thisshadowwrites

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maybe the real jujutsu kaisen was the brains we swapped along the way

#jujutsu kaisen #jjk 261

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T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

#gawain coded

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#iwtv #interview with the vampire #this is frighteningly accurate to what happened on the show

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This dramatic bald guy again (I'm impatiently waiting for news from da4)

#dragon age inquisition #dragon age #da #fen'harel #emo edgy bald elf boy #Solas

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ever since i was a little girl i knew i wanted to be a stressed adult male protagonist splashing water on his face in the bathroom

#alan wake coded

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Tom: I've been working with Scratch on the companion film for your book "Return", look!

Alan: is that... porn??

Tom, fumbling with the movie role: shit, wrong movie. sorry. sorry.

#this is 100% canon in my mind #alan wake 2 #Tom Zane #Alan wake

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wakes up from my cr nap opens eyes and screams

Essek

#this is so gorgeous #omg #this is STUNNING #critical role #critical role fanart #critical role campaign 3

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the holy trinity? do u mean one drink for hydration, one for warmth and one for fun?

#joke #adhd #audhd #it is a pattern that connects us #differing criteria but the three drink rule always applies

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"i can fix him" ok well i can make him scared of me and hard

#demon-colt coded #and zombie-verse ezekiel coded #and probably many many more

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"are you picking up what I'm putting down" brother I am hefting that shit above my head with gusto

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so is there an assistant dysfunction i can speak to

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literally going insane over the fact that so many companies refuse to send rejection emails like it’s disgraceful tbh. you put so much time and effort into putting together an application and they can’t even be bothered tell you via some measly automated message that you didn’t get the job. you’re expected to just infer

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#its gonna be....

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Monster of the Deep

#alan wake #alan wake 2 #alan wake fanart

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something i see neglected a lot in discussions is that tom was written into the story as a deus ex machina by a very desperate alan when he didn't see any other way out of barbaras manipulations.

alan made tom into a godlike being because thats what he considered barbara to be. he needed someone that survived what he thinks is unsurvivable (hence the diver suit, what better way to signal that this person can survive inside cauldron lake?). what does that mean in the broader concepts of the story? what happens to a narrative device given life and, arguably, some measure of sentience, when the narrative no longer requires it?

also, tor and odin are both seers because thats just smth andersons do ig, and in alan wake 2, they claim that a seers memory can't be deceived by alans manuscript (in regards to sagas daughter). so it stands to reason that they'd also not be blinded by toms writing. its another piece of interesting evidence for the 'did tom write alan into existence?' debate

Tom the Poet or Tom the Filmmaker

I would like all my theories to have evidence that back them up. I’ve come from fandoms where things said are a cute thing, worth considering, but solid theorising comes with quotes, screenshots, counting toes and following the writer’s pattern of three hint and foreshadowings before the big reveal. Therefore, I’m going through the first game yet again to collect all this information and put it in something coherent, something I will be happy with. I hope that the waves of my research will carry me to the proper essay with all the proofs necessary on every statement I’ve made in my first pinned post.

But there are still questions that have no answers as far as I know. One of them: why Tom Zane was made into a filmmaker and by whom?

In Control’s AWE the cutscene where Tom and Alan meet is a toned-down version of their encounter in Room 665. Alan asks if Tom is the Tom, the poet and the diver and Tom replies that it was just a beloved character in his old film. They have the same conversation at the start of Room 665 in Alan Wake II.

Alan seemed always forget that he (or someone else) changed Tom’s identity to filmmaker, still convinced that Thomas Zane he encountered at the start of his journey was a poet and a diver. First, when Tom-the-filmmaker was introduced, I thought that Alan forgot who Zane was and what he learned about him (I wouldn’t put it past Alan: he forgot many things he wrote, even his birthdate somewhat slipped his mind — in 2010 or in the Dark Place; the guide for the first game states that he’s 31, when the statue near the Parliament Tower claims he was born in 1977), but in both cases he kept insisting that Tom was a poet. So, the opposite is true: Alan forgot that Tom now is a filmmaker.

But why is Tom made to be a filmmaker? Even the second game insists that the Tom was a poet: Cynthia notes this in her journal, marvelling at why everyone thinks that he was a filmmaker; even the boys of Old Gods of Asgard say “you need him [Tom] to write the ending,” “art, like Tom’s writing” and “it’s Tom’s story we are dealing with, he’s gotta be the one to rewrite it”. And they are the only three people who knew the real Tom Zane and have some credibility in what he really was: a poet or a filmmaker.

The boys, of course, are a discussion on their own; Tom and Alan are interchangeable in their heads, they might talk about Alan the writer, hence “write, writing, story, rewrite”, but Cynthia has no such issues. She never mistook Alan for Tom, she loved Tom her whole life, devoted to his wishes and for sure wouldn’t mess such a big part of his identity in her head.

Then we have This House of Dreams, where we can read poems, some of them are by Thomas Zane and the Bright Presence shows Samantha that he was indeed a poet. Let’s add Jesse Faden into the mix, who as well, remembers Thomas Zane being a poet and even recites one of his poems in Control’s recordings. She still believes he was a poet somewhere around 2019, judging by her words about her needing to be in New York soon. Only in AWE DLC when she hears Tom claiming he’s a filmmaker, she changes her mind. But at this time, she’s already in yet another Alan’s story, her beliefs shaped by his writing (or by the words of her therapist and this vision of Tom and Alan; take your pick).

So, the question remains: why was Tom made a filmmaker?

My belief here is that Alan (or Scratch — do not confuse with Mr. Scratch) had no need of a poet. In This House of Dreams we see two sets of poems: one is by Thomas Zane and another is by Alan himself, in Control’s AWE Alan also claims that he wrote poems, and what value can Tom-the-poet add to Alan’s attempts to escape? A filmmaker on the other hand, as Tom says in AWII, can make a companion piece for his manuscript. Hence the filmmaker, the auteur.

As a side note. I do believe that the real Thomas Zane never makes his appearance in any games, first we see the Bright Presence possessing the body of Tom, then we see yet another Alan’s face in the Dark Place, that takes shape of what he believes Tom Zane was, and this part of Alan becomes a filmmaker at some point in his journey. After all, as the real Tom once wrote:

When you’re lost You’re lost in your own company

#yes yes YES #honestly the fandom makes me so mad occasionally in regards to tom #no he never made films don't drink the kool-aid #also op... #counting toes in previous fandom? #i see you #i am lovingly holding your hand #lets not name names but oh boy what a doozy that was

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a small addendum, i do believe barbaras drowning was anything but accidental. in my interpretation of the song, good ol barbs was seeking out the dark presence voluntarily, maybe in an attempt to understand the power tom told her about or to harness it, i dunno (i DO have evidence for this but i can't look it up rn). i doubt she planned to die, but i fully believe she went into the lake with the purpose of finding whatever made it special. additionally, i think the "drowning" itself is more of a metaphor for barbara being overwhelmed and consumed by the dark presence, less so an actual drowning in the lake. and maybe, here comes in my wishful thinking, she didn't actually die in the lake and is still stuck in the dark place and what tom conjured, and subsequently killed, is just a cheap imitation.

i also find it fascinating that in alan wake 1, barbara is dressed in funeral garb!! is that toms grief for his (possibly) deceased lover or is this the remnants of her love for him that he put in her manifesting, mourning his death??

but alas, i don't think these questions can ever be definitively answered cause everything we learn about tom has the huge asterisks attached that it might just be alans interpretation. if it's not in a shoebox, we can yeet it on the 'doubt' pile

What exactly happened in the 70’s

I’ll start with The Poet and The Muse. I’ve written about the real Thomas Zane being a poet already, but left out this piece of evidence (not at all on purpose, truth be told), but I want to discuss it here, since it goes well with the point I want to make.

In the song we learn the story of a Poet living happily with his Muse and telling her stories about treasures beneath the waves. Then one morning the Muse goes to the lake and drowns. The Poet at some point realises that something happened and comes to the lake, calling for the Muse, but to no avail. Whole day spent in search, and in his desperation, he swears to bring his love back. He writes a story and succeeds to some degree. The husk of the Muse comes to him in the night, possessed by some dark force. The Poet takes her in, but in trying to fix his mistake, vows them both to silence beneath the lake. The story concluded with the peculiar:

Now if its real or just a dream One mystery remains For it is said on moonless nights They may still haunt this place

Now, what exactly the boys of the Old Gods of Asgard are hinting at here (aside from the existence of the Dark and Bright Presences) I can’t tell for sure: they might just toy with all those who have that buzzing question of “who wrote whom”, but I will treat the story of Thomas Zane the Poet as a true story, that happened without any help of tortured writers. Although I will use the manuscripts as well as every other source of information.

Prepare for a long read, since firstly, I would like to present all the bits and pieces that I’ve managed to collect, and then tie them all up in a version of events, I believe, happened in July 1970.

First, the dialogs.

Tor and Odin (whom I cannot stop lovingly call “the boys”) say this:

“Tom’s just lost, is all. Baba Yaga got to him too, the damn witch!” “She used us all, taken from all of us. Took my thunder, the witch.” “And my ravens, what was...what were they? Memory and Thought! The hag.” “She took something from you too, didn’t she? That’s what she does.” “Oh, we’re better off. This place, the lake, it gives you power. If you’re a creator.... An artist, a god!” “Nightmares shifted in their sleep in the darkness of the lake...” “Heh heh, yeah, that’s the one. She makes sure it comes out twisted and wrong. Just ask the Lamp Lady. She knows what happened to that other writer.”

 Cynthia Weaver tells us:

“I knew them both. Tom and Barbara. I had such a crush on him...such a beautiful man. I was jealous. There was a part of me that was maybe a little glad when she had the accident. And then Tom started writing and woke the darkness up.... He tried to bring her back...but you can’t do that. There are no free rides like that.” […] “The witch looked like her, but it wasn’t. Barbara was sweet. He didn’t understand until it was too late. He tried to undo it, wrote himself, her, everything he’d ever written out of the world.”

We have Samantha’s dream in “This House of Dreams”, that gives us even more details:

“The diver told me that a dark presence had taken over his girlfriend (the woman in the photos). He’d tried everything he could think of to banish it from her, but everything had failed. In the end, he finally understood what he had to do, finally understood the true nature of the dark place that was hidden under the waves of the lake where they lived. The lake was an opening to dark place that was much bigger than the lake itself, in fact, much bigger than the whole universe we live in. He wrote one last poem, his masterpiece, a secret poem, a hidden poem, a poem that’s not among the poems I’ve found in the shoebox. And he took his girlfriend for one last dive. Together they sank down into the depths, far deeper than he had ever dived before.”

Then we have the manuscripts, that expand on the story:

More so, we have the dates and newspaper articles:

The last one is cut awkwardly, but, really, all I needed from it are the dates of publishing and of the seismic activity.

So, what really happened during this week? On the morning of 10th July Barbara went for a swim and drowned. As Cynthia notes in her article, Barbara was quite a swimmer and her death does seem odd. At the same time, we have another article (that I will put in the very end for those who are curious) about a writer visiting the area and encountering Taken — Robert “The Colonel” Hambleton dated 6th July 1970. Thomas even makes a snarky remark about not ever hearing about him and calling him “an uninvited guest”. All hints that with all the artists in the area: the boys of Old Gods of Asgard, Thomas Zane, Cynthia Weaver and Barbara Jagger, the Dark Presence still pounces on every other creator unfortunate enough to choose Bright Falls as a place to visit. Might’ve been because it could not make the gang mentioned above do its bidding?

The Dark Presence might be of a very different mind, alien to humans, but it’s cunning. As stated in one of the manuscripts, when it senses Alan, “all he'd need was a little incentive.” For Alan it had to drag Alice to the pier and into the lake; for Thomas it might’ve used the help of its ravens or some other means necessary to overwhelm Barbara long enough for her to drown, as at the time the Dark Presence had no physical body (but there might’ve been some other Taken swimmer around). And after Thomas spent the whole day searching for his lover, succumbing to desperation more and more, he got that incentive, the Dark Presence needed.

In the night Thomas wrote a poem to bring Jagger back. The Dark Presence plan worked and it was now in the world, almost free, wearing Barbara’s skin. But it was still constrained by the story Thomas wrote, and in his story he surely wrote something along the lines of them being together and in love again, therefore we see that the Dark Presence cannot do anything to Thomas as he ties it to the chair, carves its heart out and writes countless pieces to undo his mistake. It just couldn’t get out of the role of the loving Barbara, who would never hurt Zane. It had to go through the story in which, probably, Thomas and Barbara lived happily ever after and died on the same day, to be completely free. Which doesn’t mean that the very, pardon, presence of the Dark Presence in the world was not affecting Bright Falls at the time, the Taken might’ve been multiplying and awful things happening during this week. Yet, unlike Alan, Thomas didn’t go into the woods, fighting for his life, he searched for a solution at the cabin, armed with his typewriter and the (kitchen) knife.

The only solution he found in the end — one last dive. To bring this darkness back to where it came from.

There are still a few mysteries left:

in the guide for the first game we can read excerpts from the book “Taken by the Dark Presence” found in a shoebox that has no author, but has initials of T.Z. and J.Z. on some pages, apparently written in the late 1960’s. And, oh boy, I have lots of questions for this one!

the Bird Leg Cabin and the Diver’s Isle, that might or might not been retroactively removed by the eruption under the Cauldron Lake.

the extent of Thomas’ writing powers, since as much as it is stressed a lot that he wrote himself out of reality, Barry, with a little research, is still able to find out about his existence, yet Alan in one of the “Writer in the Cabin” TV’s claims “A story is a beast with a life of its own. You can create it, shape it, but as the story grows, it starts wanting things of its own. Change one thing, and you set off a chain reaction of events that spreads through the whole thing.” The chain reaction here never happens: we have hard evidence that both Thomas and Barbara existed.

But those are theories for another day. This is already a long enough read to throw those into the mix.

And here’s the article about Robert “The Colonel” Hambleton (spoiler alert: there is another one, confirming that he died):

#i honestly just want barbara to come back into the story ngl #i love her and her evil ways too much #i support womens wrongs #also op i wanna be friends with you #let's chat about thomas zane together #i have a full 'who is the chicken and who is the egg' rant typed out about alan and zane #and i love this post #excellent points all around #alan wake 2 #alan wake #thomas zane

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alan wake is a mary sue but his pride as a writer won't let him accept it

How can Alan be both OVERPOWERED and UNDERPOWERED like he has the ability to rewrite reality (overpowered) but he has so many limitations and rules he follows (that he may or may not impose upon himself) and with him forgetting what he writes and his desperation causes him to create horrifying shit to escape this it doesn’t really help him that much (underpowered) he’s such a mess I love him

#what a wet man #pathetic miau miau man #“i need to stay within the genre” no u don't #who said that? #genre breaks happen all the time bestie #alan wake #alan wake 2