The New Garage Chronicles

Listen, not to throw too many stones in my own community, but I am in awe of the sheer irony of the degree of Sam Lake creator worship in the fandom, considering AW2's whole second half involving Saga can be summed up as "the inevitable consequences of a mode of creativity mythologising that focuses on the contributions and visions of a singular auteur".

It's hard to be a fan of this guy when most of the fans of this guy exhibit the most unselfaware parasocial attention grinding I have ever seen. I've blocked more people over the let-me-in-buddying I see in this fandom than I've blocked in any other fandom for bad take reasons.

(Crossposted from Tumblr)

The thing that makes me the most "run around in circles" crazy about Initiation is that Alan wrote the Casey of the Dark Place into the story to help him, and then made it so that Casey knows even less about what is going on than Alan does.

Alan never gives Casey the opportunity to get past step fucking one to help him, explains nothing to him, and Casey ends up with no idea what he's even doing here, no idea what his assigned purpose is, no idea what his narrative goals are. He's an actor given no script, no stage direction, to the point that Casey doesn't even know they're in a story, and it makes him sink deeper into depression with every passing loop with no knowledge to ground him.

And it's impossible to tell if this is because Alan didn't realise that he had the perfect opportunity to write Casey like the Diver, a living repository of Alan's accumulating knowledge about the Dark Place, a seeing-eye dog to guide him through the dark -- or if Alan did try that, and it somehow went so horribly wrong that now he and Casey can't both survive in the same narrative line without trying to kill each other -- or if Alan did try that, and it went horribly right, and now the Dark Presence can't let Casey live because Alan's bespoke perfect little detective is too good at finding out useful things.

And instead, in the story we currently have, Alan made up a guy for a specific purpose of helping him, but because Alan is the protagonist, because it's his story, his fault, his duty and his job to get himself out of it, he doesn't even let Casey fulfil his narrative purpose. What the hell else is Casey supposed to do, Alan, other than the thing you literally made him for? He's the detective -- he's supposed to solve things.

My salty "it's my opinion"-ass take for AW2 is that Estevez is just like. Really uninteresting and kind of generic and just because she's gay doesn't really change that. She's like the Nightingale of AW2, and the fact that her fate is less than resolved by the end signals to me that she's not a serious player in the plot and I'm entitled to not really caring about her.

Like yes victory for the Woman Likers, but her whole character boils down to being "the fed". She's the bearer of plot-relevant information. She could have been a book Saga found at the police station. I similarly ultimately found Tim kind of boring, sure he's around more, he has his own minor mystery that goes unresolved, but he also does even less than Estevez. Like, theoretically both of them could be compelling characters but they're just hopelessly two-dimensional and uninteresting in their current iterations and I kinda just tune out whenever a conversation heavily involves them b/c like that's just someone's OC at that point.

( Edited in (salty) )

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Largely it just comes down to genre and coding. The Controlverse stories take place in worlds that are heavily driven by the concerns of the genre, where the characters are shaped by their narrative environments. They're event-driven, not character-driven, which gives them room to set up characterisation that is in conflict with himself. In the first game the genre-driven development Alan gets is "man with a sedentary intellectual's lifestyle has to pick up a gun and start shooting", he doesn't become Ash from Evil Dead until Alan Wake's American Nightmare, thanks to that story's shift into an action-mystery genre for its duration.

Casey in the Dark Place is ruled by his noir coding over and above what the real Casey or even Alan thinks about him. His genre has been decided for him, and he doesn't get to show fear or sentiment or tenderness beyond what is prescribed in that codified shared-subconscious "noir detective" frame. The real Casey, once he is within the field of effect of the story, gets prescribed the genre markers of "the cops in a horror story" -- he's ineffectual, unaware or incomprehending of the forces at work, granted prestige and authority just so the story can subvert that authority, unable to even help himself to drive home the fact that nobody is coming to help the protagonists. He has to be cool, has to seem capable and dependable, so it's scary and upsetting when he can do nothing to make the narrative budge.

And once the story really kicks in, Casey becomes what the story needs him to be. But before finding the first manuscript page, there's that liiitttle sliver of time before the narrative has been established, before either of their backstories become relevant, where he's played noticeably less eloquent, more restrained, almost awkward, and in real life... that's just how guys like him come across. Resting bitch face, kind of intense, seems unsociable because he doesn't really talk to people.

Also, the guy self-consciously looks like Sam Lake, who -- while being quite attractive, ngl -- is still kind of a goofy nerdy guy. You could make a drinking game out of the times he gets describes as "youthful" and "boyish" and "childlike" in interviews and profiles, and presents in public as not exactly being in a rush to get people to take him seriously. Casey, in universe, looks like kind of nerdy, and outside of the narrative we don't see enough about how he's treated by the people around him to really draw any conclusions either way.

So this naturally means I get to read my preferred baggage into the character, right?

Title: Completely Trapped Yet Never Here by BlessedPicturesPresents, YvannaIrie

Fandom: Alan Wake

Tags: Anal Fingering, Fingerfucking, Frottage, Hand Jobs, Healing. Bathing/Washing, Sauna, Couch Sex, Past Lives, Past Relationship(s), Singing

Summary: Alan Wake 2 spoilers, through Final Draft, though you may not notice them if you haven't played it.

Ahti shows Wake mercy.

Length: 8,368 words

Read on Ao3

In the spirit of not hiding my light under a bushel -- I worked on this! I was primarily a cultural consultant, did a little work on the concept and rewrote most of Ahti's dialogue to fit the speechpatterns of an ESL speaker. I am deathly tempted to say that I did jackshit but if Bless and Editor both want me to take credit for my work, then fuck. It would be rude not to, I guess? (I'm currently not listed as a co-creator because I, uh, frankly freaked out thinking about receiving updates on the kudos and the comments into my e-mail. Maybe one day. Or maybe never.)

Anyway. Performative self-flagellation aside; it was really nice to work with Bless because he took the idea of being authentic to Finnish culture very seriously and was fine with me blowing up parts of his concept entirely and adapting the rest to fit the mood and tone he wanted to convey. He also already came in with an excellent sense of character, the big reason it's hard for me to accept any real credit for how this fic turned out is because gosh the concept was so strong, Ahti was so compellingly written, I had to do very little but to add flavour and basically translate the existing dialogue back and forth.

I kinda hope I get to do something like this again, tbh. Like, I shy away from working on other people's stuff but the ~two artists collaborating~ part was a lot of fun, and I hope it wasn't just a positive experience for me personally.

(This post is also available on Tumblr)

Preamble: What is this?

There’s a lot of Finnish shit in Alan Wake 2. I speak Finnish. I’m really annoyed about how wrong about some of the things that are in Finnish in the game people actually are. Autumn is an Ahti fan. We’re mutually annoyed about how wrong about Ahti people are, because in general the trend is people thinking Ahti is spooky and mysterious because they don’t know what he’s saying, rather than thinking he’s spooky and mysterious because of the things he’s saying.

So Autumn went through the entire game, transcribing Ahti’s dialogue, and I went through the transcript, translating everything untranslated in the game, and providing cultural context for the rest of it (with some saves from Saikku, RH, and my mum), because truly this dude is not nearly as cryptic as people make him out to be, and is actually twice as weird as people think he is as a result.

Disclaimer: Finnish is very regional, and even with people from all over pitching in, some of the shit Ahti says might still be idioms we’re not familiar with. If you’re a Finnish person reading this going “HOW DID YOU NOT KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS”, trust me that I had many moments like that while putting this together, and please leave a comment so I can add your insight :D

This post is going to go through all of Initiation, followed by all of Return. There's unmarked spoilers past the cut -- enter at your own risk.

(Crossposted from Tumblr)

Continued thought -- it is also very interesting for me that other than the weirdo-coded profession, the real Casey is... really not that remarkable of a guy. A lot of the heavy lifting for us to see past the stony-faced exterior is just Saga's point of view, the two of them are tangibly fond of one another, her being so used to and comfortable with the kind of guy he is communicating to us that this is, like, normal, he's pretty much always like this.

The real Casey is temperamental but not particularly dramatic, realistically awkward in the way someone who spends a lot of time in his own head and doesn't enjoy the sound of his own voice would be. He's insightful, but clearly self-aware that this tells us more about him as a person than anything else. I'm sure he's capable of being charismatic, of converting confidence into authority, but that is as circumstantial to his personality as it would be in real life. He's at the upper end of what weird withdrawn guys are like, sure, but still ultimately just a guy.

And with that in mind, when you, like... mentally align the two Caseys... you can see where Alan is coming, y'know? You can see the real Casey fill out the shape of the Casey in Alan's head, you can see the creative liberties taken to turn one into the other. You can see the elisions being made going both ways, because a lot of the things that the real Casey knows would make him genuinely too offputting if said out loud make for excellent thematic background noise, and the things that ground his humanity would make for a boring story.

I've reached the point in my rewatch where I'm actively questioning if I'm the only one who's noticed how stilted the real Casey is before the story takes him over and he starts talking more like book!Casey, or if this is one of those instances where I'm just seeing what I want to see because it's the thing that resonates with me.

This was originally a part of Three Movements in C minor but I couldn't really figure out how to make it work in the context of that fic. I'm archiving it as a potential thing to build a second sonata off of, but mostly I'm trying to get in the habit of posting my WIPs if I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them in the future.

( (It's less than 200 words) )

I still think the Ashtray Maze is the best Old Gods Of Asgard sequence.

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Don't get me wrong, I think on a technical level "Herald of Darkness" is more impressive, and Dark Ocean Summoning is probably my favourite of the songs for these sequences, but so many things come together to make Ashtray Maze a fucking. Masterwork of art design, game design, gamefeel and storytelling. That sequence rewrote my DNA.

About ready to start making didactic fight-picking posts about how people need to stop calling various characters in AW2 Sam Lake's self-inserts and basing all of their readings on that.

Like not only do I care very little for the internal life of a single developer on this game, lead writer or no, but also there's literally a character called Sam Lake in the game. Like there's a very clear easily parseable autofictional explanation here, but b/c he's the least interesting of the potential self-inserts, nobody talks about that one.

(spoilers, unmarked and uncommented on)

I am in a sadist food coma, y'all. I joked for the first two days that the team clearly had some guro/eroguro artists working on it, that I was eating well watching all these pretty men suffer increasing horrors, and then we hit Day Three In Our Descent To The Bottom and discovered that the game has, in fact, an entire in-universe snuff film for you to find and watch. This was before Nightmare Mind Place. This was before the sheer creative chutzpah of giving the self-destructive egostistic artist urge the face of your lead writer.

This game needs to be put through a cheese grater, separated into fine component dust, before I even dare to take a crack at analysing it. It's recursively meta. It's actively pushing you deeper down into the spiral, telling you the only way out is through, and if you stop it's just gonna end up going deeper on some other spot. So you gotta commit. And you gotta just fucking keep going.

And it was also horny as hell, this game is just fucking oozing the eroticism of horror and blood and disembowelment, you start the game climbing out of a lake as a naked dude and get your heart cut out and it just escalates from there. Remedy really went "okay we got the 18+ rating, nothing is going to stop us now" and made the exploitation film they always wanted to.

I said on Saturday that I can't wait for the horny trans people on Youtube to get their hands on this game and I stand by that statement. This is going to be a spectacular discourse event for years to come.