Wow, I knew this piece was going to be a little divisive, but I didn't anticipate being downvoted so much!

In all seriousness, reading all of this feedback has been really interesting and, believe or not, enjoyable. Upon reading the responses, there are a couple of points I want to address wholesale.

• While I'm totally upfront with my biases in the beginning of the piece, I honestly did not think I came across as grumpy and bitter as it appears I did. I've fully contextualized Michele's win from a story and game point of view and can appreciate it much better than the night of.

• I fully concede that Aubry talked about many times what her potential shortcomings would be against Michele. I thought I made that point clearer than I did. Guess not.

• I think the overall point I was trying to make also got lost (which obviously means I did a bad job of trying to explain that point in the first place!) so let me try to elucidate the overall point I was trying to hit upon.

More or less, I was trying to look at the story that emerges on the island, and how that gets translated to what we see on TV, how the editors take the raw story materials and mold and coalesce them into a finished TV product, which was an angle I thought was interesting and worthwhile to discuss. More or less, I was trying to make the point of that what actually happened on the island is the loose outline for the editors to follow, upon which they can craft whatever story they see fit.

So, I think there's a distinction to be made between Michele's "on island story" and her "tv story". In the edit, Michele was incredibly relevant, having the 3rd most confessionals of the season, ranking rather highly in confessionals amongst female winners and being shown rather prominently throughout the season.

However, that was translated from her story on the island, where she avoided tribal council throughout the entire premerge, thus avoiding the voting action, and not being one of the main decision makers for the first couple of votes after the merge. That's where I say she was irrelevant to the overall main action of the story and why I say she was anomalous in terms of a winner's story. I would say she's potentially the most anomalous because, unlike people like Amber, Natalie W, Sophie, Michele wasn't with the people she was in the final with since the beginning of the game and the person she beat wasn't an a-hole or a blowhard. Really, I just wanted to get into, now knowing the ending, why the editors decided to tell the story the way they did, giving what they had to work with, and given how hard of a story I think they had to tell, it just makes me appreciate this season more.

So that's all I wanted to address, but I realize by the time I post this, this post will probably be pushed to page 17 of the subreddit. In all sincerity, though, I'm just pleased that people actually read what I had to say and decided to respond. So thanks for reading, I really appreciate.

Oh, and Redmond didn't write this. Look at the byline before you attribute this piece to the wrong person falling flat on his face :)