ACAB includes Saga Anderson

Spoilers for Alan Wake II ahead.

Last fall, with the release of Alan Wake II, I decided to play through the other games that are either officially in or helped inspire the so-called “Remedy Connected Universe:” Alan Wake (Remastered) of course, but also Alan Wake: American Nightmare, Quantum Break and I did a replay of 2019’s Control. While none of this was necessary to have a good time with Alan Wake II, I found that having the stories that make up the “RCU” fresh in my mind did help me appreciate what the studio was trying to do there better, both mechanically and in terms of narrative. I came away from Alan Wake II feeling genuinely like it was my favorite game of 2023, though I haven’t yet written anything substantive about the game. I liked the game’s structure, I adored its setpieces, and I found myself rooting for its wide cast of characters, all struggling against the strange forces of darkness that have taken root in Bright Falls, in the same way I would a TV show’s protagonists.

But it’s been a couple months since Alan Wake II and its free quasi-DLC, “The Final Draft,” came out. I’ve been sitting with the game and its themes, going over points of the story in my head. There are circles I can’t square: the strangely sanitized way the Pacific Northwest is portrayed; the very apparent gender dynamics and gendered relations of the cast; the game’s occasional over-reliance on other media touchstones to make its own story work. These are big topics each deserving of their own posts. But one thing I just can’t get away from is the fact that, at the end of the day, Alan Wake II is yet another cop story. And I’m getting sick of cop stories.

I’ve written about my aversion to copaganda before. Last time I did, folks tried to get my ass with the critique that I was an *American* writing about *American* police through the lens of an *Estonian*-made video game. I imagine the same criticism is going to pop up now that I’m talking about a beloved *Finnish*-made video game. “Oh the police are different in Europe! They don’t kill people as often or abuse their power in the same ways as American police! You stupid American, once again trying to push your country’s values and problems off on the rest of the world!” Miss me with that shit. Cops are cops regardless of the state they serve.

Like, to be clear: “the police,” from the smallest rural sheriff’s department to the biggest federal enforcement agencies, is a violent criminal gang whose main purpose is to maintain the state’s monopoly on lethal force. Contrary to their own self-perception, cops aren’t here to protect and serve people; when situations where their supposed tactical expertise is actually required arise, they’re nowhere to be found. Often, when they do finally arrive on-scene they escalate tensions: killing people’s pets, violently beating and killing unarmed people in crisis, shooting first and asking questions later (and often, not even doing that).

Cop stories are toxic. They erode our ability to think critically about the police, an institution that deserves far more than a healthy dose of criticism. Saga Anderson is a wonderful, richly-written, complex character – and that’s the problem. She’s someone we root for, even though her job involves dealing an immense amount of state-sanctioned violence and death to people who get no recourse, legal or otherwise (and that’s even before we get to the wanton shooting of Taken throughout the video game). We root for her ironically because of a common police-derived lie: that the job is routinely exceedingly dangerous, and we want her to make it home to Logan, her daughter, and David, her partner. (Meanwhile, policing doesn’t even make it onto this list of the top-25 most dangerous jobs in America.)

Cop stories carve out areas of exception in our minds where, when faced with the overwhelming reality of what police fundamentally are, we conceptually glitch out and say to ourselves, “oh yeah, all cops are bastards, except for Dale Cooper, haha. Or Rust Cohle. Or Jake Peralta. Or Columbo. Or Mulder and Scully. Or Olivia Benson.” We find ourselves sympathizing more with cops who (we’re told) have to bend or break the rules to get around the stultifying bureaucracy of their agency than we do with the petty “criminals” who find their faces mashed into the ground with a bootheel in their back for stealing a watch from a jewelry store or selling loose cigarettes on the street.

I know it is an exceedingly small minority position to say “abolish the police.” But even if you simply think the policing needs to be reformed, cop fiction still stymies your ability to argue that position effectively. After all, so many cop stories are explicitly about bureaucratic red tape, activists interfering with the meting out of justice, new social norms making it impossible to effectively do their job (read: with the same amount of brutality they once enjoyed). They suddenly find themselves up against exceptionally savvy terrorists or crime bosses who take advantage of society’s push towards reform to get away with their unique brands of mayhem. The thing is: it’s all bullshit, and it’s preying on you.

Part of the problem is that these cop stories are, for the vast majority of (let’s face it) white people, the only interaction they’re going to have with policing. Unless you’ve personally experienced abuse at the hands of a cop it can be very difficult to even conceptualize that the police even have the capacity to be bad, and that marginalized people might not want to interact with the cops because of their historical treatment at their hands. Even watching videos of cops being violent to – or just straight up killing – Black and brown people doesn’t break this spell most of the time. It’s easier for people who already benefit from being in the systemically privileged caste in society to pretend that violent and lethal policing is happening in another world from theirs, because functionally, it is. Cop fiction helps reinforce this veil of obfuscation.

Alan Wake II is saturated in cop fiction. Wake himself used to be a pulp crime fiction writer; his Alex Casey series heavily featured a renegade detective breaking the rules to save the soul of his city. Bright Falls’ affable sheriff, Tim Breaker, stands juxtaposed with the bumbling fool deputies, Thornton and Mulligan, who openly whisper anti-“outsider” conspiracies to each other over the radio at the beginning of the game. Detective Alex Casey, not to be confused with Wake’s creation, is the walking embodiment of “Retirony,” a cop fiction trope where the older partner gets fucked up “just a couple days from retirement.” Saga is the brilliant up-and-comer who can solve cases nobody else can thanks to her unique “Mind Place” mental visualization technique (it turns out later she’s just literally clairvoyant). Towards the back half of the game, we encounter Agent Kiran Estevez from the Federal Bureau of Control: a veteran field agent who has been monitoring the Bright Falls “AWE” (Altered World Event) zone for years who, once things go south for Casey and Anderson, commandeers their investigation. The way these characters all interact with each other is interesting and generally well-written – but it’s still all cops, all the way down!

I won’t sit here and pretend there’s any way to “purify” media of its cop obsession. Especially in the case of Alan Wake II, the game we got is the game we got. But there are glimmers, hints at a different story that could have been great. What if, instead of the story following Saga and Casey around, it had chosen Tammy and Ed Booker?

The Bookers are a couple from New York City who show up briefly in Alan Wake II‘s prologue and are minor characters that Saga interviews in the Oh Deer! Diner on the first day of her investigation. Tammy is a true crime author investigating the disappearance of Alan Wake; Ed is her perennially-frustrated political playwright husband, along for the ride as she tries to figure out how and why Wake vanished. They witnessed the murder and second death of Robert Nightingale at the hands of the Cult of the Tree. It isn’t hard to envision a game where we’re following Tammy around as she tries to grapple with these mysteries, deal with hostile locals, and reckon with the area’s supernatural forces. I mean, shit, we could have an entire plot thread where her husband gets sucked into the vortex of Cauldron Lake, and now she needs to figure out how to free both Alan and Ed in a race against time, the local cops, the FBI and the FBC before Mr. Scratch breaks free and engulfs the world in an “eternal Deerfest!” But again, the game we got is the game we got. And for what it’s worth, it’s a game I played over and over, four times in a row.

The police are not our friends – not ours, not anyone’s. They don’t deserve to be held up on a pedestal, celebrated for acts of heroism and made into the protagonists of our stories. I won’t claim to have any sort of read on the ideological positions of Sam Lake (or Clay Murphy, or Tyler Burton Smith) based solely on the fiction he writes, on the stories he wants to tell. I don’t think – in this instance or really any other – that the best way to resist the prevalence of cop stories in our fiction is to subject people to ideological purity tests like that, either. After all, Disco Elysium is a cop story, and as people simply cannot stop reminding me, it was written by Estonian communists. But I do think it’s incumbent on writers to think critically about those stories, to question why their stories need to be populated by police. And I think it’s equally incumbent on readers/viewers/gamers to examine the media they consume more critically as well. With the whole breadth of the human experience and innumerable fantasy, sci-fi and horror fictional worlds to explore, why limit ourselves to the experience of cops?