S30: Shirin Oskooi

[BigRedCheese]

 

"“Lying comes easy to me. It’s like my first language.”

 

Meh, that's Survivor talk, they all go on and on about how manipulative they are, I don't take any of that all that seriously. What I do take seriously is somebody that uses a flimsy excuse to viciously rip into somebody on a deeply personal level because they already don't like them, for whatever reason they've created in their head. You don't have to like Shirin to recognize Will's behavior to be vile and repugnant. I don't care whether she had talked about it or not, it makes no difference.

[ProfCrash]

And So said she made all her assistants cry. Shirin has not said she hadn't told anyone, Dan and Will said they didn't know before that tribal.

Shirin cannot control the editing. Dan, Joaquin, and to some extent Mike, made the sexist and/or bullying crap early in the season long. Dan had a particularly fun run making poor remarks to Rodney, Lindsey, Sierra, Shirin, and Mike. Will's comments was the rotten cherry on a crap sunday. Dan continued to poor crap on in the ladt bunch of episodes with his derisive behavior towards Shirin and Mike.

Shirin was annoying but I don't think she was discussing her abusive past all season long. If she had, we would have seen it and the folks trying to blame their bad behavior on Shirin would be trumpeting that fact and they are not.

[choclatechip45]

That makes sense she left to work for Marissa. I saw on twitter all season Marissa was tweeting her support to Shirin and even tweeted for everyone to vote for Savage and Shirin for Second Chances. Marissa and her husband were at the Survivor finale.

[ljenkins782]

I have no idea what type of relationship she has with her mother. You can support some one financially and not be close to that person.

Yeah, especially in cases of abusive relationships, it could just be one of those situations where her mother has a manipulative hold on her and she feels compelled to support her even if the relationship is not good. 

 

I was in the thread about Season 31 and I realized that I don't really want to see Shirin come back. I feel bad about the way she was treated in this last season, but I don't rate her as a player at all. For someone who apparently talked strategy all the time, she never appeared to try to enact anything—the only move I remember her trying to make was to flip from the rapidly-dwindling Nagarote alliance to Mike's (right before he fell out with his alliance), but even that was her basically pleading with Mike to tell her how to vote.

I don't really want to see her back either and I agree that her strategy was poor. I think SHE thought she was playing because she was always running things through in her mind, but she didn't have the social skills to enact anything and didn't have the social awareness to realize that she wasn't accomplishing anything.

 

She was completely convinced that she had swayed Kelly to her side at the swap, when Kelly had no intention of aligning with her. I think she was playing a game in her head based on her study of the show, but never quite made the transition to the real life game. 

 

I think starting the game with super-fan Max may have had a hand in that problem because he had similar tunnel vision.

 

You could take Shirin out of every vote this season and still get the same results (even for the Joe vote, because either Jenn wastes her vote again and forces a tie  with Joe going home on the revote, or she votes for Joe outright). We can debate whether Will is as much of a goat or how the jury would vote in the absence of Shirin and her game, but the fact that that's the only discussion of her impact to be had says it all to me. Nobody changed their strategy because of anything Shirin did directly and the only reason she made it to the merge and beyond is because she wasn't good in challenges or likely to siphon people away from their alliances, so the majority group knew that they could get rid of her whenever they wanted.

 

Frankly, I think this Will blow up and the ensuing debate/attention is the thing that got her a returning spot. She really wasn't a factor and in the end, she went out in a fairly predictable spot. That tribal council was memorable for MIKE's play (which, while watching it, I thought maybe it had been Shirin's idea because I didn't think Mike was that strategic), but Shirin confirmed in interviews that it was his idea. 

 

She started the season as a minor character, notable only for her superfandom and annoying quirks and only became the story of the season after Will's outburst. 

 

I still feel bad for her that she was on the receiving end of that and still think Will is a dick for doing it, but that doesn't mean I want to watch another season of her.

[marys1000]

http://www.cbs.com/shows/survivor/video-list/235/second-chance-castaways-talk-strategy-in-these-exclusive-videos/

 

Either she went out of her way to emphasize hyper craziness before to as she put it (paraphrased) make good tv

or

she's on different meds, or just now on meds. 

Edited September 3, 2015 by marys1000

[303420]

I'm going to assume that the opportunity to meet Savage wasn't what clinched the deal. Also, I would guess if someone is a Survivor fan and wants to meet Savage, all they have to do is ask him. Someone on the old boards said her sister (? some relative, at any rate) saw Savage's email address on his firm's website and sent him a nice, "hey, really enjoyed you on Survivor" note and then couldn't get rid of the guy. He kept sending her these long emails talking about how he got screwed over by the Outcast twist.

 

FWIW, I too sent Savage an e-mail after I found out he's a rugger. I am a rugger too and there's a nontrivial community allegiance; I basically just sent him the e-mail to tell him I'm a Survivor  fan and a rugger. He sent a nice "thanks for the e-mail, go rugby" e-mail and offered me a jersey swap, but I never got back to him and never heard from him again.

 

I feel like this should be in a Savage thread rather than the Shirin thread, but I'm not sure what conventions to follow to start one.