Its a blessing and a curse, with bad memories, chasing sunsets, hillside, summer is gone, and others like Ataegina, corporate culture, and hard times all updating so close to each other, there is going to be a big winter ahead with little to no great updates for a while.
this update certainly had its downfalls, the worse part is that it could totally have been fixed while still going in the same direction, for example. mc buged Emma's phone, with the intent to keep an eye on it during the night, but he doesn't want Charlotte to know about the tracking so when Charlotte calls him to see the photos its preventing him from watching Emma, a few lines of text could have added this plan as a MC thought.
Carter either let go of Emma which would be quite stupid or she did something, going by the image's numbers they jump up during that scene, i think he had planned a few frames to better explain this but changed his mind.
And mainly there is the fact that there is no reason to even go brawl with him, the mc had a f*** gun, he admitted to it, so the moment Emma ran from Carter he would be getting a Bullet in his head, which also resolves the issue with self defense or murder a later post brought up.
Problem is that reading of the events doesn't actually make sense, Carter had a knife and Emma, he knew that MC had a gun, so why would he open himself to be more easily shot by letting go of his bullet proof vest, in a real case here the moment emma ran carter would be dropping dead or at least being shot at.
Wow that hits squarely in the feels as you said, totally missed that.
Plus he was armed, so going in for the brawl makes 0 sense, but could have been written to make sense simply by saying something like
MC-"I dont even need my gun for this, you're going down Carter!"; making it a self imposed limitation.
I saw 1 place where such a scene made sense, it was in a Erotic novel called "
You must be registered to see the links
" (fantastic btw, found it it by complete chance),
where its a over the cloths handjob, on a bench behind their house just at the start of their exploring.
I think that some criticism is almost required if one as a author wants a great work at the end, as much as one tries to get everything perfect its hard to do from just one point of view.
If one doesn't care about a story then one wont waste time on it, people taking time to write their opinions show that it touched them enough to want to express it, take chasing sunsets for example, there was a really big discussion there a few chapters back (it jumped from 50 to 200+ pages or something like that), but people only cared because it had been so good up to that point.
Of course then its up to the author to take any or nothing of it into the story, as sometimes small phrases can remove big issues with little effect on the rest.
Even the we need sex crowd by this time has a point.
