[QUOTE=Blaster Master]
Okay, you mention again that he looked well scummy, and you even say “surely you can see [it]”. We can’t, if it was THAT obvious, everyone would have unvoted him and no one would still be suspicious of him. That is not the case, you need to explain it better. You’re the one making the claim that he’s not scummy, so you need to substantiate it.
[/QUOTE]
I’m not sure that everyone would have changed their vote if Thing Fish appeared less scummy than they originally thought. Look at the scrutiny that RyJae and I have been under for doing just that!
I will do my best to try to explain why I switched my vote off of Thing Fish. In post #314, **Thing Fish ** writes one of his first long responses to all of the accusations against him. This is what first causes my doubt. When laid out in a list like that, the arguments against him just don’t seem as compelling as I first thought. For example, Thing Fish’s “advice to newbies” seems more like innocent general strategy than malicious scumminess.
In post #331, I ask bufftabby to elaborate on her post # 329 in which she asked why it would be silly to vote for anyrose, and that she thought that anyrose had manufactured reasons to vote against Thing Fish. At this point in the game I was having doubts about my vote on Thing Fish and I really wanted to hear what other people thought on the situation.
In post #335 **Thing Fish ** responds to RyJae’s question of what he would do differently. This post just seems really simple and straightforward to me. Rather than talk about who he would vote for, or a better strategy, **Thing Fish ** simply talks about communicating his intentions more clearly. I think that if he were scum, he would try to lay the blame elsewhere, or try to come up with some other desperate strategy.
However, I think the post that removed most of my doubt was #338. In this post **Thing Fish ** talks about the importance of voting records, laying out what seems like a good strategy for finding scum. He makes some good points about RyJae jumping on bandwagons, and he really made me think about one of my reasons for voting for him - I thought that he was giving himself an out with his vote on anyrose. By post # 338, I no longer thought that was very likely.
In post #343 I told Thing Fish that I thought that he explained himself better in his last several posts than he had previously, and that I wanted to look back over his posts in the thread to make sure that I was making the right decision.
In post #350 bufftabby responded with the information that I had requested of her in post #331. She laid out her reasons for thinking that anyrose was manufacturing reasons to vote against Thing Fish, and she commented on Thing Fish’s “advice to newbies” as well. I thought that what she said made sense! (As an aside, I think that it would be fair to point out at this point that bufftabby’s argument that I piggybacked on her reasons to vote for anyrose is not really true. I had many reasons to no longer suspect Thing Fish, and anyrose was the next logical person for me to vote for. bufftabby’s post #350 just helped me to make some of my ideas a little more coherent in my own mind.)
Finally, in post #353, I responded to what bufftabby wrote, commenting that maybe **Thing Fish ** was just defending himself against anyrose and not really intending to act scummy. So, since I no longer wanted to vote for Thing Fish, I had to find another place for my vote. Since I wasn’t really sure who was scum at this point, I decided to vote for the person who was helping town the least…anyrose.
I decided to place my vote on anyrose, because I didn’t think that she had really done much to help town. I know that she eventually asked to be replaced, but I don’t think that because of this you can automatically discount everything that she said and did up to that point in the game. Of course hindsight is always 20/20, but at that point, on Day 1, I had to work with the limited information that we had available to us. Hence my vote for anyrose.