R2M13 Jojolity Delibs

Judge Galatea (Yuri)

Hi! Judge Yuri Again! Jojolity!


Starting with the boss team. Are you fucking kidding me are you for real right now. Take your **10** and get out of my face. A lot of people stop short of a good jojolity by forgetting to integrate it in anything but narrative. Storytime is good and fun, but you can’t just write some flavor text and call it a day, and this is a strat that follows up big time. Everything about it is tailor made to embody that vile, strangling love, from the presentation of the strategy itself to the actual moves made. The focus on defending the cabin, the meaningless symbol of affection, is genius, and the totally uncalled for brutality only drives the point home. This is love that has devolved into wrath, envy, and controlling paranoia. Vasant just wants to be held, but the hands he wished to be comforted by are wrapped firmly around his neck. I’m taking notes for T8. Masterclass.

Onto Players! Unfortunately I didn’t really see much of a jojolity effort beyond narrative. The narrative is good, granted, and gets across the characters’ ideas of inner beauty, but unfortunately despite how much the strat insists on it I just did not see any of that in the mechanics. I’m giving this a **6**.

Judge Persephone (Extra)

Jojolity:

Starting with the boss strategy, this was some three-star Michelin cooking right here. The pseudo-second-person narrative really enhanced all the little moments of Vasant that peeked through and really encapsulated the toxicity of the relationship perfectly; Xen pulls all the strings and Vas, even though he knows it's happening, chooses to simply ignore the red flags out of a desire to be somehow better. He abandons the items in his inventory immediately, just because Xenagoras told him to, he spends the entire strategy letting BSS do the dirty work while he assumes peaceful, domestic bliss, a perfect little fucked up microcosm of his life. In conclusion, have your **10** king. You earned it.

Moving on to the players, I confess I'm significantly more conflicted. On the one hand, I love the angle you guys took for "beauty," with the notion that beauty lies in "honesty" serving as a wonderful narrative foil to the pile of secrets and power dynamics that Vasant and Xen's love represents. On the other hand, there are moments where I feel like you undermine that honesty. Not to be that guy, but your strategy posits that "every action this match, even her every trick and misdirection, has in truth been forthright and open." I look at tech like the Scattershot Maneuver, designed entirely to confuse and obfuscate, and can only conclude that it's not as open as you pitch it. Adding Charvet to the mix, his sole purpose in this match is playing disguises (though technically the above quote refers exclusively to Gioia), and he doesn't really get any indication that he's approaching Jojolity separately. Critical to your plans is this concealment and deceit, and with the way you define Jojolity, there's a clash between mechanics and narrative here that really hurts the Jojolity showing. For all of those reasons, I'm going to give this a **6.**

Judge Echo (Coop)

Yeah the bosses get the easiest **10** Jojolity, I don’t really think this one requires too much justification. This is how you make a narrative strategy, this is that “marriage” between the mechanical nature of completing one’s objective and fulfilling the requirements of the Jojolity that we on the judge team look for. Every moment in the strat both showed the fucked up “love” between Vasant and Xenagoras while also being the actual strategy (despite being rather mid in actual strategic value). Excellent job.

For the players, I like where you were trying to take your interpretation of this Jojolity and the narrative sections supporting it, especially at the end, are amazing. What I and my fellow judges are having a harder time with is seeing how this interpretation has been incorporated into the rest of the strategy. Showing the beauty in truth and honesty works well when directly confronting the nature of the bosses’ relationship, but makes far less sense when, in order to reach that point, you employ countless tactics of disguise and subterfuge. I understand that might be a strange criticism seeing as one of the player character’s whole ability set is that, but this is the part where your strategy is also supposed to convince us otherwise. We try to judge a strat on its own terms, but that becomes more complicated and difficult when those terms are inconsistent or conflicting with each other. I really don’t want to say “you played the match wrong” but I do think that trying to tie this specific strategy with this specific Jojolity interpretation was the best call here. Again, I like what you were going for, but it just doesn’t really work out here - so I don’t think I can give much higher than a **6**.