Silent Hill series

The town doesn't seem to have any real moral agency. It's just a town where thought can sometimes come to life. It's just that negative emotions tend to be more intense, so the town reacts more to those.

And as I've said, the cult made things worse by creating a whole lot of negative emotion for the town to bring to life via child abuse.

what Silent Hill needs is some good vibes!

I headcanon that the good vibes it gets are why it's a nice vacation spot for most people.

Maybe vacationeers' having pleasant thoughts and wanting a pleasant vacation causes the town to react by creating good weather or something.

Edited by M84 on Oct 23rd 2022 at 8:03:57 PM

Silent Hill: Come for the vibes, stay to feed your addiction to PTV that our friendly neighborhood apocalypse cult made sure to hook you up with!

I really would like to visit the nice Silent Hill sometime. It would make the contrast more interesting.

I imagine that the regular unseen Silent Hill would be kinda like Cabot Cove, as written by Stephen King: A seemingly cosy place, with quirky small-town archetypes wandering the streets, with a hidden seedy underbelly.

Silent Hill still does apparently give good vibes; Laura doesn't see any monsters or nightmares, but she is still evidently in the Fog World. She just has no darkness in her heart, so there is nothing negative to really react to other than that she is lonely.

Of the original four games, Silent Hill 2 is the only one that features the characters being "punished" for their crimes - self perceived crimes, in Angela's case. Heather/Alessa's monsters are dangerous for entirely different reasons, as are Walter's.

I could see a game where it alternates between the normal world, with people going about their day, and the Fog World and Otherworld. Technology would probably allow for it in ways it didn't before.

Edited by SilentColossus on Oct 23rd 2022 at 5:00:14 AM

What you described is basically Bright Falls from Alan Wake tbh.

But I also agree that being able to see the normal town for a bit would be a good preamble to the darkness.

James having good memories of Silent Hill with Mary is important but it's ultimately exposition. We don't experience those feelings much with him. There's no positive feelings towards the town on the *player's* end of things.

In Alan Wake, while the "day" portions are criminally tiny, they do a really good job of making me feel something for the small mountain town we're playing in for right now. And that then builds to when we enter Episode 5 and have to fight Taken through locations like the Police Station and local diner we walked through normally only a handful of hours earlier.

The Real World Silent Hill is evidently quite prosperous on the whole; Downpour shows that an entirely new set of neighborhoods has been built to the southeast of the lake between the original trilogy and that one, so it’s not a town wanting for cash at the very least.

Another reason Homecoming makes no sense.

I was thinking about the differences between Cheryl and Maria as tulpas and was wondering why they're so different. Maria as a tulpa is struggling with her agency and flip-flops between her "whore" Maria persona and her "Madonna" Mary persona (because James is screwed up), but Cheryl doesn't seem to at all.

That is because they were created to fulfill a wish.

Cheryl existed to fulfill Alessa’s wish to know what it is like to be loved by good parents.

Maria otoh existed to fulfill James’ extremely fucked up combination of sexual frustration and the need to punish himself for murdering Mary.

Didn't Alessa give Cheryl part of her soul?

Cheryl was also a deliberate creation on Alessa's part, while Maria was a manifestation of some of James' subconscious desires.

That's because I don't think the composition of Team Silent was ever consistent itself.

Team Silent was different people from game to game, with not a single one of the first four having the same director.

I don't think the franchise ever had one singular vision behind it, unless you count Akira Yamaoka, who always did the music.

Edited by OrangeBun on Oct 25th 2022 at 11:39:29 AM

I wonder if Maria would have vanished from existence if James had just turned around and drove out of Silent Hill that day, never to return.

If James was the kind of person who could have done that at that point in time, Maria probably never would have been created in the first place.

That is notably what he does once he kills her/it/his guilt.

But as we see in 4, Silent Hill isn't limited to just its borders.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Oct 25th 2022 at 11:04:43 AM

There's ultimately nothing keeping a person trapped in their own Dark World except themselves.

The situation's more complicated if a person finds themselves stuck in another person's Dark World though. This is what happens to Harry Mason and others in the first game and Henry and his neighbors in the fourth game.

x5

True, but I can think of other franchises with less consistent production and team composition that have more consistent identities as works. I don't think it inherently needed a consistent director of some sort, but that someone did need to make a more executive decision on what the series *is* before it went in 5 different directions and feeling unsure of what it wants to be on the whole.

Is it about the cult? The town? Both? Neither? A completely separate cult tangentially related to the original one?

SH 1 is about the cult and from them stems the horror. SH 2 is cult-less but has the town as it's source of horror. SH 3 is primarily back to being about the cult and the town itself takes its sweet time arriving to the story. SH 4 is entirely about the cult with Silent Hill itself absent. Homecoming barely has Silent Hill in it because it's just a neighboring town who *also* has creepy shit going on and *also* happens to have a dark evil cult among it's leadership who *also* have a rather sacrificial relationship with their children. And then Downpour doesn't have the cult either (far as I remember?) and is back to more SH 2 style where the horror is more from the town itself and the character trauma.

Which feels like it's seeping into... well, Silent Hill f. Granted, look, it's just a trailer and a teaser really at that. And it does have some *really* great images and creepiness is at a high and I *am* excited to see what it does. But if I removed the logo at the end, I don't think I would ever have thought it was a Silent Hill game unless I missed something really big?

I think that's partially why a lot of the other games grew more contentious in fan opinion as the series went on. From about The Room on, the franchise gets more and more divisive on the actual quality of concepts gets more out there and less to do with the one that came before it.

"What is a Silent Hill game?"

Remind me: is it ever established if the city attracts people to it to feed off of their emotional trauma? Is it actively malevolent or are folks like James just very unlucky?

Also: anyone has a guess what we should expect from F To Pay Respects? I only really know Higurashi and the like from reputation.

Well, I suppose the US-made games could be argued to try and give the series a consistent identity, it just so it happens that identity is "hey, wasn't Silent Hill 2 fucking great?" repeated ad nauseum.

Edited by OrangeBun on Oct 25th 2022 at 4:35:03 PM

It's never been confirmed whether Silent Hill itself gets anything from the people drawn to it or if it even has a sentience of its own.

As far as we know it's just a place where peoples' thoughts can come to life.

Any malevolence seen in the series comes from people trying to exploit the town's strange properties for their own ends.

Edited by M84 on Oct 26th 2022 at 3:48:01 AM

I mean, Konami also had its own perceived vision for the series which was "isn't Silent Hill 1 great" repeated ad nasum with the cult being a constant presence. the higher ups were the ones who kept pushing for cult stuff/revisits to SH 1. Its why 3 is a sequel, the original pitch had nothing to do with the cult iirc, and was more about a teen girl dealing with even more f*ck up trauma than James did, from what little we know about the pitch

This reached its zenith with origins and homecoming both being the cult redux from SH 1 and the town messing with someone with a traumatic past redux from SH 2

the series has kind of always ping-ponged between those two's great but different horror perspectives, often to mixed effect

Edited by I-M-THE-Jetyl-1 on Oct 25th 2022 at 12:51:52 PM

Even SH 2 had a secret bad ending where James repeats the mistakes of the cult by trying to exploit the town’s properties to bring Mary back.

Mistake?

Or AWESOME.

:)

But yes, the cult is super-popular in Japan while the "tortured internal horror" SH 2 isn't nearly as so.

x6

I'll admit that I am most excited for f specifically because they appear to want to do their own thing with it.

Silent Hill 3 is a sequel to the original, and it owns it. While it being a direct sequel might not be the most unique possibility, it doesn't feel like a copy. It just feels like a Part II.

As for The Room, I'd argue it actually has relatively little to do with the cult. It might serve as a background for Walter, but it is mostly defunct by the time Henry is targeted, and Walter's goals are very different. He has no interest in creating god, he only wants to turn Room 302 into his mother. And the aesthetics, atmosphere, and themes aren't similar to 1 & 3 at all.

And both of them have much of the horror happening well away from Silent Hill. Maybe "Silent Hill" was on its way to becoming mostly an Artifact Title.

Edited by SilentColossus on Oct 25th 2022 at 7:00:35 AM