I think Lindsay was just making Cora like Shia Laboeuf from the Michael Bay Transformers movie. He is nothing special, he's only involved because of the glasses he had that's needed for the plot while his girlfriend Michaela Bayes actually has skill and knowledge involving cars. Fucking hell, her books really are Transformers fanfiction. Why would you make your main character lame, whiny, and useless on purpose just so you can copy Michael Bay?
I 100% can see her watching the part in the second movie where Shia goes to college and she felt the lightbulb moment to have her bean-sona go to college and then that's when she later had to change it to be about when Cora is going to work because the publisher didn't like how she wrote her college student as a whiny teenager who's doing movie reviews.
It's fine if she wanted her protagonist to be passive and not really invovled in the story and more like a "human camera" that keeps track of the events. It's like making something like The Great Gatsby, it can work. But the way she did it was where we only follow this human camera, we are focused on this human camera, the human camera is told to us to be the medium between the aliens and humans because she's the chosen one, and then somehow we're supposed to care about her relationships instead of the new introduction of alien stuff. It's like she tried to copy Michael Bay but couldn't even do that right.
I get into that kind of stuff in my
new analysis video about the first chapter, and I don't even know if I have to tackle any other chapters because every major issue begins at the start and remains even into the second book. But I'm not sure if I have the dedication like
@Cobalt-60 has to get into the second book in any depth other than understanding the story doesn't get any better and only gets more messy.
What really shocks me is how the people in her subreddit pretend they know what a story is all about or that they are the same type of movie reviewer as Lindsay, but then they turn around and try to justify enjoying her terrible writing when everything contradicts everything Lindsay was talking about in her 3 act story structure video. This kind of seperation from reality can only be done with a mixture of feminist film theory, woke politics, and sensitivity readers telling Lindsay to be more racist and more sexist but only in the way they want her to.
I know we all always joke about how dumb she is, but this is advanced dumbness. It's where she would have been more competent if she was simply less brainwashed and actually accepted things for what they are instead of trying to demonize simple things like "a good opening" or "an actual romance" or "describing what the setting looks like".
This is why it's always funny to watch her Q&A moments where she tried to justify her not benig anywhere related to Cora by saying Cora is latinx and she isn't. She spent years putting in this self insert that acts, thinks, and has a life so close to Lindsay's, but she thinks people won't notice because she adds "a bit o' color" to the mix.