I haven't had any time to get completely caught up on Ruby. I feel like you're the best person to ask: has she demonstrated any capacity for original thought? If she pulled off these marks, she must have had at least one original, decent idea, right?
If not, what was her most interesting topic or idea so far? I will get caught up eventually, sorry to ask for the spoon-feeding. I do find it tasteless that she's producing content ripped from her lecturers without any nuance at all. But I fear that's all she's capable of producing aside from narcissistic videos of herself dressing in wrinkled, baggy clothing.
My pet theory is that deep down, she wants to be like the "Other Girls"™ and get easy attention for her looks and clothing. But she can't reconcile that with herself, so we have the worst of both worlds: a faux intellectual who "dresses up like books." I think this is the only way she can fulfill her desire for attention/praise without sacrificing the illusion of "intellectualism" she's built her identity around. She must know by now that anyone trying to replicate her (fake, unrealistic, unhealthy) image of a studious person would burn out quickly; she knows this because she herself splices the footage from multiple days into one day. I thought she would have learned something deeper while at Oxford, but I don't really see evidence of that.
I wonder how her professors and tutors feel about grading someone who cries online over a mark on an essay that didn't even matter in the long run. How does she film that and not think twice about how that attitude reflects on her as a human being? Learning from mistakes is important in postgraduate education and even at the highest levels of academia.
That's probably the funniest thing - I don't think she's ever come up with anything resembling original thought in her content and she's arguably never had a single "interesting" video, at least not in any traditional sense.
98% of her content is the same copy-and-paste, smoke-and-mirrors vlogs/routines in which she stitches together 3-10 days' worth of footage and presents it a single day to try to look awe-inspiringly productive, so anything that breaks from that pattern I guess is more interesting by default.
There's lots of things that I think would be genuinely interesting to see in videos - like her actually talking about her writing process in depth, her experience with her agent and her attempts to get published. But ultimately she can't and won't talk about things like that, because she'd have to reveal how much she relies on simply copying the work of others and filing off the serial numbers. So instead, it's just interchangeable footage of her staring at screens, talking about "dyooing somm waaahrk".
For me at least, the videos she does upload are a fascinating cringe-watch to see what new lies, contradictions and utterly insane nonsense she'll offer up with a straight face. But for someone who prides herself on at least claiming to be an intellectual, there's no evidence of the intelligence that's supposedly earning her those high grades.
Any time she attempts to offer up something intellectual, it's either completely incoherent, never approaches a point (like the latest BookTok video essay) or is just 14 disconnected ideas that she overheard in lectures slapped together with no through-line (or all of the above). And that's usually the most telling thing: Every time she puts her "educational" hat on to impart wisdom to others, it's to talk about something she just studied in a module, and she just regurgitates what her lecturer told her, with a few mistakes added because she was too lazy to pay attention or understand/engage with the material for herself.
So far she's only done a couple of video essays. There's that latest Booktok one, then there's her hilariously bad Matilda visual essay:
I
think that's a rare occasion where she actually tried to offer ideas of her own and didn't just rip off lecture handouts. But like all her other attempts at academic insight, it's a babbling, disjointed mess. It's also incredibly telling that the only text she could engage with was for children, and that she over-intellectualised an incredibly straightforward story, reciting the basic themes of the story as though she were providing were some trenchant critical analysis.
It's also worth checking out the lone essay of hers that made it online and the University of Maryland apparently deemed worthy of publishing:
english.umd.edu
Yet again, it feels like 3 or 4 stolen ideas haphazardly stitched together with no coherent point and padded with endless supporting quotes, which seems to be the recurring trend with her academic content. It's all borrowed/stolen ideas incompetently presented as her own.
It's hard to believe that she's saving all her original thought, wisdom and insight for the essays we don't see while she's lumbering around in videos like a dim-witted, blabbering, incoherent dimwit and any writing she shows is riddled with errors, incompetence and no evidence of intelligence. Grade inflation and copying other people's hard work did a lot of the heavy lifting for her, but I don't know what accounts for the rest.