Disclaimer: this is entirely my own interpretation and not something I expect other people to take as canon, but it does mention other characters bc Alice doesn't exist in a vacuum! I'm not trying to make definitive statements about the universe at large but I kinda have to touch on some of that to make it all make a minimal amount of sense -- but this isn't a hard and fast 'if you don't see things this way we are not writing compatible' thing.
ANYWAY. tl;dr of it all is that I don't think Alice and Barbara are the same person, or reflections/echoes of the same person, in the way that a lot of other Remedyverse dual roles are presented. They are parallels in some ways but I think they're more distinctly separate than, say, Alan and Tom.
And now for the essay.
Gonna start with the more meta side of things first. In AW1, Alice is voiced by Brett Madden (fuck cancer fr) and was modeled after Jonna Järvenpää. Barbara is voiced by Kate Weiman and modeled after ??? (I literally cannot find a name sorry team). They're not portrayed by the same ladies. In fact, no one ever gives any indication that Alice resembles Barbara, a trend that starts in this game. Granted, no one from Bright Falls actually interacts with Alice directly on screen -- other than Hartman over the phone in recordings -- so it's hard to say definitively there's no resemblance, but still. They at least start planting the Tom/Alan resemblance seeds with the Andersons always calling Alan 'Tom' -- no similar examples for Alice. And other than the fact that they both get snatched by the Dark Presence which causes their respective writers to kick things off + being the muse and guiding light sort of figure for their respective men... the narrative doesn't really draw other parallels between them.
There's only two times the game does start crossing the wires. The first is towards the end, after Alan jumps into the lake with the Clicker. He wakes up in a nightmare version of the NYC apartment with what I assume is the Dark Presence's projection of Alice -- not her, possessed, but an image of her that's no more real than the apartment itself. 'Her' only goal seems to be getting Alan to chill out and stay there in the Dark. Before Alan finds the Clicker, 'she' urges him to come back to bed, Alan -- and then it changes to come back to bed, Tom but in Barbara's voice.
The second instance is later, in Alan's final approach to Bird Leg cabin. One of the interactions Alan 'overhears' is supposedly between Barbara and Tom, in the lead-up to Tom cutting her heart out after she came out of the lake wrong. And! This is the only time that Barbara sounds like Alice!! I could be wrong but I'm 99% sure it's Brett and Matthew doing those lines, and as far as I can tell it's the only instance of there being any kind of dual casting vibe for Alice and Barbara specifically. Now, I think it's an interesting place for that to happen -- because with the cabin being some kind of Threshold/Overlap (idc about terminology rn I'm not an FBC employee) and an epicenter for the Dark Place at the time of AW1, I don't think there's any reason to believe what's happening there is objective reality. It's past and present overlapping, and it's Alan trying to perceive it all, and so I don't believe that's what Barbara truly sounded like as a young woman. Especially considering it's also the only time Matthew voices Tom. But yeah other than that there's no indication of Alice and Barbara being The Same(tm) outside of fulfilling a similar role in the narrative -- or, at least, something very much wants to make Alice fulfill the same role in the narrative.
Moving along the timeline, there's another instance of potential Alice/Barbara physical similarity in the This House of Dreams blog. I really don't know how canon this stuff still is, but considering how many crumbs from it have appeared elsewhere, I'll allow it as evidence for now. In any event, we get two photos ft. Barbara and she's blonde.
Moving along to AW2, Alice is played entirely by Christina Cole, and Barbara is played entirely by Rosanna Kempi. Lore wise I'm just going to ignore all the retcons about Tom and Barbara, that's none of my business and not really relevant here, and for the sake of my sanity I'll just assume that their appearances as they're presented in this game are real and canonical at this point in the story. Other than the blog photos, this is the first time we properly see younger Barbara aaaaaaand she's not blonde. This game is where Remedy really starts leaning into the idea that the dual / repeat casting of certain actors has lore significance -- and with the unfortunate but necessary recasting for Alice, this was an opportunity to do a dual cast for her and Barbara. But they didn't. It's still two separate people.
Time Breaker is where the multicasting stuff goes ham and hammers in the idea that the different versions / reflections / echoes of people have the same base appearance in every universe. Caveat being that all of the Night Springs episodes are written by Alan as escape attempts, and are therefore his perception and interpretation of events he sees across different worlds or timelines or whatever -- and that are then poked at and twisted by him to suit his needs. So I kinda struggle with these being completely canon in a meta sense vs Remedy just showing us some 'wouldn't that be crazy' type of shit framed as Alan just throwing anything against the wall to see what sticks. But I do also think Time Breaker is probably the most genuinely lore relevant of the three -- but again this is not my circus and these are not my monkeys. The Point is that we are being shown that alternate selves (or however you want to think of them) look similar. And yet Alice and Barbara, as of this point in the franchise, do not.
So why?
I simply do not think they are the same person, or reflections or echoes of each other, or however else you want to interpret the multiversal twins headache. They're parallels, yes. But they aren't like Alan and Tom.
Like I said before, going back to the events of the first game, Alice and Barbara are meant to serve a similar narrative purpose. That's true on both a meta level and an in-universe level -- the Dark Presence is trying to use Alice as bait to get Alan to do its bidding, presumably just as it tried to use Barbara for that same purpose with Tom. Except the outcomes are different because Alan knows how it went wrong the first time etc etc -- idc about all that this isn't about him <3 But now the tables have turned and Alan is trapped while Alice is free.
And it's Alice who chooses to return to the Dark Place. It's Alice who ultimately shapes the narrative from behind the scenes through the course of the second game. She ends up taking an entirely different role than Barbara by her own volition -- so what if things didn't work out for the Dark Presence in AW1 because it was trying to force her into a role she was never going to fit in? What if it just very badly wanted her to be Barbara, for all intents and purposes, in this version of the story -- even though she was not truly an echo of the other woman?
This also seems to be something Alice herself is aware of. I'm obsessed with the fact that she has to reinsert herself into the narrative as the fridged wife again by way of faking her own suicide. It's like she knows that was the role she was intended to play, and the only way to involve herself again is by following that classic horror rule. She has to be the dead wife, the out of reach muse. But the choice to throw herself into it vs being written into it by Alan or Tom or anyone else is what allows her to operate outside the bounds of the story, safely in the margins. It’s the part she wasn’t actually meant to play because she isn’t Barbara, but by giving the story what it needs and wants of her, she's able to maintain her agency without becoming its victim.
The Dark Presence thought she was a close enough proxy for Barbara for things to work out this time and it was very, very wrong.
With the new trailer for Control Resonant it's looking like they're going to pin things going to shit squarely on Jesse's shoulders. And I would just like to take this opportunity to say:
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