- Other than the fact that they're both explicitly voiced by Troy Baker and Higgs' general focus on masks in the first game, there's a very odd detail: his hair is almost exactly the same as Amelie. It seems he's still not over trying to bring about the Extinction Entity, and is possibly attempting to BECOME Amelie in some psychotic, esoteric way.
- Confirmed, this character is Higgs.
- Death Stranding 2 will be more focused on combat than the first game. Two things point to this:
- The company's logo of this game, DRAWBRIDGE, has the slogan "both stick and rope, to protect and connect", implying that on top of delivery and logistics they're also involved in bodyguard and enforcement work, compared to BRIDGES that was purely focused on logistics.
- The hostile-looking humanoid robots shown at the end of the trailer would make for perfect mooks, as destroying them wouldn't cause Voidouts like killing humans would (assuming Voidouts still exist after the end of the original Death Stranding)
- Seemingly confirmed by the State of Play trailer, as it shows that Sam has access to an outright armory full of different types of weapons, is seen shooting robotic enemies, and Higgs comment that Sam 'traded [his] rope for a stick' when grabbing his gun.
- The trailer appears to show a baby clearly called Louise being kidnapped from Fragile's care by cultist/terrorist/MULE-like assailants. Louise's former BB container, used for a cryptobiote terrarium, features prominently. After the action of the sequence is over, with the baby's fate unknown, we see that when Fragile/Sam's hideout was ransacked, the "terrarium" was partly broken, leaving cryptobiotes floating around...and a ghostly, BT-like baby inside.
- So it's possible that in the kidnapping attempt, Louise's body was separated from her soul, as with Bridget/Amelie. In the following sequence, as Fragile prepares to introduce Sam to her "new crew", she seems to be wearing a BB harness. So it's not unlikely that, with Louise's body kidnapped by cultists, the plot of DS2 will follow Sam attempting to rescue her body (her Ha) while keeping her soul (her Ka) alive in her old BB pod. This would also parallel with Mama's BT baby.
- It's also possible that whoever's kidnapped Louise - Higgs or someone else? - they are planning to use her as a tool to recreate the Extinction that was not made possible with Amelie, around whom they have created an extinction cult.
- Additionally, while Sam's hair is white, he is not that visibly aged from his last appearance. The cryptobiotes, hovering out of Lou's broken BB container, have also turned white (in the early establishing shots some of them appear orange/yellow). So rather than Sam having gotten old, it's possible he's suffering from a complication of his DOOMs - or an effect of connecting to Lou's Ka. Even the shock of losing her might have caused it.
- The tagline of the game's trailer is "Should We Have Connected?". This provides three obvious meanings (while possibly having other less obvious interpretations): it could refer to the Chiral Network, implying that reconnecting America into the UCA was a strategic mistake that has created weaknesses (thus necessitating the transition from the Bridges corporation to Drawbridge, symbolising the ability to revoke an established connection); it may refer to Sam illegally reclaiming Louise, a piece of "broken" government-owned "hardware", as his child, having connected with her after initial attempts to decommission her...
- ...or it could indicate that Higgs, despite having created an apocalypse cult around Bridget/Amelie's memory and continuing to be a grandiose villain, is traumatised from losing Bridget/Amelie as a leader and losing his 'purpose' without her mission to end the world, and resents Sam/Fragile/Bridges/The UCA for not trying to fight to connect with him.
- To recap: The last scene of DS1 involved Sam trying to bring back Lou, who seemed to be dying. When he hugs Lou, she is suddenly brought back holding Amelie's quipu while five other baby BTs look at the scene.
Amelie brought back Lou as a last "gift" of sorts for Sam, but to do so, she had to infuse Lou's soul with her own, or just straight up put her own soul into Lou's body (de-aged and wiped clean from her memories though). The five baby BTs are the past extinction entities, perhaps "assisting" Amelie in her transfer or just looking over her. We know from DS1that the entities can appear in different forms, like the five humanoids in the sky.
This is why someone would like Lou to be dead. I propose that it was Higgs' people, who will want to rid the world of any pieces of Amelie left in order for Higgs to "ascend" and take over Amelie's role as the Apocalypse Maiden, which is implied by his red armor, blonde hair, quipu and, most importantly, his mask. Lou's spirit, however, lingers on, possibly using the pod she was kept in as an anchor- it's probably stronger than an average spirit thanks to having a piece of an EE in it. This is why Higgs is so shocked when he feels "life" in Lou's pod- he was sure that she was gone. When Sam asks Higgs if he was the one to kill Lou, Higgs says that Sam "has no idea about anything going on". Both Higgs and Sam are the two people who knew Amelie and what she's capable of the best, with Higgs being honest about it to himself, while Sam's vision is clouded due to his close, parental relationship with her. This is why Lou posesses the samurai bot and starts to fight Higgs- to protect Sam, but also to stop Higgs from revealing the truth about her.
Higgs then says that if Sam wants to learn more about Lou, his pain is only going to get worse- indeed, given how much pain Sam has already went through thanks to Amelie, finding out that his baby was "altered" without his knowledge or consent will make him feel betrayed again. He might go through an arc where he's not sure how to feel about Lou anymore, but he'll come around and accept her as his daughter no matter who she is, something like Harry Mason from Silent Hill.
As for Amelie's motivation- she wanted to be able to be reborn as a normal girl. She was pulled into the whole Extinction event very early, and because of that she never got to experience the life of a regular human. She loved humanity and wanted to be a part of it but couldn't, and in Lou she found a way to make her dream come true. She knew that Sam is a good person and a kind, caring dad, so she knew that the piece of her will be in good hands. This presents a moral dillema as to if Amelie was right to do so- On one hand she brought back Lou for Sam, but on the other she altered her very soul permanently without anyone's knowledge or consent and potentially brought danger to Lou's life, not to mention that she got to fulfill her own wish, so it wasn't entirely selfless.
Both Lou and Amelie are associated with angelic imagery- Amelie is called "Our sweet little angel of death" by Higgs in DS1, and Lou is consistently potrayed with angel wings in DS2. Amelie is potrayed in red and Lou is mostly in blue, showing that they are opposites- Amelie is an angel of death while Lou is of protection.
In that way, the roles will be now reversed- Amelie looked after Sam when he was a child and during his Expedition, and now Sam is looking over baby Lou/Amelie's safety.
"On the Beach", the subtitle, may partially refer to Sam's and Amelie's last meeting on the Beach, where Amelie decided to stay to protect humanity and Sam. She gave Sam a choice to stay and watch the extinction with her, but Sam refused- Not wanting to part with him forever, she decided to send a piece of her to him in the land of the living through Lou.
With that being said...
- I've already explained why I theorize that Amelie put her soul in Lou.
Chrystalis (Elle Fanning's character whose name we don't know yet as of trailer two) is Amelie's body that passed through the Seam, got "encased" in the cocoon and was supposed to emerge in the living world. The specific wording used in the trailer is "chrystalis", which is specifically a cocoon used by butterflies and moths. When Fragile and Ship Doctor are opening the Chrystalis, we can see that it is full of tar, and we know that the tar contains amminoacids and is capable of creating life. The specific way butterflies and moths develop is by encasing themselves in a cocoon and liquifying; Amelie's body (or a part of it) was liquified in the cocoon and remade, resulting in Elle's character emerging- perhaps some genes got shuffled in the process and that's why Elle's character looks different. Because Amelie's soul is in Lou, Elle's character is soulless, which might be the reason why she doesn't remember who she is. We can see a scene in which her body is pulled upwards off a table, and another one where she seems to have white strands attached to her- the only characters associated with being "up" or "in the sky" are the five EEs we see on the Beach- perhaps they are trying to pull up her body for her to join them, not realizing that Elle isn't entirely Amelie, and instead is a "rebuilt" version of her. Maybe Elle's character would know who she is if she got to develop in the chrystalis on her own pace, and wasn't forcefully pulled out by Fragile and Ship Medic.
The octopus we see in Lou's pod at the end of the first trailer is what remained of Amelie on her Beach. Her body and soul are in the world of the living, and whatever remained of Amelie, be it some kind of an EE essence or such, evolved into the octopus we see at the end of trailer 1. We know that the Seam has its own ecology (this is where cryptobiotes originated from), so a being evolving on the Beach is technically possible, especially if it's one as powerful as an EE. After the Extinction happened on Amelie's Beach, it has changed radically and she evolved into a being more suited for survival on the Beach. In the first scene where we see the Seam in DS1, we can see an octopus-like creature swimming at the surface, so we know that beings like that exist there. Cut off from humanity and lacking both her Ha and Ka, Amelie started to turn more animalistic in both looks and behavior. The octopus is red, we can see that in the first trailer, and red is a color associated with Amelie. Perhaps now Amelie stalks the Seam and will get in the conflict with the Magellan, mirroring the stories of giant squids and octopuses attacking ships in different legends, like the Kraken, not realizing that the Magellan is not a threat to her. Octopuses are often use to symbolize reaching power, perhaps mirroring the Magellan's mission of spreading the chiral network away from the UCA, with the chiral network being the work of Amelie's life.
- She's an unrelated character
- It's either a nightmare or a vision that takes place on a Beach, like the Cliff encounters in DS1.
- If you look closely, Sam is wearing his DS1prologue white porter uniform, he even has tears on the same spots on his chest. This is either a dream or otherwise not really happening.
