Some Readers May Find Objectionable. Viewer Discretion is Advised. ***
By DC Cueva
@DC408dxtr / @DC408dxnow
Hi everyone and welcome again to DC SocialPulse, and to our first diary for The Challenge: Free Agents - a very special super-sized edition to cover all the buzz of the action-packed premiere. Back when this was all taped several months ago, host TJ Lavin tweeted to fans, "Wow I just wanna go on record and say this is the best start to a Challenge I've EVER seen!!! Be ready!" Well, the premiere on Thursday night not only backed up his words up, but also provided us with a brilliant start to this silver anniversary season. This begins with TJ welcoming the cast to Uruguay and informing them of a stunning twist of it being an individual game that will alter the plans of many of the players. It continues with an opening mission that sees the group confront the country's largest skyscraper, including a death-defying walk 47 stories above ground. And with a game-changing twist to how the process of who goes home, in the end we get a fantastic elimination battle between a finalist from last season and an upstart in her very first Challenge. We'll be covering all of that here.
First off, for those of you visiting DCBLOG for the first time, DC SocialPulse is a unique post that I do that you can't really find anywhere in the blogosphere. These are our exclusive running diaries of how twitter sees television shows and big events as they happen. One of the things twitter does best is when people get the opportunity to see & experience the true communal experience that comes with watching television and interacting with cast members, fans and everyone else. As I've matured gradually in the twitter verse since I joined on, fittingly enough, premiere night of Real World St. Thomas on June 27, 2012, the reason why I go crazy tweeting and retweeting things when The Real World or The Challenge is on or during big events is for these posts. And in response to an issue I've had of losing followers on my primary twitter account, I recently launched a new twitter hub, DC NOW at @DC408dxnow as an place for me to still do live tweeting while protecting my primary audience.
If you're a person who wants to relive how your favorite cast members reacted to a hookup, a fight, a huge challenge or an elimination round, or anything else that took place, we will have everything covered. Or, in the case of folks out west such as yours truly, those who might have stayed off social media while the episodes aired and wouldn't get the benefit of having the true TV & Twitter experience of your favorites tweeting along with you out west, these SocialPulse posts are just for you. Instead of having to go back and read up on all those tweets in your timeline after you've seen the episodes, let yours truly take care of that for you as I piece together everything in real-time, tweet-by-tweet, uncensored and unfiltered. I monitor & compile tweets as it emerges while the show airs out east, then RT certain tweets on DC Now when it airs here, and then I burn the midnight oil to then edit it, and post these articles a day or two after. These days, it's required that fans not only have their sets tuned to MTV for the shows as they watch it live, but also have an Internet device handy to follow the other big show on at the same time: the spontaneous interaction among cast, fans and all of us.
Since we launched SocialPulse last year during the Rivals II premiere and then continuing along with the rest of that season near the end, and then this winter with Real World Ex-Plosion and Are You The One?, these SP diaries make up for a good number of DCBLOG's nearly 7,500 views, with visitors from many foreign countries checking out the twitter interaction, among others, of these shows. Yeah I know, it's a rather long process of copying & pasting cast tweets to my notepad and then putting it into my blog with commentary before & after, but the reward is lots of fans checking out my blog, not only from North America but also from overseas. And it's the work that I do compiling these tweets, along with getting views from fans and covering what I'm into that's made blogging such a great hobby of mine. For this Challenge, just as it was for RW Ex-Plosion and Are You The One?, we will be offering the same thing in bringing all the tweets together, but also I will post them the Friday or weekend after the episodes air, complete with my own commentary and thoughts & perspectives on them too.
Enough of my prologue. Let's get now to the reason you are actually here for: the following are the actual tweets of the cast, alumni, fans and me as we got to see the premiere of The Challenge: Free Agents, along with the week leading up to and the day after the premiere.
- As we begin, please note there is explicit language in many of the tweets below, but I am keeping it uncensored in order to retain the heat of the moment. So if you are mature enough, please read with discretion. :-)
- Plus, if you haven't watched the episode yet, then don't proceed. But don't worry, bookmark DCBLOG as I will compile all of these tweets into these posts after every episode so you won't be in the dark of how your favorites saw this all unfold.
- And there's also a number of twitter arguments that emerged with some members of the community while the premiere was airing. We've included all of their tweets in this post, and also carefully edited it to ensure that we showcase both sides of the matter.
So without further delay, off we go on a long ride into Challenge land... That's after the jump.
