"castle daddy" is more than a meme—it's a strategy
on the subtle brilliance of CT's social game
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Thanks to everyone who voted for which essay they wanted to see in their inboxes today. CT, The Traitors, The Challenge, and astrology was the winner (by only one vote, so I’ll be sure to write the other piece next), so here it is! Strap in, my Sagittarius Mercury went long, as it is wont to do. To read it in full, click through to your browser.
By now, you will know that The Challenge won this season of The Traitors. Well, long-time Challengers CT Tamburello and Trishelle Cannatella won the season together, with poor Johnny Bananas going home on the first night.
It pains me to compliment Trishelle on anything, really, but I have to admit she played a really great game. She turned out to be much better at The Traitors than she ever was at The Challenge1, even if the rest of the cast never listened to her about who the Traitors actually were (Brian Moylan at Vulture called her “Cassandra from Greek myth if she once had a three-way in a hot tub” and I’m basically obsessed with that as a story concept).
The Bravo-verse has now fallen in love with CT, learning what fans of MTV reality television have known for a long time: that CT is great TV. He’s been a heartthrob since he first showed up on-screen in 2003’s Real World: Paris. Over the course of the last two decades, he’s transformed himself from a hothead whose temper often got in his way and prevented him from realizing his full potential to someone who has become a cross between cast dad and cast(le) Daddy—and he’s never been more successful.2
CT has done 19 seasons of the main Challenge but he didn’t win until his 9th one. Following that win, on 2013’s “Rivals II,” he did two more seasons but took a hiatus after 2015’s “Battle of the Exes II” following the death of his on-again, off-again love (and “Exes II” partner) Diem. He returned in 2017 and has done eight seasons since, winning five of them. Then he jumped networks, joining the cast of The Traitors, and won that, too.
It’s true that on both The Challenge and The Traitors, CT excelled at the physical challenges. On the former, that’s a necessary part of winning the game; on the latter, it meant that he (along with Trishelle) almost single-handedly banked all the cast’s money (so perhaps it was only fair that they walked away with all of it tbh). But the social game is where CT really shines and he does it in such a way that no one even realizes he’s playing one. “People don’t realize how good CT is at the social game,” long-time Challenger Kyle Christie told Yahoo in 2019. “He’s perfected it.”
This is helped by his 20+ seasons of The Challenge—and a bit by the Libra Mars in his birth chart (for my non-astrology girlies, a person’s Mars placement determines how they show up in conflict and it’s one that I’ve enjoyed looking at in relationship to the way a person plays competition reality shows3). CT is incredibly adept at making it seem like he isn't picking a side—the ultimate Libra move. This was especially apparent on the 2019 “War of the Worlds 2” season of The Challenge when he played the neutral card until the end and he was able to win the season.
But a Mars placement also impacts a person’s drive and passion; in the air sign of Libra, Mars is diplomatic but also cares deeply about whatever it’s fighting for. A Libra Mars will let a lot of conflict roll off their backs but they’ll take you to the mat over something they believe is unfair or unjust in some way. And as a cardinal sign, Mars in Libra will be good at initiating things but will also have the stamina for playing the long game. At his most successful, CT does just that: he sits back and watches the chaos unfold around him, picking his moments carefully.
If you watch this season of The Traitors back, you’ll see that CT is very unassuming. He’s not making big moves. He’s schmoozing a bit, but not obviously so. He almost seems like he’s on the outside of all the alliances and doesn’t have many friends in the game. And yet at the same time, he also seems like he has a lot of friends in the game. It’s a hard fence to straddle—create an affinity with enough people that you are insulated from their ire but don’t get close enough to anyone that you get sucked into a specific group in a way that would make you a target (see: how the “Peter Pals” were systematically picked off).
But he had another strategy, too: making himself valuable in the physical challenge portion of the game. “If they want to win some money, they need to win some challenges,” CT told Parade regarding how The Traitors functioned as a game. He was one of the few cast members who had the kind of experience that The Challenge provides, meaning that he was unfazed by the missions. In a house filled with Bravo-lebrities, this was a huge asset, especially with Johnny Bananas going home as early as he did.
“Generally, on The Challenge… you don't want to be perceived as a threat,” Johnny told Parade. “If we weren't all competing as one big group to win a pot of money for everyone, if you were competing against them, you'd be like, ‘Let's get rid of the stronger people.’… On The Challenge, you come in and want to downplay your abilities.”
But on The Traitors, “you want to be present,” CT said. “You can't just hide in the shadows. It's a tough dynamic.”
A tough dynamic, but one that CT has perfected. And his Libra Mars has the ability to remain neutral and play both sides—striking only when the timing is right and he knows he can win.4 His first real big shot didn’t come until nearly the end of the season, when he finally wrote down Phaedra’s name at the round table because at that point, he was fairly sure they had the numbers to vote her out and he was confident that she was a Traitor.
“Let everybody else bang a drum about who the Traitors are, and then yeah, you’ll get my vote,” he told Vulture about the big game moves. “But I’m not trying to be the tip of the spear so I can just get murdered later on that night… Just because you think something or you feel something doesn’t mean you should say it. Let the dust settle, and maybe someone will say it for you.”
He never wants to seem like he’s doing too much (doing too much is what proved to be the downfall of The Bachelor’s Peter Weber). “I learned in my Challenge career, it’s about letting people think it’s their idea,” he said. CT is the king of making people hear what they want to hear while somehow never actually saying much. Because this skill is sometimes very quiet and unassuming, just how good CT is at doing this can be easy to miss. This is the genius of a Mars in Libra: they are always the Diplomat.
“CT is very good at a social game,” Below Deck’s Kate Chastain told The Daily Beast of CT’s stint on The Traitors. “So Phaedra felt like she had an emotional connection with him. MJ felt like he was like a brother. Trishelle thought they had an emotional connection. So, CT is very good not only at the missions, but also at gaining friends and building relationships.”
This is where CT’s Cancer sun really shows up to play. In watery Cancer, people are going to naturally feel a connection with CT—but that won’t mean he will necessarily feel it in return. Cancers tend to be quite guarded themselves (and his moon in the earth sign of Virgo will add to that), but people tend to project deep and meaningful emotional connections onto them.
In a game like The Traitors, filled with a large number of people who don’t come from competition-based shows like The Challenge, that’s going to put CT at a huge advantage. Much has been discussed regarding the ways that the “gamers” (aka Big Brother, Survivor, The Challenge players) underestimated the “non-gamers” (mostly the Housewives and extended Bravo-verse stars but also players like The Bachelor’s Weber). And that’s true and allowed many of the non-gamers to make real runs on The Traitors.
“Just because [the Housewives] haven’t played the strategic game doesn’t mean that the skill sets that they bring aren’t going to allow them to win the game,” Big Brother winner Dan Gheesling said after his exit from The Traitors. “The skill set they bring to the table is the most applicable because they’re fighting off people on a daily basis. The Housewives, I would say in the next season, should be favored to win.”
But something that came up in The Traitors reunion episode revealed another difference between the gamer versus non-gamer reality stars, something that host Andy Cohen referred to as “a cultural difference,” and it’s a place where the gamers have the upper hand—the ability to separate the show from their personal lives.
Coming from a Housewives franchise, cast members aren’t playing a game. These are their real lives and their real relationships playing out on camera. It’s why Phaedra will never forgive Dan for saying her name at that round table and ultimately blowing up her season—Dan insisted that it was purely a strategic game move and one that came from a place of respect, because he viewed Phaedra as a legitimate threat to win it but Phaedra has been clear that she thinks Dan is a “low-down son of a bitch” and a “piece of shit” for doing it.
And it’s why MJ is still so furious at CT and Trishelle for the way the finale played out. She thought they were friends because she’d been made to feel that way during the game. But at the end of the day, CT (and Trishelle) made a strategic choice they felt was best for their games and sent MJ packing. To CT, it’s “nothing personal” (“Tough break,” he told Vulture of banishing MJ despite the fact that she played “a clean game”). But to MJ, it is deeply personal.
“In this game we understand that you can still be friends with someone and vote them out and turn and backstab them and it's fine,” Trishelle told Parade. “But I don't know if everybody else gets that.”
For someone like CT, who has spent most of his adult life competing in a game of physical strength, personal politics, and strategy against his friends, he can separate the game from his off-screen relationships which means that he may make decisions in the game that fuck over people he legitimately cares about. It’s why, despite the fact that CT and Johnny have never worked together in a Challenge house, they maintain a close, real-life friendship outside of the game. But for non-gamers who have never been on this kind of show before, this kind of thinking goes against the sense of loyalty they have to their castmates. And it means that they were wholly susceptible to the belief that the bond they felt with CT would protect them when it came to this game.
In other words, they never saw him coming. But Trishelle did—hence her momentary, end-of-game suspicion that CT could have been a Traitor all along. She knows well enough that you can’t put anything past him (though CT and Trishelle may not have seen the wrath of a scorned Housewife coming, which is why they seemed shocked at how angry MJ still was during the finale, as well as her ongoing social media campaign against them5).
Any veteran Challenge player may have second-guessed another at the end. After all, it’s arguable that Johnny Bananas invented the “take the money and run” move—he notoriously stole his partner, Sarah Rice’s, half of their winnings on “Rivals III,” a move that some fans view as comparable to CT and Trishelle’s last minute play against MJ.
For his part, CT disagrees, telling PEOPLE that was different. “[Johnny] had won with Sarah,” he said. “They won the money to get crowned champions — and then he took it from her.” Regarding MJ, he said, “She made it to the finals… but she didn't win the show. That money wasn’t hers.”6
“Mars in Libra is slippery,” Alice Sparkly Kat writes. “What makes Mars in Libra so powerful is that it will only engage in conflict as a choice and never as an impulse. It will always understand that it can step away. No one can hold a Mars in Libra hostage using its anger.”
But as I wrote when I examined the Mars signs of Challenge competitors:
Here's the thing about CT: he didn't develop his Libra-esque, forever-neutral political game until he needed to. In the early days of his Challenge career, he was a physical force but he was also a loose cannon… After Diem died, he took a hiatus from the show and when he came back he was older and bigger (“Dad Bod CT,” aka peak CT aka the hottest version of CT). He also had the interpersonal goodwill from Diem dying, and he was able to parlay the combination of those things—seeming like less of a physical threat and coming back from the loss of Diem—into a new game, one in which he was able to sit back and observe, very much the “house dad” kind of vibes, and no one touched him. It was only then that he was able to find his late-career Challenge success, winning [five] of the eight seasons he's done since coming back.
So yes, “Castle Daddy” may be a meme, but it’s also the key to CT’s success.
The Challenge was effectively the first competition reality show and CT, Johnny, and Trishelle are vets of the genre. They have been competing on reality TV before many of the other franchises that The Traitors cast came from even existed. As the three Challenge veterans are all getting older and begin to think about what success post-Challenge will look like for them, it makes sense for them to move into a different kind of reality TV (Johnny has been on House of Villains this year, too). But their success on these shows also serves to remind viewers that they are pioneers of the genre and should not be underestimated.
“Me, Bananas, and Trishelle had a pact,” CT told Vulture. “We’re The Challenge. We started this competition reality-TV stuff, and we’re gonna finish it.”
More reading on The Traitors
I loved this piece from Ben Rosenstock at Vulture on the skillfull edit of this season of The Traitors, and wanted to highlight this reaction to the shocking end:
As CT Tamburello and eventually Trishelle Cannatella voted to banish MJ Javid and share the money between the two of them, I gasped and swore and laughed in amazement, knowing I was witnessing high drama. Sure, these were two players I didn’t know that well, having never watched The Challenge; I’m not even sure I like Trishelle as a person. And yet I couldn’t stop grinning as CT finally confirmed his Faithful status and she collapsed in relief, her choice to trust an old friend and rival vindicated. I’d just witnessed a betrayal more visceral than any murder all season, but it came with real emotional catharsis and warmth.
CT has discovered that the gays love him and his reaction is pretty great:
“It’s been a pump-up for sure. The other day, we were talking to—I forget his name—but he was saying that he’s a part of gay Twitter, and one of the things that I guess everybody kind of talks about is me being “caked up” or something. I didn't know what that meant before. Because I knew I was “castle daddy,” but now I’m “caked up” because of the swimsuit, from when we had to jump over the rafts. It’s like Stella getting his groove back, you know?”
This interview with Alan Cumming’s stylist on The Traitors, Sam Spector, is also great:
“I think [the funeral look is] my favorite look of the season… For that episode, I remember on the mood board, we used the Royal Family as inspiration—what they wore to the Queen’s funeral, and specifically the women. I love that I’m able to draw from not only men’s fashion but women’s fashion for Alan, and I love that he’s able to go there and pull off all these different looks. Not many people are able to do that.”
Trishelle told Parade: “For me, The Challenge at one point had gotten way too hard for me, just physically. And so I was just like, all right, I had plateaued and then I was just like not good anymore…I stopped caring [about The Challenge] because I didn't like the people. There are better people in [The Traitors]. But this is more of a mental and emotional toughness game. And I've always felt like I was super mentally and emotionally tough. So this is the perfect game for me.”
Who wants to buy me “Castle Daddy” merch?
I am not a professional astrologer, these observations are just for fun.
For contrast, Trishelle has a Leo Mars. Leo Mars is a very prideful and determined Mars that is hard to sway when it knows it’s right. But unlike some other Mars signs, which have the ability to adapt and strategize well, Leo Mars doesn’t always learn from its mistakes. Leo Mars is less good at strategy and more likely to take the tack of doing the same thing over and over again and hoping it works this time. You see a lot of these themes in Trishelle’s Challenge career but also in the way she approached her time (and competitors) in The Traitors castle.
CT told PEOPLE, “If we could have voted again, we would’ve probably all went together” regarding the decision to banish MJ at the last minute.
You could argue that if CT believed MJ was entitled to those final winnings, he wouldn’t have taken them from her; when won a Challenge season where he could have taken it all, he did the opposite of what Johnny did to Sarah, splitting his winnings with the other finalists.
Uh, premature comment before reading to squeal in delight ! Ok gonna go read now
Yummy cultural analysis and please please consider watching the UK version and giving us a deconstruction? It's replete with specifically Brit forms of nonsense.