As promised, my case on Rodion. Still voting Zinger, not moving my vote today.
I need to reveal a portion of meta that I think clears someone else before explaining a part of why I think Rodion is scum. It's a specific paradigm I've seen before, with TheFonz (one part of Pappums Leather Jacket) defending a newb against an attack (My God, he's only a BABY!) and voting the person he perceives as persecuting the newbie on the thought that it's scummy to do that. In the case I saw, TheFonz was town, the person he attacked was town, and the newbie was, in fact, scum. This led me to look at Rodion much more carefully because I don't absolutely agree with TheFonz about not pressuring newbies, but I do think it's a towntell for him. So I semi-confirmed TheFonz as town and put an IGMEOY on Rodion for the reread.
The Magna of Illusion dispute was pretty inconclusive for me, though I did note that MoI looked like town and Rodion came off null. I can't usually tell when it's town-town or town-scum (though I'm pretty good at spotting the distancing scum-scum attack-retreat dance) so I just noted it. Rodion didn't seem to have good reasons but they didn't seem scum-beneficial either.
Then we hit
this and the first thing that I can point to that was directly problematic after I started watching him.
Rodion wrote:Well, I am a mislynch. Period. Granted, scum would claim to be town as well, but I'm not appealing to emotion as much as stating a fact, fact being "I am town".
Apparently, he's town. And in the same post there's this self-serving parroting of TheFonz's argument that you shouldn't pressure newbs, except they might be scum, but then they might blow up and you'll get bits of newb all over you. Rodion expressly emphasises his own newbness.
A lot of my problems with Rodion center around claims and overreactions to wagons; any one of these things would not be a big deal by themselves, but taken together look like a pattern of behaviour. He wants a fullclaim during the Vezok RVS wagon, he wants to vote for Vifam but is afraid to hammer before a claim, he reacts to ZeLink and Zinger's claims oddly and starts asking for as many details as possible on those claims, and he asks about Mafia busdrivers, lynchers, and other weird and wonderful roles in a way that I very much didn't like.
He defends Zinger for a while, and this actually made me reevaluate Rodion because his logic made sense to me and I was agreeing with a lot of his points. Then he started doing analysis of players, and that's when I lost all faith in his townness.
Rodion is conciliatory (my personal favourite scumtell) pretty much without exception. He dismisses a number of disputes as misunderstandings, notably
here and
here and helpfully informs others of how they can avoid such misunderstandings in future
here, which is a pretty clear contrast to his I'm-just-a-newb excuses early on.
And these individual analyses are exactly characteristic of what I think scum would do, not offending anyone particularly and not offering much in the way of insight.
here and
here
He gives ZeL1nK scum points for concealing his hydra. Yes, he does. The least useful and accurate scumtell ever.
Rodion is too interested in outing power roles as a general rule, too conciliatory in his analysis of the players and overall the scummiest player in my view. Counterarguments, angry flames and logical rebuttals are always welcome.
Your eyes are weary from staring at the monitor. You feel sleepy. Notice how restful it is to watch the cursor blink. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.