Miss Alli
A-
383 users
A
Previously on It's Not Whether You Win Or Lose, It's Whether You Keep Ami From Winning: Ami was practicing her winner's strut, and she was concentrating so hard that she forgot how to count to four. When she and Leann made it perfectly clear to Scout and Twila that it was an Ami/Leann/Julie alliance, not an Ami/Leann/Scout/Twila alliance, Scout and Twila looked around and saw that there were two other people left who might also not want to go home yet, and Ami's lock on the game was finally broken. Weep for Ami's lock on the game; you will not be seeing it again. Now, six are left. Can Ami pull something out of her shapely ass, or will this keep going the way it's going and send her back to Crissy with no ill regrets?
Credits. Hee hee hee hee hee. Sorry, just celebrating a little in advance.
Alinta, Night 30. A snake wraps itself around a pole. The tribe is back from tribal council. "Well, I can say that that was a really nice move," Ami says, in a tone of mock admiration. "I just felt like we was gonna get all screwed over," Twila says simply as she adds to the campfire, "so I felt like I'd take up for the little guy." "'Take up for the little guy,' that's cute," Ami spits. "Well, you're taking up for your own guy, not for the little guy," she tells Twila contemptuously. Just a note to Ami: that's always what "the little guy" means. It is always is a reference to yourself. Even if you're not short. So Twila is hardly using it differently than anyone else does. Ami continues to babble, with what she's trying to portray as casual amusement but is actually seething anger, about how Twila's the bad one, and Twila's the one who said she was down with the four-way alliance and so on. "Screwed you, didn't I?" Twila says, about tired of being snorted at. "You didn't screw me, I'm still in the game!" Ami insists. "You screwed Leann," blah blah blah. Because certainly, that has no effect on Ami whatsoever. Chris watches with interest. "The bitterness started as soon as we got back to camp," he notes in a night-vision interview. "I'm livin' with five wildcats right now!" Dude. You have got to get over your intense interest in seeing chicks fight. Unseemly!
Twila accuses Ami of just keeping Eliza around for her own purposes, and Ami, of course, snorts that now Twila wants to keep Eliza, when before, she was always wanting to vote Eliza off. Well, true, but...so what? Twila may have wanted Eliza voted off; Ami actually voted for her. If the point is that Eliza has no reason to feel guilty about going against Ami, it seems like a pretty difficult thing to refute. Ami chatters on about how Scout and Twila always wanted to get rid of Eliza. "I know," Eliza puts in, "but who saved my ass tonight? When I was really going to go home?" As Ami persists in claiming that Eliza actually owes Ami, because she kept Eliza in the game -- you know, right up until she tried to vote her off -- Twila raises her hand behind Eliza, happily saying, "Me!" Twila certainly has stored up her resentment of Ami for a good long time, because she seems to have an abundant supply.
“ I mean, it doesn't actually endanger your son if you swear on your son and you're lying. That doesn't actually cause your son to die, unless you live in a Stephen King novel. ”
Now, you begin to see the genuinely unpleasant person Ami is, when she says to Twila, "I'm just glad I didn't swear on my little brother or my family, 'cause that would be real yucky." Okay, first of all, "yucky"? What's , a frowny-face tattoo? Second, please keep in mind that the person who dragged Ami's little brother into this discussion of reality-show moralizing was Ami. And if that's not "yucky," I just don't know what is. Furthermore, I realize that oath-taking is an old and sacred tradition, but this entire thing with "swearing on" people is so stupid. The only people who really care about maintaining some kind of a "I swear on so-and-so" system are people who want everyone to agree to some kind of system of "safe words" so they can lie all they want and then be able to repurchase their credibility for one "I swear on my father's grave" or whatever. It seems like a load of hooey to me. "I swear on my son," "I swear on that tree," "I swear on my children," who cares? It's all lying. Lying is generally bad in real life with the usual white-lie exceptions, but it's not bad on Survivor, because lying is part of the game. I mean, it doesn't actually endanger your son if you swear on your son and you're lying. That doesn't actually cause your son to die, unless you live in a Stephen King novel, so it has nothing to do with how much you love him or how important he is to you. What is the difference between saying, "I give you my word," and "I swear on my son"? Nothing. In both cases, in real life, you should be telling the truth. In both cases, in Survivor, it makes no difference.
The reason Ami is mad, it appears to me, is that she misjudged Twila to be some kind of a backwards hick who, in Ami's mind, would never swear on her son and lie. That's what I think. Ami believed that she had Twila pegged as the sort of simpleton who believes in Elvis sightings and believes that you will kill your son if you swear on his name and you're lying. In other words, Ami thought Twila had an identifiable weakness, which was a superstitious, unsophisticated belief in the validity of swearing on things or people. Turns out Twila was faking that quality, largely. And Ami is angry as all hell, because she has been flat-out beat by Twila, whom Ami has never respected, ever, going so far as to lecture her about her femininity in front of a group of other women, which, seriously? One does not do, particularly when one is talking to a woman who has had a child, and presumably is thus familiar with her femininity and has managed just fine up to now without French braids. Ami, I believe, resents being outsmarted by a southern highway worker.
At any rate, Scout tries to tell Ami to ease up on Twila, but Ami continues to snort that Twila swore on her son, and it's "the truth of [Ami's] life" that she's glad she didn't blah blah blah. Scout gently asks Ami not to "put Twila down," and if you didn't know Ami was coming back with "Twila put herself down!," you haven't been paying attention. Ami -- infuriated, impotent, and humiliated by this entire development because she had no idea it was coming -- continues to talk with disgust about Twila's hideous betrayal of...whatever she's supposed to have betrayed. In an interview, Ami keeps up with this line of discussion -- how she's "disgusted" by Twila, blah dee blah. She has lost all possible respect for Twila, could never respect Twila again...it's a little bit funny, really, watching Ami try to come up with additional superlatives to describe her sense of moral outrage, particularly since her first word on the subject was "yucky."
“ 'Yeah, I'm cocky,' Ami says dubiously. 'I'm also one of the most giving, loving, caring people,' she adds impatiently, as if it's so irritating to her that these qualities go unrecognized by others. After all, what's the point of being a good person if people won't sit back and let you have a million dollars? ”
Having been shat upon for this by Ami a few times, Twila says she'll respond if Ami wants. "Oh, I'm listening, BIG EARS, what?" Ami snorts with a smug grin, so bored by having to talk to dumb old Twila who is so beneath her. Taking note of Ami's attitude, Twila says, "Well, that's the thing, right there. You and Leann and Julie thought that you all were so freaking high and mighty." Ami snorts in disbelief, but allows, "I totally got a little cocky," and Twila says, "You're dang right." Ami goes on to say that she was cocky because she "knew [she] had people [she] could trust." In other words, she was only cocky because she loves everyone so much and believed they were as good and trustworthy as she was. I totally believe her. How about you?
Twila lies down later, staring straight up toward the camera. "We've overthrown the queen and the little princess. People like that just piss me off, because they think they're so much freakin' better than everybody else," she says. And like I said, I'm convinced that this goes all the way back to the patronizing way Ami treated Twila from the very beginning. "We've got the power," Twila says with a little smile, raising her fists to enjoy the moment. "Chris, I, Scout, Li -- we have the power now." She pauses. "I have a great mind sometimes, I love it," she says, and laughs. And while it's more than a little off-putting to see anyone engage in quite this much self-congratulation, Twila is the only damn person in the entire tribe to get a clue and make a move since about Week 2, so relatively speaking, she is coming off as rather brilliant.
Back out at the fire, Scout is still talking to Ami. "Ami, you're cocky," she says, continuing where Twila apparently has now left off. "Yeah, I'm cocky," Ami says dubiously. "I'm also one of the most giving, loving, caring people," she says with impatience, as if it's so irritating to her that these qualities go unrecognized by others. After all, what's the point of being a good person if people won't sit back and let you have a million dollars? Ami has also apparently missed out on the fact that it's generally a reliable rule that people who are genuinely "giving, loving, caring people" don't find it necessary to tell everyone all the time how great they are. And..."giving, loving, caring"? You didn't even want to tell the guys how to open a coconut, jackass. Ami is not a peace goddess; she's a poser, and at bottom, not a very good sport, or she wouldn't be tormenting Twila for kicking her ass. At least Hatch, with his cry of, "I've been bamboozled!," recognized that you at least have to pretend you don't mind being outplayed, because you're going to look like a jerk if you don't.
In an interview, Ami tells us that she's now competing with all her heart. As opposed to the game to this point, where she hasn't been trying at all. That's the only reason she's in trouble, you know. She's too nice. She'll tell you so herself.