In Alan Wake, toward the end of the game, Alan finds a manuscript page that was seemingly written not by Alan himself, but by Thomas Zane, the vanished poet who has been guiding him through his journey. It speaks to Alan's childhood, and the all-important artifact his mother provided to him that would help him deal with his nightmares: The Clicker, a switch from the cord of a lamp. Apparently this detail was taken directly from Sam Lake's own childhood, which does imbue it with a certain heft, narratively, in a game series that doesn't so much as break the fourth wall as turn it into something like MC Escher's "Print Gallery."
There will be spoilers for Control Resonant here, as well as Alan Wake II and the previous games in both series, so... just... spoilers ahead:
This raises the question: was Alan a creation of Thomas Zane's? Much as Alan's writing affects the universe, might this be the work of another writer? Obviously, it is. Sam Lake, and then for the second game, him and Clay Murphy, Tyler Burton Smith, and Sinikka Annala wrote the story, creating Alan and everyone else in Bright Falls. This statement would be kind of a "no duh" thing if not for the fact that Sam Lake appears in both games as himself, or some version of himself, in addition to being the physical model for Alex Casey (both the fictional character Alan wrote and the real in universe FBI agent, himself meant to evoke Max Payne). While Sam Lake is only a video game maker in the one-layer-down-the-Dark-Place Night Springs episode, Time Breaker, the very notion that these layers of the Dark Place are strictly separated from one another is clearly not... true.
So, Tom Zane undergoes some changes in Alan Wake II - actually, changes that really start in Control's AWE expansion. In the first game, he's Thomas Zane, not Tom (perhaps a minor change, but I think a significant one). We also only see him as a bright light sometimes housed within a diving suit. Thomas is also voiced by James McCafferey (who also voiced Max Payne and would voice Alex Casey, fittingly enough - I think we should more or less assume that Alan's Alex Casey books follow the plots of the Max Payne games and that Casey is, for all intents and purposes, Max Payne but in a way that Rockstar doesn't own the rights to him. To be clear, I mean the pulp detective novel version of him, not the real-life FBI agent, who has a less, well, pulpy personal history and a wife who simply divorced him rather than getting murdered). Thomas Zane has an American accent as well.
However, Tom Zane is played in his entirety by Ilkka Villi, the physical performer for Alan Wake. This makes him a doppelganger for Alan, but along with this shocking appearance (technically, Thomas Zane could have looked like Alan as well, but we never see him directly if memory serves) there's also a shocking change in his characterization. Thomas Zane was enigmatic sometimes, sure, but was generally serious and acted as a kind of spirit guide for Alan. His benevolence started to seem perhaps somewhat questionable with his offhanded introduction of Mr. Scratch, but whatever his intentions, Thomas Zane seemed like something very different from Tom.
Tom leans into a crazy rockstar persona - perhaps a little against type for an auteur filmmaker, but then, Alan also lived something of a rockstar lifestyle, which is if anything even more against type for an author, even if he was a hugely successful one. Tom is swaggering and sinister, even getting Alan to shoot him in the head, only for him to make this all just part of his filmmaking process - a stunt and effects shot.
(Sidenote: I just realized that Jesse and Dylan's position-swapping ability is very similar to what Tom does with Alan in that scene prior to the Zane's Film chapter. Not sure what to do with this.)
Now, here's where things get a bit more complicated:
In Alan Wake II's Final Draft, the New Game Plus that gives you the "true ending" of the game, we can find some videos that show Casper Darling having evidently arrived in the Dark Place. It's not the first time we see him in that game - in any playthrough, we can find his book "My Interpretation of Many Worlds" in the dressing room at the studio for In Between with Mr. Door (interesting: Many Worlds, obviously meant to evoke the quantum physics idea of a branching multiverse, but also hinting at Alan's adoption of the title "Master of Many Worlds"). But here, we get video footage where Darling talks about his attempts to figure out where he is. In the second video, he realizes that the nature of the Dark Place is causing his hypotheses to generate their own evidence, and so he feels he is hitting the limits of the scientific method, and thus needs someone with a more intuitive, artistic way of thinking to proceed. Instantly, Tom Zane is there with a pair of cocktails, and the two quickly start to banter (while I had initially been worried for Darling, knowing what a cruel monster he can be after Control Resonant, I don't really know who to be worried for).
Notably, Darling is played by Matthew Poretta, the voice actor for Alan Wake. Thus, we have Alan's voice and Alan's body meeting in the Dark Place, planning on some sort of collaboration.
Thus, we're left with the following mind-breaking possibility: is Alan a creation of Tom and Darling's?
To be clear, Alan did have a childhood and was born and all that, but the implication here would be that that history of his whole 50-something-year-old life (actually, what is his canonical age? I think he was like 32 in the original game, so maybe he's not quite 50. Ilkka Villi is 51, and Matthew Poretta is I think 61) was woven into reality by what Darling and Tom did, whatever that is.
But let's go down the rabbit hole a bit further:
Why is Darling in the Dark Place? Well, it's because of Hedron (perhaps we should refer to this one specifically as Polaris, as we have now met a second, far less friendly Hedron,) who somehow allowed Darling to vanish from the Oldest House and into the Dark Place (why he went there and how Hedron did that are big question marks). Why was Polaris there? Well, the FBC discovered it using the Slide Projector found by the Faden siblings.
Why did the Fadens find the slide projector? Because the kids were going out later and later after their parents started to act strangely. Why were their parents acting so strangely? Because a family with a single child suddenly had two children in it. It's not clear whether Jesse was the original and Dylan was the creation, or vice versa (I think that's the least likely) or if a single child, Jesse Dylan Faden, split into two people.
But the cause of this, I believe, was that the single Faden child was a powerful parautilitarian who could shape reality through wishes, and perhaps after playing the video game Severed Circle 2, found a deep desire for a sibling who could give them companionship. (The one way I could imagine Dylan being the original was that he, or perhaps she, if she was a girl then named Jesse Dylan Faden, wanted a big sibling to protect them from bullies.) This ability to shape reality via wishes remained with Jesse (as we saw with the disappearance of all the adults in Ordinary, with the naming of the Hiss, and with Pope's appearance down in the Foundation,) and may have even been the actual origin of the Not-Mother, which led to the most acute aspect of the Ordinary AWE crisis.
Thus, while indirect, it is Jesse's power to wish that led to Darling arriving in the Dark Place.
But if we take this further, in Control's AWE expansion, it appears that Alan, in one of his attempts to get out of the Dark Place, wrote the scenario for the Hiss invasion, cultivating, or even creating, a hero like Jesse Faden who might stand a chance at defeating the Dark Presence.
So...
Is this an ontological paradox? Did Alan create Jesse, whose actions indirectly brought Darling to the Dark Place, who, in collaboration with Tom Zane, created Alan?
The answer is... probably not?
As we found in Alan Wake II, Alan's "creations" seem more like the repurposing of existing elements, including people. Saga Andersen had her own life that had its own history and past, and Alan's writing changed the details of that past (though Saga, being a pretty powerful parautilitarian herself - we can probably assume any player character in the RCU will be one - could see past this fiction, even if it was locally true in Bright Falls and Watery). Likewise, it seems that Alan's fictional Alex Casey was inspired by his unwitting glimpses of the real Alex Casey's investigations (one of the fascinating mysteries of Alan Wake II is to what degree Casey's investigation of the Cult of the Word actually happened and how much of it was Alan's interpretation of what happened. Surely the victims, Robert Nightingale, Cynthia Weaver, and Thornton and Mulligan, were not also killed in New York, but did the real Casey investigate a massacre at a Sleep No More-like immersive theater production? Incidentally, I actually got to go to Sleep No More a couple years before Alan Wake II came out.)
Thus, probably Alan didn't create Jesse so much as he tried to write a story that got her involved, hoping she might assist with his escape. It did mean that Hartman got killed, so there's a bonus there, at least.
But that raises an interesting question: if Alan can't create people whole-cloth, does that mean Jesse can't either? Likewise, can she not unmake people like she did the adults in Ordinary?
Certainly, when it comes to the Not-Mother, Jesse sure as hell didn't intend to create a weird Lovecraftian monster that would mutate other kids into horrifying murderous demon-creatures. I'd be inclined to assume that the thing that was the Not-Mother probably already existed, but perhaps took on its vaguely-reminiscent-of-Kathy-Faden form because of Jesse.
But what of Dylan?
Well, that's harder to explain.
I do think that, whether one sibling has some claim to being the "original" more than the other, the manner in which the Faden siblings became different people probably drew upon the singular person initially - the two siblings are entangled, like in quantum physics. I think this explains a lot of how they work, but one really notable detail that they keep coming back to when exploring Dylan's backstory in Control Resonant is that he can't attune to Objects of Power. It's a major source of Darling's frustration and pushes him toward more draconian treatment of Dylan. After all, if he can't attune to the Service Weapon, that means he can't be Director.
But Dylan does manifest various powers that Jesse got from OoPs, and he does this to a large extent by connecting with her in the Faults. We get the ability to Hover this way, for example. Now, is this a gameplay contrivance? Sure. But I think it's got to be notable that they make this point that Dylan can't attune to OoPs.
He gets these abilities anyway, and I think the reason is this: Jesse is attuned to them. And if they are the same... soul, nexus of consciousness, whatever, then perhaps Jesse's ability to attune to them means both siblings are. It's even implied that Aberrant is actually a fragment of the Service Weapon (we did hear that the Service Weapon likely existed as Excalibur and Mjolnir in ages past. So, when we use Crush, are we... literally wielding Mjolnir? That thing surely looks like a hammer fit to be wielded by a god).
Perhaps, then, we can explain Dylan's appearance in reality as kinda sorta obeying the law of conservation of people by being half of an individual (Darling notes that it's unusual to have two parautilitarians who are siblings, but if they're really the same person in two separate bodies, that kind of explains that).
But even if we want to walk back on the "our protagonists were created by other characters" idea, I do think that the multilayered nature of creation through consciousness in the RCU, and not just multilayered, but a system in which the layers of reality bleed into one another, I don't necessarily think that it breaks its own logic. Just our brains trying to comprehend it.
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