Examples of Alternative Character Interpretation in Until Dawn:
- This can be applied to pretty much everyone due to game mechanics.
- The amount of involvement Chris had in the prank on Hannah is unclear. He may not have known about it, knew about it and just let it happen, or even got Josh completely wasted so they could pull it off without any struggle. At the very least, he feels guilty about that (and is, rather tellingly, the only one to do so regardless of player choice), but since Chris is a Nice Guy who's been best friends with Josh for years, that could still mean nothing about his actual guilt.
- Sam by the end of the game has 2 popular interpretations; A Stepford Smiler trying to hide her trauma as she tried telling the police about the Wendigos, and knowingly sending police into a dangerous situation, having gone mad from what she saw. Alternatively, she may have known she was sending people to their deaths, but decided forcing people into a situation where the supernatural was exposed was better than letting countless people just stumble across the Wendigos or giving ineffectual warnings.
- While Jessica is clearly the one set up as the Dumb Blonde, sometimes Sam comes off as being not so different, as she's actually one of the characters who has more moments of Genre Blindness during the game. She leaves behind Ashley in the tunnels because she's so hurried to find Mike she can't wait for Ashley to close the manhole (which can result in Ashley getting killed), and later chooses to split up from the group, not once but twice, despite knowing there are wendigos out there (other characters with less Plot Armor than her may have already been killed in a similar situation). Still, if the player collects enough clues, she will figure out that the Psycho is Josh, though the clues in question she finds make it impossible not to realize what's happening. She's also notably the only character to question the possibility of Emily turning into a Wendigo if she's bitten.
- Hannah. Her crush on Mike is shown as doomed from the start, but there's also the fact that she knowingly went after her friend's boyfriend and quite openly pined for him (with a clue heavily hinting that the reason she got her tattoo was because she hoped it would impress Mike), so she can be seen as less sympathetic and innocent than she is portrayed In-Universe. Separately, during the climax, she tackles another wendigo that is chasing Sam as she sprints towards the light switch to destroy the lodge and the wendigos with it. Perhaps instead of being an animalistic continuation of Hannah's previous fights with the other wendigos, it's Hannah breaking through to save Sam, who was her best friend. Mike, while getting injured, is the only character who doesn't get outright killed by Wendigo Hannah, while two of the most brutal deaths are dealt to Jessica and Emily, Mike's girlfriend and ex respectively. Does Wendigo Hannah still retain some feelings towards Mike? Is she intentionally pulling a Murder the Hypotenuse?
- There's also another interpretation: that perhaps, mental illness or neurodiversity run in the family. Hannah is described by Beth as "naive," Hannah's diaries are very pink and girly with rather large, untidy handwriting (often in coloured pens/pencil), and she's using compatibility quizzes from magazines that seem to be aimed at teenagers a few years younger than her. It could easily be that, emotionally speaking, she's a little behind her peers - and they would have known this before pulling the prank on her.
- Ashley potentially condemning Chris to die is probably the single most divisive (non-)action she can do in the game. For some fans, this shows that she is both heartless and vindictive, as she, without much emotion, turns on the good friend she had feelings for and leaves him to die when she could have easily and safely saved him, for the sake of revenge. Some fans believe that the whole thing was out of character for Ashley and simply written in for shock value and to display the "butterfly effect" the game uses all of the time. Some fans have also argued that Ashley was simply in shock or too terrified to react in time to open the door, citing her behaviour and dialogue afterwards.note This divided view of Ashley extends to her outside of this scenario as well: an irrational Bitch in Sheep's Clothing whose concern for her own wellbeing outweighs any concern for her friends and who will deny any blame and even not tell the others that Emily's bite wouldn't have turned her out of self-interest? Or an anxious but nice enough girl placed in extremely traumatic and stressful situations who can be pushed to her limits and end up doing horrible things, among them trying to cast a friend out to almost certain death because she is Wrong Genre Savvy and thinks she's infected and will end up killing Ashley and their friends, but who is sincerely sorry when she realizes her mistakes? Continuing with her infamous scenario involving how she allows Chris to die by the hands of a Wendigo, should he decide to sacrifice her in the Chris Vs. Ashley trap from before has also made a split and headed debate regarding on how the situation plays out from Ashley's perspective. One group perceives Ashley as selfish, spiteful, and two-faced for refusing to open the door to save Chris, especially since Ashley begging to "let me choose to save you" can be easily misinterpreted by some players as giving Chris her permission to shoot her in a dire situation where both characters were on the chopping block, while others believe that Ashley was too frightened and wary of Chris due to his early decision to sacrifice his crush, who she thought he loved, to save his own skin perhaps not once but twice and hesitated to help him in case he makes yet another decision to sacrifice her if she opened the door with the threat of the wendigo right behind him.
- While Ashley gets a lot of hatred for her possible choice of condemning him to die, Chris is usually seen as an innocent Nice Guy, despite that fact that he can try to shoot Ashley to save himself. If players had been given the Sadistic Choice scenario through Ashley's eyes, she would witness how the guy she likes and who tells her several times through the game that he would always save her, make the decision to sacrifice his crush to save his own skin, and doesn't even make any attempt to console or apologize to Ashley before and after making his decision to shoot her, once the trap turns out to be faked by Josh. While it doesn't forgive Ashley's later actions, flipping the perspective of the two characters still puts Chris in a different light. There's also his own 'killer-in-the-basement' prank he plays on Sam and Josh earlier on, the same guy who had lost his own sisters to a different kind of thoughtless prank in the exact same building done to them a year ago and is trying to get over the trauma of his family falling apart due to his friends' actions. While Josh appeared to have taken the joke well, given how he still sets up Chris as the main subject in his own twisted revenge prank against his friends to avenge his sisters, it's possible that Chris' tasteless prank only served to fuel Josh's desires to formulate his plan, or at least include Chris as a victim, since he had no part in the original prank.
- Josh: His motives for the elaborate prank on his friends are unclear as he gives us three different explanations. At one point he claims it was revenge on his friends for their role in his sisters' disappearance. But then he says it was just for the sake of getting famous by uploading the prank to the internet. Then at another point he says it was an elaborate attempt to get his best friend Chris to finally confess his feelings to Ashley. And some fans have suggested it was done out of insecurities over his attraction towards Sam. The fact that the prank (or at least what we saw of it) centered around Sam, Chris and Ashley - the three characters who were least involved in the prank on Josh's sisters - supports these latter views.
- Josh has become the subject this as of MatPat's latest theory
. To summarize, MatPat theorizes through the observations of Josh's auditory and visual hallucinations along with delusions and other symptoms that he has schizophrenia. However, he goes further to point out that despite Josh going to several psychiatrists, the help wasn't effective because he was misdiagnosed. MatPat points out that Josh was diagnosed with depression several times and given medicine for such. However, while depression focuses on serotonin, schizophrenia focuses on dopamine. Therefore, the meds did nothing to help Josh, even as he kept upping the doses in some vain hope for improvement and may have made things even worse. Ultimately, he's portrayed as a very disturbed individual who despite the whole game about being choice, has no choice (schizophrenia being a genetic disorder, being misdiagnosed and not treated properly, unable to save his sisters and ultimately unable to save himself) in what happened and worse, the player can do nothing to save him. - The staff at the mental hospital. Were they really experimenting on the miners, or were the miners blaming them for their transformation into wendigos? The prequel, The Inpatient, seems to confirm that they were indeed experimenting on them.
- A small, easily missed, and subtle detail about Mike in Chapter 8 should the player decide to execute Emily out of fear that her bite from a Wendigo is infectious and may change her into one of them. If the player checks Mike's Character Traits after shooting Emily, they will notice that for some odd or very unsettling reason, his 'Honest' and 'Funny' traits go up. Was Mike amused by the fact that he had just killed someone, especially since it was his ex-girlfriend? Or is he writing it off as a joke to cover up the mental shock of doing such a thing? The credits scene will also show Mike break into several inappropriate grins as he is trying to explain what happened and justify himself while at the same time his voice gets more panicked, high-pitched, and emotional, which could suggest that the connection with "Funny" stems from Mirthless Laughter due to shock and nerves or that like Sam in her ending, he is experiencing some degree of Sanity Slippage.
- There are many among the LGBT fanbase who see Sam as a lesbian who had feelings for either Hannah or Beth. Given her lines towards the end of the game about getting closer to Josh after the twins disappearance, you could interpret that as Sam getting close to Josh as a way of coping over the death of her girlfriend/crush.
