History Headscratchers / SilentHill2

*** It is, particularly the part where Mary immediately counters with "If that were true, why do you look so sad?" Overall, James comes across as a good man who did a very bad thing, and the idea that a good person can do very bad things is a very hard concept for a lot of people to grasp, so it's easier to just believe they're actually just monstrous and evil to the core. Spend about 10 seconds on social media and you'll see just how widespread such a mentality really is.

*** As a GeniusLoci, Silent Hill is a manipulative but rather passive entity. If, say, Eddie was feeling peckish and thinking of hopping in his van to find an open pizza parlor, the town wouldn't go to the bother of collapsing roadways or summoning demons to steer Eddie where it wanted him to go when it'd be easier for him to just find a perfectly good pizza in the first place he looked. Eddie doesn't question this because '''A:''' Silent Hill isn't manifesting the same way for him as it is for James so he probably never saw anything nightmarish to compare this mystery pie against, and '''B:''' he's kind of a dim bulb, and unlikely to be thinking too hard about how the pizza got there; it's fresh and there's nobody else's name on it, so as far as he's concerned, it's lunch.

** I have never liked this little WordOfGod detail and prefer to ignore it; it seems like such a needless complication to the story that doesn't really add anything and just begs all kinds of questions that didn't have to be asked when we could all assume Mary had already been given a proper burial the week before. Without the "her corpse is in the backseat" bit, it makes a lot of sense that James would be so consumed with guilt because it would effectively make him a KarmaHoudini for what he did. Mary dying in hospice at the tail end of a terminal illness isn't the least bit suspicious and dollars to donuts it wouldn't have triggered a post-mortem examination that could easily uncover her real cause of death by asphyxiation. I'm sure somebody will come along to "Well ACKSHUALLY" that, but speaking from personal experience, no autopsy was performed when my cousin died of congestive heart failure a few years back specifically ''because'' of the open & shut nature of her death, even after my family had voiced their suspicions that COVID-19 complications may have been a factor.

*** Well, the first poster started it by bringing up jail sentences. The real problem with the logic there is that it assumes taking a human life is invariably the sin of murder, with no regard for context or extenuating circumstances of any kind, and this is ''very, very far'' from a universal viewpoint, by the laws of God or Man. As has been said before, Silent Hill is what you bring with you. The supernatural forces behind the town don't place judgement on the morality of what you did and they have no interest in serving as your judge or your jury... just your executioner.

*** Well, the first poster started it by bringing up jail sentences. The real problem with the logic there is that it assumes taking a human life is invariably the sin of murder, with no regard for context or extenuating circumstances of any kind, and this is ''very, very far'' from a universal viewpoint, by the laws of God or Man. As has been said before, Silent Hill is what you bring with you. The supernatural forces behind the town don't place judgement on the morality of what you did and they do not serve as your judge or jury; just your executioner.

** Actually, it ''is'' his first time killing someone. All his boasts about murder were untrue, as the most he'd done is kill a dog, and shoot at someone while running away, and has no idea if it was a killshot (though the game implies that the man he shot at lived).

* I am struggling with some timeline discrepancies. SH2 apparently takes place in 1993-4; James is said to be 29 at the time (born 1964) and Mary is 25 (born 1968). But Silent Hill (assuming this isn't a retcon) has become the abandoned Fog World since at least 1983 (SH1) or 1976 (Origins).
** The Fog World didn't only start appearing in 1976. It's always been there. Silent Hill didn't become the fog world, it still exists completely as normal. The Fog World is another "dimension" or layer of reality that exists in parallel to the real world, and manifests differently to everyone based on their inner feelings. Alessa didn't create the Fog World or Otherworld, she simply entered them after suffering the trauma of being burned. The difference with Alessa is that she had the power to pull other people into HER Fog World/Otherworld with her at will. To a lesser or greater extent, Walter Sullivan and Claudia Wolf also seem to possess this ability. The reason James' Fog World/Otherworld doesn't feature The Order, any of its' members or their influence is that he has never heard of them and has no connection to them. Therefore, they're not there. The reason Harry is able to encounter The Order in SH1 despite not knowing about them is that he's not in HIS Fog World/Otherworld, he's in Alessa's, along with Dahlia, Lisa, Kaufman and Cybil.

*** As a GeniusLoci, Silent Hill is a manipulative but rather passive entity. If, say, Eddie was feeling peckish and thinking of hopping in his van to find an open pizza parlor, the town wouldn't go to the bother of collapsing roadways or summoning demons to steer Eddie where it wanted him to go when it'd be easier for him to just find a perfectly good pizza in the first place he looked. Eddie doesn't question this because '''A:''' Silent Hill isn't manifesting the same way for him as it is for James so he probably never saw anything nightmarish to cross-reference the mystery pie with, and '''B:''' he's kind of a dim bulb, and unlikely to be thinking too hard about how the pizza got there; it's fresh and there's nobody else's name on it, so as far as he's concerned, it's lunch.

*** As a GeniusLoci, Silent Hill is a manipulative but rather passive entity. If, say, Eddie was feeling peckish and thinking of hopping in his van to find an open pizza parlor, the town wouldn't go to the bother of collapsing roadways or summoning demons to steer Eddie where it wanted him to go when it'd be easier for him to just find a perfectly good pizza in the first place he looked. Eddie doesn't question this because '''A:''' Silent Hill isn't manifesting the same way for him as it is for James so he probably never saw anything nightmarish to cross-reference the mystery pie with, and '''B:''' he's kind of dim bulb, and unlikely to be thinking too hard about how the pizza got there; it's fresh and there's nobody else's name on it, so as far as he's concerned, it's lunch.

*** As a GeniusLoci, Silent Hill is a manipulative but rather passive entity. If, say, Eddie was feeling peckish and thinking of hopping in his van to find an open pizza parlor, the town wouldn't go to the bother of collapsing roadways or summoning demons to steer Eddie where it wanted him to go when it'd be easier for him to just find a perfectly good pizza in the first place he looked. Eddie doesn't question this because '''A:''' Silent Hill isn't manifesting the same way for him as it is for James so he probably never saw anything naghtmarish to begin with, and '''B:''' he's kind of dim bulb, and unlikely to be thinking too hard about how the pizza got there; it's fresh and there's nobody else's name on it, so it's lunch.

*** As a GeniusLoci, Silent Hill is a manipulative but rather passive entity. If, say, Eddie was feeling peckish and thinking of hopping in his van to find an open burger joint, the town wouldn't go to the bother of collapsing roadways or summoning demons to steer Eddie where it wanted him to go when it'd be easier for him to just find a perfectly good pizza in the first place he looked. Eddie doesn't question this because '''A:''' Silent Hill isn't manifesting the same way for him as it is for James so he probably never saw any monsters to begin with, and '''B:''' he's kind of dim bulb, and unlikely to be thinking too hard about how the pizza got there; it's fresh and there's nobody else's name on it, so it's lunch.

** Is Eddie eating a pizza that's mysteriously lying around any weirder than James drinking all those ''health drinks'' that he finds sitting around just as inexplicably...?

* Her mother and brother are burnt together with him.

** Because the game should be looked at as more an examination of how different people react to different kinds of abuse rather than the literal interpretation of the sentient town. The game isn’t telling us she deserves to be punished by having the town punish her, it’s showing us how it feels to be violated, abused, and gaslit by using the environment as a visual representation of that psychological damage. Angela was cruelly violated and left with a burning torment and rage that conflicts with her own sense of guilt from
being blamed for so long, so her town is burning and visceral. James was emotionally neglected and felt alone, isolated, and abandoned, so his town is dilapidated and decayed. Eddie took what happened to him and became a cold sociopath who views people like a butcher views his meat, so his town became a meat locker. You could even argue that the killings themselves are metaphorical. If you take these things as artistic expressions communicating these things to the audience and less of a diegetic meaning that has to be logically explained by the game’s lore (very little of which is actually mentioned in-game), then it doesn’t really cast Angela in any particular light or dark way - just shows us that she’s in pain, and gives us a visual interpretation of what that pain might feel like.