Talk:Endless Summer, Book 3/@comment-35158873-20180221164846/@comment-3452092-20180221165936

Considering for the four seconds or so that I thought Zahra was actually dead before I regained my senses and realized that was impossible I was pretty ticked off about that idea, no I'm not. It's so very Zahra to do such a thing. Yeah, she could have shown up a little sooner and saved them all that, but I don't think she planned her timing or anything like that, so I'm not mad at her for that. I would have liked to have seen it play out longer, actually, where by the end of that chapter they reaized she was alive, or maybe Craig's ember contained mention of her and if you got the ember the MC and Craig realized she was alive (and if you didn't get the ember there was still something less clear, but still enough to make you know she was alive or at least that the body they found wasn't her) and then the next chapter was about a concentrated effort to figure out what happened to her.

Is it manipulative? Sure. But that's kind of what writing is at it's core, manipulating people's emotions to tell a story. Sometimes the goal is to bring good, happy emotions. Sometimes it is knee-jerk, super sad ones. And sometimes it's to confuse and make you wonder if anything you know is true. And in this case, I don't think this was about making you sad. I think it was about making you wonder about what you knew to be true. If the sadness wasn't real, maybe the happiness isn't either. And if I'm right about that. . . honestly, that's when I'm going to get pretty annoyed at them, because I want the happiness to be real.