Ok, analysis on Shale posts!
Until the post I quote below, Shale says...little, joke phase, etc. He does give insight on his role...or at least, the name of his role, though, does it in a manner that you'd have to be familiar with the character to actually know it. Sounds like it was tongue and cheek given the "we're all villains!" claim thing. Nothing informative here, unless someone has explicitly figured out WHO Shale is, though, that says little about his actual role and/or alignment/
Count me in as looking askance at OK. Rapid-fire jokevote switching plus the "us scum" slip of the tongue....neither looks great, both together make this either a giant gift or an equally-giant distraction. ##FoS for now, maybe I should vote here but I don't like jumping onto Day 1 dogpiles, this is not new.
Says he thinks something is up with OK, but refrains from voting due to the point I just bolded. Seems pretty fair. Also, keep in mind that bolded part for later.
He then doesn't post for nearly another 24 hours, where he says...
Here again. Hungry. Tired. Overworked, as I just bitched about in chat. Catching up. On first glance, OK and Tom both seem to be looking bad on purpose, for hell-if-I-know-what reason, but if they are, I don't want to play into that. More when my brain works.
Which sounds like "RL sucks, these characters look bad, but don't wanna go after them cause I'm tired." Nothing odd about that frankly. Guessing he posts this just so he indicate he's still alive. After what happened in SSBB Mafia, I really can't blame him either!
Next post, he goes over all the lynch targets. He says the following:
Of the three people currently painting targets on themselves, I like Tom's lynch the most, followed by OK and Delta somewhere below that.
Is this the line where people say he's ready to go after anyone? Cause...uhh...that's not what he's saying. He follows up by summarizing the cases against him and why he sees Tom > OK > Delta.
He ends the post stating this:
Sleep now. Will look over the cases again in the morning and vote. My judgment on Tom/OK is rooted enough in gut reaction to OK that I want to look it over again when I'm not exhausted.
Says he's going to vote in the morning, and if I'm reading this right, he's not sure who to go after between Tom and OK. Indecisiveness, sure.
By the time he posts again...Hammer was fallen. He says he would have gone after Tom so the result wouldn't have changed much.
That followed by...
Anyway, that's...well. All three of the Day 1 targets are gone, so it's time to look at the people who were attacking those three yesterday. Fun, fun.
The famous line that people are calling him hypocritical on. Ok, so...how is this hypocritical?
FIRST OFF, if you look back at the summary of 3 lynch targets post...he basically states Delta was not a good option at the time. He qualifies this with "We've mislynched TOm and Smodge too many times for this reason alone in the past." He does state this doesn't totally disqualify Delta's action as being scummy by saying to keep an eye on him, but is more or less admitting Delta is not a good lynch target. So if anything, he did NOT attack Delta.
So what about OK and Tom?
OK he doesn't actually attack either, if you look at the post. Observe!
2) OK. Likewise thrashing about, but the desired effect seems to be not so much to confuse as to draw attention directly to himself. Tons of jokevotes, incredible and varied amounts of weird and sometimes disruptive posting with no clear purpose. "Don't lynch Tom and I'm not going to say why" may be the most suspicious thing he could possibly have said, which, like much of his posting, makes me wonder if anyone could be that suspicious without it being deliberate. Like I said before, I'm feeling an ulterior motive here, and I don't like playing to it.
Bolded Parts are Shale's speculation. He's being objective regarding what OK was actually doing; I don't see this as an attack at all, its summarizing what happened. The bolded parts are subjective, where Shale's putting his own input. He generally says that OK was doing everything purposely to draw attention. Now, Shale was pretty much 100% correct since OK flipped Jester. This...says little about Shale's alignment, of course; Jester being 3rd Party and all, not even Scum would know about it, for starters, among other obvious reasons (the ever famous WIFOM situation of Scum Defends a nonScum to look better!)
Lastly, there's the Tom part. Here, he...mostly just summarizes what Tom was doing, input involves around "I can't fathom why he would do that" though, pretty much indicates he finds Tom most suspicious due to Tom's whole "I can't say anything about what I know!"
Now, why he didn't vote Tom there...I dunno. Tom was getting close to Hammer; -3 at point. Putting him at -2 would be dangerous. GRANTED, going off close to hammers on Towns are hard to read, but still worth noting.
That and he actually stated earlier he doesn't like jumping on Trains. Granted, he gave a reason here, so it could be considered not Training, but that point still deserves some mentioning.
However...
At the same time, Shale is trying to direct attention towards the people who DID vote for either of the three targets of day 1. Presumably, it means Tom's voters, as Delta and OK had two votes between the two of them; the same Tom, whose innocence Shale now knows and says he would have gone for, but it was apparently suspicious to pursue while his claims were still very much in doubt.
From Cor! This sticks out to me. First off, OK and Delta had more than two votes, garnered outside of the Joke Phase, throughout the day. That's a key thing to note here; someone jumping from one of them to Tom is worth noting. Notice how everyone on OK eventually went to Tom anyway? Yeah; I'm also assuming when that point that everyone raised Red Flags for, Shale didn't look at the vote count at the time.
Shale responds to it directly, defending himself. I dunno; that statement felt pretty logical to me. feels like you're jumping on him for hypocrisy and false implications. He said something, you took it to mean something else, and then twisted it to prove what you mean. This...I dunno, going back and reading Shale's posts, this definitely feels like a case of "look hard enough, you'll find anything." I know someone's going to say "That's the point of mafia!"
And again, as Alex likes to emphasize many times in the past, SCUM LIKE TO STAY ON SMALL FICKLE FACTS for arguments. They thrive on watching Town argue about a minor slip that doesn't say a lot. Shale's actions don't really seem suspicious, and it feels like someone on him is scum.
Also worth noting that Cor's starting the whole "These people didn't have votes!" thing. We've debunked that not voting, especially on Day 1, in and of itself isn't really a big deal.
However, Shale did state he was actually going to vote, and even gave an explanation as to why; Cor acknowledges this, but still holds it against him some. That's...kind of awkward...
Afterwords same time, Ciato more or less Me-too's Cor, and votes on Shale for that reason alone.
Next off, Laggy's point on Shale...
Shale does feel rather backgroundish and this is a strike against him, but the specific arguments some people have made against him seem blown out of proportion(why the heck is him saying that he would have voted for Tom anyway somehow scummy? The entirety of Day 1 supports this). That said, the lack of activity and posts, as well as the lack of votes, does bother me. If he doesn't improve in this regard he will be suspect, much as I feel Strago is right now.
Bolded part is important. Laggy states Shale might be suspicious for OTHER reasons, but the other main reason which Cor attacked him for doesn't really fly.
The rest on the Shale issue seems to have moved on from here but...well...
The attacks on him for what he did? Being backgroundish does hurt some, admittedly, but the whole "Doesn't vote, go after those who voted on who he said was intending on voting for" was definitely blown out of proportion.
Though, Cor's still attacking him for...not using Votes to prod people? And for not delivering? Um, I don't see him making promises and then not delivering. He has been defending himself, looking over posts, what have you.
Basically, I feel someone who was on Shale's case is scum. Whether...Shale himself is scum or not, dunno. I have my eyes looking at Cor at the moment, for all that my vote stays on Ciato (Cor brought up the point initially, Ciato me-toos it, more or less.)
