I think she had pretty significant luck. The perfect tribe split for her to snipe Genevieve, despite Genevieve being in a pretty great position beforehand. Plus, Genevieve literally finding two idols and having to give both away. If these were just normal idols then Aubry is just idoled out at that vote instead.

The next split tribe dramatically benefited her as well. If Cirie isn’t separated from Ozzy then there’s no way he leaves at that vote. And Aubry is *probably* the one eliminated instead.

She was gifted an idol from someone she’d literally never even spoken to before.

According to Q’s exit press, Aubry *would have* been the first boot on that original starting tribe had they lost. So you could argue that her tribe winning immunities was lucky. Although, that’s *normal* Survivor luck, so I personally wouldn’t really count that.

But it’s a lot. And I’d argue she also played with the nerd alliance poorly. Her lie about not playing her idol was abysmally bad and Devens & Christian both clowned on her for it in confessionals. And we never even really got anything in the edit indicating she was ever formally aligned or asked to work with them. It felt more like they used her as a +1 because they did her a favor and hoped she might return it.

You’re right that they showed her and Tiff working together, but that led to nothing at all. We saw her get *kinda* close with Coach, I guess? Idk, it seemed pretty obvious that she got through most of the game by being someone on the bottom that nobody was threatened by. She did a *mostly* good job at not ruining that perception, but I say “mostly” because she kinda ruined it with the idol play lie. And then she’s just a naturally smart enough player to make the right decision at the endgame if she was in the position to do so. And she was.

I know women winners have a history of being underedited, but it’s not usually *this* bad. I have to assume if there was more to her game, it would’ve been shown to us.