- Anvilicious: The novel's message is not particularly subtle: Nature Is Not Nice, anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves, and trying to force it to adapt for our convenience is always going to end badly. Also, a skill set that's based on anything but manual labor is useless and you deserve to die for having it.
- Strawman Has a Point: Tony and Yvette are odious, but they aren't completely wrong about everything.
- Their idea that getting back to nature makes people better is ridiculed, but everyone except themselves actually do become their best selves when faced with the basic task of survival and the need to band together for mutual benefit. Tony and Yvette were just wrong in thinking that you could get all the good parts of primitivism without needing to deal with the bad ones.
- Yvette's first priority when trouble starts is to make sure everyone feel emotionally supported and don't worry about anything, which shows her skewed priorities. However, even Mostar admits at one point that things like morale and communal spirit are things you need in a crisis. Dealing with people's tender feelings shouldn't be the first thing on the agenda, but eventually you do have to pay them some mind.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: While we learn that hundreds (and possibly thousands) of people died when Mount Rainier erupted, we learn nothing about them, or the rescue mission to help them, and stay solely in Greenloop. This is arguably invoked, as it's the scale of the Mount Rainier disaster that allows for the comparatively small Greenloop incident to go unnoticed.
- Too Cool to Live: Mostar, a successful artist who grew up during the Bosnian War and manages to keep the entire settlement alive, given that they probably would've died of starvation before the Sasquatches even showed up if she hadn't taught them everything. She gets killed by the Sasquatch, although she dies in the final confrontation.
- Vanilla Protagonist: Kate is not particularly interesting, even after the Sasquatch attack, and shows even worse instincts than other camp members prior to that. It's not clear why Mostar has such a high opinion of her when she's still dismissive and suspicious of the others, except that she's the protagonist. Or that she's so averse to conflict, Mostar can easily force her into helping plan for the winter and mold her into a successor because she knows Kate won't resist.
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