History Headscratchers / SilentHillOrigins

** I have no idea where people get the whole 'sixteen' thing from, but I'd say it's pretty clear time has passed just considering the changes in length in Lisa's hair. Sure, it's argued that the Lisa that Harry meets [[spoiler:was never actually real and just a memory constructed by Alessa, who felt fond of her due to the care and attention Lisa gave her,]] but there would be no reason for [[spoiler:Alessa to have dreamed up a memory of Lisa with, randomly, much longer hair.]] She has to have aged at least a couple years, [[spoiler:if only for Alessa to have any time to have even developed any sort of memory of her in the first place.]] Besides, if Lisa had [[spoiler:kicked the bucket too soon before SilentHill1, who would have been taking care of Alessa? No stand-in or secondary nurse is ever mentioned, and with Alessa's wounds constantly oozing blood and pus, she needed care pretty consistently.]]
** It's from the first game's instruction book - Lisa's 23 according to it, so if this game takes place 7 years earlier, she must be around 16 years old. As for the original [[spoiler:Lisa being DeadAllAlong]] point, that's just one interpretation of her character. She could be older than 16 if you take that as a given, but not everyone does. And as said, the timeline really only makes sense if [[spoiler:she was alive for at least most of those 7 years]], so if she's not exactly 16, she's still probably a teenager. But I don't have a big problem with that age. She's only a "trainee", which could just mean glorified candy striper at Alchemeilla, and she does act like a teenager, especially in the theater. It just means Kaufmann's an even sleazier jerk than we thought. As for the censors, ''SilentHill2'' already went there [[spoiler:with Angela, while adding in incest and rape for bonus squick]], so this isn't anything the series hasn't dealt with before.

* In SilentHill1, the Flauros is shown to be an item which cuts through Alessa's power and hits her pretty hard, causing her to scream and fall over - when Harry pulls it out of his pocket, she even starts to back up, as if knowing (or sensing) the danger it could be to her. (Ultimately, it seems to allow Dahlia to find her.) If this is the case, why in the world does Alessa lead Travis around to find all the pieces and reconstruct it? It's not an object that can do any good to her at all. Did the entire nature of the Flauros randomly change over the course of seven years? What in the world is a random demon doing lurking inside of it, and why does Travis have to fight it? And how in the world does Travis passing out transport him inside of the Flauros in the first place?

* At the time Travis arrived in Silent Hill, he'd just saved Alessa from the fire, and the very end of the game shows Alessa's soul actually splitting into two pieces, with one piece becoming the baby Cheryl that Harry and his wife will find on the side of the road. How, then, does Travis get led around by a projection of Alessa, if only one Alessa exists at this point and that is the badly charred and burned near-corpse Travis pulls from the fire at the beginning of the game? Did Alessa split into ''three'' pieces? Dahlia doesn't mention this three-way split in SilentHill1, only the Alessa-Cheryl split. And why does this apparent third split have such a departure from the goals and attitudes Alessa seems to have in SilentHill1? The projection of Alessa that Travis encounters seems to be a cruel and spiteful evil little child, when in reality (relatively speaking) Alessa is a girl who only craves love and attention from her mother and an end to her own suffering - but also to keep other people from suffering. What gives?

* What was the point of the Misty World in this game at all? I'm not a fan of the Misty World idea anyway (it's one step away from saying that everything happening in the town's AllJustADream, which just kills the atmosphere for me), but Travis has a very, very weird attitude about it throughout the game. He wakes up in a seemingly abandoned town with large chasms in the road and monsters roaming about... and the only thing he ever talks to anyone about is Alessa! He meets Kaufmann in the hospital, and they have a rather casual conversation about Alessa's whereabouts rather than the expected "what happened to this town, where is everybody, what's going on" exchange that most of the protagonists have. He meets Dahlia in the apparently wrecked sanitarium, and his only concern is that she didn't help Alessa at the burning house. The only time he says anything about the town being weird is when he's talking about the otherworld (he says he's seeing things the first time he crosses through a mirror, and he tries to ask Lisa about it when he sees her there). It's almost like the script's written with Travis just roaming the ordinary town, as Harry does in ''Shattered Memories'' (also made by Climax), and the fog, the chasms and monsters are just there for the player's benefit because it's a ''SilentHill'' game. As far as the dialogue goes, Travis doesn't seem to be aware of any of it. One possible answer is that Alessa's creating a single-minded obsession within him (as hinted at in the theater library's books), but in light of the way the story's handled, I really wish they'd just had Travis in the real world and jumping straight to the otherworld via mirrors... again, much like Climax did with ''Shattered Memories''. I almost wonder if SM's treatment of the town, a real world and inhabited town that turns straight into the otherworld at times, was what they'd first planned with Origins.