Characters / Remedy Connected Universe: Alan Wake

Remedy Connected Universe Character Index
Alan Wake | Bright Falls | Federal Bureau of Control | Paranatural Phenomena | The Dark Place

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Alan Wake

Portrayed by: Matthew Porretta (voice), Ilkka Villi (model)

Appearances: Bright Falls | Alan Wake | Night Springs | Alan Wake's American Nightmare | Control | Alan Wake II

"My name is Alan Wake. I'm a writer."

^{Click here to see him in Alan Wake Remastered}
"A story is not a machine that does what you tell it. 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."

^{Click here to see him in Control}
"How can I ever know for sure I've escaped and not just lost in my own fantasy of it? That thought alone can drive you mad."

^{Click here to see him in Alan Wake's American Nightmare}
"To change reality, you nudge it into the right direction. Your version of it is there, waiting; it wants to come true. All you need to do is to help it achieve its potential."

^{Click here to see him in Alan Wake}
"There's light, and there's darkness. Cause and effect. There's guilt and there's atonement. But the scales always need to balance. Everything has a price."

"In a horror story, the victim keeps asking "Why?" But there can be no explanation, and there shouldn't be one. The unanswered mystery is what stays with us the longest, and it's what we'll remember in the end."

A best-selling novelist who is vacationing with his wife in the small town of Bright Falls while wrestling with a severe case of writer's block. She disappears abruptly, and Alan comes to in a wrecked car in the wilderness, missing a week's time, and searching for clues as to what happened to his wife, all while fighting a dark supernatural force.

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A-H

• Act of True Love: He sacrifices his life (with the potential of a Fate Worse than Death) at the end of the first game by plunging into Cauldron Lake and stopping the Dark Presence. While it is also to save Bright Falls, his first motivation is to save his beloved wife
• Action Survivor: He's literally just a novelist who spent a bit of time on the gun range and wears a quite dapper tweed jacket. This is generally shown in his performance in-game; Wake can't run very far without getting tired, he can't take too many hits, and he's not an exceptionally good shot. If the enemy is more than twenty or thirty paces away, he's not likely to hit them, even with a more accurate gun like the hunting rifle.
  • Control indicates that this may be invoked, as some of the information in the AWE expansion that Alan was already a Parautilitarian even before he came into contact with the Dark Presence, and that Alan was in turn created by Thomas Zane to be a Reality Warper Action Survivor.
• Adaptational Jerkass: In the novelization of the first game, Alan's Hair-Trigger Temper is played up even further. While being in the serene Bright Falls with his wife cools his temper on the ferry in the game, when he overhears Mott leering at him and Alice he nearly comes to blows over it in the novel. This could be a case of Characterization Marches On as the sequel establishes that Alan is very well known for his temper, almost for it as much as his books.
• Aesop Amnesia: In the Special Episodes of the first game, he briefly succumbs to his despair and tries to give up, only to learn to regain the will to escape the Dark Place. The problems of the sequel are caused by him succumbing to his despair and giving up. This is somewhat justified, from a combination of a 13 year process of failure weighing him down and his mind being altered to make him literally forget.
• The Alcoholic: Due to parties he's thrown for the success of his final Alex Casey novel, he wakes up drunk and goes about taking medicine and putting on glasses as a remedy in a way to make it clear it is far from his first time. He even lets himself get drunk with Barry at the Anderson farm, only briefly trying to reject the drink before succumbing to the temptation.
• Alternate Self: He has an alternate version of himself in Quantum Break that mostly followed the life of the "main" Alan, but somehow got a movie about Mr. Scratch and the FBI into production following his disappearance. While in-game evidence ties the game to the wider RCU multiverse, due to the franchise rights belonging to Microsoft they cannot officially place it in the same Shared Universe.
• Always Introduces Themselves: The way he introduces himself throughout the franchise is practically his catchphrase for how often he says it. He can be heard saying it at least once in Alan Wake, American Nightmare, Control, and Alan Wake II.
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • The exact nature of the relationship between Thomas Zane and Alan Wake. Did Zane write Alan into existence to fix his mistake and defeat The Dark Presence for good? Or did Alan write Zane writing Alan into existence so that he would have a way to defeat the Dark Presence? If trying to figure it out makes your head hurt, don't worry, you're not alone.
  • In the climax of Alan Wake II, he has a conversation with Saga within her Mind Place in a manner similar to a conversation she had with Odin, something Saga and Odin accomplished because they were both Seers. With the FBC labeling him a parautilitarian, does he have the same parautility the Anderson Family has, or could they only accomplish that because they were both in the Dark Place? The FBC had labeled him a parautilitarian long before the events of Alan Wake II, so is this what they were talking about? And for that matter, in the AWE DLC of Control he wrote down the events Jesse had been experiencing in real time, so did he use the power of Cauldron Lake to write the FBC and everyone in it into reality, or did he learn about the FBC through his visions and merely nudge everything into place as part of a long-term solution in his escape from the Dark Place?
• Ambiguous Syntax: At the end of AWE, he is found manically muttering about "[his] double" coming for him. While this tracks to mean his Evil Doppelgänger Mr. Scratch, the imposter Tom Zane also inexplicably looks identical to him, leaving it ambiguous who he is truly so troubled over.
• Ambiguously Human: He seems to be somehow altered after his plunge into the Dark Place. Despite aging normally and otherwise seeming human, he no longer requires sustenance and is able to contact Jesse over the Hotline, which only paranatural entities, the dead, and those who have Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence have been shown to be able to do otherwise.
  • Beyond that, Control and Alan Wake II essentially state that Alan was a parautilitarian even before coming to Bright Falls. It's implied that he has a level of psychic power, which was likely what caused all of his nightmares as a child. And the fact that the fictional Alex Casey is so very similar to the real Alex Casey is heavily implied to be because Alan was unwittingly psychically inspired by the real man to create the fictional one. This gets used as a loophole to free the real Casey from possession by the Dark Presence at the end of AWII. As Casey wasn't a creation of Alan's but a real person, he should be off limits to the story.
  • The Final Draft of II adds a new potentially unsettling wrinkle. Casper Darling has ended up in the Dark Place, and has spent what he estimates is about 2 years trying to escape. At one point his equipment manages to pick up a transmission from Alan, who he notes sounds suspiciously like he does (given that Alan is voiced by the same actor who completely plays Casper). In the second video of Casper, he comes to the conclusion that science cannot alter the reality of the Dark Place, so perhaps art can. Right on cue, Thomas Zane pops into frame and introduces himself. He notes that Casper sounds familiar and Casper notes that Zane looks familiar. They both decide to team up. It fortifies the existing existential question of whether Thomas Zane actually created Alan Wake, and if so it seems that Casper Darling may have assisted him in that endeavor.
• And I Must Scream: The exchange for releasing Alice was that Alan confined himself to the darkness underneath Cauldron Lake so he could write a definitive end for the Dark Presence through a new story. As of Control, Alan has been in the Dark Place for 10 years with no apparent hope of escape, and not only is his will to escape starting to wane, more mysteries are piling up.
• Animal Motifs: In Alan Wake II, Alan is associated with owls, specifically the taxidermized owl in the Writer's Room. Owls are nocturnal creatures, and he's trapped in the Dark Place, where it's eternally night. It's also revealed he lived most of his life in a building called Parliament Tower, which name is derived from owls^note A group of owls is known as a "Parliament" and has stylized owls as its logo.
• Anti-Hero: His many attempts to escape the Dark Place while keeping to the direction of the horror story puts a lot of indirect blood on his hands in Bright Falls and the FBC. Despite this, he never stops being a good man at heart, never gives in to the Dark Presence's desires, and when push comes to shove, he is just as willing to sacrifice himself as anyone else for the greater good.
  • This gets played with in II. In one cycle, Alan simply chooses to stop writing, as his attempts to escape have caused so much suffering for other people (though incidentally, this actually leads to the beginning of the plot as in this period of time, the Dark Presence comes to Thomas Zane masquerading as Alan and together they write Return, which in its uneditted state is the Dark Presence's ticket to reality). And Saga is very pissed that Alan writing her into his story to stop the Dark Presence and save him comes at her daughter retroactively being dead for years.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: In American Nightmare, he remarks that "Just because I say crazy things doesn't mean I believe everything." when explaining why he doesn't put a lot of credit in Emma's New Age beliefs, despite his own talk of reality alteration, shadow zombie attacks, and time travel.
• Arch-Enemy: Mutually establishes this relationship with Mr. Scratch during the events of American Nightmare. While he is theoretically a liaison of the Dark Presence, his plans for Alan are incredibly personal and made specifically to ruin every positive aspect of his life. Alan briefly stopped Scratch in Nightmare, but Control confirmed him to be still kicking (much to Alan's distress) and even more dangerous, as he has dropped the Laughably Evil pretenses.
• Author Avatar: He has quite a few things in common with the game's writer Sam Lake. Both are established writers of a popular detective series (Max Payne and Alex Casey, respectively) who endeavor to write a departure from the previous works by developing a horror story.
• Author Appeal: He seems to have developed a subconscious preference for the heroes of his stories to be competent women in some form of unique high-ranking position. In order, he's had Sheriff Sarah Breaker, Director Jesse Faden, FBI Profiler Saga Anderson, and FBC Agent Kiran Estevez be among the heroes of the stories he's written for the Dark Presence.
• Autobots, Rock Out!:
  • During a climatic showdown on the Anderson farm, Alan guns down the Taken hordes with the Old Gods of Asgard's song "Children of the Elder God" blaring in the background and fireworks roaring through the night.
  • As he fights through Mr. Scratch's hordes in American Nightmare, the Old Gods' new pop rock single "Balance Slays the Demon" starts up to give him an additional push to take Mr. Scratch down once and for all.
• Back from the Dead: "The Final Draft" mode of Alan Wake II clarifies the status of his Uncertain Doom in the base game's ending: His gambit to put an end to the loop works, which allows him to spring back to life a few moments after being shot, the Bullet of Light harmlessly fading away, and leaves him confident to face the future, find Alice, and finally escape the Dark Place.
• Badass Bookworm: He's a decorated novelist that also turns out to be an abnormally good shot for someone who spent just a bit of time in range practice.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: He's ditched both his previous attires in Alan Wake II, now sporting a sharp suit and tie as he fights through the Dark Place's twisted version of New York. The deluxe edition "Celebrity Suit" bonus skin for Alan is the even sharper suit he wore for the premier of The Sudden Stop.
• Batman Gambit: In the AWE expansion of Control, he is all but confirmed to have sent The-Thing-That-Had-Been-Hartman to the Oldest House in a bid to turn Jesse into a heroine capable of saving him from The Dark Place. Going even further, there's evidence to suggest that he created Jesse, the FBC, and the Hiss invasion as part of this plan: His writings reference aspects of Jesse's backstory that he would have no way of knowing otherwise, and if you look around the Investigations Sector, you can find pages of a Night Springs spec script that he wrote with a plot similar to that of the base game, indicating that he may have adapted this story into his current work.
• Beard of Sorrow: After thirteen years of isolation in the Dark Place, he's grown out a shaggy beard from his Permastubble to showcase just how far he's mentally fallen into his own psyche.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: He voices a quiet hope early in Alan Wake that the new environment of a small town would give his mind new ideas for his next novel. By the end of the game, he's made his next book with the town's influence, and has suffered dearly for it.
• Berserk Button: He's very touchy when it comes to his writer's block being prodded on, especially when it comes up during what he thought was just going to be a simple vacation. Alice trying to trick him into writing again causes a heated argument, and Dr. Hartman touching that nerve again later is one of the many reasons for why Alan wants to punch the smug grin off his face.
• Big Damn Heroes: Late in "The Clicker", Sarah and Barry's helicopter has been taken down, so Alan decides specifically to leave the safety of the lit concrete pipe he's traveling in to help. He arrives as Taken are swarming the two. Sarah notes "You sure know how to make an entrance. Barry and I were just about to make like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid".
• Blessed with Suck: He's a Reality Warper who cannot die within the Dark Place, but this comes at the cost of being constantly hounded by agents of the Dark Place. As he is trapped there, this deathless limbo becomes a curse as he makes constant fruitless escape attempts, with added guilt from the manuscripts altering reality and ruining other people's lives eroding his sanity.
• Bling-Bling-BANG!: In Alan Wake II, the preorder-exclusive "Ornate Revolver" is available for him to wield. It features a marbled white grip and intricately detailed floral gold patterning down the barrel.
• Bond One-Liner:
  • In "The Truth", he is told by Walter about his friend Danny going crazy and attacking him, only for a Taken to bash into the building they are in and attack. After gunning it down, Alan remarks:
  Alan: Let me guess, Danny?
  • He also quips "Down boy" after defeating a combine harvester blocking his path midway through his final push through the Taken in "Depature".
• Boom, Headshot!: Saga is forced to shoot him in the forehead with the Bullet of Light to end Scratch's invasion of reality in Alan Wake II.
• Broken Ace: Outwardly a successful, talented, charming writer who's happily married to a beautiful woman and beloved by the public. On the inside, a deeply insecure man with anger issues and a severe case of writer's block.
• The Cameo:
  • In Quantum Break, he shows up early on in an advertisement, narrating for a new story following up the events of Alan Wake as Production Foreshadowing for his next proper game. A Monarch employee also can be seen playing the real-life Alan Wake game.
  • In the base game of Control, his only appearance is a short cameo from picking up one of his typewritten pages, causing him to appear in an apparition to talk about his situation. His role is expanded from this in the AWE expansion.
• Car Fu: In combination with the strong headlights and the fast speed, Alan has the choice to use any car he comes across as a weapon against the Taken. Even during a cutscene in "The Truth" he runs a few down while fleeing Cauldron Lake Lodge.
• Cassandra Truth: Most of the people of Bright Falls are skeptical whenever he tries to reveal the nature of the threat to the town to be shadow monsters coming from the lake. Even his main allies Barry and Sheriff Breaker have a hard time trusting him and only start believing him after seeing the Dark Presence with their own eyes.
• Celebrity Is Overrated: His exasperation at his fanbase and his strong writer's block are the motivation for Alice to bring them to a small, out of the way town in the hope of having a break from it all. Even then, he comes across a radio host clamoring for an interview and a Loony Fan.
• Character Development: His standoffish qualities from the first game gradually fade away throughout the series, and he becomes far more grateful toward his allies in American Nightmare and II. For comparison, he was snarky and blunt to even his best friend in the first game, while he's cracking lighthearted jokes with Tim Breaker by their third proper meeting in the second.
• Classical Anti-Hero: He's felt like a hack writer for a while and his attempts to write in a new genre is to prove to himself he is a good writer even out of his comfort zone. He is also not the best physically, only being able to run for about ten solid seconds before he's doubling over wheezing for just as long.
• Complexity Addiction: Alan insists he needs to follow "rules" of fiction in how he alters reality. He can't just have something pop in out of nowhere but things need to be influenced in subtle ways and proper circumstances set up. According to Mister Door, the way Alan does this makes things far more difficult for himself than is necessary.
• Cruel to Be Kind: He holds Sheriff Breaker at gunpoint and has her gun taken even after they become Fire-Forged Friends. He does this in her best interest, though, as he wants her to remain in the Well-Lit Room while she wished to go with him when he didn't intend to return.
• David Versus Goliath: The David in multiple regards. In a wider sense, he's an out of his depth writer fighting an Eldritch Abomination. More specifically, he's also the physically smaller David to the Assault Taken in Alan Wake and the Giants in American Nightmare.
• Dead Artists Are Better: He's not dead exactly, but it seems that there was a surge of interest in his work after his disappearance, enough for his last published novel, The Sudden Stop, to be adapted into a film. It's also implied that his other books were adapted too, but it's unknown if this was before or after he disappeared.
  Langston: The Sudden Stop hits theaters tonight. I can't believe I'm missing an Alex Casey movie for this.
• Deadpan Snarker: Always has a quip or deadpan remark at the ready, no matter the seriousness of the situation. The majority of these moments are often out of frustration considering his circumstances, as we see when talking with Barry late in "Taken" after Barry previously refused to believe a word Alan said:
  Barry: What— What the hell was that?! I saw it from the window — I saw — I saw something!
  Alan: Forget about it, Barry, it's just me going crazy.
• Demonic Possession: By the time of Alan Wake II, Alan cannot safely leave the Dark Place because Scratch has gained the ability to do this to him in our dimension, and would escape into reality with him no matter what, with the ability to hijack his body to boot.
• Despair Speech: Has a brief one during one of his cutscenes in Control. He forlornly recalls he once had a plan to escape the Dark Place that it made him forget. Luckily, he recovers quickly, if only out of a desperation to escape before Scratch comes looking for him. Alan Wake II shows in at least one of his previous loops, he devolves into a lunatic gibbering about the hopelessness of his situation.
• Determinator: One of his most enduring character traits is the fact when he has his mind set on something, nothing will stop him from getting it done. Fighting through a forest of shadow monsters just to get his wife back, fighting his way out of an endless loop made by a version of him Made of Evil, and he will not falter even after a decade of complete isolation in his efforts to remove himself from the Dark Place.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: His rewriting of the Dark Presence to give it a weak spot. He metaphorically broke his arm in the process, but was aware that it was going to happen because that's how horror stories work.
• Deity of Human Origin: Not quite godhood, but the ending of The Final Draft implies that Alan has fully overcome and absorbed Scratch into himself and can now write without restriction. He may now even be on the same level as Mr. Door. As Alan says, he has become "the master of two worlds. No, the master of many worlds."
• Diligent Hero, Slothful Villain: Throughout American Nightmare, he is the Diligent hero to Mr. Scratch's Slothful villain. While Scratch is willing to sit around and wait for Alan to die in Night Springs, Alan fights to find a way out without rest and eventually defeats Scratch by piecing together a way to end the looping nightmare.
• Disappeared Dad: It's referenced by numerous sources that Wake grew up never knowing who his father was and was raised alone by his mother. Considering he is suggested to have been written into existence by Zane, he may not have a father to begin with to minimize the amount of people that Zane needed to write into reality.
• Dreaming of Things to Come: In Alan Wake II, it's expressed multiple times that Alan had based his best-selling novels off of visions he had confused for dreams and ideas he came up with himself, implying that he possessed prophetic parautility long before he started experiencing explicit paranatural phenomena in the first game.
• Dual Wielding: Unconventionally, Alan fights wielding a gun in one hand and a flashlight in the other. Due to the Taken's darkness shields, the light sources are certainly of equal value to the firearms he carries in keeping him alive.
• Enemy Mine: He figures out Ben Mott is his wife's alleged kidnapper, but ends up fighting side by side with him against the Taken. It's solely out of necessity to survive and their Teeth-Clenched Teamwork ends quickly at Alan's fist.
• Expy: In-Universe, he's one of Thomas Zane. Notably, some characters and/or entities such as the Old Gods of Asgard and Ahti don't seem entirely capable of seeing him as a different person. It's implied Alan is a creation of Zane's, being the linchpin of Zane's backup plan to defeat the Dark Presence. This is further shown in Control, where Alan in turn created Jesse to free him from the Dark Presence as well.
• Face Death with Dignity: When the time comes for Saga to shoot him with the Bullet of Light, he accepts his fate with grace, defying Scratch for a final time, and serenely noting in his narration he simply hopes for the nightmare to end, even if nothing awaits him.
• Foil: The opposite of Mr. Scratch, despite the fact he was made to be Alan's Enemy Without. Alan is humble, lowkey, and deep down insecure of his talents. Scratch is an over the top egotist who relishes how good he is at killing people, but is insecure in his own way: deep down he knows he's just the negative parts of Alan's reputation, and will never truly have the chance to be anything else.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: From a meager human writer with a crumbling self-esteem to a reality warper whose writings influence multiple planes of reality and who successfully Flips Off Cthulhu several times.
• Genre Savvy: He's aware that horror stories have a tendency not to end well for the protagonist, and that there can be a lot of casualties along the way. Justified, since he wrote some of them in-universe and needs to keep the tension believable so the Dark Presence won't wrestle control of the narrative away from him.
  Alan: No one is safe in a good horror story, certainly not the protagonist. That's what makes them fun. This was anything but.
• Go Among Mad People: Halfway through Alan Wake he is forcibly taken to Cauldron Lake Lodge and gaslighted into believing that he is insane. For the brief time he is there, he is obviously the Only Sane Man among genuinely mentally ill creators.
• Greater-Scope Paragon: Implied to be this, as he might've written Jesse Faden, Polaris, and even the FBC itself into existence in order to help him eventually escape The Dark Place. Complicating matters, it's also implied that he created the Hiss (or at least engineered its invasion of the Oldest House) just for the sake of his hero (Jesse) having a villain to fight, suggesting that he might unintentionally be getting close to He Who Fights Monsters territory in his desperation to escape his torment.
• Guest Fighter: He's made several playable appearances in crossovers outside the RCU:
  • For Halloween 2023, he was added as a purchasable skin in Fortnite.
  • The 30.5 half chapter of Dead by Daylight centers around him, and accordingly features him as a new survivor. His narration in promotional materials indicates his presence in the game is one of his attempts to escape the Dark Place between his first and second games.
• Hammy Villain, Serious Hero: He's become fairly reserved and low key from everything he's seen in the Dark Place and dutifully works to escape in-between his mental breaks. In contrast, his enemy and counterpart Mr. Scratch is loud, manic, and a complete sucker for attention.
• Happy Ending Override: The end of American Nightmare has him reuniting with Alice and kissing as the sun rises. While the narration notes it may not be real, the truth is left ambiguous. By the time of Control, it is confirmed he never left and has been suffering in the Dark Place for the entire decade since.
• Happily Married: He and Alice do fight occasionally, but Alan wouldn't keep looking for her with such determination if they didn't have a good marriage. There are quite a few scenes and flashbacks dedicated to showing just how devoted the two are to each other.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: He can get very riled up very quickly, which usually culminates in him throwing a haymaker at whoever his anger is directed at. This happens when confronting both Hartman and Mott throughout Alan Wake and helped establish him as a troublemaking celebrity prior to the games.
• Help Yourself in the Future: Just about every useful item in the game was written into the plot by Alan himself, either directly or through the Lady of the Light. Lampshaded in his internal monologues when noting that flash grenades aren't exactly standard electrician equipment when he finds them in company trucks parked all over the place.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: Alan Wake II reveals that after his disappearance he was pinned as the murderer of Agent Nightingale, setting the FBI on his trail when he (or rather someone with his face) resurfaces over a decade after the first game. Rumors also spread of him being the Dark Messiah of the Cult of the Tree.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • He willingly plunges into the Dark Place and begins writing the manuscript within to finish the Stable Time Loop of the story and save his wife by writing an ending where she resurfaces.
  • Again in II, as he learns there is no way for him to escape that wouldn't let Scratch back out, and he allows Saga to shoot him and end Bright Fall's nightmare.
• Hidden Depths: In the second game, he proves to be a talented singer when he gets roped into the "Herald of Darkness" song during the fourth chapter of Initiation.
• Higher Understanding Through Drugs: In his first game, he recalls his missing week from getting drunk on the Anderson's moonshine. In Control we see him suddenly remember his situation with Mr. Scratch after downing a shot with the Doppelganger claiming to be Thomas Zane.
• His Own Worst Enemy: In the past, he sabotaged his writing career and strained his relationship with his wife to prove to himself he had talent, and constantly derailed his standing with fans with his poorly kept temper. By the time of Alan Wake II, he becomes obsessed with the concept of The Hero (himself and/or his allies) having to pay a price for the story that lets him escape the Dark Place to be complete. Mr. Door calls this out as far more complicated for himself than necessary if he simply let go of his self-imposed rules, which The Final Draft proves when Alan breaks the spiral with his own willpower and a final Golden Ending.

I-Y

• Iconic Outfit:
  • His look from the first game, a tweed jacket covering a black hoodie, is both his most enduring look throughout the series, but by far also the most popular. The noticeable shoulder patches gave the outfit a unique quality that endeared it to the fanbase, and they became synonymous with the character, to the point where his appearance in This House of Dreams leaves him nameless, but describes the elbow patches on his jacket to clue the reader in.
  • His outfit from the second game, a dark brown suit with a dark blue dress shirt and a maroon tie, has become Alan's signature look in his most recent appearances.
• Icy Blue Eyes: He has quite a striking set of pale blue eyes and has a coldly ruthless streak towards his enemies. Otherwise subverted, as he tends to be quite temperamental and otherwise emotional.
• Idiot Ball: Despite him usually being quite perceptive of other's motives, in "Ransom", he automatically trusts Rose despite her having a Creepy Monotone and inexplicably having the lights out in the middle of the day. This gets him drugged and almost late to his meeting with Mott.
• Impossibly Tacky Clothing: It's a Running Gag throughout his journey through Bright Falls that no one can take his jacket with elbow patches seriously. In This House of Dreams, the mention of them is even used as an identifier for the otherwise unnamed Alan.
• Indy Ploy: He tends to act without really planning things out, such as his attempts to force Mott to give him Alice back. In the end, he jumps into Cauldron Lake and takes on the Dark Presence with only the hope the Clicker could destroy Barbara and he could work something out from there.
• Ink-Suit Actor: In every game since Quantum Break, Alan has looked physically identical to his model Ilkka Villi. This is in no small part due to the fact Remedy's Medium Blending meaning he has been repeatedly played by Villi in live-action segments.
• The Insomniac: We never see him willingly going to bed once throughout the franchise and spend most of the game running around after sunset. To be fair, he does get sedated, knocked out, and other involuntarily put to sleep more than a few times, and after his first game, he doesn't even need to sleep.
• Intergenerational Friendship: Strikes up a quick friendship with the elderly Anderson Brothers in Alan Wake, and grows mutually fond of the salty old janitor Ahti throughout the second game.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He has a reputation as a somewhat smug writer with a hair trigger, but he's approachable otherwise and a good man who genuinely loves his wife and cares for his friends and allies. The game essentially serves to make him realize he needs to think bigger than his own issues.
• Journey to the Center of the Mind: Alan does this throughout the two Special Episodes. Due to the Dark Place being formed from his own memories and psyche, he travels through memories of his life to find and restore his mind to working order, conjuring up flashbacks and a one-note perception of Barry to assist himself.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia:
  • After diving into Cauldron Lake to save Alice, he wakes up a week later in a crashed car with absolutely no memory of what happened. This holds until the end of "The Truth", when the Anderson's moonshine kicks him into a flashback.
  • One of the Dark Place's traps is that Alan immediately forgets what he was writing if he loses focus. This causes him to take a brutalist, nothing left to the imagination style of writing to minimize the consequences of him re-writing something without even being aware of it.
• Leitmotif: Alan has a fairly simple four note leitmotif associated with him, as can be heard here at about 49 seconds in to the trailer. It can be heard in all three Alan Wake games, as well as his Sequel Hook at the end of the AWE DLC for Control.
• Light 'em Up: Its subtly implied his time with Tom Zane / the Bright Presence may have given him some level of control over light. In the games, aiming Alan's flashlight at a Taken uniquely stuns them and even slightly boosts how quickly their shield is broken. He comments on it in American Nightmare on how inexplicably to him, his mental desire for the light to burn away the Taken's shields seems to amplify it in reality.
• Literal Split Personality: Is briefly split into two halves of this with Insane Alan during the Special Episodes. In practice, the playable "rational" Alan is no different from the Determinator from the main game, but is physically separate from the part of himself that wants his suffering to end after the fumes he was running on to save his wife wore off.
• Made of Iron: He can take an indefinite amount of punishment as long as he has enough time between when he is hit. Being hit by possessed cars, thrown axes, and chainsaw swings will only cause him to stagger for a few moments, and he only ever sheds any blood from the opening car crash.
• Meaningful Name: He's named A. Wake spends most of the series running around at night and generally not getting enough sleep. He's also one of the few people "awake" to the reality of what's happening in Bright Falls.
• Messianic Archetype: Despite his temperament, he ends up making a great sacrifice to save the people he cares about from the influence of a great, all-consuming evil. His fall and time in the Dark Place is even comparable to a descent into Hell. In later games starting with Quantum Break, he begins to look more like Christ at a distance as well, with longer hair and a thicker beard. In the finale of Alan Wake II, he faces death to take the brunt of another's punishment, only to return from death stronger than ever, strengthening the connection even further.
• Mistaken Identity: The Anderson brothers mistaken Alan for Thomas Zane and identify him as "Tom" well into the sequel. Whether this is because of their age and mental health or because Alan and Zane greatly resembles each other is unknown. Ahti also identifies Alan for Zane though his reason for doing so is unknown.
• Most Writers Are Writers: He's a best-selling novelist and the protagonist of his game series.
• Motifs: Spirals.
  • One of the doors in the Oceanview Motel & Casino in Control has a spiral painted onto it, the AWE DLC revealing that the door leads to The Dark Place where Alan is having a conversation with Thomas Zane. This same door would reappear in the Valhalla Retirement Home in Alan Wake II where it is guarded by Ahti who opens the door for Alan in the climax when he needs to return to the writer's room.
  • In Alan Wake II, he becomes convinced that the Dark Place has trapped him in an endless time loop he can't escape from, only for the end of the game for him to realize that it's not a loop, but a spiral, meaning that he isn't truly trapped, merely experiencing events out of order and that not all hope is lost. It also applies symbolically to his journey throughout the game: in order to escape the Dark Place, he has to dive deeper into its depths (like water circling a drain) in order to write an exit back into the Real World.
    Alan: It's not a loop... it's a spiral.
• Mr. Exposition: Throughout Control's AWE expansion, his hotline calls serve as narrated explanations of his efforts to escape and how The-Thing-That-Had-Been-Hartman was born, captured, and escaped between games.
• Nail 'Em: One of the first new weapons he totes in American Nightmare is a fully automatic nail gun. He even poses with it on the game's cover art, though in the game itself it is quickly overshadowed by the stronger, easily unlocked Submachine gun in terms of value.
• Necessary Drawback: After becoming the Reality Warper in the Dark Place, he could theoretically just write himself the powers of a god and curbstomp the Darkness. Unfortunately, the price of his powers is his requirement to adhere to a reasonable plot: if he summons up a Deus ex Machina or leaves any Plot Holes, it will be the exact conduit the Darkness can use to escape from its prison.
• The Needless: It's implied that the Dark Presence has intentionally taken away his explicit needs for food, water, and sleep in order to keep him alive and writing as much as possible so that it can eventually escape.
• Nerves of Steel: In spite of all the horrors he's faced in Bright Falls, he manages to mostly keep a cool head, especially after the event of the Special Episodes, where he comes to terms with the insane half of his mind. In American Nightmare, he notes multiple times that he has a hard time getting stressed out anymore, even while fighting with his Evil Doppelgänger in a "Groundhog Day" Loop.
  • Subverted in Alan Wake II, where he is noticeably more panicked and confused due to his Sanity Slippage and the ever-increasingly incomprehensible nature of the Dark Place.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: He hit a Despair Event Horizon between the first and second game and decided to simply stop writing to lock himself and the Dark Presence in a permanent stalemate. Unfortunately, this allows the Dark Presence to take advantage of him and begin trying to write unimpeded, leading to a new story in its favor being nearly completed before he realized what had happened.
• Not So Above It All: After the We Sing portion of Alan Wake II, he admits to Ahti that "Herald of Darkness" is catchy, and his tone of voice suggests he enjoyed himself just a little.
• Oh, Crap!: His reaction after walking up to an (unbeknownst to him) recently Taken Carl Stucky and seeing him rip his axe out of a freshly deceased corpse:
  Alan: Oh, hell.
• Old Shame: Downplayed, as he expresses he never truly hated Alex Casey, but relates that half of dozen consecutive books with someone as "dreary" as him as the star began to weigh on Alan, motivating him to finish the series and try something new.
• One-Man Army: He defeats hundreds of Taken people, as well as everything else the Dark Presence throws at him, with nothing but a few sources of light and whatever guns are laying around the area. It's amped up in American Nightmare, where he's a full blown Action Hero with better equipment and more Mooks thrown at him.
• Only Sane Man: Downplayed in the "We Sing" chapter of Alan Wake II; he still participates in "Herald of Darkness", but he has an extremely confused expression plastered on his face the entire time, clearly wondering why his horrific journey through the Dark Place includes a sudden musical number.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: Most of the people who try and antagonize him or use him for their own ends end up meeting a horrible fate. To wit, Mott turns into an Elite Mook in a tie in book, Agent Nightingale is dragged off by the Dark Presence, and even Hartman, who initially escaped his fate, is arrested by the FBC, has his assets confiscated, becomes Too Dumb to Live and dives into Cauldron Lake, and is finally deformed into a complete monstrosity held in the Oldest House. He really hated Hartmann.
• Pet the Dog: Even in the confines of the Dark Place, he makes sure to write as many happy endings for his former allies as he can. A secret hotline call in Control reveals he gave the Anderson brothers a last blaze of rock and roll glory, and he kept Barry successful in the business through making him their agent.
• Perma-Stubble: In his first game and American Nightmare, he has an unshaven look that accentuates just how tired and desperate he is throughout both games. It's been replaced by a thicker beard after Quantum Break.
• Pop-Cultured Badass: Has a large repertoire of pop culture knowledge that he draws from, though the King of Horror tends to be the most often referred to in his monologue.
• Progressively Prettier: His model in the original game is far more stylized compared to a real person and looks quite disheveled. By the time of Alan Wake II, his playable model is now a one-to-one recreation of the attractive and youthful (though not young) Ilkka Villi.
• Reality Warper: Due to the effects of the Cauldron Lake, his writings begin to enter into the real world. This is magnified to greater levels within the cabin, as he is able to write up entire alternate dimensions for the FBC to interact with. In Control and Alan Wake II, a real version of his detective character Alex Casey himself shows up trying to investigate the going-ons of Bright Falls.
• Red Baron: Since American Nightmare, he has gained the title of "Champion of Light" for his efforts to escape the Dark Place and combat his rival, the "Herald of Darkness" Scratch.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: Throughout the series, the revolver is by far his most dependable weapon no matter the situation he finds himself in.
  • In Alan Wake, while it is the only small arms choice, it gets the most ammo of all his weapons and is always given freely while the shotgun and rifle are often out of the way.
  • In American Nightmare, it is now a Punch-Packing Pistol in comparison to the new base weapon, the 9mm, while anything stronger is Awesome, but Impractical and the faster firing weapons are weaker per shot.
    Alan: [picking up a revolver in Night Springs] Can't go wrong with a classic!
  • In Alan Wake II, it's the only weapon he has for the first few chapters of the game, but it's quite reliable and stronger than Saga's own semiautomatic pistol.
• Robbing the Dead: Gets his hands on his first revolver in Alan Wake II from the freshly killed Detective Casey after he rounds a corner to investigate a mysterious noise by himself.
• Same Language Dub: Due to industry norms back in the mid/late 2000s when the first game was in production, Finnish actor Ilkka Villi is the likeness and performs the motion capture for Alan, while American actor Matthew Porretta dubs him in English. Over the years, Villi has stated that he's worked on his accent specifically so that he can better match Porretta, to the point that the two now sound similar enough that some players don't even realize that Alan is dubbed, but he and Porretta still share the character, in a back-and-forth process between motion capture with Villi delivering the dialogue in his own voice, ADR recording with Porretta, and finally facial capture lipsyncing to Porretta's recordings that leads to both actors' respective performances influencing each other at multiple points.
• Sanity Slippage: His decade stuck writing for the Dark Presence has left him unable to fully tell reality apart from his stories. Both Control and Alan Wake II that over the years of his torment, he repeatedly had mental breakdowns that left him raving like a lunatic.
• Sealed Evil in a Duel: Unsuccessfully attempts this with the Dark Presence in Alan Wake II. Tired of having to fight to escape the Dark Place, and believing the world is safe, he simply stops writing. Unfortunately, the Dark Presence takes advantage of this and has Scratch write his own manuscript which ends with it finally winning, which Alan realizes he needs to be there to actively subvert.
• Security Blanket: The "Clicker" acted as this to him, a small button his mom gave him when he was a kid to fight off his fear of the dark. In a flashback he gives it to Alice to serve the same purpose during a blackout, and it ends up being the secret weapon needed to defeat Barbara.
• Self-Deprecation: He plays along well with the jokes Harry Garrett cracks at his expense on his eponymous talk show. When he notes the reputation he developed as quick-tempered, he jokingly notes it isn't the only thing people know him for: he's written a couple books on top of that.
• Series Mascot: The first of the Remedy Connected Universe's protagonists and by far the company's most prominently appearing character throughout the franchise. He even appears in cameos not technically a part of the universe.
• Shabby Heroes, Well-Dressed Villains: He serves as the shabby hero in American Nightmare, as he's dressed in a casual but worn plaid jacket and jeans, while Mr. Scratch is the well-dressed villain as a quintessential Sharp-Dressed Man.
• Shared Dream: The dream he has in the opening of Alan Wake is revealed in The Alan Wake Files to have been both reoccurring, and shared with a real man named Clay Steward.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: He wordlessly responds to Barbara's last taunts to him by sticking the Clicker in her empty heart cavity. She is immediately destroyed by the light without any further issue.
• Significant Wardrobe Shift: A late manuscript page in American Nightmare reveals the plaid jacket he's wearing to be this between the original game and AM. It was a comfortable outfit he wore during a vacation through Arizona with Alice, and he is reminded of that good memory by wearing the clothes again, giving him extra motivation to persevere in the "Groundhog Day" Loop.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Coinciding with the game's age rating being bumped up to a Mature from the previous game's Teen, Alan reacts to most of his misfortunes throughout the second game with a worried or resigned "fuck".
• Skewed Priorities:
  • Alan's on his way to meet his wife's kidnapper when he sends Alan a text message. The first thing he takes note of, instead of anything particularly useful Mott tells him in the text, is the multitude of spelling errors he makes.
  • It's confirmed in Control that over the course of the week he fought the Dark Presence, he went out of his way to search for and collect scattered coffee thermoses for an unknown reason. They took a coffee thermos for themselves, and note it to be an Altered Item with the mundane effect of making any coffee poured out of it taste really good.
• Straight Man and Wise Guy: He's the straight man whenever he's travelling with the wisecracking Barry throughout the game. His confused, indignant reaction to Barry inexplicably deciding to lug a cutout of Alan around the forest just to crack wise about it is the most prominent example.
• Stepford Smiler: He exudes a lot of confidence in his decision to end the Alex Casey franchise when interviewed about it on a late night talk show. It's revealed throughout the series the decision was made in an attempt to force himself out of his boundaries, as he felt a serious case of Imposter Syndrome over his series of cheesy cop books being a hit.
• Super Drowning Skills: He is completely incapable of swimming in Alan Wake, in regard to both gameplay and cutscenes. He needs to be saved by an outside influence or otherwise instantly dies when he is knocked into Cauldron Lake or its surrounding rivers. Story-wise, this is suggested to be the Dark Presence within the water pulling him in.
• This Is Going to Suck: A common reaction he has to the Taken threats around him, especially if it is part of his internal monologue, is a blasé regard of how dangerous the thing in question is. A bulldozer running the building he's in off a cliff? "This is bad." A combine harvester gunning for him? "You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!".
• Time-Passage Beard: By the time of Control and Alan Wake II following it, his Perma-Stubble has grown out into a full beard, hammering home just how long he's been in the Dark Place.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: What American Nightmare is for him in the long term. While he is unable to escape the Dark Presence, he gets to defeat Mr. Scratch for a decade, see his wife is happy and safe, and briefly see himself as happy with her to give him motivation and keep his head straight while he writes to find a way out of the Dark Place.
• Took a Level in Badass: Twofold in American Nightmare. He's much better at working with the plans he's written into being as well as his own instincts. However, he's also altered the genre of the story from Surreal Horror to a surreal form of Action, allowing himself access to bigger and better weaponry (albeit necessary for bigger threats).
• Took a Level in Kindness: In American Nightmare, Alan is far more patient with the other survivors than he was during his time in Bright Falls. He notes that, given the sheer insanity of the challenges he faced in the original game and beyond, there's next to nothing that could really get his blood pressure up anymore.
• The Un-Smile: Alan mentions that he has never been capable of smiling in a convincing way. In a taped interview you can watch at his home in a flashback, you can tell his smile is kind of strained.
• Uncertain Doom: His fate at the end of II is rather ambiguous. He is shot in the head in a way that starts up a Stable Time Loop, but spontaneously returns afterward, with his dialogue suggesting there is enough small differences for him to somehow break the loop in a way that saves himself. [[spoiler:With the end of "The Final Draft", it is confirmed the loop eventually alters enough for him to survive the wound.
• Unwitting Pawn: As the messages from himself that flash on televisions reveal throughout Alan Wake, the events of the game were started by the Dark Presence playing him for its own ends. It tricks him into thinking he can write Alice back to life by making a story that frees it, and it nearly succeeds without Alan subconsciously writing in a loophole for his escape, which throws things out of the Presence's control.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: With Barry, his manager. They'll always throw a jab or two at each other whenever they talk but if Barry happens to be in danger, he'll drop everything to go after him. The backstory revealed through the manuscript is the two are childhood friends and have been True Companions since their schoolyard days.
  Alan: I've known Barry Wheeler ever since we were little boys. I'd get us in trouble, and he'd talk us out of it. Things haven't changed that much now that we're grown-ups. He's the most loyal and dependable person I've ever met — in all the things that count, anyway.
• Walking Armory:
  • He is able to carry a small arms weapon, a shotgun or rifle, heavy duty flashlights, flash grenades, flare guns, and dozens of batteries and ammunition for it all. It's a bit hard to believe, especially in American Nightmare, where his thick layers that served to make this somewhat plausible are gone in favor of a light jacket, making the fact he is pulling these weapons out of Hammerspace especially obvious.
  • This is downplayed in Alan Wake II, where he gets access to three main weapons- his revolver, flare gun, and a shotgun, plus flashbangs, flares, ammo, batteries, healing items, a single flashlight, and the Angel Lamp -but that game's use of survival horror-style inventory management limits how much stuff he can carry, as his weapons all take up inventory space in themselves and his consumables have stack limits that can cause them to take up multiple inventory slots. II also averts the hammerspace of earlier games by having Alan sling his shotgun over his back when not in use, and gives him a stylish leather satchel to carry his stuff.
• Walking Spoiler: His appearances in every game outside his own series makes him this, as he tends to be confirmation they are within the same connected universe, especially in Control as AWE as his appearance completely upends the player's interpretation of the entire Hiss crisis.
• What You Are in the Dark: Late in Alan Wake II, he gets the opportunity to escape the Dark Place with no other strings attached as long as he leaves Saga behind. He ultimately chooses to make another sacrifice to make sure the Anderson family isn't torn apart by his actions.
• Writer's Block: He is unable for the life of him to start writing his new horror series, contributing to his fears he was a hack writer all along coasting on "cheap thrills". By the end of the first game, he has managed to write the story "Departure" (albeit in a very recursive way) and has been gearing up to write the sequel, ''Return".
• You Can't Fight Fate: His reasoning for leaping into Cauldron Lake at the end of the first game. Everything else that happened has gone according to the manuscript, and the page kept in the Well-Lit Room describes him doing so. To maintain the story, he must complete it as it has been written and work from beyond its Bittersweet Ending.

Insane Alan

Alan Wake

Portrayed by: Matthew Porretta (voice), Ilkka Villi (model)

Appearances: Alan Wake

"Everything he saw was a twisted memory, a stray thought. Even the evil he faced came from within!"

"He knew he could just let go. Succumb to it. A part of him had already done it. It was over, it was finished. He was done!"

A personification of Alan's desire for death split from him by the Dark Place, and Alan's main opponent through the two Special Episodes.

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• All for Nothing: As revealed by II, Alan literally cannot die within the Dark Place, much to Alan's intense despair in certain loops. Any time Alan dies in the Dark Place, he simply reawakens in the writer's room. So even if Insane Alan had "won", he still wouldn't have gotten what he wanted.
• Arc Villain: The antagonistic force of the two Special Episodes, acting as an agent of the Dark Presence's power in a bid to retake control of the realm completely by making Alan literally succumb to his despair.
• Ax-Crazy: An insane, screaming lunatic who gleefully rants about how the Taken he sends after Alan will tear him to pieces.
• Boss Banter: At the end of The Signal, it repeatedly recites Alan's downfall into insanity and continues to ramble, all while trying to get Alan to quit and give into the Dark Presence.
• Cutscene Boss: Demoted to this in "The Writer", where Alan's rational side simply rejoins his other half and Alan wakes up at Bird Leg Cabin with his drive to escape restored.
• Deconstruction: Of Alan as a Determinator. He might have saved Alice and stopped the Dark Presence from actively hunting down and Taking people all over Bright Falls, but it's starting to dawn on him that he has no obvious way out of the Dark Place and it might take a while until he either finds or makes one. The realization is essentially tearing him apart at the seams and he's growing more and more desperate, to the point a part of him is now actively seeking to just end it all instead of continuing on any further.
• Detrimental Determination: Despite everything, he is still just as much a Determinator as the rational Alan. Unfortunately, this manifests in a unstoppably single minded desire to end his own life through his writing without considering any other choices.
• Driven to Suicide: What it ultimately wants. He's the half of Alan's being that doesn't see the point of fighting the Dark Presence and is trying to end it all by killing the half of himself that still wants to keep fighting (the Alan played during the DLCs), essentially wanting to kill himself and let the Dark Presence end him.
• Enemy Within: He's Alan's desperation and waning sanity made manifest, trying to force his own mind into surrendering to the Dark Presence.
• Eye Motifs: The flashing screens that show him all love to focus on his dilated eyes as he rambles on and on.
• Final Boss: Of "The Signal".
• Flunky Boss: The boss fight against him includes respawning waves of Taken and Poltergeists being summoned so the player will have a hard time dispelling the darkness protecting his TVs.
• Genius Loci: He's part of Alan's mind and currently the one in control, so he's the one currently dictating how Alan's mindscape should look like, resulting in the DLC's levels looking like horrific, distorted mixtures of the main game's previous locations and elements.
• Heroic BSoD: The living embodiment of one. After setting back the Dark Presence, Alan has been trapped in the Dark Place with no obvious way of making it back out to see Alice and his other friends again, so naturally he's been having a hard time keeping it together. So hard, in fact, that his mind has divided itself into two states, and the insane half is in control during both DLC episodes, his real self still at the cabin writhing and rambling to himself on the floor instead of writing his way out as he was doing beforehand.
• King Mook: Its biggest manifestation at the end of "The Signal" is a huge pile of TV screens that essentially act as one gigantic Poltergeist enemy that must be destroyed piece by piece.
• Large Ham: Given that this is the part of Alan that's going suicidally insane, this is a given. His lines are nearly all delivered screaming or agitated, a far cry from Alan's reserved or annoyed deliveries.
  Alan: WHY WAS THIS HAPPENING TO HIM!?
• Literal Split Personality: The part of Alan that is tired of fighting and wants to give in with the story nominally complete, made separate and put in control to try and finish off the rest of Alan still willing to fight.
• Ominous Television: He appears throughout the DLC episodes in this manner, as flashing images of Alan on television screens placed randomly across the map as he shouts and rambles insanely what's about to happen, all in a futile attempt to lead Alan into killing himself. The boss fight with him at the end of "The Signal" also makes use of this by making it so he's a composite of random junk and old tube TVs crammed together and shifting around while showing his demented face.
• Split-Personality Merge: His final fate. Rational Alan finds him huddled in Bird Leg Cabin and upon touching him takes his place as a reunited single being, at peace with himself and willing to write his way to freedom with a new manuscript.

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"It's not a lake. It's an ocean."

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