LJ Idol Presents:

It's a competition, of course people are going to compete! It seems rather pointless otherwise.  Exhibit A was the first of its kind, so it made sense that people were sort of sitting back to test the waters. Exhibit B, though? Game the fuck on, this shit's Sparta! Unless you set up a situation where there's nothing to lose, and everyone can just get back in the game the next week, or there's a big fluffy group hug instead of eliminations each week, people are going to be fighting tooth and nail to hang on, and that increases exponentially the more time they invest in the game and, as you mentioned above, the stiffer the competition is. Weeks 1 and 2 - okay, people have only invested a week or so of their time so far, the quality of writing is all over the map, a bunch of people are bound to self-elim by missing a deadline anyway, so let's just chill. But toward the second half of the season, and then the final stretch of the game? People have invested months of their time and tons of themselves, plus a bunch of adrenaline from staring down the barrel of a deadline and frantically pounding F5, and the safety net of cannon fodder's mostly gone. (Sorry, I'm not going to insult anyone's intelligence and pretend everyone who walks into Idol is some literary genius who's a threat for the crown - sure, there are some dark horses and surprise contenders, but there's cannon fodder every round, regardless of whether it's nice to say so out loud.) So by a certain point in the game, the human shields are dead on the battlefield, you've poured your heart and soul into the competition for months on end (which you wouldn't have bothered to do if you weren't here to seriously compete!), everyone left is a legit threat, you know good and well that *you're* in *their* was as much as they're in yours, and resting comfortably on your laurels and sipping a cup of tea while chatting about the weather ain't exactly an option anymore! Exhibit B might have been a mini-season, but a half stick of dynamite is still dynamite!