Throughout the recap in each chapter, Sean has labelled each friend or helper as an animal, and it makes sense as to why for some of them:
Brody: He is seen as a bear. While the appearance of one is pretty obvious, there is also how he is portrayed as one initially. At first, Sean sees him as pretty creepy, but he turns out to be pretty friendly and helpful when the Diaz brothers were trying to escape from the racist gas station owner. In real life, bears are not as vicious as portrayed in the media, usually running away from humans and only attack when they have no other food or defending themselves or their young. Bears are known to be solitary animals, and Brody chose to travel alone and live in his car because he didn't feel like he fit into his parents' lifestyle.
In gay slang, Brody is also a bear. This is assumedly unintentional on Sean's part.
Claire and Stephen Reynolds: Like the Diaz brothers, they are also wolves, but Sean isn't as close to them as his father's side of the family. This is a subtle hint as, despite resentment, he still sees his maternal grandparents as a family in the end as they helped them escaped from the cops.
Chris: He is seen as a raccoon, who are seen as scavengers and thieves. While Chris doesn't steal, he does scavenge things as part of his superhero fantasy, from his chores to stuff that can be seen as garbage. Rather ironically, his domino mask painted on his face looks like a raccoon mask.
Cassidy, Finn, and their group: Hounds (specifically, dogs) to parallel Sean and Daniel's wolves motif. Like the wolf, dogs have a pack mentality but unlike wolves, dogs are domesticated. Each member had their own families, but they were either abandoned or they ran away due to abuse and have formed a pack of their own together. Their counterculture appearances can mimic different appearances of dogs as well, as Merrill using their jobs as a way to domestic them but, as wolves can't be domesticated, he's a lot more suspicious of Sean and Daniel.
Reverend Fischer: A coyote. Coyotes are portrayed as a creature with dual meaning, but most commonly, they are seen as tricksters. While a benevolent trickster may be seen as a teacher of past mistakes, the Reverend uses this portrayal to manipulate Daniel into following her. In actually, she follows the more negative portrayal, using her trickery to cause more harm to others, such as causing Sarah Lee to not get treatment for her pneumonia and convincing Daniel to abandon Sean.
Karen: Again, a wolf. In this case, she follows the lone wolf portrayal in that she spent years on her own before encountering Sean, and she's offering help on her own terms, even having her own hideout alone.
Cassidy's attraction to Sean can partially be explained in him being a person of color. Cassidy's backstory reveals she fled home because her racist family abused and even threatened to murder her for dating a non-white guy. Now that she's somewhat free to make her own choices, Sean represents a throwback to the kind of love she wasn't allowed to have at home.
Sean doesn't mention his sexuality until Finn says he doesn't see gender in relationships. In real life, male bisexuality is one of the least represented portrayals in media, especially compared to their female counterparts. So of course Sean is not going to mention that he likes boys as well until Finn reveals that he does, especially when he's 16. Even if nothing comes between them, Sean will be relieved enough that another male likes boys and girls that he feels comfortable to come out.
Each of the episodes takes place around a U.S. holiday, and they do capture the spirit of each of them:
Roads takes place around Halloween, which celebrates the spookiness. Both Sean and Daniel are afraid of what happened and around the middle of the episode, gets kidnapped by a racist in the middle of the storm, looking very much like a slasher flick. Also, when Daniel reveals his powers, the scene looks like he's possessed.
Sean and Daniel are Mexican, and the holiday they celebrate is known as The Day of The Dead, when they celebrate the lives of those who passed on. Talk about irony.
Rules takes place on Christmas Holidays, a time for family and gift giving. Sean and Daniel swing by their grandparents for a few days and get to know them better. There is also Sean being involved with Chris's dad and how he's still depressed on losing his wife.
Wastelands is right after Valentine's Day, a day of love and companionship. Sean spends some time with a group of people who are around his age and are in a similar situation with him and for the first time, can enjoy the company of people since he went on his journey. Rather fittingly, this is also the episode where he can form a relationship with either Cassidy or Finn.
Faith is right after Easter, a Christian religious holiday celebrating the resurrection of Jesus. Daniel labeled as a miracle of God by a cult leader, and his behavior is almost to the point where the old Daniel is dead. When he finally snapped out of his brainwashing, it symbolizes the rebirth of the old Daniel, just with more maturity.
Wolves is on the 4th of July weekend, also known as Independence Day in America. This episode really brings up the question if Sean and Daniel would be better off in Mexico or not and both the merits and criticism of America, that there are racists who make immigrants' lives difficult but, at the same time, shows that the immigrants want to legally live in America because they see living there to be much better than their homeland.
David notes that he has never met someone with powers before, despite having interacted with Max on multiple occasions. Then you remember that Max' powers revolved around rewinding time, and thus no-one except for Chloe (to whom Max specifically made an attempt to prove the existence of her powers) knows/knew this power exists. In fact, if Chloe doesn't survive the events of the first game while Arcadia Bay does, Max' powers have not even manifested in the current timeline at all, making Daniel effectively the only known person to have developed such supernatural powers.
If you take a look at the titles of each episode, you’ll notice that there's Idiosyncratic Episode Naming of One-Word Title: (Roads, Rules, Wastelands, Faith, and Wolves). However, one of those titles stands out: Faith. The reason for this is that every single other title is a plural. This could be completely intentional, as this is the only episode in which Sean is completely on his own for a majority of its duration, specifically without Daniel.
Despite being at odds, Claire and Karen are quiet similar. They don't care about big cities, preferring a tiny community of like-minded people, who take care of each other. They both don't use modern technique, and both stall the police so Sean and Daniel get a head start running away. The only difference is that Claire is controlling, while Karen lets the children do their own thing, possibly because she remembers how suffocating Claire's treatment could be.
The game breaks the One-Steve Limit several times, with Sean and Daniel notably both sharing their first names with secondary characters from Life Is Strange (Sean Prescott and Daniel DaCosta), as well as there being two minor characters called Arthur in 2 (Arthur "Jinx" Lee and Arthur Petersen). While possibly just oversight, it may also have been a way of throwing players off the scent prior to David's return in the final episode, since he's mentioned several times before he appears on-screen without any explicit indication that he's a recurring character.
Fridge Horror
In episode 2, Daniel will kill a mountain lion out of grief for Mushroom's death. If left alone, the mountain lion will take Mushroom's body away. A little known fact about mountain lions, only female mountain lions hunt small animals. If they have cubs, then they will take the body away for them to eat, or they will bury it for later consumption as part of an instinct called "cashing". With that in mind, if Daniel kills the mountain lion, then he might have doomed her 2–4 kittens in the process.
Episode 5 confirms that, if Arcadia Bay was sacrificed, Joyce unfortunately perished in the storm. Since she was presumably still in the Two Whales when she died, this very likely means that everyone else that took shelter in the diner also died. This includes Warren, and if they were still alive at that point, Frank and Pompidou. Considering that we have David and Victoria as confirmed survivors, this can either be a huge Player Punch to fans of those characters (especially Frank and Pompidou since they are determinant and the former being alive to see the finale means he's gone through a Heel–Face Turn) or a Hope Spot assuming they escaped somehow.
True Colors and Steph's Story reveal that Steph and Mikey were in Arcadia Bay when the storm happened and are also survivors, and the tie-in comics confirm that Alyssa also survived, along with a decent number of unnamed residents of the town who were able to either find shelter or escape. With the exception of Drew, Steph's mother Lita, and Victoria's parents (all of whom died), no other named character's status has been explicitly mentioned either way,note Steph's father George is still alive in this timeline but he simply wasn't in Arcadia Bay at the time of the storm, so he's not really a fellow survivor so it is possible that there are plenty of other supporting characters from the Arcadia Bay arc who are still around. Just, sadly, not Joyce.
With Joyce dead, both of Chloe’s biological parents have now died, and her flawed but well-meaning “stepdouche” David is her sole surviving parental figure.
The Lone Wolf ending has Daniel survive on his own in Puerto Lobos following Sean's death at the border. With no one close to him, he seems despondent and with few goals in life. His powers, however, are still ever so present and more powerful than ever. The clipboard of the ending implies he has amongst other things used his powers to facilitate a "spectacular" bank heist. With such immense power at will, Daniel is not only nearly impossible to hurt, but also a potential massive danger to anything and anyone, should he choose to use his powers against them. Assuming authorities might eventually catch wind of him and attempt to capture him again, violent encounters resulting in many casualties, such as the one at the border, could occur again assuming Daniel will resist capture and defends himself.
Worsening Daniel's chances is the very fact that he has turned to crime in the first place. With destructive telekinetic powers, a willingness to kill those in his way, and every reason to lash out at the world, it's a matter of when, not if, he'll go full Tetsuo Shima.
To a lesser extent, the Blood Brothers ending has the same possible implications, although Sean exists in this timeline to keep Daniel somewhat in check. Nevertheless, authorities could still at some point catch wind of Daniel and come in to investigate.
