Underleveled posted...
Honestly, edgic is pretty much out the window in the new era, or at least, it has changed and edgicers are still trying to find the new rhythm.
I think a lot of people are trying not to be "sore losers", so they don't wanna just throw their hands up and say "that was bullshit!!!" because it's bad look to say "edgic is dead" just because
you
failed to get it right. But I do kinda think some of it has been... very divorced from pre-40 editing trends.
Like, Gabler for example, the people who called it say, in retrospect, "He got consistent confessionals every episode telling us he was laying low and underestimated but that he was still playing!", but like... I'm pretty sure that's a completely normal thing that tons of losing finalists got. You telling the viewer you're playing well while no one else ever talks about you has generally been a strong sign of losing, an easy way for editors to give a bit of suspense to a losing finalist and make the result not completely obvious, but not actually really supporting that player.
Or like how my biggest issue with Erika (and I casually binged this season so wasn't following edgic) was how she was totally absent from episodes 2 and 3, then in ep 4 Deshawn is like "So Erika's a huge threat we need to get out." To me, one of the biggest trends in edgic is that if you have no story then randomly get brought up as a threat, that's because you're not important and you're just randomly coming up now to justify a specific plot, but you don't have a throughline. I just ruled her out right then and there. But apparently it was part of a new trend where they like to have their winner randomly seem in danger pre-merge even if they weren't actually in danger.