#The one from AW1 who was their own dark entity and died in AN and the current who is just the Dark Presence

[the-ratronaut]

Okay, so I just wanna ramble about some Alan Wake stuff. Particularly, what the fuck is going on with the character Thomas Zane and my theory on it. Fair warning, this has spoilers and also I am not completely done with my playthrough of AW2's final draft. I got a couple more chapters to go so if anything happens in the last few that makes me look stupid here that's my own fault for playing slowly.

This is a long post, so I'll keep it under a cut.

Okay, so what the fuck is going on with Zane? Every time he appears Tom has been radically different. We have the poet Tom from the original game, the clone of Alan from Control and the wild filmmaking auteur from 2. The games provide the explainations for Tom's changing background by saying the poet was a fictional character made up by the filmmaker Tom that he was taking the role of... but is that true? Personally, I think it is not, or at least was no, true.

There are multiple characters who still remember the poet and his works, Alan, Jesse Faden and Cynthia Weaver in particular. Now, I can't say exactly why that is with any authority, but I have a guess. All three of those people have something in common, they are deeply connected to the paranatural. Alan for obvious reasons, Jesse due to her connection to Polaris and Cynthia due to her connection to both the clicker, the angel lamp and Zane as an entity.

Now why does that matter? Simple, Saga Anderson and the Anderson brothers already showed in AW2 that due to their paranatural abilities as seers they are able to shrug off the changes in reality brought on by the Dark Place. Now we can't say for sure if this is true for all parautilitarians, we can say that there is precedence for it. If that fact applies to the three listed above, we can make an assumption about the truth about Zane.

If my leaps in logic are actually sound, then that implies that the original Zane was not a filmmaker, but was in fact a poet. It brings into question the current Zane. It implies that there must have been a shift in reality that changed Zane into a filmmaker. Now I can't say why this happened, there's a lot of failed plans that Alan had in the Dark Place and it could've been the result of one of those that brought about the current Zane... but that still doesn't explain everything, does it?

There was an ARG that Sam Lake put on after AW1 that centered around a blog called "This House of Dreams". It was about a woman moving into a house in a town called Ordinary (This happening 10 years after the Ordinary AWE). There's a lot going on in this blog but to sum it up she finds a shoebox full of poems by Zane and receives dreams explaining things further seemingly from Zane. The last of those dreams implying that the Zane we see in AW1 is not the original Zane, but a "bright presence" who Zane gave his body to as he dived into the Dark Place, using his last poem to create a safe haven within it for himself and the original Barbara Jagger.

So, that gives us a fourth Zane to account for, while also changing what we know about the Zanes we've already seen. This also implies that the Zane we know from AW1 was probably also a creation of Alan's as his fate doesn't match the one from This House of Dreams. It also solidifies the idea that the original Zane was not a filmmaker, as we see even more of his work. This all together means that no Zane we've met in a game has been unaltered by the story.

Not, what do I think this all means? I think there are at least two, but probably three separate Zanes. The solid two are the Poet who left this reality, and the Bright Presence who took Zane's form and is the one we know from AW1. Looking at the filmmaker Zane is where this gets weird. I believe one of two things is true. Either they are still the Bright Presence but they've been so heavily edited by Alan's writing that they are unrecognizable. Or they are a third entity that at some point latched onto Alan's writing for their own goals. If AW2 Zane is still the bright presence, it wouldn't explain the hostility and desperation he showed towards Alan, not unless Alan's rewrites really did change it to something very different from the benevolent diving suited entity in AW1. If it's a different being entirely, that begs the question of what the hell happened to the bright presence in the last 13 years. Not to mention why is the Control Zane so identical to Wake? Is that one some sort of form of the filmmaker that's still a WIP that Alan is writing? One where the details still needed to be filled out?