#saga anderson | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

diiebu · 2 days

Text

"She's one of us, Jaakko"

#alan wake #alan wake 2 #alan wake ii #alan wake fanart #saga anderson #ilmo koskela #jaakko koskela #koskela brothers #cult of the tree

107 notes · View notes

unseemingowl · 20 hours

Text

Saga Anderson, and Nordic rep in Alan Wake 2

Early on in Saga Anderson’s exploration in Alan Wake 2, she runs into Ilmo Koskela. Fiercely proud of his Finnish heritage, Ilmo gregariously makes note of Saga’s Nordic sounding name and the familiar design of her knitted sweater. Perhaps a fellow Finn?

Alas no, Saga’s mom is Swedish she informs him. Immediately Ilmo’s face falls. I’m not sure if it’s actually just the animated character defaulting to his resting face, but either way the timing is too perfect. Cue uproarious laughter from me. People in the Nordics are on friendly terms of course, but we gotta have the tiniest bit of… scornfor each other. All in good fun of course. It’s traditional.

Now, I’m Danish, not Finnish, but still, I feel right at home in the towns of Bright Falls and Watery in Alan Wake 2. All of the little nods to Nordic culture and mindset feel so wonderfully familiar to me. The melancholia, the irreverent sense of humor, the affection for the Finnish and Swedish quirks of the characters. The game feels all the stronger in tone and narrative for Remedy embracing the Finnish roots of the studio.

Which is exactly why it sucks that I almost immediately saw the charm of those narrative decisions weaponised against Saga.

I first watched the scene between Ilmo and Saga on a lets play when I was trying to figure out if I should finally dip my toes into survival horror and buy the game. Delighted by the writing I took a look into the comments to see if people were vibing as hard with it as I was. They were. But I also saw a comment that made me frown.

Paraphrasing, it basically went, come on, like hell a guy like Ilmo would make the assumption that a black woman is Finnish. There are a multitude of reasons why I think that person was wrong, mainly that Nordic people love it when we run into each other in other countries, but it also just made me sad.

Saga being black does not negate her Swedish heritage. Formally, she is American, sure (I assume, not sure how that works in the US), but she’s raised by her single Swedish mom, of course she’s going to identify heavily with that part of her herself. It’s a profound and essential part of who she is.

But hey, I’m a white potato Dane, so I’m not gonna argue that I know much about the experience of being biracial. I’m gonna stick to what I know, which is that Saga is a very moving and beautiful example of something that I’m actually not used to seeing much of - a story about connecting with your Nordic heritage and roots. And it’s part of why I love her so much.

When Nordic people show up in big, international productions, it’s usually as Vikings, and sure, it’s fun to see our wild ancestors, but contemporary questions of Nordic identity and heritage is not something I often see explored. Not even in our own productions.

So much of Saga’s story is about family. Fighting for her current one, Logan and Casey (and sure, David too, lol), and rediscovering her first one. Tor and Odin.

Her discovering her ties to Tor and Odin is profoundly moving and made me teary-eyed several times over. And sure, a lot of those ties are fantastical in nature, but they still feel very much grounded - and what makes us Nordic if not the ties to our myths and legends that Tor and Odin have made themselves the living avatars of.

While Saga’s mom, Freya, had good reasons for leaving the Anderson seer magics behind, seeing them as part of what made her family fucked up, she also cut Saga off from the fullness of her capabilities. It is only through Saga reforming her family, healing its scars and fully embracing the Anderson heritage that she becomes as powerful a parautilitarian as she is at the end of the game. That’s beautiful.

And in fact I think Saga being black only deepens the richness of those themes rather than negate them or make them irrelevant. Because yes, Saga’s story would have been moving if she was a white character too, but I am very well aware that a lot of biracial people of Nordic ancestry can feel alienated from that part of themselves. Not least because questions of who gets to claim a Nordic heritage can get pretty ugly around here. There are most definitely people who share the racist mindset of that commentator. It adds an extra dimension. Which is why seeing Tor and Odin’s eagerness to claim Saga as part of the Anderson heritage is all the more moving. Through her magics, she’s just so obviously an Anderson, and they’re so damn proud to call her theirs and fight alongside her. Because they all got that wild Viking blood in them. They’re part of her and she’s part of them.

Roger Ebert, the film critic once called movies empathy machines. I think games, when they’re at their best, can be an even more intense variation of that. Which is exactly why it baffles me that some people can play through Alan Wake 2 and still think Saga is a stunt-woke character rather than someone fully and beautifully integrated in the narrative. A narrative which, at its most basic level – in my opinion – is about the mystical bonds we form with each other and the rest of the world through art and love and blood and family and heritage. All the great horror doesn’t negate that either, it amplifies it. Kind of like that clicker.

#I really didn’t mean to write like… a fucking essay #so this is probably gonna flop #but I love Saga so much #and as a Scandinavian woman #I feel so seen by her #and I hate that people are being so vile about her character #Saga Anderson #Alan Wake 2

37 notes · View notes

ilkkawhat · 2 days

Text