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110. Jonathan Young (Survivor 42, 4th place) [18/18]
I actually quite enjoyed Jonthan in the early parts of Survivor 42. It was pretty fun, almost hilarious even, watching him just absolutely dominate the physical game to an almost superhuman degree that wed seriously never seen before. Not from James, not from Ozzy, not at all. Actually, Ill admit that having seen him compete Ive been motivated to push myself even harder when working out. He was also just decently enjoyable as a character. Even at times when he was being a bit of a dick, it was entertaining, like in the episode where he was complaining about how annoying the women on his tribe were. As somebody (Andy I think?) pointed out when it happens, its the kind of magic that happens when there are no tribe swaps so the Survivors are subjected to living with the same people for the entire pre-merge, and Im very thankful that after 17 consecutive seasons with some sort of pre-merge tribe reconfiguration, we finally got not one but two in a row without a tribe swap.

Anyway, I figured that, as one of the biggest physical threats in Survivor history, Jonathan would be an obvious early-merge target. But he never was. I was actually really shocked. For the early part of the post-merge, he was never seriously targeted aside from the usual this person is a threat, oh yeah, well have to deal with that eventually that a lot of people get subjected to in the early merge phase in any season. But he had been enjoyable enough in the pre-merge that I didnt mind him sticking around for a few extra rounds, and we even got a bit of a funny running gag about his diet (which I even named a topic after). But then things started to go downhill at the negotiation episode, when Jeff offered the tribe more rice in exchange for a negotiated number of people sitting out of the immunity challenge. Despite having gone on at great length about how he needs more calories than everyone else because he has more mass (a little cocky-sounding but not incorrect) and stepping in to be one of the prime negotiators he absolutely did not budge on sitting out of the challenge himself. And that rubbed me the wrong way a bit. Then the split-tribal episode happened and I have no problem with him targeting Drea here (she was absolutely one of the biggest strategic threats at that point and they had a wide open opportunity to take her out), the way he went about it was so horrible. Not only was he a stubborn asshole when discussing how to split the vote with Lindsay, but he was flat-out wrong about how to do it (rather than splitting the vote onto outsider Tori, he wanted to split it onto his own ally Maryanne, which made 0 sense as it risked either eliminating her or alienating her). Then tribal council happens and a racial discussion takes place, and while I dont think Jonathan is a racist person, nor did he say anything explicitly racist (nor, you know, blatantly factor race into his strategy), many of his remarks came across as tonedeaf to say the least.

From this point forward, his role in the season is to lay around camp being miserable and constantly complaining about how stupid everyone else is for not going along with his bad strategy, and about how hungry he is, and constantly evading elimination despite the majority of the people left wanting him gone. Then in the finale, when Lindsay was the obvious target at the final five and the immunity challenge appeared to be between her and Mike, Jonathan literally just put his puzzle pieces down and watched the two of them fight it out like winning it didnt even matter to him. It came across as so arrogant and was just the capstone on the deterioration of a character that really kind of endeared me early on.

109. A winner