For the record, it has occurred to me at this point that (from my point of view) townGumshoe now necessarily implies a scum team of Axem, Gilgamesh and Oddjob, given that everyone else has been offered the scum hammer and declined it.
On the other hand, I'm back to assuming that townAxem implies a scum team of Gilgamesh, Guidenstern and Gumshoe.
You'll note that this has an overlap of Gilgamesh, who I've effectively decided is scum by this rationale. There are two problems here, even when offered such high scum lynching odds. One is that I can't totally justify clearing Whim from the second scenario, so a Dick/Guild/Whim team sail free by this. The second one is that killing Gilgamesh doesn't resolve the stalemate, and no messing around with the night phase can resolve the pairing, so we'd hit tomorrow with (at best) two pairs of people calling for the other's lynch, and no better way of telling which one is right than we can do now. Worse than that, with Gilgamesh lynched I can't envision a scenario where I'm not the night kill. Call me an arrogant twat if you like for that, but it looks like by far the best odds for scum regardless of the team, mostly because any team needs to limit the cop clears there are.
So sure, poor old Smithers getting NKed at some point is hardly worth crying over (and I'm fairly sure is inevitable on the path to victory), but the best I can do is to resolve the showdown here and now before I do die, and lynching Gilgamesh resolves nothing and still has risk of complete loss.
The key question then becomes which of Axem and Gumshoe is to be trusted, and which is to be lynched. There are things that seriously tug at me when I think about trusting Axem, such as just how sparklingly perfect the cop-claim is with regards to what it implies and the problems it resolved and so on, especially when all it needed to work is a role cop to have scanned me vanilla, and that could just have been what Gumshoe saw so far as I know.
You know what? Crap.
I came here to write this post and convince myself that voting Dick was the only sensible course of action and that I'd already made that judgement, and that previous long paragraph was supposed to basically say 'Axem leaves me with some wurgles, but Dick looks much worse,' but here I stand convincing myself of less and less. The more I think about the claims, the less sense Axem's choice of targets make and the more I can see Gumshoe's, and all of the surrounding actions just don't seem to make sense from scum getting cornered (though Dick's latest response has done nothing to persuade me in his favour). It's frustrating as hell when both sides of the argument look incredibly dodgy. The stress is just stupid, because getting this choice wrong now is even worse than it was before.
Looking for the silver lining to me crapping myself here, I should appreciate that I've reduced it to two teams. I'm now in desperate need of sleep and don't trust myself to get it right (I'll probably wake up and regret stumbling now), so I'm going to be an even bigger wuss and postpone the decision until tomorrow, whereupon I'll examine the likelihood of the two teams before making the choice (again).
In the end, I would like to be voting for precisely either Axem or Dick. I will only vote for Gilgamesh if convinced I cannot get my way but have made my exact stance perfectly clear.
Uggh.
Did I mention how much I hate putting myself in a position like this?
