Dear Members of the “Big Brother” Season 14 Jury,
Seriously, y’all are a bunch of butthurts. As a longtime fan of “Big Brother,” I am ashamed of you for voting for Ian to win “Big Brother 14″ over Dan. (Danielle, I can’t give you too many props for voting for Dan to win, because you only did so out of loyalty and loyalty in this game is bullshit. You should have voted for him because he deserved it.) The only reason you all voted for Ian over Dan was put best by Ian himself: he “played a slightly cleaner game.”
That is the worst reason EVER to award someone $500,000. If the choice is between someone who played a dirty game and someone who played a clean game, I can see why someone might choose the saint over the sinner. But faced with two liars, I would pick the one who lied the best, the hardest, the most convincingly, the one who lied with his hand on a Bible, on his wedding ring, and on the cross owned by his dead grandfather. That person, again and again and again, up until the very last second, was Dan. And you all fell for it. Ultimately, the only reason you didn’t vote for him to win in the end was as simple as … U MAD?!?!?!
But for real, I am embarrassed for you. You participated for months on a reality TV game show and ended up giving the money — the reason you were away from your family and friends and job for that long — to the person who hurt your feelings the least. What is the point of that?! Your job if you don’t make it to the final two is to award the money to the person who played the best. Not the most moral. Not the most honest. Not the most nice. Not the most, like, improved. Every single one of you had your throats cut by Dan and didn’t know it was coming until you were dead in the water. Every. Single. One.
Look, Ian is not a bad winner. He played well enough, won many challenges, and had a pretty decent social game. I like him too, so I can’t be too angry about him being $500K richer. But I think every single one of you would be hard pressed to explain what exactly made him a better player than Dan. Voting for him to win was really a vote against Dan for stabbing each of you in the back. Even Ian fell for Dan in the end — look at how absolutely flummoxed he was to discover, sitting in the final two, that Dan wouldn’t have taken him to the finals had he won the last Head Of Household.
I feel passionately about this because I just love reality competition shows that involve strategy and psychological manipulation. It started with the very first episode of “Survivor,” and the type of player I’ve rooted for has always been the person who played the most cuthroat, thought-out, devious game. Richard Hatch, “Survivor”‘s first winner, set the tone but unfortunately, as the years have gone on and many shows like it have hit the small screen, self-righteous pseudo morality has managed to poison the game, the purpose of which is to win something that has nothing to do with morality — money.
I’ve long had a dream of appearing on one of these shows, and as someone who isn’t particularly physically adept — I do a mean downward dog, but that’s about it — I know I would have to play a very strategic game to get ahead. I respect puppet-masters, players who control the game not with brawn but with brains. If a player like Dan had duped me into falling for his lies (after watching him dupe everyone else, over and over again), I would happily award give him the money for being better at the game than I was. He was a million times better than all of you and not voting for him to win was sour grapes. Every time a guy like Dan, or “Survivor”‘s Russell Hantz (another highly strategic and manipulative player) loses to a lesser but “nicer” player, the game as a whole suffers and that makes this fan mad.
So thanks a lot, Shane, Brittany, Joe, Jenn, Ashley, and Frank, for contributing to the ruin of the “Big Brother” franchise. You suck.
Sincerely,
Amelia McDonell-Parry
