Janitor Ahti is the coolest character in Control. I don't speak Finnish, so I used reddit, a lot of googling and the work of absolute legend Markus Tolvanen, who wrote his bachelor's thesis on this: jultika.oulu.fi/files/nbnfioul...
Something I've just realized while watching this video: Everytime Jesse has an internal monologue/talks with her inner voice, Ahti can actually hear it and responds to it. Mind = blown.
That's because he's an entity. I remember in Control they said he appeared randomly one day cleaning in the oldest house. A powerful entity that likes to do normal things like being a janitor lol I love this character. If I'm not mistaken, it was forbidden to bother him while he "works".
I believe he's the personification/avatar of the oldest house, that's why he's trying to help Jesse clean up the mess inside itself. That quote is pretty funny since without Ahti, Jesse would be conversing straight with a "faceless" entity that is the oldest house.
I hope it isn't lost to anyone that Ahti being the janitor is pretty spot on to how important he is to the entirety of it all. Janitor in Finnish is talonmies which apparently has the literal translation of "man of the house" as in Ahti is the man of the Oldest House.
@@41tinman41 And he's damn right: we spend the whole game cleaning after the Bureau (Especially Trench, Darling and Northmoor) and he's the only one giving decent instructions. Better him than the Board.
@@cobaltfalcon9458 He also tells her she'll be applying for the job of "janitor's assistant". But since she's literally cleaning the house of the Hiss, that's not too far from the truth.
"Damn vikings. Swedish Brothers can't take decent steam". He must be referring to Tor and Odin Anderson. He must have invited them to his Sauna and they gave him the cassette tape for Jesse.
Ahti is literally an old god of a different mythology. The name appears in the Kalevala, and the figure seems to be a combination of the god Ahto and the hero Ahti Saarelainen.
I appreciate how there's no grand reveal where ahti changes form or anything corny. You understand what his purpose is and how you really are just his assistant, way out of your depth to truly take over his job. The entirety of Control is your job interview and you do work for Ahti. For him dealing with these entities and monsters is routine.
I'd say it is very deliberate. Ahti is designed to be as typical of a Finn as they come. Extremely modest (In Finnish mythology, Ahti is the literal god of oceans and islands) for a godly being, showing himself as an elderly janitor and nothing more. He talks very plainly and frankly with little to no self sencoring, or back handed intentions. He's powerful enough to see the Hiss as nothing more than a pest infestation, yet old and tired enough to seek for an assistant to help him with the task, which shows that even gods are not infallible, or even omnipotent (Which they very much weren't in Finnish mythology). He is clearly fed up and annoyed with the Hiss and everything going on in the Old House, but is still tenacious (In Finnish, 'sisukas') enough to just keep on working as there's still work to be done which can be done, so it will be done, with Jesse's help of course.
well, he's the janitor. control is filled to the brim with "personifications" of ideas in the cultural consciousness - darling has a talk about it as well. you contact the board via a red telephone because that's the kind of thing we'd expect from a director's red telephone. you can walk through the images of the slide projector because that's the kind of game kids would play with a slide projector. the oceanview motel is the archetype of all motels you've ever stayed in while traveling from one place to another. ahti is the almighty janitor - talonmies, the man of the house. but yeah, a revelation of who he "really" is would entirely ruin the character! i dunno if the _control_ writers are fans of jung (i know i'm not!), but they sure read up on him for this. _(synchronicity_ lab?)
@@Caldera01 I took it more to be that the Hiss wasn't really a threat to the Oldest House. It was just a threat to the people who are currently in it. Ahti didn't really care for Trench or how he ran the place, taking direct orders from the board. The head of the oldest House is meant to be the caretakers assistant. But there's nothing that makes us assume that either Trench or Northmoor took that to be their jobs. They thought they were the director, The ones on top who took their marching orders from the board. The whole inverted pyramid. Jesse is the first person who understood that Ahti was the person she could trust and who she should listen to. Her relationship with the Board is strained at best, and after what happened with the former, I imagine she'll come into conflict with them eventually. But no matter what, Ahti will always remain in the Oldest House, taking care of it. And Jesse is there to help him.
@@Ana_Ng I think Jung's musings on how our psyches function is going to turn out to be more correct than the detractors want to think. His ideas just seem to key in on the creative process. So much so that I think lots of creatives form similar patterns even if they're totally ignorant of the Red Book or Aion. Remedy are certainly big Jungians though, way too many parallels for them not to be.
We're still learning about his true form. In Alan Wake 2 he talks about never being lost because he doesn't care where he ends up, just where he's needed. We also see him creating thresholds just using water
See you might think that it's strange that a fundamentally important character to the lore only has 7 mins of dialogue or so, but you have to remember, for a Finn, this is almost excessive.
I'm curious, which ones? For me, as a Russian speaker, "you think there's a dog buried in this" and "starting to climb on the walls" made sense. Both can be almost literally translated to Russian, "ты думаешь здесь собака зарыта" and "уже на стену лезет" with the same meanings as in Finnish. Also, "catch the end of the thread" is kind of similar to "уловить нить", literally "catch the thread", means "to understand, to grasp" something. Not the same meaning as in Finnish, but something familiar
@@iliaszholdasov We have "i tu jest pies pogrzebany" (eng.: "and there is the dog buried") which means "there lies the problem" and "obchodzi mnie to tyle co zeszłoroczny śnieg" (eng.: "I care about it as much as I care about the last year's snow") meaning "I don't care about it at all"
@@iliaszholdasov We have "i tu jest pies pogrzebany" (eng.: "and there is the dog buried") which means "there lies the problem" and "obchodzi mnie to tyle co zeszłoroczny śnieg" (eng.: "I care about it as much as I care about the last year's snow") meaning "I don't care about it at all"
Additional, less quirky ones you missed: 2:24 Disappear like a fart in Sahara - "Hävitä kuin pieru Saharaan" - To disappear without a trace 5:08 What would kill a bad thing - "Mikäs sen pahan tappaisi" (as mentioned in another comment) 5:24 Greedy will have a shitty end - "Ahneella on paskainen loppu" - Being greedy won't end well
Jesse is more the "face" while good old Ahti is the one running things behind the scenes in the Old House so to speak. This is something mind you I have seen to be discussed frequently! So I am just echoing what I heard.
In reference to the power plant and Ex-Director Northmoor: "Hyppiä seinille" can also mean 'being extremely anxious when being confined'. Usually that's calmed by talking a walk but... Northmoor can't really do that anyway, can he?
The "tupenrapinat" (sheath rattling) can also mean rattling of the puukko knife sheath when you're removing the belt to whip a kid with it, not actually hitting anyone with a knife. Usually the idiom means less severe "someone should beat you up" instead of the extreme "someone should kill you"
5:08 "What would kill a bad thing" is a direct translation of the Finnish saying "Mikä(s sen) pahan tappaisi". I'd say it's most often used when encountering a persistent problem as it reoccurs. In this case it would be the clog, the bad thing, that came back to give trouble once again.
Why do I suspect that his understanding of their relationship (Jesse as his assistant and not his boss, despite her being the Director) is probably more accurate than what the rest of the Bureau would think? He's certainly more a part of and integral to the Bureau than any of the other directors, that's for sure.
Oh it goes much deeper the more you dig into it. Trench talks about a man who was "Sometimes a plumber unclogging the drain because there was a fish stuck in there. Yeah, a big fish. But sometimes he was an old God, you see, and he had put the fish there in the first place to um, well, to keep the waste - there was rising waste - from leaking out. So he was um, well he was conflicted, but he knew many things. But he was, he was also senile, like me. It was more like a riddle, or an omen." Well guess what is at the bottom of the Oldest House? The Nail. What happens when it is broken(removed)? the Astral Plane (waste) starts leaking. The name "Ahti" is also the name of the Finnish Pagan god of the Sea. When you visit Ahti in the Foundation to get his cassette player there's an overlay of waves and his hair flows as if underwater. So Ahti is an "Old" God that put a fish (Nail) in the plumbing (reality) to stop the waste (astral plane) from seeping in.
@@18Rakas I'm from Argentina and I made a Finn friend who's living here in my home town. "Perkele" was obviously the first thing I said to him as soon as I learned where he was from. He laughed and was shocked about how accurate my pronunciation was. I listen to many Finnish metal bands and watched a lot of interviews and off stage videos, so I guess the accent caught on subconsciously, but I wasn't expecting to get it right. It was a nice surprise.
Is one of my characters other then trench . The words he uses are fun to hear and think about especially when u know the meanings . Thank you for explaining them
I'm not Finnish, but a lot of these sayings feel familiar. I'm Norwegian and we use "satan" (perkele) quite often, but perkele in my language can also be said as faen (Fanden, the devil). A lot of Ahti's sayings are common here, such as "knock on wood", except we say "bank i bordet" which would be "punch the table".
Im Finnish and we have a curse word " Saatana" too, ( heh, I dont think I have to translate it) , Perkele, is a different word. We have so many different " curse words , more than most country's, that its quite funny, in fact. Btw. I have visited in Norway, eleven times that I can remember, I have been there allways with own car and traveled it from south to North and back, your mountains are the most beautiful with those waterfalls in the whole world. Its like a fairytail land, extraordinary from anything I have ever seen. And I've traveled a lot! Seen a lot. : ) I wish all the best to you and your people, especially in these times.. we will get through this! Perkele..😅
I hope everyone is aware that ahti runs the show and has the most answers. He knows too much and if you watch the new AW 2 gameplay he is on the stage at a karaoke bar singing. So he is....on vacation. In Alans world. Hm. If Ahti gets DLC it will be BIG.
1:05 "It's place for congratulations" is also a clumsy literal translation of the Finnish "on onnittelun paikka", where on = It is onnittelun = congratulations (genitive form) paikka = place While "place" is one of the more common meanings for "paikka", in this context I'd say it has the meaning of "occasion". So a better translation would be "It's an occasion of congratulations". Or an even better translation would be "This calls for congratulations" or just simply "congratulations", in my opinion.
"perkele" can also in theory be traced back to the old finnish thunder god, and so while it can be "damn" or "goddamn" or whatever, it can also be used in a way that's essentially "god give me strength". At least, that's how it was taught to me. :)
@@maggienewson8859 Both are correct; Perkele being the old thunder god who's name the christian converters started to associate with Satan. The old way was meant to indeed invoke the power of Perkele, but afterwards it got turned into a curse and ''Jumalauta'' (i.e. Jumala Auta, ''Help, God'') replaced it in daily parlance. You just have to decide if you want to be an Iron Age Finn, or a Medieval Finn when choosing :P
You were taught wrong... Perkele comes from the name of the BALTIC thunder god, Perkunas. It was loaned into Finnish as a swear word in the first place. It was not used by Finns to refer to the Finnish thunder god.
@@ChampTalos No Perkele is one name for Ukko god of sky and thunder. It comes from Baltic Perkunas. He was Baltic god of sky and thunder But after Christianity blackmailed all Finnish gods aa demons and devils, Perkele was transformed to mean Satan/Lucifer. Rather than the creator of everything.
Hahaha då får yxan jobba man i love finns im swedish and i can tell you this we revere the finns they are like the elves for us but if the elves drank like seamen and said hilarious idioms. You are lucky if you have fin that you call your friend and thats a universal truth that most swedes know!
I don't know when I'll get around to playing it, or if I will feel like making that video. But hey - I made this video because I couldn't find one like it ; )
This would be better if you were better at english, many of these are translated a bit weird/wrong. For example, climbing on the walls isn't so much acting alarmed as it means going crazy. Thanks nevertheless
then ahti wouldnt shine so much, I think. mostly the reason we remember ahti is because he was one of a kind apart from everyone else being just almost normal.
Ahti is a Finnish god of the sea and hard workers, in the legends he was a friend of tor and helped him by manipulating the sea while tor faught the Midgard serpent
