LJ Idol Presents:

This is my third season, and it's the first time I recall Gary grouping us based on earlier poll results, so I haven't seen this before.

Of course, as we go through the season, we'll all see people go out we just can't believe didn't make it. Sometimes that's based on personal tastes, but a lot of it also comes down to which people can round up votes. (And that doesn't just mean the contestant themselves asking for votes; a lot of contestants pimp for their friends, unasked, because they believe in them and their writing, and/or just want to see them stay in the competition.)

Many, many, many times in Idol, you will see people stay who you don't think wrote well enough that week to stay, and you will see people go who you think wrote well enough to stay. It's a tricky, weird, nebulous situation with a hundred factors you can think of but not calculate, not to mention often plenty going on on the background that you can't know, and nobody can know.

Pimping sometimes backfires, however. Someone recently said it really well (I think it was rattsu's meta post - people will begin to resent you if you got twice as many votes as everyone else, and you didn't write twice as well. (Even if you're a great writer!) And we do have the occasional contestant-only votes, which can flush out people who've wound up with a target on their backs for any reason (any number of things that can brand you a Bad Idol Citizen in the eyes of your peers). There is also usually a gatekeeper round, which can serve as an equalizer in terms of perceived quality of writing exclusively.