okay, you want to know why i disagree? let’s do this
first off i’d love to know why you think zoe’s vain because frankly that’s an idea so out of left field that i feel like i can’t even refute it because i have no clue where you’re even getting that from textually. like… are you just saying this because she’s… a girl and on a different social rung to the other kids? (although i definitely wouldn’t even say she’s popular, to be honest. zoe has friends, sure, but she’s not like, the queen bee of their school or even in that ballpark)
we know that one person from her school thinks she’s a “stuck up bitch” but i think any perception of zoe as being stuck up comes from the fact that she’s prone to emotionally closing herself off which probably stems from years of living with her emotionally volatile brother and often being swept aside because her parents are so preoccupied with him (and she’s also just generally quite a blunt person which, sure, is not a great character trait to have but is anyone actually here for totally flawless perfect characters?). so she’s left to handle herself and her own problems meaning she’s simultaneously very mature for her age and quite emotionally lost because she ends up building emotional walls due to nobody else really having the time to help her work through her feelings. in reality we see that she’s actually very considerate and even friendly, including to people who are right at the bottom of the social ladder (she checks if evan is okay after being pushed over, and they don’t even know each other at that point), and she’s definitely not someone who gives a lot of thought to what other people think about her or the image she’s giving off to the world - the costume designer says of her “she’s a cool girl, but she’s not trying to be a cool girl”, and several of the things evan says about her in if i could tell her corroborate that.
hell, if you’re looking for a straight up exposition dump of several personality traits and quirks zoe has, even if they’re viewed through the rose-coloured lens of how evan feels about her, just go to if i could tell her. she’s artistic, a little quirky, and, yeah, she doesn’t care what people think of her (”he wondered how you learned to dance like the rest of the world isn’t there”)
also, and i’m only going to touch on this briefly but calling zoe “dramatic” because of, presumably, how she responds to her brother abusing her and evan lying to her and betraying her trust? that’s gonna be a big old yikes from me, buddy
moving on, obviously, yes, a lot of what we see from her emotionally is related to evan and connor (and to her parents as well) but this is really because… this is a show with only eight characters and evan and connor happen to have direct impacts on zoe’s life. we could literally say the same of a lot of the other characters because that’s… how… the plot works.
but it’s definitely more nuanced than “love” and “hate”. and i think it’s interesting that you accuse zoe of being so black and white when that’s a phrase she uses herself in requiem. zoe’s relationship with connor and his memory is fascinating because he treated her terribly and she’s grappling with whether or not to forgive him, grieve him, etc as a result of that. despite what she says about him in requiem it’s clear that she was actually desperate to connect to connor again and find any indication that they could have repaired their relationship; she clings to the idea of “connor” mentioning her in his “note”, and only really starts to become receptive to the idea of grieving him and moving on once she has indication that actually he didn’t hate her after all. she loves and despises her brother at the same time, and part of her character arc is an insight into the complexities of dealing with the deaths of people who mistreated us. i think, really, zoe initially clings to her hatred of connor and viewing their relationship through a very black and white lens because it’s so difficult and painful for her to acknowledge any of the good parts of their relationship, or that she still sort of loves her brother, because it is confusing and scary and painful to grapple with those complex conflicting emotions
as for her relationship with evan, i think it’s interesting that you put “love” in inverted commas because i’m guessing that means you fall into the camp of “zoe only thought she was into evan because of the things he did pertaining to the lie”. i personally don’t subscribe to that. i think their relationship is messy and complicated, to steal evan’s words, and i think in the actual initiating of things there’s a few crossed wires in zoe’s brain between gratitude and love, but i also think it’s really clear that she genuinely cares about evan. i think the whole point of the conversation before if i could tell her is to show that there’s already this burgeoning chemistry between them before evan really brings connor into things (i think in particular laura dreyfuss’s delivery of the line “you’re weird” is SO flirty)
you say that zoe’s just there to impact other characters, but i think it’s the other way round - a lot of who zoe is as a person is influenced by how other people have treated her. i kind of brought this up with regard to how she’s quite emotionally closed off. but i also don’t think she’s a prop or not a great character herself - a lot of her arc, as i’ve said, is about learning to grapple with and accept her conflicting emotions (a lot of which relate to connor and evan because, uh, connor’s her brother who was horrible to her for probably years and also Just Fucking Died, and evan comes in and completely overturns everything zoe thought she knew about her brother like… do you really want and expect her to have her own totally independent plotline about like, competing for a solo in jazz band or some shit in the midst of all that?!). she’s struggling with suddenly becoming her own person after years of being in connor’s shadow, but she also can’t do that yet because everything’s still about connor even when he’s dead, which is where only us comes in (”my whole life, everything has always been about connor. i just want… i need something just for me”). and, yeah, she’s learning a lot about trust, and shades of grey, and forgiveness, which i think is where the end of the show comes in
i think zoe coming to the orchard and getting that closure with evan is a sign of how both characters have grown, and i think zoe actually has found herself by that point, or as much as any 18 year old girl can find herself by the time she graduates high school. even though evan is another person who’s mistreated her and betrayed her trust, zoe by the time of the finale is able to accept the nuance of the situation and that it wasn’t all horrible (”everybody needed it for something”). it’s clear that she doesn’t totally forgive evan, and they’re never going to go back to how they were, and she doesn’t want things to be that way even though she acknowledges and feels some longing for what could have been. but she also knows that what could have been wasn’t, and that’s okay, because that’s not how life works sometimes but she can cope with that. she doesn’t come running back to evan, because she doesn’t want or need to, and i think interpreting that scene as anything other than a sign of zoe finding herself (as a direct parallel to evan’s growth that he then goes on to verbalise more explicitly because he’s… uh… the protagonist) is a huge disservice both to her as a character and to steven levenson’s writing
so yeah tl;dr op this post couldn’t be more wrong if you tried xo