Author | Lightnews

kris 🕊️🕊️🕊️ @sadboatride.bsky.social · 8h

think i might make a ranking of rookie seasons but after checking up on the folks i know were heavy hitters from the start of their careers i think Wes and Laurel have the overall most impressive first seasons (though there were a couple more first season champs than i realized)

kris 🕊️🕊️🕊️ @sadboatride.bsky.social · 8h

no one:
me: has anyone had a better challenge rookie season since tori deal in dirty 30?
me, an hour later after reminding myself of finishes on wikipedia: wow kam was better than i remembered in vendettas and i need to give more respect to olivia on ride or dies

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kris 🕊️🕊️🕊️ @sadboatride.bsky.social · 11h

ok im done challenge posting for tn it's time to catch up on the amazing race 🚪🚶‍♂️

kris 🕊️🕊️🕊️ @sadboatride.bsky.social · 11h

Letting a 50+ year old Johnny Bananas run the challenge community like navy simply isn’t going to work, and they’re barreling towards doing just that. This show refuses to evolve and trust itself to operate without its longtime main characters, and it ~will~ die if it holds onto them too tightly

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kris 🕊️🕊️🕊️ @sadboatride.bsky.social · 11h

The casting pool is huge now and there’s tons of people who want a shot on the show, but if you want to give someone a real shot to succeed you have to let them fail and come back. The OGs need to primarily compete in all-stars so there’s more room for newer competitors to establish themselves

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kris 🕊️🕊️🕊️ @sadboatride.bsky.social · 11h

Loud fans will be upset about losing the OGs, but if the show is competitive and fun they’ll get over it. The relationship we have with the legends are great but the show has survived losing key personalities before (Ev*n and K*nny), and found ways to adapt around not having the old main characters

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kris 🕊️🕊️🕊️ @sadboatride.bsky.social · 11h

The show didn't used to churn through players like this. Bananas and Cara Maria were first to be eliminated on their original seasons, but the casting pool was more limited so they were more permissive with giving players a chance to build themselves up. Now, if you don't pop immediately you're done

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kris 🕊️🕊️🕊️ @sadboatride.bsky.social · 11h

Season 39 should have at least been a great opportunity for the show to let these players establish themselves with the fanbase, but only 4 of the 24 members of the cast were on season 40, and 1 of those 4 was brought back for 41. What happened to the people they primed us to see as rising stars?

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kris 🕊️🕊️🕊️ @sadboatride.bsky.social · 11h

7 of the 16 vets on season 41 are from the first 20 seasons (1998-2010) of the show, with 6 more making names for themselves on the show in the 2010s. Where are season 39s competitors? How many of the 16 (!) rookies on 41 do we believe will be given a real opportunity to come back consistently?

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kris 🕊️🕊️🕊️ @sadboatride.bsky.social · 11h

The problem with 41 is they just went back to the well and are currently doing a “can these young players beat out the OGs??!!” thing again, reheating the nachos of seasons 29 (and to a lesser extend, 33 & 39). The third time isn’t going to be the charm, the show needs to unleash the younger players

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kris 🕊️🕊️🕊️ @sadboatride.bsky.social · 11h

Season 40 was fun, but should have been the end of an era (pun intended) and the start of a transition away from OGs like CT, Bananas, and Laurel competing in a traditional format. The show can and should find ways to keep the legends around: they can come back as coaches, captains, mercenaries, etc

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kris 🕊️🕊️🕊️ @sadboatride.bsky.social · 11h

How much you win or how well you place in a season structured like 39 doesn’t help much moving forward. This show is a soap opera, but if you only have relationships with a subset of the overall ensemble then you’re still at a disadvantage compared the main characters who have history with everyone

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kris 🕊️🕊️🕊️ @sadboatride.bsky.social · 11h

The problem with season 39s format was that the social hierarchy built in this season didn’t matter. Breaking through with the vets is has been the key to success for ages, but they couldn’t build relationships with those who are at the top of the social pyramid because they weren’t really around

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kris 🕊️🕊️🕊️ @sadboatride.bsky.social · 11h

The best way for new players to establish themselves and become popular is to win challenges and last deep into game. This gives them more time to build relationships that they can lean on when they return. Winning helps build social capital, having social capital means you don’t need to win as much

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kris 🕊️🕊️🕊️ @sadboatride.bsky.social · 11h

Season 39 acknowledges the problems the show had been having in establishing new stars, and brought a group of newer vets together to redo season 29s theme of “lets give young players some breathing room to succeed and win”, but brought in champs to compete in eliminations but not for the title

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kris 🕊️🕊️🕊️ @sadboatride.bsky.social · 11h

These are two sides of the same coin, but just dropping the veterans who have been around for over a decade isn’t enough. I thought I might need to work through the history of the show to get my point across, but the problems are super clear when looking at the 3 most recent seasons (39-41)

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kris 🕊️🕊️🕊️ @sadboatride.bsky.social · 11h

My take is that the show is struggling right because they continue casting OG veterans who have too much influence, while not giving young players the room establish themselves or the opportunity to come back and become key characters (twists are another problem but that's a different convo)

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kris 🕊️🕊️🕊️ @sadboatride.bsky.social · 11h

linking to this thread here, as im gonna be posting my thoughts about the challenge over time and want to have a way of keeping track of them all bsky.app/profile/sadb...

kris 🕊️🕊️🕊️ @sadboatride.bsky.social · 11h

There’s a lot of talk about the issues with challenge and the idea of it being a dying show. I don’t think it’s dying, but it is at a place where it needs to change and adapt. It’s refusal to let go of the stars that defined the last 15 years is keeping it stuck in the past #thechallenge41

kris 🕊️🕊️🕊️ @sadboatride.bsky.social · 11h

There’s a lot of talk about the issues with challenge and the idea of it being a dying show. I don’t think it’s dying, but it is at a place where it needs to change and adapt. It’s refusal to let go of the stars that defined the last 15 years is keeping it stuck in the past #thechallenge41

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kris 🕊️🕊️🕊️ @sadboatride.bsky.social · 1d

Yep, not sure what was going on with him that made him want to step away but we’ve seen tons of players come back after taking breaks and I’d take Marlon over a ton of the people they’ve resurfaced. They should at least let him go on all stars if he’s still interested

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kris 🕊️🕊️🕊️ @sadboatride.bsky.social · 1d

I’ve gotten my thoughts down to a tight 15 skeets but it spawned like 5 new rabbit holes I want to talk about and now I really want to rewatch a bunch of the classic seasons

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kris 🕊️🕊️🕊️ @sadboatride.bsky.social · 1d

He’s wanted to, not sure why they never gave him another shot

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kris 🕊️🕊️🕊️ @sadboatride.bsky.social · 1d

It’s been ages since I rewatched the ruins so I totally forgot she did that 😭. Karma really was too harsh for the way Sarah got hosed in Rivals 3

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kris 🕊️🕊️🕊️ @sadboatride.bsky.social · 1d

Her arc is so interesting. A really rough start to her challenge career, a great run in the middle, and then a truly devastating end

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kris 🕊️🕊️🕊️ @sadboatride.bsky.social · 2d

fighting for my life to not jump into scorebug discourse but this nba on nbc bug could be so good with a few changes