#I have an unhealthy obsession with Alan Wake

[autumn0689]

Here are some of my favorite Alan moments in his Writers Journey tapes!

Here’s Alan casually eating paper! Instead of wasting paper by throwing it away, try eating paper instead!

Ever wanted to get flipped off by a tortured writer? Well here is him flipping you off!

I… yeah idk what he is doing, but you go Alan! Yeah you flap those arms like you’re a bird!

He may be having a breakdown… yeah he’s just having a breakdown, maybe he should get a hug! (Or maybe he should BE ABLE TO ESCAPE REMEDY WHY END IT OFF ON THAT CLIFFHANGER RICKY WHEN I CATCH YOU RICKY-)

Look! He’s faster than Sonic!!!!!

I think we can all agree that Alan needs a vacation. Like not the one he had in Bright Falls, I mean a genuine, enjoyable vacation where he can just relax and be actually happy instead of in a constant state of turmoil.

(This post is sponsored by the LABH™️, the Let Alan Be Happy™️ foundation)

[blueopinions49]

Healthy/Unhealthy Type 5

Healthy Social 5

Milo Thatch (5w4 so/sp)- he rejects allot of the traditional notion about the E5 we usually see. He is open about his feelings and is extremely extroverted, always eager to share his knowledge . He is always able to express how he feels and live in the moment.

Barbara Gordon (5w6 so/sx)- Even at her lowest Barb is always capable of thinking of solutions. She's always there for the team and always open to helping others.

Dale Cooper (5w4 so/sx)- The most charismatic E5 in media. He was always up to learn about things and kept a very clear mind on what was going on in the moment. Always seemed to care about getting his facts right and was open to understanding others.

Unhealthy Social 5

Doctor Doom (5w4 so/sx)- I was very close to typing him as an SO3 but honestly after paying a bit more attention it's very clear he is an SO5. Dooms whole idea revolves around outsmarting Reed Richards and proving he is his superior drives him into obsession and isolation.

Beth Harmon (5w6 so/sp)- Her desire to be the best at chest drives her to obsession and as the series goes on we see her disintegrate towards 8 and eventually moving back to her normal self. In the end we see a Beth who has let go of her need of perfection in chest and just finds enjoyment in the sport.

Quan Chi (5w6 so/sp)- His desire for knowledge intertwines with his need for power and control. Eventually deciding to create and army of the undead and resurrect multiple people who have been long gone.

Healthy Self-preservation 5

Peter Parker TASM (5w6 sp/sx)- This version of Peter Parker is more focused on the look for knowledge and understanding. He is a bit less focused on the external world but rather his own personal understanding of his family. However he never rejected others and always stayed

Wednesday Adams (5w4 sp/so)- While she can be looked at as detached from others. In the second movie we see a Wednesday who clearly has her heart in the right place. She is caring and always looking for the vest for her family.

Ellie Chu (5w6 sp/so)- At the beginning of the film we see her reduce her self as much as possible trying to go by unnoticed. but as the movie goes on we see her become more open about her feelings and stop being afraid of creating connections with others.

Unhealthy Self-preservation 5

Donnie Darko (5w4 sp/so)-In the movie we see him spiral completely down and detach himself from others.

Walter White (5w6 sp/so)- Wanting to feel alive in the little time he has he decides to over indulge and let him self go. He disintegrates towards 8 a bit each season. In the end eventually loosing everyone.

Haymitch Avarnethay (5w6 sp/so)- Due to the effects the games had on him we see him make a slow move to 8. While he is Katniss mentor we see him improve himself and become more centered in reality.

Healthy Sexual 5

Simon Petrigrof (5w6 sx/sp)- In the beginning of F&C we meet back with him completely sad and focused on getting Betty back. He has comply withdrawn from others and grew to believe he didn't have ay value outside of getting with Betty. In the end of the show we see him make peace with Betty and moving on.

James (EOFW) (5w4 sx/sp)- He spent allot of time detached from others and due to this he believed he has APD. However when Alissa finds him they become close and form a bond that couldn't be broken. While their Journey has consequences they were able to come together to figure out in the end.

Alan Wake (5w4 sx/so)- While allot of his actions are morally dubious, his desire was always to share the stories he had to tell. And his love for Alice kept him sane in the dark place.

Unhealthy Sexual 5

Hannibal Lecter (5w4 sx/so)- His intense desire to have a relationship with Will Graham sends him spiraling down to the point of obsession.

Gendo Ikari (5w4 sx/so)- He completely withdraws from the world once he loses Yui and neglects Shinji in the process. He eventually tries to make the third impact happen in order to get over the core fear of enneagram 5.

Mother Miranda (5w6 sx/so)- She intended to substitute someone else's baby for her own...Yeah pretty self explanatory. Her desire to have that special bond with Eva takes her to dark places. Eventually neglecting her "children" this eventually causing all of them desiring her personal admiration and validation (dying for it too).

[tulipsie-art]

Are you playing any video games currently, or is there one you go back to often?

i'm ~85 hours deep into my first run of persona 5 royal and desperately trying to summon the motivation to see it through, it's been amazing but i do not have the willpower for these jrpgs normally and this one is pushing ittt

i'm also playing alan wake 2, which, combined with my unhealthy obsession with life is strange is convincing me that i need to leave my entire life behind and go live in the pacific northwest, the vibes are immaculate

i gotta be honest though, my brain's been a bit rotten and i've been struggling to summon the motivation and focus for games with deep story and stuff - most of my gaming these last few weeks has been what i like to call junk-food gaming, where i put a movie or a youtube video on one monitor and just smash out runs on hades and, more recently, dead cells on the other monitor (dead cells fucking rules, by the way, incredible game)

[trevorbarre]

Jack The Ripper - a fresh and welcome perspective. 1 of 2.

I don’t tend to blog about books, especially books that aren’t about music, but sometimes I feel the need to talk about the ones that especially move me. One such is the just-out  The Five: the Untold Story of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper. From the refreshing lack of the word ‘victim’ onward, author Hallie Rubenhold offers a fresh re-examination of the Ripper ‘case’ and the unfortunate  women who he came across and killed in such cowardly ways, and from a feminist perspective at last. Its a shame that it took a mere 130 years for such a study to emerge, but here it is, and what a fantastic work of social history it is. However, for of the purpose these blogs, I will bring the book into focus alongside the way that the Ripper mythos has impacted on the rock music world. A micro-perspective, but one that mirrors the macro.

The counterculture has made use of Jack the Ripper over the years, even to the extent of portraying him (and we will assume that it is a him) as a curious kind of anti-hero, just as Charles Manson has become such a creature in certain quarters. Or at least a topic of fascination, inevitably, among men. Enter, predictably, good old Nick Cave, with his ‘Jack the Ripper’ from 1992′s Henry’s Dream. He’s trying to be ironic, obviously, but here we go: “I got a woman...She rules my home with an iron fist, I got a woman...she screams out Jack the Ripper, every time I try to give that girl a kiss”. It’s a powerful Bad Seeds track. but Cave’s shtick is tiresomely double standard, the’ got’ female accusing the male protagonist, in hyperbolic fashion, of carrying murderous thoughts and intents, all for the cause of a rollicking bit of rock and roll, pelvic thrusts optional.

Now, I’m as big a Cave fan as the next person, but my problem with him is his rather tedious fascination with violence against women, especially in the 90s. He couched it in ethno-musicological terms as’ Murder Ballads’, but come on, these were excavated women-killing numbers added to some home-grown ones, most absurdly represented by the beyond-parody, attention-stripping ‘O’Malley’s Bar’ from Murder Ballads itself. Utter nonsense, and it still amazes me when this record gets highly rated, as I think its one of Cave’s weakest projects. He followed it by the sublime Boatman’s Call, showing that he could appreciate and venerate the female sex, as opposed to exploring methods of eviscerating them.

Tom Waits, an equally titanic modern presence, explored serial killing in his nineties projects,the Blood Money/Alice albums, as well as  the Woyzeck play with Robert Wilson. Not The Ripper exactly, but exploring similar territory. We even had Spinal Tap’s ‘Saucy Jack’ to provide us with a fun house mirror to our unhealthy interest in the first Victorian serial killer.  Writer Alan Moore’s (very great) ‘From Hell’ further bedded down the mythos, into incalculable depths of conspiracy and counter-conspiracy tropes of staggering complexity that Johnny Depp’s film of the same name could only feebly approximate.

But it was all from the male gaze, inevitably. So now here comes Hallie Rubenhold, with a new take on this most obsessive of subjects, one that has acute resonance with our own times. Still, even 100 + years on, when we might be forgiven in thinking that the social problems of the 1880′s slums of London’s Eat End might have been consigned to history. On reading ‘The Five...’, I realised that these problems have never really gone away, and are still alive in the Conservative Party-dominated England of our present day. This was yet another wake-up call for me, and I can only recommend most  strongly a book that can exert such a call. I will further explain in the next blog..

[autumn0689]

An analysis of Alice, Rose, and Scratch’s relationship with Alan as it relates to obsession. Well, my interpretation of their relationships with him.

I love how in the game, there are characters, well three in total, who have an obsession (well, not in Alice’s case but I’ll get to that) with Alan Wake (the man himself) and how interesting those dynamics are in relation to how Alan views the person.

With Alice, it’s not an obsession but she does do everything she can to help her husband, even willing to throw herself back into the Dark Place to help him and is helping him every step of the way. Alice has always wanted to help Alan, which is what led her to bringing him to Bright Falls to get help, and I can imagine that Alice is happy to finally be able to help Alan, even if it’s from a distance.

With Alan, he cares so much for Alice. He cares to the point of doing anything to ensure her safety, even if it ends up being detrimental to himself, such as sacrificing himself so that Alice could emerge out of the lake, and Alan is constantly worry about Alice, with his goal often being about how to help her, to save her even. Alan’s view of Alice is almost like he doesn’t believe she can handle herself, which is the exact opposite, and when Alan falls for Alice’s rise in believing that she is dead, he gets furious, then guilt ridden when he learns that it was him haunting her, causing him to almost have a disregard to himself, thinking of saving everyone and even ending the story with him dead, taking Scratch with him and Alice refusing to let that happen as she helps him ascend by leading him to where he needs to be, slowly inching him towards ascension as Alan probably has something he hasn’t felt in a while, hope. Hope of escaping and to be with Alice (and I do hope they will be together in the end and the story not end in tragedy)

Alan’s relationship with Alice is one on how romantic relationships are, on how it’s about love but also about conflict in the relationship. Alan’s refusal to get any sort of help and to sulk when he was experiencing Writers Block began to strain his and Alice’s relationship and how as much as Alice tried to help, Alan had to be willing to put in the work. It’s about how mutual their relationship should be, instead of Alice constantly worrying about him as Alan, quite frankly, treated her and others around him like shit. It’s about how strong their love is, with Alan being shocked how Alice was still with him, even after everything he did, and their relationship isn’t abusive, it is heavily flawed, just like all types of relationships are. Their relationship to each other is about care and so, so much love for one another, and how that even if relationships grow sour, there is always a chance to change it and to possibly have their relationships become stronger because of it, and that through all their hardships and being separated for so long, their love for each other remains just as strong as it did thirteen years ago.

It’s not exactly obsession, but I feel like Alice’s relationship with Alan is important to keep in mind as I continue to discuss about other two people who have more intense feelings for the writer, but in more unhealthy ways.

With Rose, almost everything she does revolves around Alan. She worships him, wants to be his muse, wants to be with him, and writes fanfic about him (which is not a bad thing but I love that she writes fanfic, you go girl) and she basically has a shrine of him, but is able to show self restraint when she meets up with Alan, which surprises me, because she was very professional when she met with Alan, but with Saga she was basically gushing about him, being happy to help him in whatever ways she can, doing anything to help him, and I mean anything.

Alan’s relationship with Rose is one akin to a parasocial relationship. Rose is head over heels for Alan, calling herself his ‘muse all along’ and writing fanfic and drawing sketches about him while Alan remembers her ‘as Rose from the Diner’. Since Alan said that he wasn’t leaving Rose any messages, it was most likely Scratch, and it shows how easily Rose is to be manipulated by others if they just use that ‘Alan needs her’ (Saga even said the phrase that Rose had been waiting for and got excited even though Saga didn’t believe that she was a character in his story) and, believe me I understand liking an famous people or obsessing over a fictional character, but Rose took it to the next level, having her whole life dedicated to helping Alan and, being stated to ‘read The Sudden Stop before she goes to bed’, and while it’s okay to like authors or fictional characters and actors, it’s not when it becomes to unhealthy standards, like how Rose started to basically dedicate her life to him and never outgrowing that obsession for him.

Rose’s obsession with Alan was used by her to Scratch’s advantage, using her obsession of Alan to his own gain, and with Rose’s parallel to Cynthia Weaver, who was obsessed with Zane and how that ruined her life and led to her demise, it is very possible that Rose’s obsession with Alan may lead to her demise. (I love Rose and while it’s fine to like Alan’s work, considering her parallel to Cynthia, I hope that her obsession with Alan doesn’t consume her to the point that she doesn’t have a life outside of a singular goal to help her crush, just like Cynthia, and I hope that Scratch leaves my girl alone!)

Now speaking of Scratch, let’s get to him.

Scratch is OBSESSED with Alan. Scratch is basically after Alan in Alan’s section of the game. Scratch is way different than his American Nightmare self, being more reclusive in his appearances rather than his more boisterous self in American Nightmare (and also that he was drenched in blood a majority of the time) He then hitches a ride in Alan’s body, laying dormant until Saga got the Clicker, then he comes out and WANTS the Clicker, so much that he even takes over Saga’s Mind Palace before Saga regained control. Then Scratch takes over Casey, takes the Clicker, and turns Bright Falls into a never ending DEERFEST in which they talk only about one thing: Alan. It’s all about Alan, about his book, Return, and how is a fantastic writer.

Now we get to the chase scene in the Wellness Center. Scratch says many stuff that alludes to his obsession of Alan (and himself by extension) saying lines such as ‘welcome be back home’ and ‘everything revolves around us’ and ‘you are home’ a bunch of other lines. It’s such specific dialogue that Scratch says, mostly referring to him and Alan as one, especially since he had disdain for Alan in American Nightmare, often remarking that he is better than Alan and doesn’t even want to be put in the same league as him. Now, we have to remember that Scratch is now an aspect of Alan in AW2, so Scratch’s obsession over him could be the fact that they are both linked together, with Scratch being Alan’s dark self manifested.

Now, Alan’s relationship with Scratch is purely antagonistic. Alan holds immense disdain for Scratch, to the point of writing a note that Scratch is bad. Since Scratch wrote Return and Alan modified it, Alan has even more disdain for Scratch, and then he learned that, apparently, Scratch was haunting Alice, which resulted in her ‘death’, and then Alan went and shot who he thought was Scratch, only to learn that it was him, that he was the one haunting Alice.

Alan then, as a result of Saga being thrown into the Dark Place and Alice’s ‘death’ and Casey being taken over, blames himself for everything that happened, and while he still has animosity for Scratch, he acknowledges that he also had a role in what happened and that he had to fix it, with him writing him dying, taking Scratch with him, beckoning him home, most likely a symbolism of Alan accepting his dark sides, as Saga shoots him with the Bullet of Light, resulted in him dying, then coming back as he utters “It’s not a Loop, it’s a Spiral.”, leaving Scratch’s fate ambiguous.

Scratch and Alan’s relationship is one of repression, of trying not ignore your worst qualities, and instead of trying to resolve them, you ignore them as you let them fester, and since Alan is in the Dark Place, a place that can alter reality, Alan’s dark self was manifested as Scratch, at first a murderous, suave being who had no regards for anything and dislikes Alan, to an animalistic egotistical being that wants to take over Alan’s body (and if you want you can also interpret Scratch wanting to be Alan so that he can take his place, just like how Mr Scratch in AWAN wanted, but instead of being separate he wants to be the only one, which may be why he wants to be in Alan’s body, since technically Alan would be out of the picture) in which Mr Scratch represented people’s interpretation of Alan while Scratch represents Alan’s repressed emotions.

I wonder how Scratch will be in NG+ or in a hypothetical Alan Wake 3 if NG+ doesn’t wrap up the ending. I wonder if he will even play a part since Alan technically took him ‘back home’ or if Scratch is still out there. Since this is a spiral, is Scratch still inside Alan? I guess we will have to wait and see until NG+

Can’t wait to see what else is in store for this amazing game and, if NG+ really does change a lot, how these relationships change (or not change) in NG+ (and to see more of Alice)

To anyone who has read all of this (my ramblings) uh… thanks. Feel free to correct me if I got anything incorrect and wow this was a longer post than expected.