offended or defensive. As some of you who are participants in this thread know, I often pose questions and ask for gender of the person or geographical location, etc. in order to reach some conclusions on how the show is viewed. In this instance, race is often a sensitive subject but this is no different as when I have asked questions with respect to gender or age, etc. Please know that I am only looking for responses as opposed to any debates and I also ask because with a setting such as this, I cannot fathom it won’t be discussed by the contestants themselves (we certainly saw age and gender discussed in prior seasons)

With respect to the initial breakdown of the tribes are there any advantages or disadvantages you see that will occur?

For example, the Amazon season was broken down men vs. women. It was no surprise that many felt the women would be at a disadvantage physically in certain challenges along with general living. This too was also believed with the vast difference in the Koror and Ulong tribes with respect to the physical competitions (mind you that this observations does not take into account the sourced information as I learned post game of the magnitude of spoilers with respect to Ulong getting obliterated) and let’s not forget stereotypes associated with people like Tom from Africa based on his geographical location; I would suggest that many people didn’t feel his IQ was the same number as someone like Ethan

In other words, can you conceive of any tribe lacking in any area and/or excelling based upon the makeup of the tribes and yes, the stereotypes associated? I certainly felt the Amazon women would not meet up to the physical standards of the men but also knew that the women’s mentality of showing the men they were tough may negate my automatic opinion.

Would it not be interesting to end up seeing what we saw of last season’s final four; one member from each original tribe?