Full spoilers for both seasons.
The premise's hidden cruelty. Holo is not rescued in the premiere — she defects. She was bound to a village by a promise to guarantee good harvests, and she leaves because the farmers stopped believing in her. Everything that follows, including her later fear of abandonment, is coloured by the fact that she was left first, and by her own knowledge that she abandoned a contract in return.
Season one, first arc (Pazzio). Lawrence's scheme around silver-coin purity turns on information that others want suppressed, and it goes wrong physically rather than financially. The arc's real function is to reveal Holo's true form — the enormous wolf — establishing both that she is genuinely a deity and that her power is useless against the problems that will actually threaten them.
Season one, second arc (Ruvinheigen). Lawrence's ambition finally outruns his judgment: the venture collapses and leaves him in ruinous debt, forcing a desperate salvage scheme with the shepherd Norah, a Church-dependent outsider Holo instinctively resents. This is the series' first structural reversal — the competent merchant is broke, and the god in his cart cannot buy him out of it. The following OVA, Wolf and Amber Melancholy, deliberately spends its runtime on the celebratory feast afterward with Lawrence, Norah and Holo, quietly stating that the meal is the point and the money never was.
Season two. The scale rises to guilds, foreign consortiums and market manipulation, and with it the emotional exposure. Holo begins engineering distance — including entertaining alternatives to Lawrence — not out of caprice but because she has done the arithmetic on outliving him, and the second season's arcs repeatedly hinge on Lawrence being unable to tell the difference between her manipulation and her fear. Wolf and Lonely Smile (episode 10) brings that pattern to its breaking point.
The finale, Wolf and Endless Tears. Lawrence leaves Holo with traders as a matter of business calculation, then is forced to reconsider his plans; the reversal leads to a violent confrontation in which his future with her is directly at stake. The resolution is not a commercial triumph. Lawrence sets aside his lifelong dream of owning a shop — for now — and declares his love. The retroactive meaning of the whole series lands here: every negotiated exchange, every arc in which he priced a risk correctly, was training for the single moment when he refuses to price something at all.
What the ending does not resolve. They never reach Yoitsu. The anime stops far short of the light novels' conclusion, so the questions the journey was built on — whether Holo's homeland still exists, and what happens to a human's life measured against a wolf's — are left open. Read strictly, the finale is a commitment, not a destination.