Follow TV Tropes

Following

Fridge / Silent Hill 3

Go To

As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.


Fridge Brilliance

  • The Mall's map is a lot less helpful than the maps of other locations in the franchise, as it neglects to indicate the placement of public storefronts as "doors". This isn't just an artificial way to complicate Heather's search for access-points: the map she finds is specifically intended to guide Mall employees around the place. So it shows the "Employee Only" routes through the shopping center's back hallways, but deliberately leaves off the storefronts which janitors and the like aren't supposed to come barging through during business hours, lest they spoil the ambience for the customers.
  • The voice wishing you a happy birthday doesn't make sense as it never gets the numbers right; but each time he says it, he's correlating not just to Heather's birthdays, but to those as Cheryl in Silent Hill 1, Alessa from Silent Hill 1, or any combination of the three. Indeed, the voice never equates it to Heather's birthday by itself, and the only mention of Heather's birthday at all is in a note found after the creepy message, in the "gift room".
  • The Mirror room. Many people think it's a meaningless jump scare, inteded to make the game more frightening. I thought so too at first—it's head-tiltingly bizzarre. But it fits with the overall theme of identity. Heather is a teenager, and moreover, she's the product of three identities: Cheryl, Alessa, and Heather herself. At that age, most teens are trying to figure out who their identities are. Heather spends part of the game trying to figure out her true 'identity', and in the end, it's something she hates. Early on, in the bathroom scene after meeting Douglass, Heather says she hates mirrors. Later on she finds the Mirror room, that kills her if she doesn't escape soon enough. And later, a mirror image of herself— of Alessa —shows up to kill her. Mirrors, for Heather, seem to represent inner confusion and self hatred.
  • If you try to shoot Claudia at the end of the game, this causes the cult's god to be born, in a non-standard game over. At first, this may seem to be just an excuse to not let the players pull an anti-climactic Take a Third Option. But then the player remembers that the cult's god is nourished and matured by hatred and other negative emotions. And attempting to kill Claudia would be the ultimate act of hatred.
  • While the location of the god fetus fails biology, Buddhist monks often teach their students to center their mind to the lower dantian where the navel resides to control their thoughts and emotions. Silent Hill reflects Heather's subconscious thoughts and emotions, so in a way, it would make sense for a supernatural deity to be there.
  • Forgiving the confessor in the church nets you a ton of points towards the Possession ending because it shows that Heather is willing to exercise the authority of St. Alessa, but it runs deeper than that. The confession is that of a mother who killed a girl in revenge for murdering her daughter. Every facet of that situation is a reflection of Heather's three selves: the one who kills for revenge is Heather (who is on her way to avenge Harry), the girl killed in revenge is Cheryl (who was inadvertently killed by Alessa when they merged), and the murdered girl is Alessa (the first victim and originator of all this vengeance). When Heather forgives the confessor, she's not just accepting the mantle of the cult's god and thus accepting that she is responsible for everything that Silent Hill has become since the first game, she's reaching out to someone she sympathizes with because she's felt that pain on every possible level...which is exactly what the cult wants the god within her to understand.
  • Vincent joking about the monsters possibly being people isn't just a scare to the player and Heather. By making Heather doubt herself, he also makes the player rethink about attacking the monsters in-game. With the fear that Heather's been attacking people this entire time, the player might attempt to avoid the monsters instead, reducing by far the chances of getting the "Possessed" ending (even if you can't get it on first try). With his sick and twisted humor, Vincent prevents Heather from becoming the very murderous deity that the cult has been worshiping by warning her about going on a killing spree.
    • It also could potentially make the player think twice about killing Claudia, which leads to a Non-Standard Game Over as the God is birthed through Heather's negative emotions. Vincent doesn't want the God to be born, so he wants to suppress Heather's negative emotions as much as possible to delay or prevent that.

Fridge Horror

  • You find the sub-machine gun, strongest gun in the game. Sweet! Time to mow down some enemies! But then you think about where you found it: at the end of a bloody hallway in the hospital basement. It's pointed at the elevator, now broken open and drenched in blood. What was the SMG's previous owner shooting at?
    • And, furthermore, why did he or she leave it behind?
    • Notice how there's a wheelchair in that hallway. Some handicapped person probably had the gun and was carrying it around in the hospital when a monster attacked and overpowered them, dragging them out of the chair and making them drop the gun. ...actually, wait, that makes it worse—why would a handicapped person carry a submachine gun in the middle of a hospital, and what kind of monster would be powerful enough to resist the damage the gun inflicted?
    • Also, clearly the SMG didn't work out too well for its previous owner. Not a good track record for the most powerful weapon in the game.
      • Given that the SMG is empty when you find it, the reason it didn't work out is clear; it ran out of ammo. And indeed, that's one of the biggest problems with the regular SMG—it runs through its ammo fast, and ammo pickups are few and far between. Still, the fact that the monster(s) the previous owner was fighting withstood at least one full clip of the SMG, doesn't speak well for the situation.
  • "Monsters? They looked like monsters to you?" Vincent says he was joking... but was he? Let's look at the game's point system. Racking up points eventually leads to the bad ending, in which Heather embraces Alessa and the path of darkness. Forgiving the woman in the confessional nets a huge quantity of points, symbolizing how Heather is taking on the responsibilities of St. Alessa, including forgiveness of sins. Killing monsters also earns points, and Alessa has decades of rage built up. An end-game reveal that the "monsters" Heather killed throughout the game were actually people would have been perfectly consistent with the bad ending. She's not just possessed, she's carried out by far the single greatest killing spree in history.
    Fatale-distraction: You know, because of the heavily psychological themes in Silent Hill, the idea that it looks different to each individual... nothing has scared me more in the ENTIRE series than that ONE line from Vincent. That was the moment I went, “oh, SHIT.” It calls to mind so many different ideas. What does Silent Hill look like to him? What does Silent Hill ACTUALLY look like? What are we actually fighting? What if we’re killing PEOPLE? What if the monsters aren’t real, and we’re going around slaughtering real people? Maybe even other people trapped in Silent Hill just like us? What if they attack us because WE look like the monsters to them? What if we’re the real monster.
    • There's a lot to be said for perceptions in Silent Hill, and how subjective reality can be in Silent Hill 3 especially: every character can be seen differently depending on whose lens you're looking through. There's an awful lot of evidence, especially with Claudia's father, that if they aren't still human, the monsters were at some point.
    • Consider also that the monsters have a tendency to attack Heather in ways that center on her sexual organs. If they're actually normal humans, and enemies of the cult, they may be trying to help her by trying to forcibly abort the child she doesn't know she's carrying, but Heather distorted perception makes her impossible to talk to or reason with... which, being knowledgeable about the cult, they already know, and are willingly going to their deaths to save the world from Saint Alessa's Child. And if they are the human cultists, they may be doing what the Missionary does in killing Harry, abusing Alessa in order to force the cult god to suffer and thus have more sympathy for humanity, maybe even seeing it as a holy ritual to leave "their" mark on the newborn god. Considering the feminine and pregnancy themes, it's a good way to disturb the fear of a teenage mother being judged for being pregnant, and to twist the tendency of people to constantly want to put their hands on a pregnant belly.
    • We should, however, note that we never get evidence that the monsters are human, at least not fully. Consider this line from Douglas at the end of the Mall level: "And that monster...what the hell was that?" Since Douglas doesn't have any personal demons on the same level as Heather, it's most likely meant to strongly imply that he sees the same monsters that Heather does, and that they aren't regular people. For all we know, since Vincent is in The Order, he could be seeing angels.
    • To elaborate: the only other people in the town who see the monsters as well as you are the local insane evil death cult. Who are insane. One of the cultists, Vincent, poses the above question to Heather. Who's to say your character isn't just as delusional as they are and wandering around killing innocent people who he/she just thinks are monsters? To everyone else, it could just be a perfectly normal town that happens to attract serial killers — maybe because the death cult itself is driving people insane. In fact, a couple of the games even hint at this if you know where to look.
      • In the 30-minute movie The Making of Silent Hill 3, one of the creators of the game brought this up and said that there was, in fact, a high possibility that you could be killing people you knew or otherwise innocent bystanders. Sweet Jesus.
      • The sheer number of monsters Heather encounters makes it hard for her to be killing ordinary people all over the city she lives in and the town. If that's the case, she would have to be in another dimension partially, so that police officers couldn't easily shoot her down and end her killing spree. The alternative is worse, though. If Silent Hill is a town of spirits, and people who die there are trapped forever, then you could conceivably be killing the spirits of the people who have died there as you see them in different forms, over and over again, all the way from the time the cult was founded in the 1800's. Consider the town is referred to as the Place of the Silent Spirits in Silent Hill 2. This is confirmed partly by the developers stating that Lisa's soul is still in torment in Silent Hill 3 after what she did in Silent Hill 1. If Lisa is strapped to a rusty ceiling and being tortured by Valtiel for ostensibly doing nothing wrong, who's to say the 'monsters' you encounter aren't the ghosts of ordinary people who have died in the town and are now trapped in the Otherworld thanks to the cult's corruption? They could be anyone - innocent people, criminals, even children...anyone who's died in the town. That would explain why the dead guy James finds in Silent Hill 2 at the beginning saw a demon, while his friend saw something else. It's not a hallucination being pulled out of thin air. What you're seeing is the spirit of someone who has died in the town and is now helpless to control their fate, used as a pawn by the town for its purposes. In other words, it's the worst Purgatory you can possibly imagine.
      • At first, this infamous theory doesn't seem to make sense. If the monsters and demons are actually innocent people, why do they actively attack Heather? Why does Heather actually get hurt in the "real world" if it's all an illusion? An alternative explanation: the monsters could indeed actually be humans, but they're either insane criminals or Claudia's Order minions (who again, are insane). This would mean that the Order has become so powerful that they can openly attack people in the streets (or malls and train stations), and no one who happens to be watching can do anything about it.
      • Unless you look like a monster to them. You are carrying a weapon, there's probably bits of 'monster' blood and... other stuff stuck to your skin and hair and clothes, and you're staring at them. All of this would probably lead to most people trying to attack you and probably kill you.
      • The above is just Insane Troll Logic at its finest. Unless you immediately took a swing at them with said pipe in this scenario, the vast majority of people anywhere in the world would first try to see if you were okay instead of instantly trying to murder you.
      • This is further supported by the Book of Lost Memories, which states that the Missionary boss is a transformed cultist.
      • What makes it even worse is the camera switches to first person. Doubled up with the fact he's telling her she enjoys killing the "monsters" and hearing their screams, it seems like he isn't talking to Heather. He's talking to YOU.
      • Just a thing: Vincent's part of an insane cult who worships the monsters as angels. Hence, he probably didn't mean 'They're humans' More 'Our angels look like monsters to you?'
      • He does follow it up with "Just joking," and he's enough of a Troll for it to be in-character. Alternately, some of the monsters are figments of Silent Hill and others are human, and Heather just sees them as monsters due to Alessa's influence. Heather might see Leonard as a monster, for example, because Alessa remembers him as being an abusive 'monster' to Claudia; she might see hospital staff as Nurses because Alessa identifies them with Lisa and/or Kaufmann.
      • While Vincent certainly isn't sane, he never appears to be as unhinged as the other cultists. To him, the church is more like a business. His whole motivation for helping Heather kill God is that it would negatively affect his profits. In addition, he makes a comment not long after asking Heather whether or not everything in town is just part of her delusional mindset, further blurring the line between fantasy and reality. If the monsters truly are the other cultists or innocent people, he's got the best chance of seeing it out of the principal cast (except maybe Douglas).

Fridge Logic

  • Artistic License – Biology: In theory, Heather's aglaophotis wouldn't have worked. Fetuses aren't in a girl's stomach, so making yourself vomit wouldn't bring a baby out.
    • Well, considering what happens to Claudia's body after she ingests the god, and what the god was doing to Heather's body while it was inside her, it's probably more logical to conclude that this god grows not within the womb, but the vessel's entire body, or more spiritually, in her soul. Think of it like a parasite that can literally grow out of its host once it's, well, "mature." See also how the god was forced out of Alessa in the first game.
      • If one notices how the camera rises in the fake ending if you take too long or try to attack Claudia, it's implied the gods has torn its way out of Heather's body.
    • Aglaophotis isn't an emetic, it's a general-purpose exorcism medicine. So taking it makes you expel whatever "gods" or "demons" are inside you, whichever part of the body they're in.
    • In the first game, Alessa was simply doused with the stuff and it was sufficient to expel the demon.

Top