History Headscratchers / SilentHill1

*** Also my takeaway. By the end you understand that Kaufmann knows enough about what's actually happened to the town to be well aware that no outside help is actually coming, hence why he was in the Lakeside Resort area in the first place trying to retrieve his stashed vial of Aglaophotis. It's just a MotivationalLie to keep Harry from sniffing around and discovering what he's up to.

* Dahlia seems to be a NonActiongBigBad. She's unarmed, barefoot, and Alessa probably doesn't have the best feelings for her after burning her alive. How is Dahlia able to traverse Silent Hill unmolested with monsters attacking indiscriminately?

** Harry is a desperate father searching for his daughter. Cybil's a good enough judge of character to realize that the only way she could ''stop'' him from charging on in pursuit of the missing girl, with or without her help, would be to physically restrain and confine him. And she can't drag him to the police station and lock him up for his own safety, because the whole town is infested with monsters that'd be more than capable of breaking into a jail cell to eat him, bars or no bars.

** I always thought it was pretty poignant about the game's expression of horror. Remember, Silent Hill practically pioneered survival horror as a genre (ResidentEvil came first, but it emphasized action over atmosphere and it contributed more to zombie action horror than psychological thrillers). Most of the blood in the game is completely harmless because it's part of the aesthetic and doesn't come from anywhere; pooled in gurney sheets or splattered on the walls rather than gushing from open wounds. Even Lisa doesn't suffer any actual damage, she just starts bleeding from nothing. The message isn't "being afraid of being hurt means being afraid of being hurt", it's "The presence of blood implies a physical threat". Stephen King's ''IT'' does the same thing: the blood that Pennywise splatters all over the place doesn't ''come'' from anywhere in particular (adults can't even see it), but the fact that it ''is'' blood makes its presence terrifying.

* So this entire cult has tried decades to summon this almighty God to change the entire world as we know it forever. But when it gets summoned, some random hick with a shotgun kills it in minutes. Why the hell is this 'God' so horribly weak? How can it change the world when it can't beat even one man, let alone the armies of all nations? The 'God' in 3 and Homecoming was just as weaksauce. Sure, in all cases the births were flawed, but would it really weaken them that much? They don't seem to really be able to harm anyone or affect life as we know it outside of Silent Hill. Where's the tension?
** When in Alessa's room in Nowhere one of the doctors mentions that the power will be almost nothing compared to what they would have had if everything went according to plan. Flawed births are that bad, even for the baddies it seems.
** In SH3, Harry states in his little notebook that it was Alessa who truly "defeated" God by pushing it back down (he mentioned "conscious resistance"). I think the idea is that there's a sort of IT-esque battle of wills going on behind the scenes. At the end of SH1 is the most powerful incarnation of God that we get to see, and it took Alessa's mental powers to just bring it back down and not even "kill" it. And this one wasn't born properly. In SH3 the birth was beyond screwed. God wasn't done, and then got born premature by a woman that wasn't half as powerful as Alessa. Plus She was just waking up.

*** Perhaps it's the seven years thing that is why it is so weak. It wasn't growing and gestating in that time, it was sustaining itself and calling out to it's host's other half. Perhaps in that time if it's focus had not been divided, it may have been considerably stronger.

* In the first scene with Kaufmann, he shoots at harry at point-blank range and misses. But Harry didn't move until ''after'' the shot was fired, meaning that the bullet should've hit him. How did the bullet miss?

** I thought it was talking about the game's aesthetic. Most of the monsters are fleshy masses, and the Ohterworld has a bunch of bodies just tied up at random, walls that look like they're made of something organic, etc. "Flesh" is definitely what comes to mind when I think of Silent Hill.

** Also, this was the PS1 era. [[BlindIdiotTranslation Localizations weren't exactly the best at the time.]]

** I think, PS1 graphical limitations aside, Kaufmann was supposed to have jerked the gun away at the last second or aimed over Harry's shoulder once he realized Harry's not one of the monsters, or is otherwise ''that bad'' a shot.