Headscratchers / Silent Hill 2

Headscratchers for Silent Hill 2.

---

Silent Hill Pizzas, We Deliver!

• Where did Eddie get that pizza? In the bowling alley, he sits there with Laura eating pizza, and I'm like... did you order that? Does someone deliver to Silent Hill? Or did you just find it... amid the rust and blood and monsters and gore and hideousness, you just found a perfectly fresh pizza and decided "Awesome.. .magic pizza, probably safe to eat it, and it's probably not haunted or anything." Or maybe you raided someone's fridge and ignored the "Property of P. Head" post-it.
  • I wouldn't believe any note with the name "P. Head" on it.
  • It's hinted at that Eddie and Laura don't actually 'see' Silent Hill the exact same way that James does, as Eddie actually states early on when he thinks James is a little nutters. Laura sees the town as an adult-less world for her to play in and doesn't see the monsters, and Eddie feels it as a sort of isolated prison for something he thought about doing. It seems that Eddie can sometimes cross back into Normal Silent Hill (hence his absence in some spots) and back into Other World Silent Hill at will.
    • Lost Memories says that to Laura, "the town appears to be normal". Make of that what you will.
    • Couldn't it also be possible that he suddenly wanted pizza, and the town just... gave him one?
    • That's actually in its own way scarier than the monsters.
  • If you count the name on the pizza box, advertisements around town, and store fronts, Silent Hill appears to have about four different pizza parlors. That town loves pizza, apparently.
    • Doesn't everybody?
  • This is Eddie we're talking about, is it unbelievable that he really did just find a pizza among all the nastiness and his response really was "awesome!"?
  • Remember that Eddie has presumably been seeing the town and its monsters in forms that are meaningful to him, which probably means things that mock and demean him. We know he feels fat-shamed, so perhaps one of his personal "monsters" is one that lays out delicious food to tempt Eddie, then leaps out to harass him when he collects it. After a few such experiences, Eddie started counter-ambushing his monsters to savor their deaths and then steal their bait, in this case a pizza.
  • Is Eddie scarfing down a pizza that's mysteriously lying around any weirder than James guzzling all those health drinks that he finds sitting around just as inexplicably...?
    • I like this idea. Eddie is both immature and overweight and that's part of what ends up making him think James is just another Chad giving him crap. Silent Hill is a purgatory-like place, but it isn't really out to murder, just punish. If the town generates health-restoring items to make sure the penitents stay in the game, it makes perfect sense that they'd be tailored to each one.
    • As a Genius Loci, Silent Hill is a manipulative but rather passive entity. If, say, Eddie was feeling peckish (he'd just blown groceries not too long before, so he would) and thinking of hopping in his van to find an open pizza parlor, the town wouldn't go to the bother of collapsing roadways or summoning demons to steer Eddie where it wanted him to go when it'd be easier for him to just find a perfectly good pizza in the first place he looked. Eddie doesn't question this because A: Silent Hill isn't manifesting the same way for him as it is for James so he probably didn't see anything nightmarish in the bowling alley to compare this mystery pie against, and B: he's kind of a dim bulb, and unlikely to be thinking too hard about how the pizza got there; it's fresh and there's nobody else's name on it, so as far as he's concerned, it's lunch.

Let's go play in the toilet!

• "Hey, this place is pretty creepy and everything is decrepit and stuff. Oh, that's a pretty grody toilet. God knows what in i- HEYYY a wallet! With convenient numbers! Underneath all that icky looking crap!" What the fuck James.
  • In that same vein: "Oh, I just walked into a room with the doorway to the hall behind me. WHOA that pyramid thing is dong something horrible to the sink! Time to jump in the closet and shoot at it!" Idiot Ball much?
    • Well, what did you expect? The Pyramid Head was acting as if it realized something was in the closet and was walking towards it, and James reacted like any normal person would; he panicked and tried to kill it. It's not as if he would have automatically known that Pyramid Head, unlike the other monsters James had encountered up until that point, was impervious to conventional weaponry.
    • Well, perhaps Pyramid Head wouldn't have noticed James if he had TURNED OFF THE FLASHLIGHT!
    • ...Touché.
    • Though given that Pyramid Head is the manifestation of James's guilt, it's very, VERY possible he would've sensed James's presence no matter what.
    • Its been a while since I played the game, but I believe the flashlight stays on in cutscenes if you had it on before it started and is off if you had it off before the scene starts.
    • I think the original point being made is that James should have opened the door and ran like hell, rather than hiding in the closet.
    • Well, do you want to hide and not be seen or be chased after by Pyramid Head?
    • I'd much rather get chased by him. Haven't you noticed? Even with just a spear he's not exactly a track star.
    • I wouldn't bet on that; I have a feeling (and it's sort of implied in the game) that Pyramid Head is the kind of entity who'll always find you, no matter how fast you run.

How dare you kill your rapist father!

• It's been a while since this troper has touched SH2, but given that the town is "punishing" its visitors for their past misdeeds...then why is Angela being punished for killing her rapist father? Unfortunate Implications much?
  • It's implied that the town doesn't really care what people who enter it deserve, it's not conscious in that way. It just has the effect of manifesting what people THINK they deserve or want. Angela sees what she sees not because the town is judging her actions, but because she feels that way about herself. She thinks she's guilty and worthless and the world is hellish, so that's what manifests for her.
  • It might help if you consider that the town isn't INTENTIONALLY punishing anyone. Laura's Silent Hill was, supposedly, an entirely abandoned town for her to play in without adult supervision or interference (with the exception of Eddie and James) — considering how content she seems with this arrangement, that's more of a reward than a judgmental call. Also, it could be argued that the town only does to its adventurers what they think they deserve. Angela didn't think she deserved being saved or helped ("Don't pity me. I'm not worth it." "Thank you for saving me, but I wish you hadn't"), and the town responded accordingly.
    • This is exactly it. Think about what happens with James in the main plot. Right before the final boss fight with the two Pyramid Heads, James says that he didn't need to have someone else punish him anymore... and right after that he can kill Pyramid Head (twice) when before at best he could drive him away. That changes because his sense of guilt has changed, now that he's consciously facing it and coping with it. He chooses to take his redemption into his own hands (what exactly that entails depends on the ending) and the town shifts to allow it. Angela, too, gets what she believes she deserves, and what she chooses.
  • I don't really see the town as "punishing" them for their misdeeds, so much as acting as a metaphysical conduit for their guilt. Eddie felt some guilt for what he did, at first, and when you first meet him, he mentions the monsters around the place. Later on, when you meet him (particularly in the prison), he's lost quite a bit of his sanity by that point, and no longer feels guilty about what he did. Notice that at this point, he doesn't seem nearly as freaked out by his surroundings, acting like James was weird for not assuming he'd be fine on his own. When he finally snaps, he seems to actually like the town. Laura isn't guilty of anything, so the town seems perfectly normal to her. James, however, enters Silent Hill still having repressed the guilt of what he did, and the further he goes, the closer he gets to the truth, and the more nightmarish the town gets for him. Angela, while a sympathetic character to us, feels just as guilty about what she did as James does when he realizes what he did, if not more, so the town picks that up and amplifies it. Besides, who said Silent Hill was fair?
  • The town isn't consciously punishing them, it's just reflecting all their darkest issues and insecurities. Angela feels guilty about it, so the otherworld automatically brings that guilt to life in the form of her own personal hell.
    • ...which isn't abnormal for victims of abuse. Guilt is a very common reaction many physical and sexual abuse victims feel, often feeling unworthy and that they are the ones to blame.
  • I agree with the above. This game is all about personal guilt, not necessarily whether the people in question are worthy of blame. Should James be punished for wanting to end the suffering of his wife? It's also vaguely implied that Angela might have killed her mother and brother as well. As for how much they deserved it, well...
  • I'd argue that the town itself isn't punishing anyone, it's just providing a place for people that subconsciously want to punish themselves. The over-reaching theme of the Silent Hill series, Silent Hill 2 especially, is that of guilt. And people sometimes feel guilty for things that others wouldn't blame them for. Silent Hill is rather like some early concepts of Hell, not a place of intentional, deliberate torture or pain, but a nightmarish version of the old "Go to your room and think about what you did." Essentially, Silent Hill takes normal people wracked with guilt, whether that guilt is deserved or not, and turns them into reality warpers so they can create their own private, personal hells.
  • Also, because she killed her dad. Why she did it is irrelevant. Silent Hill punishes murderers, and she is one. Or, to look at all three of them: Eddie is a burgeoning psychopath. James has a mix of selfish and noble reasons. Angela is mostly sympathetic. But Silent Hill punishes murderers. It doesn't care if you did it for good reasons.
    • Silent Hill isn't punishing anybody in this game. It merely allows people to punish themselves, if they feel punishment is what they deserve. Angela certainly feels she does, and is rewarded accordingly, but she never personally mentions killing anybody, and it's clear that the guilt eating her alive has nothing to do with the specific act of killing her father (when she gets the chance to re-enact the killing, she does so without hesitation). She feels guilty about her own flaws, a notion her mother reinforces. Eddie definitely does not feel as though he did anything wrong, and he certainly doesn't feel he's being punished (in fact, it appears as though he's having the time of his life acting out against all the people he perceives to have wronged him in life). This is because Eddie never feels any guilt at all, and what people look at and think is his guilt is actually his fear of being caught and suffering consequences, hence his lying and evasion until he feels safe enough from punishment to flaunt himself. Laura, clearly no punishment going on there. And, James? The punishment he does receive comes mostly in the form of a monster which is very obviously representing himself and his less than savory aspects. Whether or not punishment is finalized is definitely his decision to make. The town itself displays no will of its own at any time. It's also worth noting that Eddie never actually killed anybody. Well, not a person, at least.
    • Not that I disagree with you, but I had a thought: Let's say that Silent Hill is punishing people to the extent they believe they deserve to be punished. By the end, Eddie doesn't believe he's in the wrong or that he should be punished; he's free of guilt. He dies anyway. Why? Because James killed him. But the town seems to have control over where James goes (broken streets, locked doors) so why would it allow James to meet with Eddie at all? Maybe—speculating here—Eddie didn't feel any guilt, so the town couldn't produce monsters for him. But, maybe it thought he still deserved to be punished, and so the town let James find Eddie while Eddie is in his most psychopathic state...
    • I think that's giving the town too much credit as a Genius Loci, and working too hard to justify gameplay elements that are just part of the survival horror genre. There's nothing to say it's really controlling every last footstep anyone takes, or that it's "thinking" anything at all. James, Eddie and Angela each came to Silent Hill for their own reasons, got pulled into the otherworld because they all have deep, dark issues, and the otherworld's reflecting and bringing to life their guilt, anger, all their inner darkness. James and Eddie crossed paths for the same reason that he crossed paths with Laura and Angela: they're all roaming the town, that's all. The only two characters who are meeting James by design, because they've been created by his manifested guilt, are Maria and Pyramid Head.
  • Sympathetic Murderer though she may be, she is still a murderer. Pretty much the whole point. It's meant as simply a tragedy, but it's her own mind that allows her to be devoured by the town's hell. And you don't get to skip on jail just because it was an Asshole Victim that totally had it coming. She's meant to be a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds, and it damn well works.
    • Actually, Battered Woman/Person Defense exists for pretty much exactly Angela's case. She was abused for a long period of time (at least sexually by her father, and at least emotionally by her mother) and finally snapped, either in reaction to something that usually preceded abuse or during a vulnerable moment that she perceived as the only time she could defend herself. Either way, any court worth its weight in human decency would be trying to find a way to get her help, not send her to jail.
    • And if Silent Hill had a legal system, that would mean something. But it doesn't, because Silent Hill is not run by the American legal system, it's what Silent Hill, the weird multilayered-reality town, does when Alessa's powers aren't highjacking its ability to reflect the fears and dark subconscious desires of its inhabitants.
    • Well, the first poster started it by bringing up jail sentences. The real problem with the logic there is that it assumes taking a human life is invariably the sin of murder, with no regard for context or extenuating circumstances of any kind, and this is very, very far from a universal viewpoint by the laws of God or Man. As has been said before, Silent Hill is what you bring with you. The supernatural forces behind the town don't place judgement on the morality of what you did and they have no interest in serving as your judge or your jury... just your executioner. Angela believes she deserves to suffer, and so Silent Hill is more than happy to oblige.
  • Because the game should be looked at as more an examination of how different people react to different kinds of abuse rather than the literal interpretation of the sentient town. The game isn’t telling us she deserves to be punished by having the town punish her, it’s showing us how it feels to be violated, abused, and gaslit by using the environment as a visual representation of that psychological damage. Angela was cruelly violated and left with a burning torment and rage that conflicts with her own sense of guilt from being blamed for so long, so her town is burning and visceral. James was emotionally neglected and felt alone, isolated, and abandoned, so his town is dilapidated and decayed. Eddie took what happened to him and became a cold sociopath who views people like a butcher views his meat, so his town became a meat locker. You could even argue that the killings themselves are metaphorical. If you take these things as artistic expressions communicating these things to the audience and less of a diegetic meaning that has to be logically explained by the game’s lore (very little of which is actually mentioned in-game), then it doesn’t really cast Angela in any particular light or dark way - just shows us that she’s in pain, and gives us a visual interpretation of what that pain might feel like.

Forgetful James

• How the heck does James go into such thorough denial that he outright forgets suffocating his wife?
  • Word of God has actually confirmed that James was wrecked so deeply by regret, guilt and sadness that he repressed the memory because it was the only way he could keep going. The town still probably had some part in this.
    • It's also possible that James had managed to persuade himself that the actual killing was a nightmare, if he'd already been having dreams of Mary's death in the stress-plagued months previous. Given how conflicted his feelings were by that point, he'd probably had nightmares about killing Mary, abandoning Mary, watching Mary suffer, being Mary, being terminally-ill James whom Mary was killing... heck, it's surprising he hadn't been questioning his sanity before he started seeing killer mannequins and acid-barfing amputees.
  • Presumably, that's part of the effect Silent Hill has on its victims. It calls out to people who can't handle whatever grief they're suffering and leads them into the Otherworld by erasing their memories so that they can start fresh and rediscover the truth. All the visitors to Silent Hill display some form of memory loss and recovery. Angela and Eddie are all on their own little journeys, they just happen to intersect with James' once in a while.
    • Angela says she's looking for her mother, but doesn't remember telling James that when she meets him in the apartment and becomes violent and suspicious when he mentions it. Later on, she specifically refers to her mother in the past tense, suggesting her mother was Dead All Along just like Mary.
    • Eddie vomits after murdering the man in the apartment building, which suggests this was his first time killing a human, but we find out later that Eddie's killed plenty of times in the past before he came to Silent Hill. He reacts that way because he doesn't remember any of his other murders, so to him, it's his first. He also takes Laura's crap at first, rather than lashing out at her the way he jumps down James' throat for even the slightest hint of an insult.
    • Actually, it is his first time killing someone. All his boasts about murder were untrue, as the most he'd done is kill a dog, and shoot at someone while running away, and has no idea if it was a killshot (though the game implies that the man he shot at lived).

Misc

• I am struggling with some timeline discrepancies. SH2 apparently takes place in 1993-4; James is said to be 29 at the time (born 1964) and Mary is 25 (born 1968). But Silent Hill (assuming this isn't a retcon) has become the abandoned Fog World since at least 1983 (SH1) or 1976 (Origins).
  • The Fog World didn't only start appearing in 1976. It's always been there. Silent Hill didn't become the fog world, it still exists completely as normal. The Fog World is another "dimension" or layer of reality that exists in parallel to the real world, and manifests differently to everyone based on their inner feelings. Alessa didn't create the Fog World or Otherworld, she simply entered them after suffering the trauma of being burned. The difference with Alessa is that she had the power to pull other people into HER Fog World/Otherworld with her at will. To a lesser or greater extent, Walter Sullivan and Claudia Wolf also seem to possess this ability. The reason James' Fog World/Otherworld doesn't feature The Order, any of its' members or their influence is that he has never heard of them and has no connection to them. Therefore, they're not there. The reason Harry is able to encounter The Order in SH1 despite not knowing about them is that he's not in HIS Fog World/Otherworld, he's in Alessa's, along with Dahlia, Lisa, Kaufman and Cybil.
  • How was Silent Hill James and Mary's special place by this time?
  • Consider their ages; Mary says that they had some "good years together"; did they get married at an unusually young age?

• So here's something that's been bothering me for a long, long time about Silent Hill 2. It's been hinted that Mary's body is in James' car, either in the back seat or trunk. So how was James able to carry her body from where ever she was being treated without anyone noticing?
  • She died at home, not in the hospital. The room you see her in in bed when James is talking to her (and eventually kills her in) is in their house. She mentions in her letter that the hospital are letting her go home to die (in as many words). It's also a common misconception that she was in Brookhaven Hospital. She wasn't in hospital in Silent Hill at all. The name of the hospital she was in with Laura, or its' location is never mentioned.
  • I got the impression that she was allowed to go home, to live out her last few days. Would make removal of the body a lot easier, that is for certain.
  • She was suffocated in the hotel, one would assume the hotel staff were at least aware of her condition, being tired all the time, etc, so when James carries his "sleeping" wife out to the car, nobody looks twice, stuffing her in the trunk might have been trickier though.
    • The direct above is completely and totally untrue.
  • In the pregame cinematic (the clip that plays if you sit a few minutes idle on the startup screen) there is a frame of a bedroom where you can see numerous open medicine bottles on the windowsill, some empty. It's implied to be Mary's room (no Hospital would allow medicine bottles to sit out like that,) and the number of med bottles implies she's been here for a while. Her letter mentions the hospital letting her come back home at intervals, so they must have eventually released her to James for in-home hospice care when it became clear nothing else could be done for her.
  • I have never liked this little Word of God detail and prefer to ignore it; it seems like such a needless complication to the story that doesn't really add anything and just begs all kinds of questions that didn't have to be asked when we could all assume Mary had already been properly laid to rest. Without the "her corpse is in the backseat" bit, it makes a lot of sense that James would be so consumed with guilt because it would effectively make him a Karma Houdini for what he did. Mary dying in hospice at the tail end of a terminal illness isn't the least bit suspicious and dollars to donuts it wouldn't have triggered a post-mortem examination that could easily uncover her real cause of death by asphyxiation. I'm sure somebody will come along to "Well ACKSHUALLY" that, but speaking from personal experience, no autopsy was performed when my cousin died of congestive heart failure a few years back, specifically because of the open & shut nature of her death, even after my family had voiced their suspicions that COVID-19 complications may have been a factor.

• Just finished the game the other day, and, after walking away from it, letting it sit a bit, and reading about it on these very pages, I have two questions. The first, much simpler question, is when, exactly, did Mary die? When I was first playing through it, my impression was that James was correct about when she died, and the only thing his memory had altered was exactly how she'd died. But then I came to this wiki, where people were talking about how Mary's death took place only a few days or a couple weeks at most before the main story, which Laura's story seems to corroborate- don't know how I missed it the first time. But then, people started talking about how it happened only a few hours earlier- and, what? Does anyone have any definite answers on this one?
  • The game never states when exactly she died, but we can be certain it was within the last year, since Laura recalls being in the hospital with Mary "last year". Given that we don't see the state of Mary's body, it's really impossible to judge beyond that time frame. We can possibly narrow it down a little further with the knowledge that Mary left the hospital before Laura, so it's likely to have been less than a year possibly sometime within the last 9-11 months.
  • No official timeline for when she died, but the general consensus is that it did happen recently, as you guessed. How recently depends on two factors: how long James spent grieving, and how long the drive took from Home to SH. We aren’t outright told the answer to either of these, but we’re left some clues.
  • In the pregame cinematic, (the clip that plays if you sit a few minutes idle on the startup screen) you can see a male figure lifting and carrying a female one through a dark corridor. We can assume this is James carrying Mary’s corpse to the car or her bedroom after death. He has no emotion on his face, meaning either shock has immediately set in, or that grief has passed into exhaustion/repression – and, the body he is carrying is limp, meaning rigor mortis has either not set in yet, (0-8 hours) or it has passed (24-36 hours.) Another clue: James is wearing the same green coat (and presumably the same outfit) through Mary’s death scene, the pregame cinematic, and the rest of the game. Now, it’s not unheard of for depressed/suicidal characters to ignore personal hygiene, meaning James could have worn his outfit for several days or even weeks straight, but by 3+ weeks we’d be stretching it, especially since he killed his wife while wearing it.
  • As for how long the drive took, we aren’t told where SH is or where James lives. But we can assume that the distance is at least a few hours, since James and Mary never visited again after their honeymoon, despite Mary’s strong desire to go back someday. Therefore we have a minimum of 3 hours since Mary’s death and a maximum of 3 weeks – with the most probable answer being a few-to-several days, given James’ mental and physical state. The time James spent grieving is up in the air, whether he immediately went into shock/repressed his memories and drove to SH, or if his decent into denial happened at a slower pace, is essentially up to the player.
  • One last clue: Maria’s deaths are supposed to remind James of Mary’s death. There is one scene where we see Maria behind bars, perfectly healthy; but when we find our way to her room a few (hours?) later, she is lying dead on the bed, and badly decomposed. Since the decomposition couldn’t have happened in the short time between scenes, and the developers could’ve instead splattered Maria with blood to let us know she was dead, the decomposition may have been symbolic or a reminder of Mary’s death – which in my opinion, James would not have been able to see if the “immediately went into shock” theory was true.

• My second, more complicated question, is actually directed at a particular Alternate Character Interpretation for James- namely, that he's apparently this disgusting misogynist. Why? What does he do in this game to indicate that he hates women? Yes, he killed Mary, but that was, by all accounts, a Mercy Kill, as she was in intense suffering, and had been for several years- on top of that, his ensuing sorrow, guilt, and anger towards himself for having committed the deed is what drives the whole game! Of course, he does admit that his actions were driven (very, very slightly) by anger towards Mary, but first off, once again, the whole point of the game is the sorrow and guilt he feels over that slight feeling of anger. What's more, said anger didn't stem from any sort of disdain towards Mary, let alone against women as a whole, but from the fact that he was doing everything within his power to save her, only for her to routinely throw his love back in his face by verbally abusing him- yeah, it's not really her fault, but then, can we really say it's James's fault for feeling slightly resentful about it, especially when it was only a tiny emotion compared to the intense sorrow and guilt that he feels for the remainder of the game? And even if his killing of her was driven entirely by anger (which, as fully noted above, it wasn't,) that's only anger towards a single woman, not towards women as a whole- his actions through the rest of the game indicate he's anything but misogynistic. He goes out of his way to help everyone he sees, male and female alike, doing everything he can to help Eddie, Maria, Laura, and Angela, even as they verbally abused him for it (whether she had reasons behind it or not, it had to sting for James to risk his life to save Angela's, only for her to basically say he couldn't have had any reason behind it besides just wanting to get into her pants- which is a very misandristic idea that nobody ever calls her on, rightly or wrongly.) So, where are the accusations of misogyny coming from?
  • The simple answer is that people oversimplify narratives, and Silent Hill 2, being a somewhat complex narrative, is especially vulnerable to reductive interpretations of the characters:
    • Angela's accusation against James is a fairly common one for someone who has experienced sexual abuse, and isn't meant solely to criticize James' character; it's also supposed to foreshadow her own backstory.
    • Secondly, People generally tend to only interpret James' character in light of his dynamic with Maria and Angela, who are the characters who address sexuality. Silent Hill in this game functions to bring suppressed psychological issues to light, so James' repressed sexuality is a significant feature of the monster design and narrative of the game. That kind of imagery and symbolism tends to stick with people more than anything else, which is why people may misinterpret James as only a murderous lecher. In reality, his lust is only one aspect of his psyche which Silent Hill manifests. For example, another major theme of his interactions with women in Silent Hill is helplessness, which ties into the abuse and loss of control he experienced when his wife fell ill (e.g. Maria and Laura are very domineering characters; Angela confronts James directly with his inability to help her cope in any meaningful way, etc.). People also tend to gloss over his interactions with Eddie, which explore subjects beyond sex and relationships, like immaturity, immorality, and selfishness. Finally, his interactions with Laura are supposed to represent James' resentment towards the responsibility he was saddled with, but few people tend to explore that either. It's just a consequence of selectively interpreting James' motivations for his actions.
    • Finally, it's also a natural side-effect of James' inner conflict. It's completely impossible to separate James' inner turmoil from femininity because his relationship to a woman is the driving force of the conflict. That's why nearly every monster is overtly feminine (except for the one that represents James' guilt, Pyramid Head). People tend to misinterpret this as James having an antipathy towards femininity itself, rather than him having a specific personal struggle to which virtually every interaction he has in Silent Hill is referencing.
  • The main source of that appears to be the monster design. Mannequins and nurses in particular are overly sexualized, and James' personal demon is shown to like a jolly good time. Seeing how James kills the monsters, that can equate to wanting to hurt women... And, well, this troper can only guess that being sexually repressed as your wife isn't around to relieve the pressure is mysoginistic - you do, after all, end up staring at various bits and pieces. Judging by the monster designs, James is more of a leg man, so that'd be even more noticeable. It's still silly to think that with how he treats Angela and Laura, so it is blown out of proportion in the end.
  • Consider his entire situation with Mary. She gets sick, becomes bedridden, and the main thing that makes this a problem for James is not grief for his dying wife, or the fear of losing her, it's that he can't have sex with her. Even the final hallway conversation, the clearest picture we ever get of their final days together, centers on how Mary hates how unattractive she is, and how she's only being treated by the hospital so they can farm her for medical bills. As she says, she feels worthless because she isn't attractive (read: sexually available) to her husband while being a drain on their finances, which draws a strong connection between her appearance and sexuality and monetary worth: that's partly why Maria is designed to be sexy in a trashy way. And although James is in that conversation, he never answers Mary once she starts speaking, and instead completely ignores (or possibly abandons) her even when she's broken down in tears because of how afraid she is of dying. James' interactions with her are awkward, impersonal, and end with him murdering her, and everything in his version of Silent Hill centers on hurting the female form, if not strictly women. Even the Abstract Daddy, which is Angela's monster, is something he can interact with and will attack him. It's the only monster in the game besides Pyramid Head that has any implication of masculinity, and it's a rapist. James' entire problem (and the reason why it's unclear as to whether it was a mercy kill or a proper murder) is that he's so focused on his own sexual gratification that he has no empathy for his dying wife, and many of his interactions with Mary and his interactions with Maria (especially in her ending, which you get by deliberately focusing on caring and protecting her) indicate that her sex appeal is the only thing he's really interested in — she's got Mary's disease on top of already literally being a monster, James is willing to dance that dance all over again (which condemns Maria to a horrible slow death and possibly a repeated murder) if it means he gets to bang his totally hot, trampy wife. That all adds up to a man with a lot of problems treating women like human beings. Note that the only two women he actually does seem to have any real care for are Angela and Laura, both of whom are childlike and thus (we hope) not physically attractive to him.
    • It's also notable that Maria, despite not really having a personal history because she's a Silent Hill monster, is built around being seductive and sexually adventurous where Mary was more reserved and dowdy even before she got sick. It's basically the Madonna-Whore Complex from Hell, with Maria being the sexy, temptation-peddling Whore to Mary's chaste, fragile Madonna. Silent Hill designed her to be everything James really wanted: just like his wife, except sexy (of course) with her own income with a sexy job(she never actually does it, but the story frames her as taking the "role" of a stripper or bartender in a seedy strip joint) and she's wholly devoted to being whatever he wants her to be, to be there for him. In her, he has someone that will satisfy his sexual appetite and support him emotionally, but will never need him to reciprocate. That's his idea of the perfect woman.
    • It's what Silent Hill offers to him as his ideal woman, but whether she is or not depends on how you approach the story and which ending you get (i.e. in the "Maria" ending the town turns out to have guessed right, but not in the others). Also, it's heavily implied that James didn't coldly ignore Mary's breakdown, but had already left the room (at her insistence) so he wasn't there to hear it.
    • Then you have Pyramid Head, the literal embodiment of James' dark side, whose introductory scene is raping (well, not strictly raping, as the models aren't designed to have the necessary equipment, but it's pretty clearly sexual violence) and killing helpless lesser monsters. Keep in mind that the two monster types are the ones most strongly embodying helpless women: different expressions of a feminine creature with no face and no arms, traits that symbolize a lack of agency and a lack of identity which mirror James' inability to relate to women in general and his inability to connect with his wife. As to Angela, it's really cheap to reduce her characterization to mundane misandry just because she doesn't trust James. She seems to be well aware of his being a killer, and even if she isn't, that boss battle takes place in what is very likely the place where her rapes took place, and almost all sexual abusers groom their victims to gain their trust in order to better control them later on. She accuses James of only wanting "one thing" because that's the only experience she has with the men in her life. James' entire presence in Silent Hill has roots in his sexual frustration and it's very likely that she's aware of it and has seen James' monsters the way James sees Eddie's human victims. She doesn't trust him because he isn't trustworthy, he just doesn't know that yet.
    • That said, the sexual aspects of James' monsters, are, like everything else that the Town cooks up, the parts of himself that he hates and feels guilt over. The smaller monsters are his guilt over letting his sexual needs creating tension with his wife, and PH is his self-loathing at his deeply repressed desires of sexuality, violence, and sexual violence. Silent Hill shows you the worst parts of yourself, the parts you hate and don't want to see the light of day. I'd say that's a point in James' favour for his literal personal demons to be of a sexual nature.
    • Argh, I keep coming back to this because I've been replaying it. James basically comes right out and says he killed Mary because he wanted his life back, which I think paints it pretty clearly as a selfishly-motivated murder and not a mercy kill, but something else I noticed is that when James talks about Mary, he calls her "my wife", and mentions that she's already dead when it becomes relevant to the conversation. When he meets Maria, however, he calls her "my late wife": he's telling her that he's available. The writing in this game is so excellent.
    • It is, particularly the part where Mary immediately counters with "If that were true, why do you look so sad?" Overall, James comes across as a good man who did a very terrible thing, and the idea that a good person can do very terrible things is a difficult and unpleasant concept for a lot of people to accept, so it's easier to just believe that anyone who does a very terrible thing must truly be a bad person. Spend about 10 seconds on social media and you'll see just how widespread such a childish and reductive mentality really is.
    • Another important thing to keep in mind when examining James and his motivations is that if sexual frustration was his only issue with Mary's illness and he really is nothing more than a horny, thoughtless, self-absorbed cad, then nothing was really stopping him from fooling around on her and just dipping his wick with someone else while she was wasting away in the hospital. But that's not what he did. He shut out the world around him, drank heavily, and slipped into a terrible depression. Mary was the love of his life and the person he chose to spend the rest of it with, and he was powerless to keep from losing her in a very protracted and painful way. Sexual fulfillment was merely one of the many things he was deprived of by Mary's illness and that drove him to do what he did, but Silent Hill latches onto that aspect of his inner feelings above all else to torture him because it's the one he's most ashamed of having.
  • Much like the rest of James's character, just how much of a misogynist he is really depends on how you play him. The "Leave" and "Maria" endings represent two opposite interpretations of how much guilt he deserves for Mary's death; in "Leave," he blames himself the hardest, but Mary's quick to remind him that he wouldn't be so grief-stricken if he hated her as much as he claims. In "Maria," it's the other way around; he still says he couldn't watch her suffer, but in this case, it's a pathetic excuse, and he admits in short order that he did want her out of the way. By default, James is probably somewhere in the middle, and it's up to the player to decide whether his best or worst traits will win out. He has his prejudices and his sexual frustrations, but he's also someone who's capable of love, and who wants to do the right thing by others, including vulnerable people like Angela and Laura. Mary's illness was an ordeal for both of them, and she was the one to kick him out of her room during the hallway conversation even if she changed her mind right after; when he left, he was partly doing what she wanted. For the record, it's also interesting to note that Silent Hill 2 has a lot to say about how men interact with each other, not just with women. We all know about Pyramid Head, but it's fascinating to watch how the relationship between James and Eddie evolves over the course of the game. At the start, James is a respectable, handsome family man in search of his wife, and Eddie is a lazy overgrown boy with no sexuality to speak of (James even berates Eddie for failing to look after Laura the way a responsible man should). By the time of Eddie's boss fight, he's become an embodiment of masculine violence, sneering at James for his hypocrisy and weak will; James wins the fight out of necessity, but it's not at all clear that he has the moral high ground anymore.

• Where is the option to "disable" combat that keeps getting mentioning across the wiki? You can lower the difficulty to the point that enemies might as well not be there, yeah, but I've never seen any way to remove monsters or the need to kill them from the game.
  • That would be the 'Beginner' difficulty setting. It doesn't remove the monsters exactly, but makes them almost harmless and pretty much all one-hit kills, even with the plank.

• Something that bugs me a bit is the fact that the twin Pyramid Head boss is the same regardless of the player's actions throughout the game; since the fight embodies James getting over his denial and accepting responsibility for himself, and thus no longer needing the Pyramid Heads to punish him for his sins, the fight only really makes sense on the Leave route (in which James comes to terms with and moves on from his sins entirely) and the In Water route (in which James commits suicide out of guilt, thus no longer needing to be punished as he is committed to carrying out his own punishment). In the "Maria" ending he's actively asserting his denial, thus never actually comes to terms with his sins, and in the "Rebirth" ending he attempts to undo his sin instead of moving on, so in neither is he really in a position to move past his murder of Mary. The fact that the Maria ending implies history will repeat does not help this case... So it doesn't really make sense that the Pyramid heads kill themselves, as James has not actually reached the conclusion they exist to bring him towards. What gives?
  • It may make less sense, but in a way, Pyramid Heads are James' desire to be punished. If that's all there is to it, in the "Maria" ending does James get his "second chance" to love a woman, thus removing the need to be punished as he wants to try again, and maybe do better this time. In the "Rebirth" ending, this is about the same thing: he tries to revive Mary, so his belief to be able to bring her back (as you HAD to hunt for the items to get to that ending, you can't get that ending by pure accident. Bonus points for being a New Game+ exclusive ending, which you may remember where key items are and not really look for those in particular) actually kills his desire to be punished. You can see it as if James wanted to be punished out of despair, and the ritual items are what brings him hope.

• So what happens to Laura after James learns "the truth" in both the In Water and Maria endings? Everyone is literally dead/"stuck" in Silent Hill, and it's not like someone can expect a kid her age to just walk her way back to civilization.
  • The opening cinematic suggests she hitched a ride into Silent Hill with Eddie. Fingers crossed she be able to find another benevolent motorist outside the town to take her somewhere safe.

• Born From a Wish establishes that Maria was capable of fighting off some of the monsters in Silent Hill and that she still has the cleaver in her inventory. So...why doesn't she aid James in killing these creeps?

• That whole thing with Maria remembering Laura then just forgetting the girl. What was the point in all of that since not even James questions why she's not concerned for this poor girl running around Silent Hill?
  • She's a Tulpa based on Mary, part of which includes being based on her personality and having her memories. By the time James encounters her again outside the hospital, he's more concerned with how she somehow returned unharmed despite dying right in front of him to bother asking why she was so worried about Laura. Even without that, he could always just chalk up Maria's worrying about Laura to her simply being concerned for the safety of an innocent young child, as most decent human beings would be.

---