r/AlanWake • u/zoey1bm • 1d ago
Thinking about Alan's in-universe fandom makes me go insane Discussion
This man was a crime thriller writer.
Putting the Casey/Payne thing aside for now, the real world equivalent to Casey would probably be the likes of Jo Nesbo's Harry Hole. Gritty, depressed cops trying to make sense of complex narratives. Arguably the biggest difference between the Casey books and actual modern Scandinavian crime literature is the fan response to them. Both of them gather high praise from critics, but Stieg Larsson sure as shit didn't get interviewed for magazines aimed at teenage girls. Alan did.
And it's just so wild to me because he does not fit the image of someone who irl would be beloved on tumblr at all. While the "complicated bad boy" act was something that celebrities utilized as part of their public persona, the success of it was kinda exclusive to like boys band musicians, or actors. Not writers of hardboiled detective stories đđ Rose's fansite might not actually have won awards for "best fansite ever", but with the way the reception around him is framed, Im certain that micro communities around Wake and Casey formed.
Which makes the lack of a riot over Sudden Stop so weird?? Like if you know anything about fandom history, you probably know that the first instance of modern fandom having an unhinged moment is usually credited to sherlockians harassing and sending death threats to ACD for killing Holmes. And yet everyone is mostly fine with Casey dying in Alan's last regular novel? In a fandom that apparently skews towards parasocial behaviors??
All that to ask, how in the world did we even arrive at officially licensed Alex Casey lunchboxes????
disclaimer: I know this mainly done in order to have Rose be an actual character with contributions. But let me gnaw at the implications of it lol.
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u/LewdSkeletor1313 1d ago
It doesnât seem like most people were fine with it, the host of the Garretty show gives him shit for it. The lunchboxes only exist because Casey got turned into a movie franchise after Alanâs âdeathâ, managed by Barry
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u/0sm1um 20h ago
I think Alan's celebrity status is more inspired by a guy like Steven King. A guy like King did/does TV interviews regularly, had/has his works adapted into TV shows and movies, and is certainly a guy who most people know by name.
I don't think it's super immersion breaking that Alan lives in a world where crime thrillers are more popular than they are in our world. Imagine if instead of Twilight we got Alex Casey.
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u/ValueProud 23h ago
Correct me if Iâm wrong, but isnât the âbest fansite everâ thing from the Night Springs DLC? Which is intentionally over the top? So I donât think she actually got that award irl, but I could be remembering wrong
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u/Puzzleheaded_Nerve83 In Between 22h ago
Yeah thatâs true, you are remembering right. It was a Night Springs thing, Roseâs ideas of awards werenât even real awards.
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u/zoey1bm 19h ago
Yep yep, as I said, the renown of any fan community she might manage is very overplayed in #1 Fan, but there is no way she doesn't have a Wake centric tumblr blog :p
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u/ValueProud 18h ago
She says she does have a website in the main game, right towards the end when sheâs talking to Alan. I remember her saying that she received messages from him on the forums of her fansite lol
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u/peonykat 20h ago
Everyone makes food points I didnât think about, like the movie and the lunchboxes. I assumed it was also because most writers donât party like Alan did, like a rock star, and he attracted the medias attention with his bad boy antics. So he was unusual and coupled with his age at the time and good looks, it was great fodder for paparazzi and the publicâs interest.
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u/Accomplished-Lack721 19h ago
You're forgetting that we really don't have a sense of how much of "reality" Alan himself wrote, or Tom (whichever one) wrote into existence, or was retconned into existence after the fact to fit the narratives they later established. The game deliberately blurs the line between its in-game reality and its in-game fictions nonstop, and makes it unclear what's derivative of what.
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u/Nowheresilent 3h ago
In the Remedy multiverse, some events can be seen as reflections of events happening in other universes. Reflections being cast onto the sea of night.
Max Payne was a huge success for Remedy, and got Sam Lake interviews with gamer press. The Casey books being a huge success and getting Alan Wake interviews with the mainstream press is a reflection of that.
The nature of the multiverse acts to incorporate the nature of storytelling into reality itself. Sam Lake was drawing upon his own experiences as a writer to create the story of Alan Wake (as well as being inspired by celebrity authors like Stephen King), but when we look at it through the lens of Remedy cosmology itâs one universe reflecting another.
As for Alanâs superstar status being realistic, weâve seen this sort of thing in real world authors like Stephen King, J. K. Rowling, and George R. R. Martin.
In some cases it was the work of these celebrity authors that gave a boost in popularity to the genres they were writing in. So, sure, crime novels arenât the biggest genre in our world, but Alan may have been a big enough hit to boost its popularity in his world.
In regards to Alanâs bad boy image, he has mental health and substance abuse problems, and when these issues are combined with financial success, celebrity status, and public scrutiny it can spiral out of control and give a public image that doesnât match the reality. The public loves stories about celebrities being dangerous and destructive. And the media desperately wants to sell these stories, because their goal is to make money. So Alanâs troubles quickly got spun into an image the press thought would sell magazines. And the public eagerly devoured it.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Nerve83 In Between 1d ago
Didnât the lunch boxes come out after the movie adaptations? Would make it more credible rather than it just being from books. And I would relate the popularity of Alan Wake novels in their world to our worldsâ Witcher or Game of Thrones level of popularity based on the response. Those got TV show and game adaptations. Itâs more believable for those for us because they are complex fantasy worlds. It just so happens that in Alanâs world, his crime thrillers have a similar popularity. Barry is constantly talking about being hounded by producers wanting video game and movie adaptations too. Movie already happened, games were being discussed.
Now imagine that if their authors were way younger and handsome, I think you can easily accept that Alan had the level of fan response he does in his world. Tumblr fans would absolutely go crazy. Rose would be either running a popular (within fan circles) blog or be an active moderator of fan communities.