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INFO + PERMISSIONS
Apr. 3rd, 2037 03:08 pm
EXRT: THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF A. WAKE
in character permissions
SEXUALITY: bi/pan, devoted to her husband with a whiff of he's been missing for 13 fucking years
PHYSICAL AFFECTION: time and a place tends to apply in that "I live in New York, I'm in my 30s or 40s, I've been dealing with some shit" kind of way, but no one can convince me that when Alice feels close to someone (looking at you, Alan/Barry/Serena) that she doesn't have a habit of crowding in, leaning on, hand-holding, and sharing elbow room like it's the Titanic and the life raft can fit maybe one more person inside if we all skooch in super close. younger Alice in a nyctophobic episode would be a complete latch-on, but in the grown iteration of her that I default to from AW2, I interpret it as she's CBT'd (you know which one I mean here) her way out of it.
PHYSICAL VIOLENCE: meet her in the pit. (yes) she can scrap if she needs to.
FLIRTING: have fun. she'll think you're adorable.
ROMANCE: Alice is canonically a Wife Guy first and foremost (Alan. Alan is her wife.) but they're artists that've been around this world for a spin and a half and I'm here for it. kiss your man, kiss his man, kiss the gorgeous girl behind that man, kiss the metaphorical monster and the complex feelings of artistic self-loathing, kiss the agent that's been practically married to him since childhood. not to be cliche but they're coming off the back of the 70s and I find the concept of loving someone unconditionally when they wrap their car around a tree and come home at 7am with coke on their nose = Alice isn't going to give a damn if he's been making eyes at the physical manifestation of his psychosexual right lobe or that dour FBI agent. who knows, maybe they're cute.
for something more serious than that, it'll depend on context: Sam Lake has said Alan needs Alice more than she needs him, and while that's true, it's pretty hardlined that she's been stuck on him for a long time, minus the gaps where she's missing her full memory. tl;dr: it's possible, but she's leaving the wedding ring on. sorry in advance for when she lore-drops Alan Wake facts at 2am with the lights on over a cigarette while getting dressed. this woman does not and never will pass the Bechdel test
DEATH: in the Dark Place: absolutely. she'll pop right back up next loop like a daisy
in the real world or any other permanent-death setting: sure, but let's collaborate on that so it's not a sudden stop (get it. get it.)
MINDREADING: always fine, ask me if you need me to relay any details.
PHYSICAL AFFECTION: time and a place tends to apply in that "I live in New York, I'm in my 30s or 40s, I've been dealing with some shit" kind of way, but no one can convince me that when Alice feels close to someone (looking at you, Alan/Barry/Serena) that she doesn't have a habit of crowding in, leaning on, hand-holding, and sharing elbow room like it's the Titanic and the life raft can fit maybe one more person inside if we all skooch in super close. younger Alice in a nyctophobic episode would be a complete latch-on, but in the grown iteration of her that I default to from AW2, I interpret it as she's CBT'd (you know which one I mean here) her way out of it.
PHYSICAL VIOLENCE: meet her in the pit. (yes) she can scrap if she needs to.
FLIRTING: have fun. she'll think you're adorable.
ROMANCE: Alice is canonically a Wife Guy first and foremost (Alan. Alan is her wife.) but they're artists that've been around this world for a spin and a half and I'm here for it. kiss your man, kiss his man, kiss the gorgeous girl behind that man, kiss the metaphorical monster and the complex feelings of artistic self-loathing, kiss the agent that's been practically married to him since childhood. not to be cliche but they're coming off the back of the 70s and I find the concept of loving someone unconditionally when they wrap their car around a tree and come home at 7am with coke on their nose = Alice isn't going to give a damn if he's been making eyes at the physical manifestation of his psychosexual right lobe or that dour FBI agent. who knows, maybe they're cute.
for something more serious than that, it'll depend on context: Sam Lake has said Alan needs Alice more than she needs him, and while that's true, it's pretty hardlined that she's been stuck on him for a long time, minus the gaps where she's missing her full memory. tl;dr: it's possible, but she's leaving the wedding ring on. sorry in advance for when she lore-drops Alan Wake facts at 2am with the lights on over a cigarette while getting dressed. this woman does not and never will pass the Bechdel test
DEATH: in the Dark Place: absolutely. she'll pop right back up next loop like a daisy
in the real world or any other permanent-death setting: sure, but let's collaborate on that so it's not a sudden stop (get it. get it.)
MINDREADING: always fine, ask me if you need me to relay any details.
in character appearance and powers
APPEARANCE:
- age: 43 (can scroll the timeline back to her younger self if that's the version you prefer, I just default to here)
- height: her original actress was 5'4" and Christina Cole is 5'5" so we'll leave that as the metric. 5'4" baseline, 5'5" if you squint. or if her hair is down.
- hair color: blonde
- eye color: grey-hazel
- build: lean, fit. og Remedy used a model for its character scans so is anyone really shocked that Alan and Alice look the way they do (no)
SCENT: chemical sourness (more intense on a sliding scale if she's been working in the darkroom a lot), has a canonical perfume scent as per the Alan Wake novelization, but with 0 distinction beyond that, so assume it's something warm as far as mixes go: jasmine, sandalwood, magnolia, sea salt with a tannin bite FACE: Christina Cole
VOICE: also Christina Cole
HISTORY (SPOILERS AHEAD FOR ALAN WAKE SERIES/ CONTROL DLC): in the simplest possible explanation: Alice was pulled out of reality as we know it into an alternate plane of existence by an eldritch entity known as The Dark Presence that predated humanity's existence. Said supernatural horror was hoping that Alice's husband Alan would, in an effort to get her back, write a doorway into our world with which it could (presumably) corrupt and spread unchecked. Instead, Alan wrote a loophole into the story that allowed him to "destroy" the Dark Presence's host body using a paranatural object known as the Clicker, setting Alice free but permanently trapping himself on the other side of reality in the process.
As per the rules of Alan Wake, once returned to reality, Alice forgot what happened to her. She falsely believed for years that her husband drowned after an argument had on the shores of Cauldron Lake in Bright Falls Washington, and resumed her life to the best of her abilities.
Years later, investigating the abnormalities of the events that had occurred, a special sector of the federal government brought Alice Wake in for questioning as she'd been reportedly "stalked and haunted" by the ghost of her ex husband, or more accurately: a fucking monster that looked like him, but wasn't. In a twist, however, Alan Wake was reshaping reality from his side of existence in order to facilitate his own escape using Alice's outreach: the moment she entered the bureau's headquarters a link formed between the building and the Dark Place through her existence as a conduit for it; her lost memories came back, a Darkness-touched entity held captive in the bureau's custody went mad and broke free, and Alice bolted back to her own life with the super fun knowledge that it wasn't a monster that had been hunting her: it was Alan. And he needed help.
To cut to the chase: Alice willingly staged her own death via suicide on film, leaping off the edge of a cliff while her camera was recording, claiming that she couldn't stand the torture of sleeplessness and horror any more, and that it was time to make the transition from "artist" to "art". In reality, Alice had jumped back into Cauldron Lake determined to save Alan the way he'd saved her thirteen years prior.
POWERS: (skip to the bottom of this section for the quick and dirty*) the rule of "everything is true and nothing is true" is big time applicable to a canon as weird and untamed as Alan Wake, so treat everything as subjective and with a grain of salt: we have absolutely 0 concrete proof of anything as far as abilities are concerned (hence why I'm dreading this section as I write it, hah), and there are a lot of canon edits that are both true and retconned at the same time.
At the core of things, it's been said there are two entities on the other side of the mirror to our world: the Dark Presence and the Bright Presence. Light and Dark. But don't mistake that for unicorns and rainbows vs monsters and demons: the Darkness and the Light are alien entities and concepts inside their canon worlds, what we know about their function and form is scratching the surface, and ultimately the idea canon reiterates here is that balance is best. Prior to Alan Wake, fiction implies there were two others who fell prey to this cycle, Tom and his wife Barbara. Barbara was killed by the Dark Presence, becoming its new host; Tom freed his murdered wife's soul, and in the process was taken over by the Bright Presence.
As things are now, there are themes in canon that seem to suggest a reversal this time around: Alan binds himself to the Dark Presence, and Alice seemingly to the Light in order to kill the monster and free him from its hold. How much of that is performative to make the story true is up to debate, but as a baseline at least is thematically on point.
Moreover, if we take Tom Zane's story as true fiction: when Barbara was drawn into the lake, she died. Her corruption was a complete act from start to finish, and Tom attempting to revive her is what set the Dark Presence free. However, despite being taken into the lake in presumably the same fashion, Alice doesn't break despite what she claims was a pointed attempt to burn her mind out completely through torture, and she doesn't die. How much of that is resilience when Alan also endures the same kind of torture for thirteen years (or always) is debatable af, but Alan is also a proven parautilitarian (he's got superpowers, let's call it that), and it seems likely that possession of said potential for supernatural abilities is what acts as a baseline liferaft in a hurricane when otherwise average people are decimated in the Dark Place points to Alice having something similar going on.
This could be because Alan wrote her specifically as a "conduit" for the powers that be in the Dark Place through the vaguest terms imaginable, effectively giving her a blank check for supernatural amplification even in reverse across the entirety of her life (because fun fact: if you write something in the future in Alan Wake, it affects the past too), or because the potential was already there without their knowledge.
*THIS IS A LOT OF WORDS TO SAY: Alice seems aligned with the ability amplification powers of the Light in Alan Wake's canon, if not a new host on a technical level for the Bright Presence to match Alan's connection to the Dark. She confirmedly acts as a waking, walking threshold for the Dark Place's overlap to reality, "thinning the veil" so to speak, and if in the Dark Place itself, can manifest and create edits to the world.
I try to play it pretty lax since otherwise even the gods in Alan Wake canon are, at the end of the day, just people: fallible and killable as your next door neighbor, they just also get to edit the drafting of our world. You know, for fun.
ooc info and permissions
CONTACT: pm me for info or just to chat!
ACTIVE HOURS: I've forgotten what sleep is
FORMATTING: no preference for prose or brackets, I can work with anything and I love short tags as much as long ones
BACKTAGGING: always
FOURTHWALLING: sure
OFFENSIVE SUBJECTS AND TRIGGERS: none whatsoever
INTERESTED THEMES: I live for any kind of complexity with feelings, narrative themes, role reversals, power dynamics, schisms, perspective divides, blurred lines, antagonism, longing, grief, regret turned into action, love in unlikely manifestations or places, found family/bonds, narrative foils cooperating either reluctantly or for a cause, hurt-comfort, alternate timelines, and everything in between.
OOC NOTES: thanks in advance for tolerating me stumbling into functionality and trying not to mess this up— I'm new to this series so if I get anything wrong despite bingeing for weeks in a wild canon catch up re: lore, absolutely let me know so I can fix it (my only other character is the AW2 iteration of Scratch so that's what we're working with here, okay). I swear it's not intentional, I'm just a dog smashing keys at the wheel.
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