Fair warning, this is going to address some heavy, probably personal themes related to both SAU and US Survivor, so you should probably buckle up.

Ahem.

So, what’s your view on “sob stories”?

Okay then, eesh.

On the premiere of David vs Goliath, throughout day two, a mood went around camp. Something in the weather, maybe. Perhaps it was the fear of a new adventure. Maybe it was the fear of new people that they would unquestionably have to bond with. Maybe it was because they wanted to bond with them at all. Whatever it was, to quote Trish Hegarty, “we started to share intimate stories.”

Jessica Peet started by sharing the story of an abusive relationship she saw her mom go through and how it forced her to grow up faster. Compounding off of that, Bi talked about an abusive relationship she once had and how that affected her career in MMA and the direction it took. Hours later, and admittedly not without cynicism, Nick relayed his own story about his mother dying from opioid abuse.

Flash back (or forward, they were filmed concurrently). In Champions vs Contenders, they filmed what I liked to call Lost Scenes, where we were taken off the island to get a glimpse of these peoples’ real lives. As we heard of their backgrounds, so have we heard of their own struggles. We heard of Mat’s autistic child, and of how Moana was the caretaker of her sister with Mobius syndrome. There was also Damien in general, who came into this game with both of his legs artificial. Some of these people had reasons to play, and others had entirely different experiences ahead of them.

This subject should be a complicated one, but somewhat universally, it’s surprisingly not. There’s a crowd that buys into these and uses them as motivations to root for characters, and a crowd just as equal in size that hates the fact that these exist. What side am I on? Well, it would be easy to say that I was on neither, but despite my complicated take on the matter, I lean pretty heavily on the former one. Well, maybe not that all “sob stories” deserve to be taken as reasons for unconditional support (cough Rodney cough Kyle) but that they’re treated quite callously by the fans.

On one hand, I get it- the handling of these segments can be really offputting. I have a lot of reasons why some bug me to view. Rodney used the overdosing death of his sister as a strategic move to get favor with (to use Davie’s favorite term) “females”, and this can lead to people calling the whole thing fake just because they don’t like Rodney. Like, as big of a shitstain he is, I am still very certain that he lost his sister.

Then there’s events that are treated like tragedies when they aren’t. Generally, these go to the “I have an autistic kid” type stories. In themselves, there’s nothing harmful about them. They can be made into reasons people want to motivate themselves to win; being autistic myself, I’ve been there, and it can be costly to care for us. However, the idea that people like us are both a tragedy and burden on their parents, and because of that we should forgive their slip-ups, and shitty behavior? Hell no. Frustration and a cross word is one thing – bullying and directly antagonizing people is another.

That brings us, then, back into the territory I will defend. The classic “sob story”. The callously thrown away feelsy bullshit that reminds us that characters are humans and overloads us with these “emotion” things. “Sob stories” are generally a common talking point in other sorts of reality TV shows that have one straightforward subject at hand (sewing, modeling, masterchefing) and down time that doesn’t intrinsically affect the game. In those empty spaces, you often need something to fill it, and something to get you invested in the characters. Masterchef is especially guilty of this.

I love Masterchef.

I love how it carves out characters with a sledgehammer, and I will always be invested in their one-line summaries of contestants. Some of the ““sob stories”” they give contestants just do not work and it’s hilarious. (Courtney used to strip to support her kids? Remind me when we got to the twenty-first century still shaming sex work, Elizabeth?) Still, in a genre where people did not get much characterization aside from what they did and how they did it, I can’t deny that this made my basic little heart flutter.

That brings me to this week, where we have the premiere to a season with a theme that instantly draws a good versus evil side where we should expect a few “sob stories”. The backstories, for the most part, did what they were supposed to- they got us to understand the theme and why the divide existed (though Probst shitting on Allison for not being as underprivileged as Pat felt unnecessarily cruel, even for someone who does love a good eat-the-rich story).

Possibly the biggest “sob story” in recent memory is the story of Adam and his mother, who was fighting cancer that was eventually fatal. Adam won at the end of the game, and admitted to the jury that he was playing even as a millennial barely older than I am now who was dealing with such tragedy. It was a shame to see his “sob story” falsely summarized as little more than a foreign entity that dictated the jury vote and delegitimized it somehow. That’s a bit of a reductive attitude to such a traumatic event.

It definitely had an effect on me.

I could give a few pages about how this has personally affected me, but I am going to try and condense it and save shit for my autobiography (likely a barnburner in the making). As my readers likely know, from the start I’ve been dealing with cancer, which disappeared and came back as a debilitating brain tumor. It… got bad. It got very, very bad.

This was also just as Millennials vs Gen X was starting, and a season-long was Adam’s storyline about his mother fighting and dying of cancer. It was explicit. It was complicated. It was tragic. It was an overload on my mind as I faced my own battle. Throughout the run, however, I saw the conversation on it turn negative- that it was repetitive, that it was too “schmaltzy”, and as mentioned, that it was a sympathy ploy that tainted the end result- all negative reactions from others that I feared my own struggles would garner were I to share them.

I reacted in the stupidest way possible- I accepted the message others told me. I did not talk much about my experience with friends I made in the fanbase. I fully believed that it would inconvenience others to hear about my suffering because something similar did that to fans- and similar things still do. It was an unhealthy decision I made because I was part of a fanbase that made it quite clear that they did not want to deal with hearing about things I had to live with, and I’m still sifting through the effects of that.

Quite frankly, I don’t deserve that. Neither does anyone on the show. I can understand if “sob stories” are hard to watch, that production handles them poorly, and that they can be obstacles to the promise of the show. However, I urge all the viewers to watch them with patience. I can guarantee you that these events are more of a burden on those experiencing them than you may know. To condemn the players personally or indicate that the contestants are doing something wrong by sharing their story crosses the line.

People should not be scared to share their personal stories. Bottom line. I would gladly take a roadblock to my TV products to hear them out without shame. It’s an obligation at this point because I pray people would hear me if I were in their shoes. Survivor is a sociopathic game about the human condition, and the latter shouldn’t be forgotten.

-Cam

P.S. This artwork from @josenanigans on Twitter is a phenomenal addition to the vibe of this article.