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C: REMEDY [AW2 STORYBOARDS]

in character permissions

SEXUALITY: a fucking mess

PHYSICAL AFFECTION: really would not recommend it. really. really. REALLY. would not recommend it.

PHYSICAL VIOLENCE: his love language eternal

FLIRTING: he ain't gonna comprehend it, chief

ROMANCE: good luck not getting corrupted, devoured, maimed or straight up murdered. the circumstances would have to be wildly right for it to actually pan out (so just tap me if this is something you want to write and we'll see what we can do), but if so meet your new pseudo-werewolf boyfriend who thinks love is circling the bloody drain wherein you spend an eternity in a nightmare, but together. isn't that nice. as with all the alan wake cyclical nonsense I'm big time here for anything involving reflections of the self as love/hate/desire, so hit me with scratch/wake, alice/scratch, double scratch, casey/scratch etc— yeah, I'm showing my hand here in terms of narrative thirst over opposing parallels lmao.

DEATH: absolutely go for it; unless you've got a bullet made out of distilled love from his effective counterpart you won't be getting anywhere on this front though, alas.

MINDREADING: always fine, ask me if you need me to relay any details.

in character appearance and powers

APPEARANCE:

• age: older than you humanity 46
• height: 6'2" bordering on 6'3"
• hair color: dark brown
• eye color: blue
• build: smoke and scalding contempt in a frame built like a barrel-chested brick wall. absolutely do not play hoops against him.

BODY LANGUAGE: raw. feral, hungry— pure rage with the ability to speak and a desire to make everyone uncomfortable if not dead. more force of nature than anything else, there's an instinct at play. a desire that's base and animalistic. simplified behaviors are a rule, but always with the hard slam of seething hatred backed behind them.

he is obsessive to that end, and the hollowed out emotions of his host are the vestigial fuel for his inclinations. Don't expect playtime to happen or a nice discussion. Not unless you want to bleed. everyone boo this man. boo.

DETAILS: concept sketches, storyboards and model work show scratch has a pair of inhuman fangs pushing through his teeth. they're no longer well-aligned. maybe that's a charm point if you like a grin that could eat you like a sandwich.

otherwise: smoke trails. blurred reality. Scratch distorts the air around him in a haze that's almost a self-contained storm. you know, until it isn't.

SCENT: smoke, gunpowder, copper and livewire iron, brackish water and stagnant silt that's been left to rot for ages
FACE: Ilkka Villi
VOICE: also Ilkka Villi

HISTORY (SPOILERS AHEAD FOR ALAN WAKE SERIES/ CONTROL DLC): "the dark place in your place. note for my editor, you're using the wrong tense."

rewrites upon rewrites— what do you get when you take an ancient horror representing pure darkness and whittle it down through countless narrative edits to become the hopelessly self-contained reflection of your Jungian shadow? a hot mess, that's what. this hot mess. meet Scratch: Alan Wake's manifestation of grief, rage, desire, obsession and hateful vanity all made manifest. The Dark Presence in its former iterations before being recast was, at first, a cunning thing. A patient thing. It would hide in the cracks between worlds, biding time in wait for any opportunity to free itself, and it knew how to work loopholes to its advantage.

Then it was sly. And charming. And baser. A little more human in more respects than ever, but still uniquely focused on freedom. Consumption. A copy of a copy of a copy, to put it into canon words— Alan was using his talents and stories over time to reshape the monster in his own image. Poking holes in the idea of something grand and unkillable, and making it mortal, so to speak.

Lastly, it was just him. The Dark Presence reduced in its final iteration to just one point of origin: Alan wake's shattered skull. No more cosmic birthright, no more eldritch thing in the dark. Wake was Scratch; Scratch was Wake, and to that extent it was no longer cunning or clever or charming. It played blunt games with obvious goals— his goals— and while it could still hide in plain sight, it didn't really want to. Not anymore.

in short: Alan Wake has been rewriting reality for an endlessly looping eternity. Each actually successful pass at retelling the story seems to have been sealed in place as canon by use of an object of supernatural power that makes any rewrites in the story "true". In other words: play through the story of Alan Wake 2 once, and the Dark Presence is solidified as Alan Wake's own darkness, bled out through a bullet hole after his death. Play through it again, and the Dark Presence, no longer anything but Alan Wake, can and will die.

Or so the story goes.

Aside from that, details are subjective as always with this canon. I happen to roll with Gaming University's take on things mostly because it has a tidy throughline on the story of the Dark Presence while still leaving plenty of room for there to be other countless iterations of Scratch/the Herald/the Dark Presence, which just feels fun for me a person who loves thematic self-shipping wait no hang on come back

POWERS: invulnerability (to a point), photosensitivity to high-powered light, teleportation, unnatural strength, heightened reflexes and speed, fucked up teeth, cool leather jacket, immortality (to a point), possession, corruption and mind control/puppetry, telekinetic shockwave projection, obsessive compulsive urge to be loved get this man a restraining order

he can't tolerate daylight, but for any other light sources, most anything that isn't military grade won't have even a slight effect. that includes flashbangs, flares, spotlights and shotgun shells to the face. The haze that protects him is too thick to permeate easily— but he's an eldritch evil bottled up in the body of a dehydrated writer with bad joints, so that's pretty par for the course

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: absolutely none, so please do me a favor and let me know if there's anything you really don't want to thread. I'll check permissions posts religiously but this character is more than a walking red flag and I lean into that angle rather than away (though I do try to strike an overall balance with threads so as not to be unfun or unplayable: Scratch IS Scratch, he does not self-moderate and he's as rabid as it gets)
INTERESTED THEMES: power dynamics, schisms, perspective divides, blurred lines, antagonism, jealousy, longing, processing grief through violence, conceptual monster taming, rivalry, willfully trapped together, read a piece once about Alice and Scratch grudgingly collaborating together on manuscript edits as the new Bright/Dark presences instead of letting him stay trapped forever (and give me that if you play Alice pls and thank you), I really love leaning into the AU-ish idea that this whole thing is just a cosmic performance and that between takes sometimes there's the opportunity to have a figurative cigarette break: animosity still somewhat there but everyone is trapped in tartarus together, there's no point in perpetuating violence like the lights are on; alternatively gimme the tom and barbara vibes, or barbara and barbara or tom and tom vibes, give me self loathing and self acceptance, give me all, this is my jam

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 . I swear it's not intentional, I'm just a dog smashing keys at the wheel. fair warning, most threads will be prose/vibe/action heavy; he's not an eloquent guy in this particular iteration

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