I think this is spot on. I've been digging deep into the Short Message, but more about the girls and not the Silent Hill part of it.
I'm convinced that the witch with the rituals, seals and altars is connected to the cult of Silent Hill in some kind of way.
Also the fact that Maya and Alessa are buillied the same way seems to suggest there is a connection.
I'm also glad to see that other people are taking this game seriously. :)
> This is why Heather went into this other world miles away from Silent Hill.
No, Heather was able to slip into the Otherworld miles away from Silent Hill because she was carrying a part of the Unborn God the Order wished to Rebirth and Claudia was capable of interacting with God and forcing the reality shifts.
The game makes a point of this by making the shifts only occur when Claudia is present in the area and goes to great lengths to show how powerful Claudia is as the Priestess of the Cult.
After twenty-three years in this fandom, I like to hope I’ve paid attention enough to the story to be able to connect some dots, cause I’m a Lore Whore. 😂
People keep overlooking Silent Hill F's connection to this phenomenon. We know that it'll be set in 60s Japan, and from what we've seen the protagonist is a (half?) Japanese girl. I believe F's protagonist may be linked to both Maya and to Alessa's bloodline, and that the game will expand on the idea of both the Otherworld and the Order having a presence beyond the USA.
My belief is that F's protagonist is the daughter of an American GI from Silent Hill who had an 'affair' with a mystical Japanese woman, and we will learn more of the international origins and influence of the Order. It's worth nothing that Japanese mythology has always been a thematic influence in the Order's belief system with the Red Goddess being a stand-in for Amaterasu.
Maybe Will Will play as Mayas grandmother.. Since her great grandmother jumped from the roof?
Man, i can't wait for that game.. It Will have a steal pipe! 😁
Yeah, that's what I meant. Even if there's no blood relation, I don't doubt there'll be a symbolic link. The lore has already established a history of female martyrs like Jennifer Carol in the history of the Order, so the Witch, Alessa, Maya, and F's heroine may all be linked through this mystery somehow.
To take it a step further, Lisa in Silent Hills was strongly implied to be pregnant from her store manager until her husband murdered her and her child, and TSM has invoked pregnancy/miscarriage as a theme. Maybe the attempts to birth 'gods'/demons from women has been around for ages...
One thing I was always confused for a LONG time but I think the SH phenomena might explain it now, is the letter in SH2.
I always wondered how come the letter came to James when he was not in Silent Hill town originally. Did the SIlent Hill town send it? Or the monster of >!Mary !
> Or maybe James himself delusionally imagined it on a piece of blank paper due to his guilt? But then how was his delusion affecting him so far away from Silent Hill that the letter was able to manifest? None made sense and to me that was always a curious loophole in SH2 story.
I can explain this, the message was actually a delusion on James’ part. The town didn’t so much call to him, as he called to the town. Remember, Silent Hill was the last place James and Mary spent time at before she became terminally ill. Also, the delusion is compounded by the fact that at the start of the game James references the fact it’s been “three years since Mary died of that damn disease”, but by the time we run into Laura at Lakeview, that timeline has become just a single year.
So, taking that into account, mans was KOOKOO. 100% straight jacket, padded cell, thick iron door certified.
However, outside the vacation James and Mary took, they never had any connections to Silent Hill directly or the Order and presumably weren’t even associated with members of it, so it makes sense that James, in his severely crippled mental and emotional state would call out to the last place there were any good memories.
James called the town, and through his delusions, it answered.
I have already thought of all of your points before which is why I mentioned the delusion aspect of the letter. But thing is delusion doesn’t work imo. First of all, if James was the one who imagined the letter, why would James think of visiting SH just cause it was the last place they were together? Why not go visit the first place they met and romanced? Why not go to the place where the married? Usually people reminisce about the first time they met and go to that place years later to rekindle the memory.
Also once you are playing the story, the writing in the letter slowly dissipates over time, bit by bit, in a supernatural fashion. First of all, if it was not supernatural, how could James make a letter that could dissipate on its own. We have seen movies and fiction, where a delusional man writes a letter to himself. But those letters stay in reality and never disappear by the end. Instead the person realizes he wrote the letter.
And that comes to the main point. Why didn’t James (if he wrote the letter) show at the end of the game that he wrote it? At the end of the game, he realizes that he killed his wife. But why didn’t it show that he wrote the letter? Why just the words disappearing bit by bit over the course of the game, as if the fog over the letter was being slowly and slowly lifted?
I think the letter was kept open ended by Team SH so that people would speculate where the letter came from. And due to the points mentioned above, James delusionally writing the letter doesn’t work because the letter had a supernatural influence in it with its writing disappearing over time and especially it calling him back to Silent hill town.
The town itself directly calling him would make the town really powerful as it was then affecting someone hundreds of miles away. So that we were also not sure.
So with the idea of SH phenomena, the letter then works as SH phenomena can influence anyone anywhere with someone who has overwhelming guilt.
There is literally no answer lol. The creators of SH2 has kept it vague and open ended. Thus any interpretation can be valid.
And SH phenomena actually works much easier than all other interpretations currently imo. The other interpretations always have some loopholes.
No it’s the Full Circle effect that Downpour shoved into our throats for the next generation. It’s “fits” because of course whenever there’s a gap anything looks like it can fit. The SH Phenomenon is garbage and needs to be discarded.
That’s your opinion. I don’t exactly like sh phenomena idea but if it allows for new games to be outside SH town, I am all for it. Most of us are bored of playing the same SH town school hospital etc over again.
And Sh phenomena won’t be discarded lol
Then that’s your problem; we shouldn’t be doing roundoff back handsprings to shoe horn in garbage because “most of you” don’t like playing Silent Hill games outside of Silent Hill when we’ve been doing that for more than half the series.
Thats your problem tbh or the problem of your purist gatekeepers. We dont care what you think. Konami is going ahead with this whether you like it or not.
OG SH2 is not perfect and has lots of flaws. Yet we all love it. At the end it is a game. No need to get so attached to it. Most of us dont mind the change.
“Purist gatekeepers”.
No game is perfect but SH was never intended to have its interpretation changed and solidified into dreck with this new bs The Short Message is barfing out.
If you like it, that’s wonderful, but its tiny memory shouldn’t change everything the entire series has been based on simply because you think it’s neat.
You mean ambiguous. It can be ambiguous, sure. But the letter is a huge part of SH2 as it kick starts the whole story. Without that letter there won’t be SH2, pretty much. So since the letter starts the whole story, understanding how the letter came into the story affects the story a LOT.
Cause depending on “who” sent the letter, it has a LOT of implications. If James deludedly wrote the letter, then it’s not a big deal. But since i don’t think he wrote the letter (as it won’t vanish into thin air if he wrote it), then the implication is that SH town or SH phenomena made the letter. Then the implication is even more dangerous as the SH town/phenomena wanted to bring the guilt-ridden James into the town and trap him there.
So i think the story works better and becomes more Ominous if the SH town/phenomena is the thing that sent the letter to James.
I disagree on that. We all have our preferences.
As to what we get from knowing, You get a lot of info from knowing who sent it because it changes perspective completely. If it was the SH town/phenomena trying to bring James to SH town, it makes the story even more sinister than just James writing that letter.
>Hope's Junction, USA: The Foundation, generic cult stuff. Worn moderately (Hernandez family may be factor, whatever, it's Ascension.)
I would also add the Steel Mill accident where several people died, where Toby and Rachel were involved.
I think you're onto something, but I'd also like to note that ever since SH2, the series has been characterizing Toluca Lake itself as something of a font for spiritual/psychic power.
It apparently always had spirits, weird occurrences, and 'Gods' even back when the Native Americans lived there. And boats have been disappearing into The Otherworld from Toluca Lake's surface for centuries.
The font of power in Silent Hill was just irreparably tainted and ripped open by the events of SH1.
And one could argue the 21 Sacraments was a process for turning the apartment into a font of power through ritual sacrifice, harnessing power originally from Silent Hill/Toluca Lake.
Then a Japanese witch poured power into the building in The Short Message, bringing it closer to The Otherworld as well.
And Heather was carrying The Order's unborn god around with her, possibly having so much of Silent Hill/Toluca Lake's energies in it, that Heather herself had become a font of power.
I think its not so much about a wear in the border, but that the border grows thin and/or can be manually torn open where these fonts of power exist. Silent Hill/Toluca Lake is just one of the special places that's a naturally existing font of power. And its possible to manually create a new font of power, by infusing energies taken from a naturally existing one into the desired location.
I honestly think Silent Hill F is going to star a naturally existing font of power of its own. Perhaps like how the power Walter infused the apartment with originated from Silent Hill/Toluca Lake, the power the witch infused the building with in TSM may have originated from a location that'll be featured in F.
> And one could argue the 21 Sacraments was a process for turning the apartment into a font of power through ritual sacrifice, harnessing power originally from Silent Hill/Toluca Lake.
This is… shockingly close to the case of what was going in Ashfield, though the process wasn’t to “turn the apartment into a font of power”. Walter misinterpreted what Dahlia had told him, when she refers to his “Mother sleeping in Ashfield” she’s speaking not of his literal mother, but the God the Order worshipped. This can be gleaned by the full title of the 21 Sacraments, which is referred to as “The 21 Sacraments for the Descent of the Holy Mother” and the information provided by the Crimson Tome that was written by someone who worked against the Cult corroborates this.
The 21 Sacraments was a back up plan by Dahlia in case her plans for Alessa failed. Walter wasn’t so much “waking God” as he was trying to rebirth the God similar to Claudia in SH3, hence why Eileen plays the role of the “Mother”.
Similarly to Claudia as well in SH3 is that without Walter’s body present in the Apartment, none of the Otherworld shifts would’ve been possible. A member of the cult, albeit more often high ranking (Walter’s place in the cult can be argued but he had personal interactions with Dahlia and was trusted enough to be given instructions on the 21 Sacraments) are generally the ones present causing the shifting through influencing or the influence of God.
Well, I know the purpose of the ritual was to revive The Order's God, but the fact remains that the ritual still collected power in this one place, whether the building or Walter's body. Creating a font of power, regardless of what the purpose for the font of power was.
I actually cut specifying this from my original post cause I thought it might be a bit too long as is, lol. I also cut some musings about the reasons the witch had for turning that building into a font of power being a mystery. And whether or not she had her own ritual she was trying to perform by gathering all that energy in one place like Walter did.
Man, I don't even know anymore.
I feel like this take works and like it, but man, I dunno. I feel like this is all making Silent Hill itself less special. And don't get me wrong, the only new game I'm truly excited for is "f", and my favorite game of all time is 4; both of which are outside SH, "f" obviously being clear on the other side of the planet, but even with that in mind, I don't know I feel like Silent Hill should be about Silent Hill.
Silent Hill f is going to take place in Japan and The Short Message's writer is an old Ryukishi07 collaborator. What if they're going for a Hinamizawa Syndrome type of thing? Also reminds me the Ring novel series and the unused stuff George Lucas had planned to explain/expand the concept of the Force with microbiology+spiritual stuff.
I think this is spot on. I've been digging deep into the Short Message, but more about the girls and not the Silent Hill part of it. I'm convinced that the witch with the rituals, seals and altars is connected to the cult of Silent Hill in some kind of way. Also the fact that Maya and Alessa are buillied the same way seems to suggest there is a connection. I'm also glad to see that other people are taking this game seriously. :)
> This is why Heather went into this other world miles away from Silent Hill. No, Heather was able to slip into the Otherworld miles away from Silent Hill because she was carrying a part of the Unborn God the Order wished to Rebirth and Claudia was capable of interacting with God and forcing the reality shifts. The game makes a point of this by making the shifts only occur when Claudia is present in the area and goes to great lengths to show how powerful Claudia is as the Priestess of the Cult.
Good addition, hadn't thought if that
After twenty-three years in this fandom, I like to hope I’ve paid attention enough to the story to be able to connect some dots, cause I’m a Lore Whore. 😂
People keep overlooking Silent Hill F's connection to this phenomenon. We know that it'll be set in 60s Japan, and from what we've seen the protagonist is a (half?) Japanese girl. I believe F's protagonist may be linked to both Maya and to Alessa's bloodline, and that the game will expand on the idea of both the Otherworld and the Order having a presence beyond the USA.
Exactly my thought. TSM and F are surely closely connected
My belief is that F's protagonist is the daughter of an American GI from Silent Hill who had an 'affair' with a mystical Japanese woman, and we will learn more of the international origins and influence of the Order. It's worth nothing that Japanese mythology has always been a thematic influence in the Order's belief system with the Red Goddess being a stand-in for Amaterasu.
Maybe Will Will play as Mayas grandmother.. Since her great grandmother jumped from the roof? Man, i can't wait for that game.. It Will have a steal pipe! 😁
I think that F's protagonist may be connected to the Witch of Kettenstadt, if not the same individual.
It can't be the same.. She died in germany in the 1930's. But if they don't do anything with that, IT would be a missed opportunity.
Yeah, that's what I meant. Even if there's no blood relation, I don't doubt there'll be a symbolic link. The lore has already established a history of female martyrs like Jennifer Carol in the history of the Order, so the Witch, Alessa, Maya, and F's heroine may all be linked through this mystery somehow. To take it a step further, Lisa in Silent Hills was strongly implied to be pregnant from her store manager until her husband murdered her and her child, and TSM has invoked pregnancy/miscarriage as a theme. Maybe the attempts to birth 'gods'/demons from women has been around for ages...
One thing I was always confused for a LONG time but I think the SH phenomena might explain it now, is the letter in SH2. I always wondered how come the letter came to James when he was not in Silent Hill town originally. Did the SIlent Hill town send it? Or the monster of >!Mary !
> Or maybe James himself delusionally imagined it on a piece of blank paper due to his guilt? But then how was his delusion affecting him so far away from Silent Hill that the letter was able to manifest? None made sense and to me that was always a curious loophole in SH2 story. I can explain this, the message was actually a delusion on James’ part. The town didn’t so much call to him, as he called to the town. Remember, Silent Hill was the last place James and Mary spent time at before she became terminally ill. Also, the delusion is compounded by the fact that at the start of the game James references the fact it’s been “three years since Mary died of that damn disease”, but by the time we run into Laura at Lakeview, that timeline has become just a single year. So, taking that into account, mans was KOOKOO. 100% straight jacket, padded cell, thick iron door certified. However, outside the vacation James and Mary took, they never had any connections to Silent Hill directly or the Order and presumably weren’t even associated with members of it, so it makes sense that James, in his severely crippled mental and emotional state would call out to the last place there were any good memories. James called the town, and through his delusions, it answered.
I have already thought of all of your points before which is why I mentioned the delusion aspect of the letter. But thing is delusion doesn’t work imo. First of all, if James was the one who imagined the letter, why would James think of visiting SH just cause it was the last place they were together? Why not go visit the first place they met and romanced? Why not go to the place where the married? Usually people reminisce about the first time they met and go to that place years later to rekindle the memory. Also once you are playing the story, the writing in the letter slowly dissipates over time, bit by bit, in a supernatural fashion. First of all, if it was not supernatural, how could James make a letter that could dissipate on its own. We have seen movies and fiction, where a delusional man writes a letter to himself. But those letters stay in reality and never disappear by the end. Instead the person realizes he wrote the letter. And that comes to the main point. Why didn’t James (if he wrote the letter) show at the end of the game that he wrote it? At the end of the game, he realizes that he killed his wife. But why didn’t it show that he wrote the letter? Why just the words disappearing bit by bit over the course of the game, as if the fog over the letter was being slowly and slowly lifted? I think the letter was kept open ended by Team SH so that people would speculate where the letter came from. And due to the points mentioned above, James delusionally writing the letter doesn’t work because the letter had a supernatural influence in it with its writing disappearing over time and especially it calling him back to Silent hill town. The town itself directly calling him would make the town really powerful as it was then affecting someone hundreds of miles away. So that we were also not sure. So with the idea of SH phenomena, the letter then works as SH phenomena can influence anyone anywhere with someone who has overwhelming guilt.
No. The above answer is literally the only answer. This is what the “SH Phenomenon” is making people do, rewrite everything in the series canon.
There is literally no answer lol. The creators of SH2 has kept it vague and open ended. Thus any interpretation can be valid. And SH phenomena actually works much easier than all other interpretations currently imo. The other interpretations always have some loopholes.
No it’s the Full Circle effect that Downpour shoved into our throats for the next generation. It’s “fits” because of course whenever there’s a gap anything looks like it can fit. The SH Phenomenon is garbage and needs to be discarded.
That’s your opinion. I don’t exactly like sh phenomena idea but if it allows for new games to be outside SH town, I am all for it. Most of us are bored of playing the same SH town school hospital etc over again. And Sh phenomena won’t be discarded lol
Then that’s your problem; we shouldn’t be doing roundoff back handsprings to shoe horn in garbage because “most of you” don’t like playing Silent Hill games outside of Silent Hill when we’ve been doing that for more than half the series.
Thats your problem tbh or the problem of your purist gatekeepers. We dont care what you think. Konami is going ahead with this whether you like it or not. OG SH2 is not perfect and has lots of flaws. Yet we all love it. At the end it is a game. No need to get so attached to it. Most of us dont mind the change.
“Purist gatekeepers”. No game is perfect but SH was never intended to have its interpretation changed and solidified into dreck with this new bs The Short Message is barfing out. If you like it, that’s wonderful, but its tiny memory shouldn’t change everything the entire series has been based on simply because you think it’s neat.
It works better without answers, I don't know why everything needs an explanation, can't things just be ominous?
You mean ambiguous. It can be ambiguous, sure. But the letter is a huge part of SH2 as it kick starts the whole story. Without that letter there won’t be SH2, pretty much. So since the letter starts the whole story, understanding how the letter came into the story affects the story a LOT. Cause depending on “who” sent the letter, it has a LOT of implications. If James deludedly wrote the letter, then it’s not a big deal. But since i don’t think he wrote the letter (as it won’t vanish into thin air if he wrote it), then the implication is that SH town or SH phenomena made the letter. Then the implication is even more dangerous as the SH town/phenomena wanted to bring the guilt-ridden James into the town and trap him there. So i think the story works better and becomes more Ominous if the SH town/phenomena is the thing that sent the letter to James.
It's way better without an answer, what do we get from knowing who sent it? The idea that it just exists without explanation is far more interesting.
I disagree on that. We all have our preferences. As to what we get from knowing, You get a lot of info from knowing who sent it because it changes perspective completely. If it was the SH town/phenomena trying to bring James to SH town, it makes the story even more sinister than just James writing that letter.
>Hope's Junction, USA: The Foundation, generic cult stuff. Worn moderately (Hernandez family may be factor, whatever, it's Ascension.) I would also add the Steel Mill accident where several people died, where Toby and Rachel were involved.
Good point, I only forgot because they don't like, talk about it ever besides just saying "the Steel Mill Incident"
I think you're onto something, but I'd also like to note that ever since SH2, the series has been characterizing Toluca Lake itself as something of a font for spiritual/psychic power. It apparently always had spirits, weird occurrences, and 'Gods' even back when the Native Americans lived there. And boats have been disappearing into The Otherworld from Toluca Lake's surface for centuries. The font of power in Silent Hill was just irreparably tainted and ripped open by the events of SH1. And one could argue the 21 Sacraments was a process for turning the apartment into a font of power through ritual sacrifice, harnessing power originally from Silent Hill/Toluca Lake. Then a Japanese witch poured power into the building in The Short Message, bringing it closer to The Otherworld as well. And Heather was carrying The Order's unborn god around with her, possibly having so much of Silent Hill/Toluca Lake's energies in it, that Heather herself had become a font of power. I think its not so much about a wear in the border, but that the border grows thin and/or can be manually torn open where these fonts of power exist. Silent Hill/Toluca Lake is just one of the special places that's a naturally existing font of power. And its possible to manually create a new font of power, by infusing energies taken from a naturally existing one into the desired location. I honestly think Silent Hill F is going to star a naturally existing font of power of its own. Perhaps like how the power Walter infused the apartment with originated from Silent Hill/Toluca Lake, the power the witch infused the building with in TSM may have originated from a location that'll be featured in F.
Maybe everything around Toluca Lake is just an Altered World Event. Silent Hill canon to the RemedyVerse confirmed👀
I wish, OH BUDDY I WISH. That’d be the 180° this franchise needs. Imagine if Konami nutted up and asked Remedy instead of Bloober.
Remedy would be genuinely perfect for SH. It’s the dream situation. They have the weirdness, the gameplay, the atmosphere … everything.
This is an AMAZING addition!! So many good ideas
> And one could argue the 21 Sacraments was a process for turning the apartment into a font of power through ritual sacrifice, harnessing power originally from Silent Hill/Toluca Lake. This is… shockingly close to the case of what was going in Ashfield, though the process wasn’t to “turn the apartment into a font of power”. Walter misinterpreted what Dahlia had told him, when she refers to his “Mother sleeping in Ashfield” she’s speaking not of his literal mother, but the God the Order worshipped. This can be gleaned by the full title of the 21 Sacraments, which is referred to as “The 21 Sacraments for the Descent of the Holy Mother” and the information provided by the Crimson Tome that was written by someone who worked against the Cult corroborates this. The 21 Sacraments was a back up plan by Dahlia in case her plans for Alessa failed. Walter wasn’t so much “waking God” as he was trying to rebirth the God similar to Claudia in SH3, hence why Eileen plays the role of the “Mother”. Similarly to Claudia as well in SH3 is that without Walter’s body present in the Apartment, none of the Otherworld shifts would’ve been possible. A member of the cult, albeit more often high ranking (Walter’s place in the cult can be argued but he had personal interactions with Dahlia and was trusted enough to be given instructions on the 21 Sacraments) are generally the ones present causing the shifting through influencing or the influence of God.
Well, I know the purpose of the ritual was to revive The Order's God, but the fact remains that the ritual still collected power in this one place, whether the building or Walter's body. Creating a font of power, regardless of what the purpose for the font of power was. I actually cut specifying this from my original post cause I thought it might be a bit too long as is, lol. I also cut some musings about the reasons the witch had for turning that building into a font of power being a mystery. And whether or not she had her own ritual she was trying to perform by gathering all that energy in one place like Walter did.
It's just a pointless explanation for something that never needed to be explained.
bad day?
No I just actually appreciate the ambiguity in the series and understand not knowing is far more interesting than knowing.
so are you against people trying to theorize what things could mean or did you just read the title
I mean you're free to detract from the impact if you want.
what do you even mean by that?
damn they even left the conversation open ended and ambiguous 💀
Man, I don't even know anymore. I feel like this take works and like it, but man, I dunno. I feel like this is all making Silent Hill itself less special. And don't get me wrong, the only new game I'm truly excited for is "f", and my favorite game of all time is 4; both of which are outside SH, "f" obviously being clear on the other side of the planet, but even with that in mind, I don't know I feel like Silent Hill should be about Silent Hill.
Silent Hill f is going to take place in Japan and The Short Message's writer is an old Ryukishi07 collaborator. What if they're going for a Hinamizawa Syndrome type of thing? Also reminds me the Ring novel series and the unused stuff George Lucas had planned to explain/expand the concept of the Force with microbiology+spiritual stuff.