User blog comment:SevereWizardShark/Survivor: Barbados/Tortuga Q&A/@comment-26485526-20200206042502/@comment-30438246-20200206164954

Between Barbados and Tortuga, which season is your favourite between them, and why?

I'd have to go with Tortuga as my favorite! Nothing against Barbados, but I do think it struggled, as JakeToby commented just a bit ago, with having a somewhat unlikable majority alliance. Scott was good, but Jessica wasn't really a threat to win since she was so negative, Jordan was fairly uninteresting despite having more confessionals than 17 others in the cast, and Nadine was just there. I feel like this season had a lot more people that someone could relate to and root for, though I'm still working on fine-tuning personalities, and I hope that next season can be even better in terms of personalities and backstories for characters.

In both seasons, which character(s) had the biggest shift in personality from first draft to publishing?

This is a tough question! Off the top of my head, the two biggest shifts would be...

- Toni from Barbados was initially meant to be very under-the-radar the whole way through, hence why her edit at the beginning of the season was so mediocre. She was initially meant to be a quiet, reserved player, I had no plans for her to be a big narrator for the first two merge episodes. I'm glad I did give her more content, as I ended up liking writing her and was disappointed that I had to get rid of her when I did.

- Jack from Tortuga was initially... not a dick LMAO. He was initially going to be just this positive, more boring, middle-of-the-road, father-type character, but once Alina was gone, I didn't really have any characters who created conflict in the game, and so I decided to switch up Jack and make his true colors shine around the time where he was losing power in the game.

Were there any changes to the original boot order for either season?

There weren't any huge changes, like, the winners and the final three were always the same for both seasons, but there were a few small changes for both seasons that I think did improve both of them as a whole.

Barbados:

- I think the plan was always to have Victor be medevacced, but I never intended for him to be medevacced as early as he was. It kinda just got to the point where he was getting repetitive and I didn't feel like he was going to add much to the game going forward, so I decided to just axe him in Episode 4 rather than flesh him out more. I actually regret this decision in hindsight, because I think his medevac was pretty poorly written. There was no foreshadowing at all to it, and there wasn't really any emotional impact when it happened. It was just like 'oh that happened'.

- Toni was meant to make it further into the season, I think like 7th or 8th or so, but I decided to do a double tribal council in Episode 9. The reason for this change was because I thought by getting rid of two minority members, it would build up Fabian and Shonda's underdog story, and make the Alex voteout feel more impactful. I don't regret this decision, but it did suck to lose Leonard and Toni back-to-back because I liked writing both of them.

Tortuga:

- Alina was not originally meant to be ejected from the game, in the original boot order, Episode 6 was going to have two tribal councils and two immunity challenges (similar to Episode 12), however, the Alina boot would have been really, really boring, with no real story or suspense, so I decided to spice things up and take a different route. What was awkward was that the Alina ejection happened at about the same time as the Dan Spilo ejection in irl Survivor, which made things a bit awkward for me as this was not planned by any means.

- Originally, Ulyssa was 9th, Jack was 8th, and Dustin was 7th. The reason I changed things up was because with Ulyssa going 9th, I couldn't think of a way to realistically make Millie, Riley, Jack, Dustin and Ulyssa to not team up to vote out someone. So I decided to cut Dustin at 9th, then the majority would have the power to cut Ulyssa, and then Jack could finally leave haha. I think this was a good change because I didn't like having only two females (Millie and Annette) in the final eight, especially in a Battle of the Sexes season.