Is James a monster who killed his wife because he didn't feel like taking care of her anymore, an innocent man tortured by guilt, or a complex tragic character who was the instrument of Mary's assisted suicide? Or, perhaps, James is just a normal man who did a horrible thing.
Mary, for that matter, seems less a dedicated, sickly woman whose trust was betrayed than a tormented Death Seeker. As her health and beauty decline, she alienates and badgers James, using his obligation to care for her as a knife to drive into him until he relents to put her out of her misery. It's possible he's trying to perceive it that way to assuage his guilt, but it doesn't seem to work at all.
There's a fan theory that runs that Henry is in fact responsible for the murders throughout the fourth game. See the Wild Mass Guessing page for details.
Henry's dull wit and emotional detachment may be signs of sociopathy; or the natural symptoms of sleep deprivation, starvation, and dehydration. The latter could be argued, but this can be thrown out the window as Henry himself mentions in the game that he doesn't starve or need sleep while being trapped in Room 302.
Depending on how you answer Dr. K's questions and how you play as Harry, you can give the player character of Shattered Memories a different set of characteristics and motivations every time you play through.
The game itself is rife with ACIs. Dahlia becomes Harry's lover and later claims to be his wife, and Kaufmann is Cheryl's therapist. Lisa and Cybil are both largely the same, although their circumstances differ from SH1.
The titular town itself, particularly in Silent Hill 2. Some fans believe that whatever forces are manipulating things behind the scenes are determined to punish wrongdoers and help guide them to find redemption, while the majority maintain that these forces are purely malevolent, and instead seek to corrupt and condemn those who fall into its clutches, regardless of their true culpability. The idea that there's any particular "will", moral or otherwise, behind these events is itself subject to interpretation, too.
Audience-Alienating Era: While fans will vigorously disagree as to precisely when the series fell into this (as noted below under Broken Base), virtually all of them agree that it lost its touch sometime after the third game, especially after Team Silent disbanded.
Silent Hill Ascension takes things in such a bizarrely different direction - making a story dependent on audience participation including monetary donations and a livestreamed chat - that has been very unpopular with fans. Many joking(?) posts on the reddit lament being too hard on the later games.
Better as a Let's Play: The games are widely praised by both fans and critics alike for their characters and storytelling, but most agree that the puzzles, the length of the games, and the clunky combat may not jive for everyone, thus people looking to get into the series may opt to watch someone else play it and see their reactions to the events in the stories.
Broken Base: Boy howdy. The divides in the fandom are so deep and so numerous that it took a whole separate page to list them all.
Everyone knows that the series is all about a troubled hero who battles his own personal demons, right? Nope. From the very beginning the series has always been about a cult known as "The Order" and the main characters attempts to stop them from bringing their God out into the real world. While there have been somegames that mix the cult and personal demons plots together, the cult has always played a part in the series. Even the games that seemingly don’t have anything to do with The Order, such as Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 4, make subtle references to the cult itself note Silent Hill 4 especially makes it clear that the villain of the game, Walter Sullivan, was a part of The Order before becoming a serial killer. If anything only two games have nothing to do with The Order and focus strictly on the personal demons angle, Shattered Memories and Downpour.
Pyramid Head is exclusively a being created from the desire of James Sunderland to be punished for his sins... except he's not. Despite this being the oft-cited reason why Pyramid Head's appearances in the films and other games aren't welcome, even in Silent Hill 2, Pyramid Head was an established icon that had roots in the Order's punishment rituals. Even across the franchise, his motivation as a punisher generally stays consistent, although who he punishes tends to vary, and Silent Hill: Revelation 3D goes the extra mile and brands him a protector.
It's been a common talking point in the fandom for years that the first three or so games (though this is most often used specifically in regards to 2) had Narm voice acting completely on purpose. While it could be argued that due to the heavy inspiration from David Lynch, who famously had stilted and just plain bizarre bits of dialogue in his works, Team Silent opted to use similar tactics such as long pauses in speech - there has been no clear cut answer from any of the main developers so far.
The town of Silent Hill is based off the real-life town of Centralia... except it isn't. Background and Creature Designer Mashahiro Ito has stated, on multiple occasions, that Silent Hill isn't based on any specific town, and series creator Keiichiro Toyama has stated that "[The game's team] deliberately did not use an actual place, since it might cause inconsistency with the real thing." However, scriptwriter Roger Avary used the town as inspiration for the script of the 2006 film, leading the game and the film's backstory to get conflated - particularly since later games leaned on the film's aesthetics and had ash fall from the sky.
Creepy Cute: Thanks to its timid gait and pathetic moaning Numb Body of the third game has become probably one of the most adorable monsters ever.
Cult Soundtrack: It wouldn't be much of an exaggeration to say Akira Yamaoka's music for the games practically has its own fanbase. The eclectic mix of industrial, drone, trip hop, and alt rock he employs is really unlike anything else in the genre and is a huge part of what gives the games such a distinctive aesthetic. Fan remixes and covers of iconic songs from the original games are quite common, and there's even a blossoming community on YouTube and Bandcamp of artists making original music In the Style of Yamaoka's compositions.
The nurses in the second and third games, especially on Hard difficulty and higher. They have long attack range and some in the third game carry guns, attack in groups so the rest will jump on you when you move in to stomp a downed nurse, and tend to respawn right in your face after you come out of a room. Worse, in SH2, James also has to protect Maria from them, or else it's Game Over.
The first game has the infamous Mumblers.note These are commonly mislabeled "Grey Children," because of the similar creatures of that name in the first movie, and because a Konami publication mistakenly used "Mumbler" for their international replacement. See Unreliable Canon, sub-entry. They appear in groups in the dark corridors of the school, sometimes right in your face when you enter, and gang up on you, with one grabbing you while the others slice and dice. Then you tend to get grabbed by another after getting free and the cycle repeats. And towards the end of the game, there's the adult variant of the Stalkers, which is transparent and harder to see.
The Crawlers in SH2 can be demonic on Hard difficulty and if you're low on health. See, for example, the basement corridor in "Born From A Wish". Get bitten by one Crawler too many, cue Critical Existence Failure.
Slurpers. They lunge at you and knock you down, then when you are getting back up, they may ram you again. Lather, rinse, repeat, throw controller.
The Abstract Daddies in the hotel. Due to the near-total darkness and very narrow hallways, it's hard to see how far away they are or dodge them, resulting in James being head-raped repeatedly.
Carrions. No matter how far away they are, they'll always get the first hit in and dole out a huge amount of pain thanks to a lightning-fast and incredibly accurate lunge. How does roadkill move so quickly?!
Scrapers in SH3, especially if you're low on ammo and/or health. In the narrow corridors, they tend to block your path, including access to spare ammo.
Raw Shocks, which makes sense, given that they are preventing Harry from realizing the truth.
Insane Cancers in the third game. Large mounds of hell that block your paths and force you to fight them. It takes an insane amount of resources to knock them down, and then once you think they're dead and go to kick them, they get right back up and take out a chunk of your health. They're also a lot faster than they look - from a distance, they can suddenly just sprint at you. The fact that these things can take eight shotgun blasts to the face and still come back laughing is far scarier than what they're meant to represent. At least you can block their attacks to minimize damage... but still.
Needlers. Able to scale walls and ceilings, move very rapidly, block most of Alex's attacks, and seek shelter when close to death.
Siams. Incredibly strong? Check. Incredibly fast? Check. Able to soak up tons of damage? Check.
Smogs. Incredibly annoying with their ability to blow noxious fumes at Alex, with insane tracking skills, and an annoying headbutt attack at close range that consistently knocks Alex flat on his butt.
Weeping Bats. Strong, fast and often cling to ceilings — and their descent from said ceilings is a nasty unblockable attack.
Difficulty Spike: The hospitals, where the nurses are much tougher than previously encountered enemies, notably in 2 and 3 on the higher difficulty levels.
Fandom-Enraging Misconception: Centralia only inspired the movie version of Silent Hill, and not the games. Do NOT try to say otherwise.
Fandom Heresy: When interacting with fans of the franchise online or offline, there are some very definitive "don'ts". Don't criticise any of the games made under the Team Silent banner. Don't say that 2 isn't one of the, if not THE, best game of all time. Don't say that you preferred the Western produced games. Don't state or even imply that 3, or indeed any game in the series, is better than 2. And for Valtiel's sake, do NOT say that you liked Homecoming.
Fanfic Fuel: Many a player and/or fan of the games would write fanfics based on other types of characters who get involved with Silent Hill.
Pyramid Head had a very good - and at the time rather brilliantly symbolic - reason for playing the role that he did in Silent Hill 2, which is what made him so terrifying and memorable. His repeated appearances as an iconic part of the franchise has led to a steadily worsening agitation towards media that features him. Established as a Shadow Archetype, Pyramid Head's motivation has changed to generally suit whatever direction his latest appearance needs, which the fandom tends not to appreciate.
A downplayed variation with the role of a Tragic Hero with a Dark and Troubled Past: it's often cited that later installments ripped off Silent Hill 2 in this regard and that re-doing it simply results in a Cliché Storm. However, Silent Hill 3also put a lot of stock in the main character's tragic history and the psychological effects it had on her, but people rarely criticize this. While James was the first iteration of this being centered on the player character, and certainly the most well-remembered, the town's hellish elements taking after the psyche of the individual sculpting it was established before his game and he was not the Original in the trope's name.
Foe Yay Shipping: Rule 34 means that the fanbase reads quite a bit of subtext into certain character interactions.
Silent Hill — Fanon says that Kaufmann did unspeakable things to Harry on that pool table after Harry rescued him from the monster.
Silent Hill 4 — Walter persistently stalks Henry, kills everyone around him, and addresses Henry as his "Receiver of Wisdom".
Silent Hill: Homecoming — Bogeyman (aka Pyramid Head), even though the "foe" part is debatable (seeing as he only appears to be coming after Adam).
Silent Hill: Downpour — Murphy and Sewell. Hello, Prison Rape. (It doesn't help that Sewell calls Murphy "cupcake.") Murphy and Cunningham also to a lesser extent.
Gateway Series: Along with Resident Evil, most people get into survival horror through these games. Additionally, Akira Yamaoka's iconic soundtracks for the series have gotten many people into electronic and industrial music.
Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Though the series is successful enough in Japan, it's found a much, much larger audience in North America and Europe. No surprise considering that the games are deliberately made to be as Western as possible.
The Air Screamers in the first game and the Pendulums in the third. The latter often get in the way while traversing narrow pathways or stairs, take copious amounts of ammo to kill, and make a Nightmare Fuel-ing screeching sound.
And the Invincible Minor Minion Victims in part 4, which can follow you through walls. The Hummers too, which look like a cross between a literal bat and a mosquito.
Numb Bodies in Silent Hill 3, which would populate some rooms and keep bumping you. Yes, that's their attack. Bumping. GET OUT OF THE WAY!!
Iron Woobie: Alessa. She endured seven years in utter agony and could have simply broke and called Cheryl back until she came, but she wanted Cheryl/herself to experience being loved by a parent. It was only after hearing that Dahlia was still planning on birthing the god that she decided to stop her plans for good and prevented the whole world from becoming like the Otherworld by trapping herself in that dimension — if not for Harry's and Dahlia's interference.
Just Here for Godzilla: With the hard Sequelitis that began to hit the series after the transition to Western developers, most fans agreed that the soundtracks of Akira Yamaoka were still great as ever and worth the price of admission despite the decline in quality of the games themselves. Coincidentally, the first game without Yamaoka's involvement ended up being the effective Franchise Killer of the series for now.
Magnificent Bitch: Alessa Gillespie is a powerful psychic born to Dahlia, a wicked head of the Order. Used in a ritual to birth the Order's God, Alessa fights back by telepathically communicating with trucker Travis Grady, having him construct the Flauvos to regain her strength and retaliate. Separating half of her soul to be happily adopted by Harry Mason and his wife, Alessa resists seven years of torture before luring back her other half to stop Dahlia's plans for good. Manipulating Harry, Alessa ensures God's birth is corrupted and it is defeated by Harry before reincarnating herself as a baby to be lovingly raised by him. Leaving a failsafe to kill her own reincarnation should the Order try to use her to birth god again, Alessa is determined to save humanity from the cult at all costs.
Much of the voice acting and dialogue from the first game, particularly Harry's performance. The voice acting and dialogue does noticeably improve starting with Silent Hill 2 (and gets better from there, with the possible exception of Origins), but this trope still pops up from time to time.
Dahlia Gillespie gives us the immortal line, "It was foretold by gyromancy!". Go ahead, Wikipedia "gyromancy".
If you wear the dog suit that you can earn as a reward, the entirety of Origins can be turned into this.
Ditto Silent Hill 3 if you use the Magical Girl outfit. Add in the cheat that has Douglas in his boxers and very little else for extra fun.
The UFO Endings which purposely channel old school sci-fi B movies for comedic value.
The voice acting and dialogue from the first game. Most likely due to the actors recording their lines independently from each other, as was the standard back then.
Only the Creator Does It Right: How a lot of fans feel about the series since the disbanding of Team Silent. However, Hideo Kojima came the closest to Team Silent's reputation with Silent Hills before getting screwed over.
What's that lurking in the distance? What's with this radio? Will this thing kill me if I touch it? Should I shoot this monster to death or run and save my ammunition? Who keeps leaving these Health Drinks in the middle of nowhere?
There's a room in the mall in 3, where there's a sign that says you need to turn off the lights because the room becomes very noticeable if you don't. Even while watching a friend play the game, when they go to turn off the lights, it's terrifying because of previous knowledge of Silent Hill games. Nothing actually happens either way, which really makes it Paranoia Fuel.
In Silent Hill 2, while wandering around in the abandoned apartments, you hear a noise coming from the north in a room you visited a few minutes before. When you go back into the previously empty room, a man you haven't seen before is sitting dead in the chair in front of the TV, which has been turned on to static and has blood all over it. And all the corpses that James runs into use the same character model look like him, except for one that looks like Harry Mason.
In Silent Hill 4, you wander through Otherworlds, which are created from Walter's memories. Every person you meet in these Otherworlds dies gruesomely, and it isn't until later that you realize it's Walter completing his ritualistic murders. That's right, the Big Bad has been seeking out each victim like a predator does its prey, meaning he's also been stalking YOU through each Otherworld the whole time. It's even worse when he comes out of hiding when you revisit these areas.
Since the second game, hints and comments by characters and the plot itself can have a player wondering if they really are fighting monsters, or if the main character is just crazy and delusional. It says something that all the main characters of the series have at least some people believing that they are hallucinating while on a mass-murder rampage.
The Silent Hill HD Collection, which was supposed to be remastered versions of Silent Hill 2 and 3 that could be played on HD consoles, has shown itself to be this. Handled by a studio who only had a couple of mobile/handheld games under their belt, and partly based on code from old beta versions of the original games as Konami had managed to misplace the finished versions; the output are both technical messes plagued with bugs that weren't there in the original versions of the games, rampant slowdown issues, poor in-game lighting, missing music tracks, and badly synced character voices. Especially glaring is the fact that several of the game's iconic fog effects are broken in several places, most notably in SH2 where it renders certain scenes downright laughable. A day-one patch which at least mitigated (and emphasis on mitigated) some of these problems was eventually put out, but was only made available for the PS3 version.
The PC version of Silent Hill 4 has for some reason limited its frames per second in gameplay to 30, which wouldn't be too bad, if wasn't for the fact that that every cutscene for some insane reason is restricted to 15 frames per second. The port also lacks six of the apartment hauntings available in the console releases.
Sacred Cow: Silent Hill 2 and to a much lesser extent Silent Hill 3 are held up as some of the greatest examples of video game art in existence, and expressing any form of negativity towards them will NOT be tolerated by the fandom.
Among installments, Homecoming is this to the fandom.
Laura of 2 is widely despised for being a deliberate and highly unpleasant Spoiled Brat, even if there is a plot-relevant reason for her to be as nasty as she is toward James for most of the story.
Just being a murderous and sanctimonious religious fanatic (an all but inherently unlikable character archetype) would be enough as is, but Claudia earned the fandom's everlasting hatred by ordering the death of Harry Mason, Heather's beloved father and the protagonist of the original game. Heather is eventually able to pity Claudia in spite of this, but not many fans share in her magnanimity.
Shocking Moments: Those air screamers? Every once in a while, if you loop back, you see it walking right behind you, stalking you.
Ships That Pass in the Night: Harry/James is somewhat popular in certain circles, despite that fact that the two have only ever interacted in the decidedly non-canon UFO endings of 2 and 3 (with this one showing that the two share an apartment!). Perhaps it's due to both having wives that died young of illness, and leaving Silent Hill with a child in the "happier" endings of their respective games.
Signature Scene: Individual examples are listed across the game's pages, but for the series overall it would be the introduction to the Fog World in Silent Hill, Pyramid Head's introduction in Silent Hill 2, or the Wham Line in Silent Hill 3. Take your pick.
The Silent Hill fandom is notoriously vocal — particularly concerning sequels that haven't yet been released. Fans complained about the supposed overemphasis on combat in Homecoming six months before it hit the shelves. Shattered Memories, on the other hand, has no combat at all — and people still complained about that. There's also a great deal of grief being voiced over the fact that the protagonist has a touch-screen cell phone to represent the menu commands.
Any post-Team Silent entry will get flak from fans for being too "Americanized", despite the fact that a couple of the more recent dev teams originate from Britain (Climax Studios) and the Czech Republic (Vatra Games) respectively. Even Silent Hill 4, the last Team Silent game, was polarizing due to the radical gameplay changes. Still more baffling is the very accusation that the series has shifted toward "American" horror — as Word of God states, the the series was intended as an homage to American horror in the first place and draws most of its inspiration from it, hence the town's streets being named after various Western horror writers and directors.
The Silent Hill HD Collection, containing HD remakes of the second and third games, was revealed pre-release to have new voiceovers. This did not go over well with fans. Then it turned out it was far worse than that. Even setting aside bugs and glitches, many sound effects, music and other details were changed, which was not met with a warm welcome.
Since the release of the PT for Silent Hills, fans are still complaining, stating that Hideo Kojima wouldn't be able to pull off the new game, Guillermo del Toro wouldn't be able to execute the atmosphere properly (since you know, the creator of Pan's Labyrinthdoesn't know anything about horror), and even more over the fact that the teaser was shot from first person view. This stopped pretty quickly when it turned out that Kojima and del Toro wouldn't be able to pull it off after all, because Konami nuked the entire project and, as far as the fandom outside Japan is concerned, more-or-less cancelled the Silent Hill series completely.
Common fanon is restricted to the first three or four games, which were produced by Team Silent and present a more or less consistent idea of what the town is and how it works. Though SH4 continues to divide the fanbase over its experimental nature and the uninvolvement of certain prominent members of Team Silent in its production, fans overwhelmingly refuse to consider the Western-developed games canon. This is primarily because of each's vastly different iteration of the town and its workings or history, in addition to conspicuous fanservice in a franchise built on subtlety; the near-complete overhaul of development teams from KCET or even the previous game's developers; and Konami's substantial cuts to the productions' budgets and development times, starting with Origins. Since much of these outcomes seem to stem from The Problem with Licensed Games (and Silent Hill is far from their only intellectual property to have suffered them over the past decade or two), Konami has since become a public enemy of many of their franchises' fandoms.
The Book of Lost Memories, published on the reverse side of the Japanese Silent Hill 3 manual. Compiled by uninvolved Konami staff members from various notes of Team Silent members, it retcons the first three games'settings into specific years, gives the wrong monster name to one of the creatures of SH1,note that is, labeling the Clawfinger a "Mumbler," which was actually the name of the monster it replaced in the Japanese and PAL ports, to appease the Media Watchdogs; and contains inconsistent information regarding the games' timeline.
Character Perception Evolution: For as far as the town can be considered a villain (which many fans do), the overarching mythology of Silent Hill, is that in order for the town itself to send you to its more disturbing, and supernatural layers, you have to be guilty or feel guilt about something that needs atoning for—which long times fans have treated as an onus.note Personal guilt and inner torment that the town can latch onto will occasionally be treated as the same contentious issue by critics as well, since what Angela did to her father would be considered ethically justifiable by a wide majority of impartial observers, but she couldn't forgive herself because of the psychological damage inflicted on her by years of abuse
The film version of Pyramid Head, a large, hulking man with a BFS, is far more widely recognized than the normal, gaunt Pyramid Head from the games.
Broken Base: A twofer. Fans of the games either find the movie to be a decent attempt at adopting the material into its own thing and avoiding typical pitfalls of Video Game Movies Suckor decry it for changing so many elements of the lore. On top of that, there is a split between general audiences and the fandom of the games, where general audiences were far more receptive to the straight-out horror, rather than focusing on the lore (which isn't particularly well explained). Generally speaking, the less someone obsess over the first three games, the better their opinion tends to be about the movie.
Critical Dissonance: See below. While it got very poor ratings from most critics, the first movie was actually fairly well received by fans of the games and most general audiences, and if nothing else, it's considered lightyears ahead of most competitors by the standards of the genre, for effectively capturing the visuals and sinister lore of the game quite closely, especially given how faithfully (and convincingly) the monsters were done. When the second movie was released, however, no one disputed its poor critical reception.
Months after the release of the Silent Hill movie came The Wicker Man (2006), which similarly involves a motorcycle cop who explores a creepy town outside of their department's jurisdiction to help a mother find her missing child. Like Cybil, Nicholas Cage's police character Edward encounters a superficially friendly religious community that quickly reveals it's ugly true colours, beats him up and sets him on fire as part of a ritualised murder.
Les Yay: Rose and Cybil have their own fanbase because of this. Made even more hilarious by the Bubble-Head Nurses being a sign of repressed sexuality.
Magnificent Bitch: Alessa Gillespie is a formidable Reality Warper, who has turned Silent Hill into her own nightmarish dimension. Once an abused girl who was burned alive by "the Brethren", Alessa pulls them into the Otherworld, creating monsters to hunt and kill them. Splitting her soul into another half, "Sharon", Alessa lures her to Silent Hill and leaves clues for her adoptive mother, heroine Rose De Silva to follow. Once Rose pieces together her story, Alessa appears to her, and convinces her to ally with her, then with Rose's help enters the church, brutally killing her tormentors, before merging her soul with Sharon's. Alessa then leaves Silent Hill with Rose, trapping her in the Otherworld with her, content that she again has a mother who loves her. Through it all, Alessa is always in control, maintaining an affable, dark charisma, and ends the film with all her goals accomplished.
Cybil: "They used to say this place was haunted." Rose: [awkwardly long pause] "I think they were right..."
So much of the second movie. Almost all of the dialogue, for starters, plus the overzealous Juggalo-esque makeup on Alessa and the epic hug battle of doom.
Signature Scene: Pyramid Head brutally killing Anna by the entrance of the church. Christabella's death inside the church may also qualify.
Strawman Has a Point: Rose's husband Christopher is supposed to be a jerk for being against going to Silent Hill and putting a hold on their credit cards. The thing is, he's absolutely right about how crazy this is. It's publicly available knowledge that the town has massive coal fires that make it too dangerous to go to, plus the additional danger made by taking a mentally-troubled child along.
Tainted by the Preview: Return to Silent Hill's announcement has a lot of fans worried because Christophe Gans is once again in creative control. While it's extraordinarily well-suited to adapting into a film, the plot of Silent Hill 2 is also built like a house of cards and depends very heavily on the symbolism, events, and characterization all working in tandem with each other, while Gans —despite his impressive fidelity to the source material's visual style— has shown past form for randomly tossing in iconic imagery and making unnecessary changes without regard for any negative effects it may have on the story (and if early leaks are any indication, their concern may not be baseless).
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Anna, considering that she's the only known resident of Silent Hill that was born in the Dark World, is also the only known offspring of the cultists, and knows virtually nothing of the outside world. This unique perspective is barely explored, as Anna is unceremoniously killed off ten minutes after her introduction, and is never mentioned again.
Video Game Movies Suck: Zig-zagged. The film was panned by most critics, with a 30% Rotten Tomatoes score (5% among "Top Critics"), but was positively received by most fans and casual audiences, with a respectable 6.5 on IMDB, and even the fans that didn't like it seem to have some respect for it. It's generally agreed that, although nowhere near the level of the games, unlike most video game movies which don't even bother, the first film stuck really close to the visuals and general atmosphere of the games, and a fair amount of work was put into making it feel right. The second film, however, falls squarely into this trope, a fact which almost no one disputes.
While far from Vindicated by History, the first Silent Hill is actually well praised and respected in recent years mainly due to how well and beautiful the special effects are and the small amount of detail certain scenes have, with the many unnecessary changes made to the plot being the only major gripe.
Visual Effects of Awesome: While some of the symbolism really didn't belong, there is very little dispute that the film's visuals are a perfect representation of what a Silent Hill movie should look like.
In particular the visual effect of normal Silent Hill transforming into the dark version with all surfaces flaking away to reveal rusted metal was something the games copied afterwards.
Sadly, the sequel had about a third of the budget and looks considerably worse for the wear. The Otherworld especially is very underwhelming, often just looking like... well, night time.
Joe, the name Linkara gave to Ike’s former roommate in Paint It Black, who has gained some popularity for being the smartest character in the comics by kicking Ike out for not paying the rent.
The unnamed surgeon monster from Paint It Black, which has gotten some attention for being the only original Silent Hill monster from the comics, and for featuring a pretty damn cool, Giger-esque design.
Any scene with Christabella in Dead/Alive is hard to take seriously. Design-wise she is obviously a riff on the Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl archetype, which normally incur horror through their silent, aloof, and cold nature, but this is thrown completely out of the window with Christabella, who not only won't ever shut up whenever she appears, but also near-constantly swears like a drunk sailor.
The Scrappy: Christabella, who is utterly loathed by everyone both in and out of universe. Doesn't help that she's a complete Creator's Pet. She was so hated that the character was completely erased when a new writer took over.
They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: A common complaint with the comics (mostly the Scott Ciencin penned issues) is that they took too many liberties with the games and that it felt more in tune with the Lovecraft mythos by comparison.
Christabella is a child who was murdered by The Order as a way to appease their God. Yet between her loudmouth and whiny personality combined with her constant need to swear all the time has made many readers actively advocate for her death.
Whatever sympathy Lauryn may have had to begin with was lost when it’s revealed that she deliberately brought her friends to Silent Hill to be selfishly sacrificed so that she could take over the titular town from her sister Christabella.
Ike Issacs, who's essentially a prisoner of the town and forced to create twisted and surreal paintings and by the end is left for dead by Cheryl (no not that one) and her Cheerleader squad. Instead of invoking sympathy, he has gained ire by many who see him as a lazy idiot who willingly chose to stay in the town (while subsequently ignoring any attempts to escape such as a state trooper who hasn’t been attacked that patrols the streets regularly) and when seeing innocent bystanders he does nothing to help them.
Cheryl and her cheerleader squad arguably fare even worse than Ike, as they break into his home, redecorates said home, locks him in his closet and when hearing some of their members died, deliberately leave Ike to die out of petty revenge. Yet readers are supposed to root for them to escape.
Robert Tower is established as a state trooper ready to retire who is scolded by many for not believing that there is such superstition looming over the town. While he does have a point to not believe said superstition, his sympathy falls apart for many readers when he and his fellow officers decide to play a "prank" on the newbie taking his spot. Said prank involves the other officers beating him up while dressed as monsters because he himself believes in the supernatural and unexplained.
The Woobie: Jason of Among the Damned not only has to deal with the horrors of Silent Hill, but also his own very mundane PTSD and Survivor's Guilt of watching his old military unit die before him, starting off the story openly contemplating suicide even before the monsters show up. The fact he still manages to endure everything and remain noble in his attempts to protect others ends up making him likely the most empathetic and sympathetic characters in all the Scott Ciencin comics.
