Alan Wake II has a twisted narrative. It's hard, sometimes, to figure out what is precisely real or not. This is especially difficult when it comes to Alan's half of the game, which takes place in a dreamy, imagined version of New York that is basically like "Noir York City" from the "Address Unknown" show seen in Max Payne - it's the nightmare hellscape that a lot of conservatives imagine NYC to be like if they haven't actually been there. For instance, a number of people we know to have died and become Taken in Bright Falls are found in Alan's "research" expeditions that make up the main bulk of his half of the game.
But reading reactions to the game and analyses, I want to address two ideas that I see people saying that I think are mis-reading the narrative. Naturally, I'm just one player and my own reading is certainly fallible, but I feel pretty strongly that some players are missing a few details and getting the wrong impression about two elements of the plot.
This is, of course, spoiler territory.
Spoilers Ahead.
The Cult of the Tree is Malevolent:
The first is more central to the narrative. I've been seeing people saying that the Cult of the Tree is still, ultimately, some kind of murderous death cult. To be sure, the Cult of the Tree is reckless and disorganized, but I think the game makes it clear that the intent behind the so-called Cult is purely benevolent.
Ilmo Koskela is clearly a guy who follows through on a lot of ideas - even ideas that are maybe not, you know, good ones. In founding the Cult of the Tree with his brother and recruiting members of the nearby area, there are two main goals they're trying to accomplish:
The first is to protect the town from the Taken. It appears that the Taken, or at least some of the more powerful ones, arrive in the area through the lake, as we see with Robert Nightingale at the very beginning of the game.
As we learn in Saga's investigation, they do not murder Nightingale - the disgraced ex-FBI agent has been dead a long time, and his body is bloated and blue from drowning in the lake. The stories of other people showing up with similar MOs - bloated by water and with their hearts cut out - is because if this hadn't been done to them, they would have been deadly menaces just like Nightingale. Because the ritual to take their hearts out and use the Clicker inside of it was interrupted, Nightingale was able to go on his rampage and kill a few police officers before Saga tracked him down and killed him in the Overlap.
Now, Cult of the Tree members Thornton and Mulligan do kill an innocent person. But this is basically negligent manslaughter - they think they see a Taken in the forest, but kill an innocent woman instead, and rather than present this accident to anyone and face the consequences of their actions, they hide her body, unknowingly reenacting a ritual that lets the Dark Presence into them, turning them into Taken.
But the Cult as a whole is not even necessarily aware that this happened - I'd hazard the Koskelas are totally ignorant of it.
The second goal of the Cult is to keep people out of the woods - for their own safety. Ilmo talks about trying to make the woods a terrifying, frightening place, because if people don't go out into them, they're less likely to be killed by Taken, and also less likely to accidentally being killed by Cultists patrolling the place.
Now, is the Cult of the Tree dangerous? Absolutely. Not only do two of its members kill an innocent person, but their assault on the Lodge in an effort to take Alan is a deadly catastrophe. From their perspective, of course, they think that it's necessary to take him to save the world (and they're not precisely wrong that the enemy is in there - but they're also utterly unequipped to contain Mr. Scratch. Hell, even the FBC is.)
This is, really, one of the big twists of the game, but I think it's pretty clear.
Alice Got Her Memories Back by Meeting with the FBC:
This is a more esoteric one, but one I think is important to note:
In mid-credits scene that reveals Alice to be alive in the Dark Place, going in to save Alan just as he went in to save her, she talks about how she met with members of an organization and soon remembered her time in the Dark Place and all the things that happened to her thirteen years ago.
Naturally, a lot of people came to the conclusion that it was the FBC that cleared all that up for her. Indeed, with Jesse Faden in charge, the FBC is hopefully becoming a more benign force in the world. And if there's one organization that knows about all this weird paranormal stuff, it's them.
However, there's a couple of flagged words that I think someone who didn't play Control, and even if they did, someone who didn't go deep into all the lore documents in that game, might not recognize.
With their use of the Clicker and general involvement in paranatural (the FBC's preferred version of paranormal) phenomena, the Cult of the Tree is classified as a paracriminal organization. However, they're seriously small-time. Other than having their hands on an Object of Power, they're basically a bunch of doofuses who have no idea the degree of danger they've inserted themselves into.
The Blessed Organization, though, is top-tier. And they are targeting the FBC, sending Altered Items to effectively assassinate FBC personnel. Their ultimate aims are mysterious, but it's even possible that they're affiliated with The Board, the extradimensional entity (or probably a group of entities) that exercises a lot of power over the FBC, including by choosing their Director.
The Blessed Organization takes many forms - there's a Blessed Pictures film studio, Blessed Repair and Service - which "fixed" a jukebox that became an altered item, and there's a motivational speaker named Chester Bless who talks about using the "power of the Board," apparently in possession of an altered item in the form of a surfboard.
When we enter the Wakes' apartment in the Dark Place, at one stage we find that Barry Wheeler, now serving as executive producer on the various Alex Casey movies in an effort to protect Alan's legacy, has "joined a cult," (he says jokingly) after meeting one Chester Bless, and is now networking at the Blessed Wellness Center in Hollywood (or maybe Beverly Hills or Westwood or some other fancy part of L.A.).
And in the final visit to the apartment, after it has all been packed up and Alice has moved out, we see moving boxes with "Blessed" stamped on the sides.
We do know that Alice visited not just the FBC but the Oldest House - she was there to be interviewed about the appearances of Mr. Scratch, which she was capturing on her motion-sensor cameras in the apartment (and, as we discover, far from driving her to despair, his appearance actually gives her hope that Alan's still alive). Her arrival sets off Emile Hartman, who, sensing her, goes full-Taken, and leads to the shutting down of the Investigations sector well before the Hiss ever make it into the Oldest House.
But while Alice and the FBC have interacted, I think a different narrative is suggested here:
I think that the Blessed Organization probably knew something about Alan Wake and his disappearance already, and likely suspected or knew that there was an AWE involved. So, when Barry shows up in Hollywood to work on the Alex Casey movies, Blessed, already well-established in Los Angeles, is in the perfect position to approach Barry. And maybe their entire reason for doing so is to get to Alice.
Blessed is clearly doing its own research into the paranatural - the victim of the Movie Camera altered item seemed to have been just a delivery driver - so their interest in Alice could be as simple as just trying to get involved in the Cauldron Lake stuff.
Still, the appearance of Blessed-branded moving boxes suggests to me that Barry does get her in touch with the Organization. Meeting with this "Organization," Alice unlocks her repressed memories of being in the Dark Place, and embarks on a pretty radical endeavor, delving into the Dark Place to aid Alan with the tools he needs to escape (or at least progress) through the winding spiral the place is.
Now, in this case the text is certainly less direct and obvious, but I think the evidence strongly points toward Blessed being the organization that contacts Alice, not the FBC. Blessed is very clearly being set up as a major part of the Remedyverse, though whether they'll play a central role in Control 2, Alan Wake III, or an as-yet-unannounced other series within the larger franchise remains to be seen.
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