One of the overarching themes of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Alan Wake is that storytelling is an inherently powerful thing. From a story, a mere few words on a page, an entire world is born, sequences of events set in🥀 motion. However, unlike in real life, a story has a definitive conclusion.
As Alan Wake heavily uses literary and metafictional tropes in i👍ts story, it can be a bit of a difficult sequence of events to pin down, even once the ending is reached. But with a little bit of insight into the story, its characters, and its governing ♔forces, we can make some semblance of sense of this dark and mysterious tale.
Beware, spoilers for Alan Wake ahead
The Dark Presence
Before we get to the actual events of the ending, we first need to touch on the game's primary antagonistic force: the Dark Presence. Throughout Alan's story (both from our perspective and his perspective), this malevolent being of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:darkness and shadow torments and taunts him, stealing away his wife, Alice, and warping the minds and bodies of th꧑e residents of Bright Falls.
Based on anecdotal evidence from Thomas Zane and the Anderson Brothers, as well as the Dark Presence's occasional quips, it appears to be a supernatural force that has dwelled at the bottom of Cauldron Lake since time immemorial. The Dark Presence is borderline omnipotent when it has a hold on our world, but the catch is that it can't enter our worl🐟d without a foothold in the minds and hearts of humans. The most convenient way for the Presence to find this foothold is through artistic pursuits like poetry, music, and storytelling. If the Presence can coerc🉐e a human to "dream it free," as it says, it will have free rein in our world.
However, this comes with its own complication: the Presence must adhere to the rules of whatever medium its host specializes in. In Alan's case, for instance, it needed him to write an entire horror story. If he just pulled out a piece of paper and wrote, "and then Darkness happened, the end," that wouldn't make it past his suspension of disbelief. A good story has stakes and draws you in, and once you're in, the Presence is out. We'll get to the importance of these rules later.
Alan's Journey
After Alice is snatched away by the Presence at the beginning of the story, Alan is guided by 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:pages of a manuscript under his name that he doesn't recognize titled "Departure." This manuscript seemingly predicts the events of his trials as they occur, as well as spark outbursts of the Dark Presence and its minions.
However, at the same time, it carefully guides him to the helpful Cynthia Weaver and her Well-Lit Room, serving as a vault to store a mysterious broken light switch called the Clicker. This is baffling to Alan, as the Clicker was just an old light switch his mother gave him as a child to help him with his fear of the dark; it shouldn't even be in Bright Falls, let alone have supernatural abilities.
Nevertheless, with Clicker in hand, he returns to Cauldron Lake and plunges headfirst into its shadowy depths, using the light of the Clicker to fight off the Presence's avatar and rescue Alice. Afterward, Alan finds himself trapped in the extradimensional Dark Place, home of the Dark Presence, with nothing but a typewriter and seemingly infinite time. In the bonus episodes that follow the main game, we see him go through a period of mania, attempting to traverse the Dark Place's wider realms before ultimately reclaiming his clarity of mind and beginning work on a new manuscript to facilitate his return to reality: "Return."
Blurred Lines Of Metafiction
First, let's cover the Clicker. How did it get in Bright Falls, and was it really magic? In that order, Thomas Zane got it to Bright Falls, and no, it was not magic, at least not originally. Zane (or perhaps Alan acting in the future through Zane) is implied to have written the Clicker into existence for the express purpose of battling the Presence, but it needed to have narrative weight in order to work.
The trick was to set it up as a "Chekov's Gun" of sorts, a literary trick where a potentially useful object or concept is hinted at early in a story before being used later on. During a flashback in the second episode, Alan tells Alice about the Clicker while she's experiencing a panic attack to help calm her down. With the Clicker's existence established as a "magic light," Zane was then able to make it appear in the "climax" of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Alan's journey as a heroic weapon. However, doing thi🙈s required Zane to nearly erase his own exis🍸tence due to the rules of the Dark Place.
That brings us to our next major point: the Dark Place. After Alan defeats the Presence's avatar and frees Alice, the Presence traps him in the Dark Place in an effort to force him to write a new story and set it free again. When a creative individual is near or within the Presence's realm, their creations gain the ability to influence reality, though again, it must be within the bounds of their medium.
Obviously, Alan wouldn't just set the Presence free again if he could help it, but he needed to concoct a story that could conceivably end with the Presence defeated and him set free. The stress of attempting to concoct this story, paired with the oppressive atmosphere of the Dark Place, is what briefly drove Alan mad. This is why we play as a separate aspect of him in the bonus episodes; his mania drives him to attempt to punish himself for landing in the Dark Place in the first place.
To briefly diverge, due to the mysteries that cropped up surrounding the events of the main game, many rumors began to circulate about Alan, painting him as a murderer and a lunatic. As a byproduct of his being trapped in the Dark Place, a dark doppelganger was created called Mr. Scratch, who attempted to seize control of Alan's life. Since Mr. Scratch was a facet of the Presence, he was still beholden to its rules, which allowed Alan to trap him in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the fictional city of Night Springs using an episode script of the eponymous show, leading to the events of Alan Wake's American Nightmare. Unfortunately, while Alan was able to write an aspect of himself into reality to battle Mr. Scratch, he couldn't persist after the story concluded, leaving the real Alan still trapped in the Dark Place.
Where Is Alan Now?
As of the end of Alan Wake, as well as Alan's cameo in the AWE DLC of Control, he is presumably still trapped in the Dark Place, trying to put together the perfect story and maintain his grip on his sanity. Time seems to dilate while within the Presence's realm, so from Alan's perspective, he's been sitting and writing for years, possibly decades. Unfortunately, he can't leave the Dark Place until he can create an absolutely perfect narrative: no contrivances, no cop-outs. He needs a conceivable means by which the Dark Presence can be destroyed or at least subdued, and he needs a concrete way to free himself from the author's chair.