Alessa’s Otherworld includes several strangely gendered, misshapen, and moaning creatures that have no identity as if a child is working to process their own perceptions and grapple with their experience. Caruth writes, “Traumatic experience, beyond the psychological dimension of suffering it, involves, suggests a certain paradox: that the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it; that immediacy, paradoxically, may take the form of belatedness”. The violent event, even though intense and immediate, occurs at least outwardly in a rather slow process. [...] In the world of Silent Hill, this belatedness of traumatic experience is shown in the gameplay. Because the town itself is a creation of Alessa’s trauma, it forces the player to go through the world and experience her trauma at the expense of completing the game.
The aspects of puzzle-solving, boss sequences and other monsters directly engage with Caruth’s definition of belatedness in personal trauma narratives. The monsters are symbolic of the struggle Alessa is having with her trauma: the creatures are simultaneously a method she uses to communicate her pain and ones she uses to inflict pain. Meanwhile, puzzle-solving showcases to the player that Alessa is first and foremost a child, and through solving the child-like puzzles we learn to empathize with her story.
Miller, BrookLyn, "Monstrous Women in the Monstrous Wonderland: An Exploration of Abjection and Trauma in the Silent Hill Franchise" (2022). Honors 499 Theses and Creative Projects. 18.
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