Michele's game in Kaôh Rong
Many people have claimed that Michele didn't deserve to win in Kaôh Rōng because she didn't make any big moves in the game. But after the season, Rob Cesternino had a 2-and-1/2 hour interview with Michele on his podcast and it turns out that Michele did a lot of things in Kaôh Rōng that the producers never showed. Some of the things that Michele said during her interview with Rob C.:
1. On Day 1, Michele made her 1st alliance with Nick. (This wasn't shown.)
2. On Day 2, Michele and Nick recruited Tai into their alliance. But the next day, Tai brought up Michele's name to the rest of the Beauty tribe as the 1st person to vote out if the Beauties had to go to TC. So Michele broke off her alliance with Tai. (None of this was shown.)
3. Michele had a hard time talking to Nick. It seemed to Michele that Nick didn't see Michele as an equal partner in the alliance but rather as just an extra vote that he would control (similar to how Aubry controlled Joe's vote). Michele didn't want to just be someone's extra vote and wanted to have a voice in her alliance so Michele decided to align with Anna and Julia instead of Nick. (None of this was shown.)
4. The day before Caleb's medevac, Michele made a secret alliance with Caleb and they both promised to go to the final together. (This wasn't shown.) So Aubry fans claim that Aubry lost close allies (Neal and Joe) to medevac, but Michele also lost a close ally (Caleb) to medevac.
5. After the tribal swap, Michele ended up on a tribe with Nick, Cydney, Jason, Debbie, and Neal. Michele then went to work on her social game. Michele made a connection with Cydney and that was when they first talked about voting out Nick (this wasn't shown). Michele also made a connection with Debbie and told Debbie that she would rather work with Debbie than with Nick (this wasn't shown). Michele also tried to make a connection with Neal, but Neal refused to have anything to do with Michele.
6. After the merge, the Beauties and Brawn aligned together and their plan was to split the vote between Neal (whom they knew had an HII) and Aubry. The 4 Beauties (Michele, Tai, Julia, and Nick) would vote for Aubry while the 3 Brawn (Cydney, Jason, and Scot) would vote for Neal. If the 4 Brains voted together, it would be a 4-4-3 tie and then the Beauties and Brawn would vote out Aubry on the re-vote. So Aubry was definitely going to be voted out at the 1st post-merge TC, but Neal's medevac saved Aubry. Also, Neal knew that the Beauties and Brawn were targeted him so Neal went to Michele and asked if she was still willing to work with him, but Michele declined (since Neal had made it clear earlier that he didn't want to have anything to do with Michele).
7. After Scot was blindsided (and the core alliance didn't include Michele and Julia in the Scot blindside), the day of the next TC, Michele was the one who suggested voting out Julia (this wasn't shown). Michele did that because she wanted to prove to the core alliance that she was loyal to the alliance and that she was willing to vote out Julia for the benefit of the alliance.
8. At F6 TC, Michele got into a heated argument with Tai when Tai suggested voting her out because Michele knew that Tai wasn't popular with the jury and that was her chance to gain some jury votes by arguing vehemently against Tai in front of the jury.
9. Michele never considered removing Scot from the jury. It was always between Neal and Joe. But Michele knew that Joe would never say anything negative about anyone while Neal would probably try to convince the jury to vote against Michele. So it was an easy choice to remove Neal from the jury.
As we can see from the interview, Michele played a great social game and made connections with several people (many of which weren't shown) which helped her get jury votes from Julia, Cydney, and Debbie. Michele also made some subtle but brilliant strategic moves (e.g. suggesting that her core alliance vote out Julia; arguing vehemently against Tai in front of the jury). Michele definitely played the best game in Kaôh Rōng and deserved the win.
So why didn't the producers show more of Michele's superior game in Kaôh Rōng? There are 2 main reasons:
1. After the immunity challenge, the producers only show the tribe that lost immunity to show them scrambling and deciding whom to vote out and never show the tribe that won immunity. Michele's tribe didn't go to tribal council at all prior to the merge so the producers didn't show Michele's tribe that much and thus didn't show Michele's social game pre-merge (when Michele made many of the social connections that helped her get the jury votes at FTC).
2. The producers knew that they were bringing Aubry back for Season 34. So the producers wanted to focus on giving Aubry as positive an edit as they could so that it would look like Aubry deserved to come back for another season.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD0vARpus-g