[BB22]

The "Sophie will be evicted argument" has been given significantly less attention here than Bunnygate yet I think it is an interesting example of how minor discussions and petty gripes are twisted once they get worked on by Team Nasty.

Since I have just watched the argument on the highlights show early this morning I thought I would offer an analysis of exactly what happened and the lessons we can learn from it.

The origin of the argument was as follows: Marcus and Kris were discussing who might be evicted and in what way the public might perceive the various Housemates. Marcus has always stated that he believes he, Kris or Freddie will be evicted. Marcus discussed, in a very loose way, how the public might perceive people in the House and said that they might possibly think Sophie was "boring". Kris agreed and added that the public might think she had not done much. I should note, to be fair to both Marcus and Kris, that both of them gave the impression that they were talking about how the public might perceive Housemates, not giving their own opinions. At no point did anyone say that they actually thought Sophie would be evicted.

Stage two was a conversation in the bedroom at which Marcus, Noirin and Sophie were present. Marcus continued airing his thoughts about the eviction and gave a loose report of his conversation with Kris. Again, he couched it in terms of how difficult it was to tell how the public might perceive the Housemates. At no point did he say he or Kris thought Sophie would be evicted. Everything started fairly calmly but Sophie appeared to start to take it as if it was a criticism of her and, pretty much out of nowhere as far as I could see, believe that Marcus had said that Kris thought she would be evicted because she was so quiet.

Stage three is the most interesting stage: Sophie reported back to Team Nasty and suddenly the entire conversation mutated into the idea that Marcus was stirring, picking on Sophie and making up things that Kris had said. Team Nasty now had the idea that Marcus had reported Kris as saying that Sophie "was quiet". Marcus did think Kris had said something like that, although in fact Kris had said that the public might perceive her as "not doing much" (which some might think was a worse thing to say).

The final stage was the confrontation, when a confused and upset Sophie talked directly to Marcus, with Kris constantly interjecting that he had said nothing about Sophie. Note here that despite the confusion, with both Marcus and Kris believing the other had said Sophie "was quiet", in fact neither of them had said it, although they had both said something similar.

The really interesting thing here is the way an entirely innocent and, on the face of it, fairly honest and friendly conversation between Marcus and Kris was mutated by Team Nasty. At the end of the process, Marcus was under attack from the whole team, including Kris. I note at this point that Lisa said the most unpleasant things about Marcus, despite knowing next to nothing about what had happened, yet she only said them in the privacy of the bedroom, surrounded by her unpleasant cronies. As far as I could tell from the HLs, she said nothing within earshot of Marcus himself.

Once again, a real indictment of the way the Nasties react and can turn innocent conversations into unpleasant attacks on other HMs.