The most unfair theme Survivor has ever done is cast two different seasons of Fans vs Favorites. From the get-go, producers are sending out 10 players who have no actual shot at winning the game. The fans are rookies in the Survivor world. They have never dealt with the harsh conditions of living in a desolate area. They’ve never had to find their own food, make their own shelter or even try to spark a fire while fighting the elements.

Having done it before, some for 39 days, some for less, is a gigantic advantage. Every favorite except for Francesca Hogi had a wealth of knowledge that the fans couldn’t lean on in order to survive those first few days. In Micronesia, things were even more slanted in the favorites’ favor simply by the fact that Ozzy Lusth was on the beach doing his nature boy act for everybody. It should come as no surprise that in both seasons, the favorites entered the jury portion of the game with a numbers advantage.

What’s even more unfair is that the favorites have an advantage before even starting the game. While the new players have no knowledge of who they are about to play Survivor with, most returning players have a deep pool of alumni contacts. The minute they are informed they are going out to play again, they can safely surmise that they won’t be the only returning player. That means that on both Fans vs Favorites, half of the players came in with pre-game alliances and the other half came in blind. Some of the “fans” likely didn’t even know who some of the returning players were.

If having essentially no chance to win the game wasn’t enough, being a fan on a Fans vs Favorites season also means being ignored by the show. Why would the producers focus on Joel Anderson when he is the dollar store version of James Clement and they have the real one hanging out on the other tribe? A lot of the Survivor audience loves familiarity and the producers know this. Many of the fans across both seasons don’t even have a defined personality on the show. Everybody gets cast for a reason. Something in their personality speaks to the casting crew and yet in both Fans vs Favorites seasons, the majority of the fans become washed out.

Let’s just take Micronesia’s group of fans for example since I have recently re-watched the season. Mary Sartain? There’s a reason “Mary who?” became such a big Survivor meme. She was a potential showmance partner for Mikey B and that was the extent we saw of her. Mikey B? He was depicted as sort of the leader of the fans but he was blindsided like Mary was. These are two of the most soulless blindsides the show has produced. How are we supposed to care they got taken out unexpectedly when we don’t know a thing about them? Joel was an ox who was also sort of an asshole. Tracy Hughes-Wolf is the older outcast with strategic chops that goes too early. Jason Siska is an interesting case. He gets a fairly big edit but all of it is simply to point and make fun of him. He is portrayed as an extremely overconfident idiot. Jason finds an idol and it’s clearly fake and he’s the only one not to see it. When he throws a challenge to gain favor with the cast, everyone plans on voting him out despite their promises and he is only saved by Cirie capitalizing on the moment to send out Ozzy. On his boot episode, Jason gets duped by the women into not playing his idol and goes home looking foolish. Even when he throws it back to Borneo by eating a rat, Parvati calls him a loser for trying to impress the favorites. Jason can’t win. Alexis Jones kind of had a thing with Ozzy in between his thing with Amanda Kimmel and then she was idol’ed out by Amanda. She was also sort of a Black Widow Brigade member in the same way that you made your little sibling play as Tails in Sonic the Hedgehog 2.

Alexis.

Then you have Natalie Bolton who has one of the most uneven edits the show has ever created. For the first 10 episodes, she has two confessionals. Then she suddenly explodes for seven in episode 11 when she talks about flossing teeth with Jason’s jugular and other assorted bat-shit insane sayings. Are we supposed to think that she wasn’t saying crazy stuff like that for the first 10 episodes? No. The producers just had no reason to include any of it because she wasn’t yet part of Cirie Fields and Parvati Shallow’s story. It’s just startling to have this seemingly normal but boring woman hang around for 10 episodes to suddenly turn into Lorena Bobbitt 2.0 and then fade back into obscurity until jury questioning when she tries to romance Parvati.

Probably the three fans who get the most fully fleshed edits are Chet Welsh, Kathy Sleckman and Erik Reichenbach. Erik’s is easy to see why. He goes deep into the game and becomes the last man standing. He is a very real challenge threat to the women and he keeps pulling out wins to stay alive. Erik is also shown throughout the season to be lacking in life experiences, slightly naïve and generally soft-spoken. The women see this in him and use it to manipulate the immunity necklace off of his neck so they can promptly vote him out. It’s one of Survivor’s marquee moments and while Erik is its unfortunate star, he handles his blunder with a lot of poise and definitely makes good out of a bad situation. It isn’t really surprising that out of 20 fans across two Fans vs Favorites seasons, he is the only one they have ever brought back. Erik is a nice presence on the season who makes his mark without feeling forced or out of place.

Chet gets the edit of a man who is quite likely the least fit to play Survivor in the history of casting. Not in a sense of his physical abilities but Chet’s general ineptness at all things survival. If Chet had ever been sent to Exile Island alone, he may very well have died. It’s one of Jason’s highlights of the season that he did not let the man starve to death as they shared the beach together. In challenges, Chet is more of a limp noodle than Pearl Islands’ Ryan Shoulders could ever hope to be. He comes close to actually dying when being dragged around by Joel in the “tag the other side” challenge.

Despite being an obvious first boot, Chet keeps surviving round after round through no effort of his own before finally being mercy killed. We don’t get to see a full on exploration of Chet’s character but seeing him as someone on the show who is clearly not built for anything Survivor has to throw at him is interesting for his time on the season.

As for Kathy, she gets an interesting edit because of her psyche as the season goes on. Early on, she is the tribe’s annoying older woman. She marvels at being out on the island and meeting an openly gay man for the first time. Because the fans can’t help but screw themselves over, Kathy survives the first few votes after her temporary immunity idol is used up at the tribe’s first tribal. The longer she stays in the game, the more she starts to unravel mentally and starts to really lose her sanity.

Going through casting, Kathy neglected to tell producers that she was on antidepressants and had been for a while. Since she hadn’t told them, by the time she had to go out on the island, she knew she wouldn’t be given medication and decided to quit her pills cold turkey. It turned out to be a terrible idea. As we see Kathy edge more and more towards unhinging on the show that is her going through a very real withdrawal period because of her medication. She pulls herself from the game and is considered to be a quitter by the show but really, Kathy is medevac’ed for her own safety. By the time she was leaving the island, she was considering cutting off one of her fingers to be pulled from the game. Obviously that isn’t something the show wants to delve too deeply into and without Kathy informing them of her prescription in casting, they couldn’t have known but the edit does a nice job of showing Kathy being mentally unable to cope with the game. To see her go from a bubbly woman who goes through so many firsts on the island into a sad, broken woman who just can’t deal with the realities of being on Survivor is sobering for many fans. Her Reddit AMA is one really worth going through for her great insight into the season.

Kathy can no longer handle the game.

In a way, Kathy is a great microcosm for many fans who would like to do the show. She watches on television and gets the highlights. She sees a few minutes of rain or the tribe finding food and putting together a shelter. On TV, it all seems like fun. When she actually goes out and experiences it 24 hours a day for days on end, Kathy realizes that she signed up for something she didn’t really understand. We all would like to think of ourselves as master strategists who would dominate the game but placed out there, starving, cold and without our loved ones and what would we really become?

For Kathy, it’s great that she got a pretty deep characterization despite having a tough time on the island. Imagine being someone like Jason, Alexis or Natalie and coming back after going pretty far into the game and seeing how the show portrayed your every move. We are all the stars of our own lives and their perspective on the screen is never really shown. They are just fodder for the stars of the season, Cirie, Parvati, Amanda, and Ozzy to use and react to. Short of being non-playable characters in a role playing game, the fans get treated like secondary citizens to the favorites’ star billing. It may have been expected but it isn’t fair. For the fans, it’s like sharing a birthday with your sibling and you get a pair of socks while your sibling gets a car.

Hopefully the producers have realized that while fans may enjoy watching all-star seasons, we aren’t interested in seeing 10 people who don’t have a shot at winning and won’t get much camera attention. Either go full-on all-stars and let us be disappointed in peace or give us a brand new cast to enjoy. In my free time, I sometimes like to imagine how a season featuring both tribes of fans would play out. Is Mikey B a breakout star? Maybe Hope Driskill turns out to be the next Parvati. We will never know because the show forced them into becoming lambs for the slaughter.