OK, I asked our dear assistant ChatGPT: fireflies represent departing souls and being surrounded by them is either a moment of threshold (life&death) or simply a reunion of the emotions in a liminal realm. There is another interpretation by which the fireflies stand for how fickle happiness can be, and while the reunion might be real it would be seen in a "frozen time/everything changed but our feelings didn't" type of way. Either way, I'd say the author failed both. In the first case everything should have been more ambigous; I've seen story uses this methapor and it can work beautifully, but the letter about surviving and seeing her as an old lady make it hard to not take it seriously... why add those details like you are trying to fool us readers with possible scenarios and visual confirmations pointing at her being alive when everything else does to her death. In the second one, what do you mean in 50 years they couldn't have found a way to announce her survival to the world, wtf; the young master who supposedly saved her had enough resources to spread information like that easely. Not to mention there is no way ML didn't attend her funeral or see her corpse, like there is no way FL stayed put on that island instead of searching for him. It just makes no sense at all.
Yeah it gotta be the first option, really done badly I must say. Apart from the ending the story is truly beautiful
OK, I asked our dear assistant ChatGPT: fireflies represent departing souls and being surrounded by them is either a moment of threshold (life&death) or simply a reunion of the emotions in a liminal realm. There is another interpretation by which the fireflies stand for how fickle happiness can be, and while the reunion might be real it would be seen in a "frozen time/everything changed but our feelings didn't" type of way.
Either way, I'd say the author failed both. In the first case everything should have been more ambigous; I've seen story uses this methapor and it can work beautifully, but the letter about surviving and seeing her as an old lady make it hard to not take it seriously... why add those details like you are trying to fool us readers with possible scenarios and visual confirmations pointing at her being alive when everything else does to her death.
In the second one, what do you mean in 50 years they couldn't have found a way to announce her survival to the world, wtf; the young master who supposedly saved her had enough resources to spread information like that easely. Not to mention there is no way ML didn't attend her funeral or see her corpse, like there is no way FL stayed put on that island instead of searching for him. It just makes no sense at all.
Yeah it gotta be the first option, really done badly I must say.
Apart from the ending the story is truly beautiful