User blog comment:Coolio15/Canary Islands Boot Order/@comment-38115759-20190821030905/@comment-9949103-20190821215516

Toshi: Oh poor Toshi. I knew from the beginning that he would be an antagonist to the whole Paul-Faith dynamic that I had been building up in my head, so itwas unfortunately never gonna end well for him.

Toshi was someone who had the right skillset for the game. He was pretty strong and intelligent, making him an asset in challenges. He was socially savvy enough to bond with a couple of key players and position himself comfortably in the middle of two big alliances. And, of course, he had such a chill look to his persona that made him come off as pretty nonthreatening.

Where Toshi's game really unraveled was, as the readers saw, his emotions getting in the way of his gameplay. After he went off on Faith, Toshi got tunnel vision and was very blinded by the idea of Faith being his primary target that he didn't have the emotional intelligence to read the room and see that his allies were getting turned off from him real quick.

One of the first big examples of this is in episode 3, where Toshi, having just recruited Liz into his "Nerd Herd" alliance with Brianna and Paul, attempted to convince her that getting rid of Faith over Bowen would be good for all of their games since they were all aligned. Though both Liz and Robbie considered the move, they ultimately went back on the promise and chose to get rid of Bowen in order to appease the so-called "princess Eula" who had had a fight with Bowen the day prior. Toshi, unhappy that Liz didn't follow through with his plan, confronted her and made it blantantly obvious that he didn't fully trust her any more. Of course, this feeling soon became mutual between the two once Liz was informed by Tara that Toshi himself was aligned with two different groups.

Toshi also isolated certain allies in his effort to keep his position in the middle secure, promising Paul that they'd have the numbers to boot Jasper at the fourth Tribal Council but then flipping and staying loyal to the construction crew by voting for Julio, exposing Paul and Clay for targeting Jasper and making the former question Toshi's committment to their alliance.

For Toshi, his banishment to a separate camp was unknowingly his undoing as he was put onto a new tribe with the two allies who he had just pissed off, one of which fully knows that he is aligned with Jasper, along with Faith, who he had made no secret about being his target. And once Liz had pulled in Robbie, that's all they needed to epically blindside him at the Tribal right before the merge.

Ultimately, Toshi had all the right stuff to do well in the game. But he let his own personal hangups and drama with Faith get in the way of his game, causing him to appear two-faced and playing a "sloppy" game as Paul later claimed, which would push most of his close allies away and into the arms of their former enemies. Even though I would have despised him as a reader, he was a character who I think I would have loved writing simply because of his fall from grace. The fact that everyone was fawning over him during the pregame too further fueled my fire to so epically destroy his character xD