Spoilers for Echo VN below, You have been warned now!
So in my peeking around on the internet for people's thoughts on echo, a surprisingly common sentiment I've seen from multiple places from reddit to YouTube is, bafflingly, that echo pulls its punches too much and relies heavily on the town making everyone crazy, and haunted, and I find this an insane but also somewhat interesting way of analyzing not only echo, but also stories as a whole. It's so blatantly literalist in nature that I genuinely find it hard to imagine what it is like to consume and feel impacted by fiction.
Like when Leo succumbs to the hysteria are we supposed to actually think he's just being manipulated by evil forces and that deep down he's just a cute beautiful sunshine puppy who didn't do anything wrong and should be taken with a grain of salt?
When Chase is possessed by Sam are we genuinely supposed to think that all his actions aren't his own and therefore he can't be held accountable for anything he's done?
When Carl and Jenna are possessed by the spirits of their ancestors are we supposed to believe that this all the interpersonal conflict of these century-old men, and that it speaks nothing to the way their relationship is now in present time?
When Jenna tries to flood the whole town using the dam are we supposed to take this as indubitable proof that deep down she's a blood thirsty killer who has no problems killing a whole town worth of people?
Hell, even looking past the obvious examples what about ones like how Chase is somehow able to take Flynn in a fight, a guy who is about a foot taller than him, or how he's able to get away with killing his childhood friend in public around the rest of his friend group and gets away with it.
Well the reasonable answer is that obviously, we aren't supposed to take these hyper-literal interpretations as what is actually what is happening in the story, but rather as figurative concessions to the themes and ideas of the story.
Like with the assumption you interpret echo in the same way as me, being a story that seeks to explore trauma and its recursive effects on people, all of the above actions make fairly logical sense as figurative things.
Leo isn't just getting worse from the town being haunted, the town is symbolic for trauma and the way he lives in the shackles of it without actually coming to terms with what happened, and trying to grow and leave it behind. That's why in both his good end and bad end he won't leave the town because he's not over the past yet.
Chase isn't just possessed by a guy and therefore that's why he does all his actions, it's thematic to how a common way people deal with trauma is dissociating from reality, feeling unreal, feeling like all your choices are made by someone else, and additionally represents how his guilt ways over him and is the deciding factor in everything he does.
In Carl's route it isn't just the conflict between John Begay and James Hendricks, it's that and how that generational trauma comes between them in the modern day.
In Jenna's route her contemplating destroying the whole isn't her being secretly evil, it shows how she wants to act like her past doesn't matter to her anymore and doesn't affect her now, but ends up growing into a better person from coming to terms with the fact it still deeply impacts her.
Even those smaller 'plot holes' aren't actually plot holes, they are just the things we need to accept to get to all the interesting themes and ideas in the story.
