So, this is a case where I don't know if I just don't know all the deep lore of Alan Wake or if there simply isn't as much. I played through the original game and its two DLC chapters after finishing Control (with the release of Alan Wake Remastered) and so I think I have the bulk of the story.
I never played Alan Wake's American Nightmare, which I think was an exclusive to Xbox (and might have been on the 360, which we have at my apartment, but we weren't doing a lot of online stuff in that console generation, and I think it was like, part of their Xbox Live service or something). But I'm given to understand that American Nightmare was basically one episode of many in which Alan tried to write himself out of the Dark Place.
As we know, and experience in the DLCs, Alan is trapped in the Dark Place as a sort of dramatic balance to allow his wife, Alice, to escape from the lake for real, rather than in a twisted mockery the way that Thomas Zane revived his girlfriend, Barbara Jagger.
As far as we know, Alice was truly herself after escaping, and we know from Control that she actually visited the FBC for an interview, in which she complained that someone who looked exactly like her husband was menacing her.
The ending of Alan Wake sees the introduction of Mr. Scratch, but as far as I can tell, outside of American Nightmare (in which he does play the key villain role and is theoretically defeated,) he doesn't really pop up in, for example, the Signal or the Writer DLCs. He's a doppelganger who seems to embody all the worst aspects of Alan's personality - I heard it described (possibly by creative director Sam Lake, who's kind of the face of Remedy Studio, and literally the face of Max Payne/Alex Casey) as if Mr. Scratch is all the worst rumors about Alan's behavior manifested.
While it's more backstory than part of the main game, Alan Wake has a reputation for drug and alcohol abuse and getting into physical altercations, and rumors that he's kind of a psychotic asshole. Of course, we know that he's not really that - just an artist struggling to keep up with the demands that fame has placed on him - but Mr. Scratch, well, is. And he seems to be a full-on monster.
While Stephen King's books are clearly the biggest point of inspiration for Alan Wake, the influence of David Lynch and particularly Twin Peaks is also a big source that the game draws from. The Oh Deer Diner we visit at the start of the game is clearly modeled on the Double R Diner from that show, and the Pacific Northwest setting as well (if it were pure King it would be either set in Maine or Colorado).
At the end of the original Twin Peaks run in the early 1990s, central protagonist Dale Cooper travels into the Black Lodge - an otherworldly place beyond our reality, not unlike the Dark Place. And like Alan, Cooper spends over a decade (more than one in Cooper's case) trapped within it, the distant "sequel" series, Twin Peaks: The Return finally has Cooper escape it. But within the Lodge, Dale meets his doppelganger - a version of him that seems to contain the evil spirit BOB that is behind much of the terror inflicted on the eponymous town. The Return shows us that Dark Cooper, as some call him, has been operating as a basically pure evil gang leader who murders on a whim and explicitly does things because he wants to do them, not because he needs to do them.
I think Mr. Scratch is likely to play a similar role.
Specifically, the "real world" side of the story in which we'll be playing as FBI Agent Saga Anderson has us travel to Watery (the neighboring town to Bright Falls) to investigate a series of ritualized murders that are related to something called the Cult of the Tree. There's a rumor that the leader of the cult is missing author Alan Wake.
So, naturally, I think it likely that this cult leader is, in fact, Mr. Scratch - this doppelganger born of the Dark Place.
Maybe this is obvious. But I think it'll be interesting to see how much of Alan is really in Mr. Scratch. In the DLCs, we face off against another doppelganger, but in this case it's half of Alan's psyche, while the Alan we're playing as is actually the rational, determined part of him.
Alan Wake II looks to be all about dualities - two player characters, two realities, and of course, two Alans. I'll be curious to see how deep this theme goes.
The idea of the doppelganger is a potent trope in psychological horror. The doppelganger can be our opposite, standing in for all the things we're opposed to, but because of this, they take on our own shape. Or, more insidiously, they can represent inner truths we believe about ourselves. Maybe the monstrous doppelganger is the real us, and that the persona we've crafted to serve as our identity is a false facade?
Jung wrote about the Shadow - this kind of dark reflection of the things we know. Our self-perception can also be shaped by the perceptions of others, or even our perceptions of those perceptions. Alan Wake, the character/person, seems to be a mostly good guy who maybe has a temper and doesn't deal with his stress in the healthiest ways, but ultimately means well. But this image that has been pieced together by the public of his worst moments has created this image of an unstable menace, and Alan is well aware of that image, which feeds into the creation of Mr. Scratch.
The Dark Place is almost a literal representation of the Shadow - the Taken, who are claimed by the Dark Presence, are warped and violent versions of themselves.
Ok, let's go deep, though:
Barbara Jagger is clearly named that as a reference to Baba Yaga, the quintessential witch in Slavic folklore. The game is not subtle about this: the cabin that Alan and Alice go to through Jagger's manipulation (and that doesn't, strictly, exist) is called Bird Leg Cabin, a reference to Baba Yaga's hut, which walks around on chicken legs.
Baba Yaga is actually not always the villain in the stories where she appears. But she has an immense amount of power, and is tricky to deal with.
But to go a step further, the very concept of the Witch is typically a kind of shadow of what we expect an old woman to be like. If the idealized old woman is the kind and caring and giving grandmother, the Witch is the old woman who is nasty, self-interested, and demands heavy prices if you want something from her.
Now, that archetype is, of course, born out of a patriarchal system, where women are valued as caregivers and expected to give more than they receive. As such, in a modern, anti-patriarchal way, the archetype of the witch has transformed into something more aspirational.
The point is, what Barbara Jagger came back as was the shadow of what she had been. In 1970, when she was still alive, she was Thomas Zane's girlfriend. We actually don't get a great sense (as far as I can tell) what sort of person she really was, but it's her Shadow that actually emerges from the lake. And even when Zane tries to kill her, it turns out to be impossible.
In Control, the notion that humanity's collective unconscious shapes reality has real practicable effects - objects of power and even just altered items tend to be things with a strong, iconic appearance - something that we would all instantly recognize.
The Dark Place seems to empower an individual to shape things in this way on an individual level.
But we also see that the Dark Place is fluid and shapes itself around the person within it. In the DLCs, we mostly saw a dream- (or nightmare-) logic version of Bright Falls, but in all honesty that's probably because they already had those assets to work with. In Alan Wake II, Wake seems to be trapped in the grimy, noirish version of New York that his Alex Casey novels take place in.
The power of the Dark Place seems to allow one to shape this reality with ease, but it's clear that one can also do that in the real world with the Dark Place's power.
Indeed, there's a real chicken-and-egg question with a lot of the stuff going on in Alan Wake and Control. Control's AWE expansion implied that Jesse may have been created by Alan's writing about her (indeed, Jesse's backstory, which you can piece together over the course of the game - the events in Ordinary that she and Dylan were the only survivors of - sounds just like a Stephen King story, especially the details about a bunch of bullies being transformed into monsters by something called the Not-Mother, and with Wake loosely based on King, it would make sense that he could write a story like this). But we also seem to see Thomas Zane, and he looks just like Alan. Did Alan write Zane into existence? Did Zane write Alan into existence?
And are those two even mutually exclusive?
I don't know to what extent Zane will play a role in Alan Wake II. He was necessary as a literal guiding light in the first game, but after thirteen years, Alan's needed to come up with new strategies to survive and escape.
It does appear, from one of the trailers, that Alan does make it out of the Dark Place - we see him meeting Saga (or at least, it seems like we do) but I don't know when that will happen. My assumption was that we'd spend most of the game with Alan still in the Dark Place, but maybe not.
We also don't know if the FBC or Jesse Faden are going to play a big role. I think they probably want to allow each game to stand on its own for the most part, and Saga and her partner Alex Casey (who also looks identical to Sam Lake) are from the FBI, not the FBC. Still, while I don't think they need to go full-on latter-day MCU on this, I am curious to see if there are any hints at what we'll be seeing in Control II.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
I don't know what role, if any, Alice will play. Sadly, Alice's voice actor, Brett Madden, died in 2020, and I don't know if they'd want to recast or potentially even suggest Alice died as well (given that she was being menaced by Mr. Scratch, it wouldn't be terribly surprising, but it might also be considered insensitive as a choice given the reality).
Anyway, you can probably tell I'm hyped for the game.
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