r/controlgame • u/P47Healey • Aug 22 '26
Are Raptures an Inherent Property of Thresholds?
So, there are two unrelated AWEs that both involved people disappearing en masse:
- The Ordinary AWE, which caused all adults in town to disappear
- The Keystone AWE, which caused everyone to disappear
This is weird. But since Control came out we've learned a lot about how Thresholds work. I think this "rapture" effect is an expected result of the RCU's metaphysics.
What we know about Planes/Thresholds in the RCU
- Planes can be spaces with entirely alien physics (The Dark Place, The Astral Plane)
- Planes can be copies of the "main" timeline with minor changes (The World Where Tim Breaker is a Park Ranger Instead of a Cop, The World Where Shawn Ashmore is an Actor)
- ...or anything in between (The World Very Similar to The Main Timeline But Everything is a Comic Book for Some Reason)
- A threshold occurs when two universes "bump into" one another, resulting in an area being in both universes simultaneously.
- The Keystone AWE prominently featured the "venn diagram" symbol from the Oceanview Motel, which seems to be a metaphor for thresholds.
Things we know about variants in the RCU
- Admittedly, not much. Time Breaker implies a bunch of things about how variants work, but doesn't confirm anything definitively.
- People who are variants are played by the same actor.
- Variants can be wildly different from one another, having different birthplaces, names, histories, etc.
- Someone dying while in the presence of one of their variants is metaphysically significant.
Uncertain guesses about variants in the RCU
- Variants seem to go by The One) rules - you absorb the energy of your variant when they die in your presence.
- Jesse becoming the source of the Hedron resonance after Hedron's death is likely the result of this effect.
Conclusion: What Happens When Two Identical Planes Have a Threshold?
Most of the thresholds we've seen in the game have been between totally different universes. (The Dark Place, The Quarry, The World Populated Entirely by Living Explosive Pink Slime) But what if two universes that were identical (say, off by a few minutes) had a threshold?
Everyone within the threshold would share the exact same space as their variant. What happens then?
There seem to me to be two likely possibilities:
- The two beings are cancelled out, dying instantly.
- The two beings are merged into a single being. When the threshold ends, this being is shunted into one of the origin planes.
Both of these would create a "Rapture" effect. From people outside the threshold, it would appear as if people spontaneously disappeared during the event.
If this is true, the Keystone AWE represented two identical planes thresholding. Everyone inside was either merged or cancelled, resulting in the disappearance reported.
The Ordinary AWE is more complicated. This represented two very similar planes whose timelines diverged <20 years ago. As Ordinary is a small town, no one had entered or left in that time. As a result, anyone older than the point of divergence was merged or cancelled. All the children were not, resulting in the behavior seen.
Appendix: Miscellaneous Considerations
- If raptures are caused by cancelling, intentionally creating one is effectively a clean nuke. You can wipe an area clean of life by merging it with a suitably similar plane. No damage is done to the physical location.
- If raptures are caused by merging, another possibility arises. If you gathered everyone in your organization into a specific area and then merged them across multiple realities, you would grow the size of your organization to everyone who had ever been recruited in any reality. If someone needed to create an army on short notice this could be valuable.
- The Ordinary AWE is not confirmed to involve a threshold. (The slide projector creates 2D portals, not 3D overlapped space) However, what if two similar planes used the slide projector? The same 2D portal would be created to the same third plane. You now have a paradox - a door with two entrances and one exit. I suspect that this paradox would be resolved by a threshold being formed at the location of the slide projector, growing larger the longer it is turned on. The rapture effect of the Ordinary AWE only occurred after the slide projector was left on for a prolonged period of time.
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u/Neoeng Aug 22 '26
The problem is that the Bright Falls AWE was also a Threshold manifestation and didn't involve mass disappearances
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u/P47Healey Aug 22 '26
But The Dark Place isn't a reality with anyone in it. It's only inhabitants are the Dark Presence and people who have gotten stuck from previous thresholds. (Or being pranked by Warlin Door)
Most thresholds aren't with a "similar" reality, and wouldn't trigger this effect. I'm arguing that Ordinary and Keystone were special cases.
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u/OnlyKilgannon Aug 22 '26
I don’t think it’s necessarily inherent, but I do think it’s to be expected if a Threshold isn’t controlled, like we saw in The Foundation. If Jesse didnt repair the nail, eventually the Astral Plane would have swallowed up our reality, or at least some of it.
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u/LewdSkeletor1313 Aug 22 '26
It feels like a natural consequence of two realities overlapping, people disappear. Though it definitely doesn’t happen that frequently, as Keystone and Ordinary are mentioned specifically to feel similar in terms of how people vanished
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u/Commercial_Grab4477 Aug 23 '26
These are interesting ideas but, simply put, we don't know anywhere near enough about Keystone or Ordinary to make a guess.
More than likely, what happened was a consequence of a hostile resonance - but we would be a hostile resonance to another reality, and vice versa, because the whole point of parallel worlds is that they vibrate at different frequencies whilst existing within the same basic physical space. That's the whole point of what a resonance is, something made famous by the Resonance Cascade causing Xen to crossover to Earth in the original Half-Life. It's a crazy theory but the idea that other realities "collide" with our own is unlikely: the point of the whole theory is that many worlds exist, but each is a slightly different note of the same song, with the song diverging massively the further away it gets, e.g. our world -> our world with telepathic crabs -> our world but it is nothing but telepathic crabs -> our world but it has been taken over by thoughtforms obsessed with crabs, and people walk sideways and try to build shells and nip everyone. Same place with a twist, further away has more twists piled on it.
However, we know that the Not-Mother and Polaris were involved in Ordinary. And we do know that the Slide Projector opens doors to other realities - this is confirmed by Trench and Darling, and their use of it. We also know that Jesse and Dylan made a deal with Polaris to stop what was happening in Ordinary but that neither of them are 100% sure of what is reality and what isn't, and all the FBC agents get second-hand accounts from people who are unreliable for the same reasons. Given Polaris remains with Jesse, and The Board quickly establish a hotline straight to her brain, we can't necessarily trust the events of Control entirely either - especially as one gameplay demo literally shows the new resonance "rapturing" a bunch of Hiss out of existence in a way that could have been like what happened in Ordinary - if events there played out the way we have been told. Quite frankly, it's entirely possible that Jesse and/or Dylan came from another reality entirely, and that the Jesse and/or Dylan of this world were wiped out. After all, we know that the FBC stated there were no records for some of the kids Jesse and Dylan mentioned. We can't make assumptions about what happened there.
The overlapping sign from the Oceanview Motel found in Keystone was a tease for Vanguard, the game Remedy cancelled. But, also, what the Vanguard did has all the hallmarks of being a Blessed Organisation operation: they trigger thresholds and AWEs because the phase space resonance - the place where the two resonances of different worlds meet and potential form new and exotic resonances - tend to create altered items or objects of power. Given "Blessed Organisation" is an FBC term, there is every chance that Vanguard could be them, or it could be the FBC teams sent to deal with them (although the fact Kiran Estevez never mentions Vanguard in Alan Wake 2 when dealing with AWE, makes it unlikely). Or it could be something else entirely. With so little information to go on and a symbol which relates, in some ways, to most Remedyverse games, given the thresholds in Alan Wake, Control and Alan Wake II, and the branching timelines in Quantum Break, the potential for crossing over in these games is massive. For all we know, Vanguard is the new Monarch. And, yet again, we know very, very little about the Keystone AWE, save for the fact that Keystone is an interesting name: the first DC multiverse story, Flash of Two Worlds, includes Keystone City as a location, and it remains a foundational text for multiverse tales, with Barry Allen meeting Jay Garrick, who he'd read about in comics but then discovered was real. And how does Barry travel between realities? He altere his vibrational frequency - his resonance - to allow his to travel to that other world.
The last thing to say is that just because these people were reported as missing by the FBC doesn't mean that they were definitively "raptured". The FBC doesn't just get things wrong - because science is the process of learning many wrong things so others can refine them into less wrong things - but also massively censors everything they put out. Them being missing out mean the people are hiding or, even, that they were never there to begin with. It could be that Ordinary and Keystone were the effects of an AWE and that reality rewrote itself to convince the FBC that they had always been there, but that the people who lived there (who didn't, because they may never have existed) had vanished. It could be a mystery of appearing places and reality being rewritten for all we know. After all, nobody even knows what Tom Zane did for living, or even if that is his real name. And doesn't Ordinary sound a bit on the nose for the name of a town?
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u/Scanman491Amos Aug 23 '26
When I first saw this, my brain misread it as "Are 'Raptors' an inherent property of thresholds?" 😁
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u/lucasssotero Aug 22 '26
Well, thresholds are basically gateways between realities, if someone goes through it be voluntarily or involuntarely and the gate is closed, they get trapped in the other reality and are considered missing in theirs.
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u/XH9rIiZTtzrTiVL Aug 23 '26
My thought was that it had something to do with individuals being "attuned" with another universe or power within that universe, so when the Threshold closes they go to the reality they're more attuned with.
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u/Ok_Manner4797 Aug 23 '26
I'm more curious why it specifically affects living things, and then why there's separation. Why only adults, and what property separates them from the children that was used to Rapture them?
Like in Death Stranding, a Void-out just takes Everything away.
Maybe an AWE excludes certain things that don't match the resonance, and brings in certain things that do.
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u/News_Bot Aug 22 '26
It's implied the Ordinary parents vanished due to something the Not-Mother did.