The two playable characters in Alan Wake II play through the two books that are written over the course of the game, in a weird way.
In the original Alan Wake, the events of the game are the plot of Alan's manuscript, Departure, which he writes during a week trapped in the Dark Place after he dives in to rescue Alice from Cauldron Lake. The week of missing time is a mystery that he must unravel over the course of the game, but there's this odd question of time: because he is going through the events of a story he's already written, what does that really mean for his agency and free will and the very reality of what is happening to him over the course of the game? The goal of the first game is to ensure that Alice survives and escapes the lake, and that ultimately works, but at the cost of Alan's sacrifice to take her place in the lake.
Departure is also the first third of Joseph Campbell's mono-myth, which describes the hero's journey coming in three acts: Departure, Initiation, and Return. At the end of the Writer DLC in the first Alan Wake, we see him begin to work on a manuscript for Return, but we find out in Alan Wake II that he's been unable to complete it - and that the reason is likely that he has not done the intermediary step: Initiation.
So, what we see of Alan in the game is the plot of Initiation, whereas Saga's journey is that of Return.
This actually resolves a question I had had about the events of the game: the sequence.
I've actually come to a conclusion that the game might be less non-linear than I previously thought it to be.
Now, a caveat here: the Dark Place definitely messes with how one perceives time. And Alan's story only works if there is a looping element to his time there. At three points Alan comes back to the writer's room and interacts with the core climax of Initiation.
The first time, Alan finds his own dead body, and only the title page of Return, with the author's name scratched out. In his confusion, the Dark Presence finds him and invades his mind, but then he awakens in the green room at the talk show, ready for the We Sing chapter.
The second time, Alan walks into the writer's room and finds a complete manuscript of Return, but realizes it has been written by Mr. Scratch, and so decides he must try to edit and fix it, introducing Saga Anderson to the story to serve as its hero to thwart Scratch. But, while in this process, another Alan walks in and shoots him in the head.
The third time, after Alan has come to believe that his wife killed herself after being tormented by Mr. Scratch, he enters the writer's room in a rage and, seeing what he thinks to be Scratch ruining his manuscript, shoots him in the head, only for him to realize that it wasn't Scratch, but him who was responsible for all of this - in this moment of self-doubt, the Dark Presence takes him and then he vanishes from the Writer's Room.
Naturally, the conclusion I draw is that this first visit to this scene is after it all goes down - while Alan is experiencing these visits in the above order, they're also sort of occurring in a 2-3-1 order.
But: I think that the end of the third scene, in which Alan vanishes gripping a single manuscript page, and all but the title page of the manuscript has vanished, also links up with another scene in the game: when Alan appears on the beach of Cauldron Lake after Saga defeats Nightingale.
Scene Three doesn't just say "End of Part" like the others do - it says "End of Initiation."
Thus, I think that we can imagine a somewhat linear layout to the game: Alan's parts are flashbacks.
I think before I had taken the whole notion of being able to swap from Saga's story to Alan's and back to imply there was some simultaneity to them, and to be certain, the Overlap conversations they have lend some credence to that interpretation.
But I think the ambiguity of where Alan truly is during Saga's story is something of a red herring. Saga and Alan speak to one another across time in those Overlaps, but the Alan found on the beach is not a doppelganger - he's both Alan and Scratch, because Mr. Scratch in this game is just Alan when he contains the Dark Presence. That presence doesn't let itself be known until he's in the jail cell.
I had previously thought that perhaps Alan was still trapped in the Dark Place during this time, but I don't think that adds up - for one thing, once the Dark Presence leaves him to take over Casey, Alan seems fully there.
This leaves the question of who we're controlling in the brief bit at the end of Local Girl - when the Cult of the Tree attacks the lodge and we control Alan fighting taken members of the cult. I think it would be fair to interpret this as our actually controlling Mr. Scratch, but my own interpretation is that the Dark Presence is laying dormant within Alan, letting him think the threat is external for the time being.
And, frankly, this actually makes the sequence of the trilogy make more sense. Initiation comes before Return. Alan has struggled for thirteen years because he tried to skip forward. Initiation can be a difficult phase to go through.
Consider, for example, Star Wars - a trilogy that used Campbell's monomyth extensively. If we think of the original three movies as fitting these same categories, that makes Empire Strikes Back the "Initiation" phase (obviously there's also a microcosm of that in the original movie as well, but if the first movie is Luke learning to use the Force in any meaningful way, the trilogy is about him becoming a true Jedi Master). And, you might recall, Empire Strikes Back is the one in which things do not go well for our heroes. Han's frozen in carbonite, the Empire has the Rebellion in retreat, and Luke gets his ass well and truly handed to him by Darth Vader, losing a hand and also discovering that... oh crap, that father that you had a vague sense as being some kind of heroic Jedi? Nah, he's the dude in the skeletal mask and black armor who has killed like billions of people.
It's the phase at which the heroes go through painful episodes, but learn important lessons. And without the trials, they can't grow to the point where they can succeed.
Saga's own story is a microcosm, going through her own Departure, Initiation, and Return (and hopefully gets to walk out of that writer's room and back into the real world to go hang out with her family). But Alan might have needed his initiation to teach him that he couldn't make it all about himself, as he's become literally his own worst enemy - he rejects the self-centered auteur identity (that Tom Zane represents) to bring Saga in to be the hero and to help write the ending.
There's still a journey for him in Return, and he doesn't get to just exercise his own mastery to solve the problem on his own. Indeed, he's given the role of hero to Saga, and must play victim, villain, guiding sage, and co-author to her.
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