#and foreshadowing to awii

[jsaunderswrites]

Testing the limits of my very personal, vibe-based cataloguing system for my media collection:

Like, although they officially do not take place in the same universe I have The Spectacular Spider-Man and The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes placed together as though they do.

Similarly I have put Green Lantern: The Animated Series with Young Justice based on the latter having an episode that follows up on the characters from the former.

But now I'm considering how to treat the Remedy Universe. I would place Quantum Break among them if I owned a physical copy, but what about Max Payne? I'm thinking not as there's not even an unintentional hint of crossover cosmology. But maybe the remake will change that.

[taranida]

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