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thelivingautomaton · 2 years ago

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*also i really really wish there was more stuff in the game with alan and casey (either real world casey or dark place casey) interacting* <- LITERALLY SAME‼️‼️ I had to scramble for footage for this edit but this whole concept is so intriguing to me and I wish we had a whole DLC with them (also thank you for nice tags under the rb ur too kind🫡)

(yes ofc, your graphics go so hard i love them!) and YES, it's such a wild concept to me especially because like. ok lemme put this under a cut for big-time alan wake 2 spoilers but also i kind of word-vomited a lot of percolating thoughts on the game, LOL oops

so for maybe 75% of the game i was CERTAIN that i had the game's twists Figured Out by the end of chapter 1, and i was sure that one of those twists was gonna be "fbi agent casey is 1:1 the same person as the fictional detective casey that alan's books are about, or even if he's not, agent casey was still created wholesale by alan as part of the overarching scheme to get saga to bright falls and have her assume the role of 'hero' in getting him out of the dark place". (this was part of my overarching idea re: saga's storyline which was that the version of events where saga lived in watery and logan drowned was the "true" reality, and alan rewrote her life/memories basically to "make" her into a better/less traumatized hero figure, and also get rid of stuff that would prevent her from wanting to go "back" to bright falls)

so like, at first i felt kind of "meh" about the reveal that fbi agent casey is the "real"/original/whatever version and fictional detective casey arose from alan using echoes of his life as writing material (compounded with the game making it pretty clear that alan can't wholesale make/create new stuff, just rewrite or guide what's already "real", and the seemingly straightforward reveal that saga's remembered version of events is "real" because she's immune to retcon bullshit). but the more i think about it the more i actually think it works really well and if anything is a much more interesting take on the trope of "fictional character and their creator interact/come into conflict"?

like, rather than the usual angst of "oh my god, am i real, is anything in my life real, does anything i do matter when my life is a fictional narrative", you get the more interesting flavors of inner drama both from casey (i.e. "i am a real person, but exactly how much of my memories and life can i trust, how much might have been twisted or rewritten by an outside hand to make a better story, could my past mistakes/regrets be erased, have they already been?") and also more importantly alan (i.e. "holy shit i've been taking Actual Real People and treating them like paper dolls to cut up and rearrange however i want to make a good story out of it")

plus by establishing that alan can't just make shit exist + nobody in the story is a made-up creation (well, i mean. within the narrative nobody is fictional, lol), it helps ground the story and characters and maintain your investment in their struggles and the stakes. and it also helps align the broader cosmology of the alan wake games with the wider remedy-verse by maintaining a baseline "reality" that presumably follows certain rules vis a vis the way objects of power and parautilitarian abilities work. like, the rules might be fucking weird, and we as players are probably getting only 20% of all the information because in-universe people know at most like, 40% of all the information, but it's clear that SOMEWHERE remedy has a bible of rules for How Their World Works so that they can keep things internally consistent across their games

with that all being said i also think they've left things open-ended enough that they can take a lot of these concepts in a bunch of directions simultaneously -- alan can still manifest/write up distorted funhouse mirror versions of "real" characters within the dark place who can yell at him for being a jackass or try to kill him or whatever, i wouldn't be surprised if one or both dlcs have further appearances of dark place casey and/or other "fictional" versions of casey written by alan, not to mention that real world fbi agent casey could easily get sucked into further metafictional alternate reality/narrative bullshit by virtue of how he got possessed by the dark presence (albeit briefly). like the only thing i'm for sure certain about is that remedy will probably keep finding new and exciting ways of pulling the rug out from under my feet, LOL

#armored-core6 #ask #alan wake #alan wake 2 spoilers #alan wake 2 #again sorry for the word vomit i am feeling so normal about these games <3 (lying)#also i just finished playing max payne 1 so it is FASCINATING to compare and contrast the approach to storytelling then vs now #like. this game would not exist as it does without “max you're in a computer game” and all those ideas first utilized in max payne #but now the way the metanarrative(s) are being set up carries a LOT more nuance and subtlety imo #that being said. if aw3 doesn't have as its climax alan briefly meeting Real Life Game Developer Sam Lake. i will be a little sad

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networkuuuu · 29 days ago

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