Despair Kiyama

***Despair*** was a castaway on Essential Survivor: Fans vs. Favorites

## Fans Vs. Favorites

Despair started on Kahu. They hit it off with Oma immediately as they had previous history. They also were aligned closely with Kristin and Matthew, while noticing Kristin’s social prowess. They didn’t have much content confessional-wise for the first few episodes, but based off of tribe dynamics, they were near the bottom due to Oma’s elimination. At the Joint Tribal, Despair found an idol during a tribe search, immediately revealing this to Kahu. They give their idol to Kip so that he can play it on himself at Tribal. Which ended up failing as he received no votes. As Kahu won the next few challenges, Despair believed that they were in a good position, which was highly debatable, but not a foregone conclusion. Because of this, they had a shaky start to the merge.

At the merge, Despair had a gut feeling to flip, that was later acted on when Mark came to them questioning their positioning. So they flipped to the faves for this vote with the idea of voting off Karmynn. However, it wasn’t so cookie-cutter. Believing that they were the deciding vote, Despair constantly flipped back and forth on if they should vote Aria or Karmynn. But after a talk with Mark they settled on voting Aria, but after realizing the vote was 9-4 against Karmynn, they were feeling manipulated by Mark.

After the merge vote, Despair’s outlook on the game wasn’t positive. Feeling like a goat and on the bottom, they were at least somewhat hopeful that things would pick up again. Which it did a little? They voted with the majority this time, voting out Bradley, but Despair wanted the secondary target, Kip out. Thankfully, Tae blew up the trio of Cole, Kip and Kristin (YEG) at the TC. Another small tidbit to note, Despair and Jaylen had this small rivalry for a few episodes due to Jaylen not trusting where Despair voted at the Karmynn boot. Of course, Jaylen never revealed that to Despair and ridiculed them for no apparent reason.

Final 11, Aria just won immunity and YEG was looking to be the main target, great for Despair. This was also a round where their read on the game started to get better. With this new burst of confidence from Despair, they attempted to lead a split vote against YEG to take out Cole or Kip if Cole uses his idol. Kip was voted out, but not with the intended vote count. Regardless, Despair was happy the plan worked to an extent. At Final 10,  a demerge came and Despair was on a tribe with Kristin, John, Tae and Jaylen. The latter 2 were the easy targets, causing the others to band together. The plan was to use Kristin’s Extra Vote to make a tie between Tae and Jaylen, then take out Tae on the revote. But Despair felt like Tae was beneficial to their game, so with a little influence to keep the intended vote 3-3, Despair caused a 3-2-1 to take out their foe Jaylen.

Come Final 8, Tae, Aria and Despair were the clear minority. Believing that they could flip the script on the game, Despair tried to campaign for both Mark and Kristin to flip with them and vote for John. While it worked on Mark, Kristin didn’t comply. Regardless, John stole Mark’s vote which sent Tae home 5-3. During the next round, it was painfully obvious that either one of Despair and Aria would be going home. And even though the obvious choice would be Aria, Despair was taken out in a 3-2-2 intentional split vote, placing 7th.