Thanks for the explanation. I like the idea of Pyramid Head and Maria being inexorably linked. The reason I thought it might be possible is because the Abstract Daddy is a monster manifestation of Angela's (seemingly like her Pyramid Head?) but James is able to see and fight it. I heard an interesting theory that Angela relying on someone else to kill her personal "demon" is at least symbolic of why she succumbed to despair later, whereas James dealt with PH personally.
It’s funny you mention that! I had actually typed up a small bit about the Abstract Daddy, more or less making the same point you did, but removed it because I was having a hard time putting my thoughts regarding it into words.
There was a post I made quite a while back on one of my sideblogs… talking about how it felt unfair to me that Angela, who is a victim of abuse, was being seemingly ‘punished’ for killing her own abuser. It felt wrong to me, because I’d incorrectly viewed Silent Hill as, by default, a place of penalty. Thinking about it put a lot of things into perspective for me, and I realized that subscribing to the popular “personal hell” theory had closed me off completely to what was actually happening in the game, and what the role of the town itself was, and how each characters’ narratives varied.
Silent Hill 2 presents three different killers, each one very different; while some people believe that Silent Hill is meant to be a personal hell for all who enter, I feel that each of them were placed in an environment that gave them a chance to redeem themselves for their actions, or to come to terms with them, or to overcome them completely. Not every narrative in the game is inherently a narrative of punishment. It just depends on the actions each of them take.
The narrative of the game does revolve mostly around James, though, so of course the roles of the other characters are sort of supplementary to his story; putting thought into their roles is important to understanding the plot and themes of the game.
