"The only thing that burns in hell is the part of you that won't let go of your life: your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away, but they're not punishing you, they're freeing your soul. If you're frightened of dying and you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. If you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels freeing you from the earth."
Hi! I've been following you for a while and your Silent Hill musings finally got me to play the game. I just recently finished it and I loved it. Thank you so much! Though I'm a bit displeased with the ending I got. I got the Leave ending, which is apparently the "good" ending but it really doesn't feel like it. He just gets away with it??
hii!
First of all i am so happy that my obsession led someone else to try out the game for themselves! This is my favorite thing in all the world thanks to another person, a very good friend of mine who really helped make this world come alive for me. I will never understand people who try to “gatekeep” their favorite things lest other people like it too. Isn’t it better when other people discover the fun of it and you can talk to them about it!?
That being said, i hear you, anon! I understand where your thoughts and frustrations are coming from but i can’t say i agree with it entirely.
I think with a game like silent hill, one has to consider where it is coming from, it is not a western game and thus applying black and white dualistic western thinking might not be the best way to approach it especially because the purpose of the game is not to decide whether James is a good or a bad person, especially because you can’t. We simply don’t really know enough, and what we do know does not help form a pure dichotomy between good and evil.
Silent hill 2 was very inspired by other works like Crime and Punishment. If you’ve read the book you know that the actions of the main character, Raskolnikov, are undoubtedly wrong, but the book is not really analyzing it from an ethical lens but from a personal morality lens. How does the mind of someone who has committed a vile act cope with it? How does guilt play into it? How can people be reformed?
(so much more under the cut omg)
While my argument here is not in favor of diminishing your point about misogyny, which i think you’re correct about no doubt, since i myself have stated i think that is one of the central themes in the whole franchise (whether intentional or not by the creators) and, while i also don’t disagree at all with the fact James’ action was a horribly unhappy one, i don’t think the debate of whether he deserves forgiveness or punishment is necessarily the question the game poses, but rather, the ways in which our own minds punish us when we do bad things or things we see as being bad. The ways we create our own hells and our own heavens.
I think also james IS morally gray simply because we cannot trust his narrative. We see him being confused about events more than once and furthermore we are inside his head, and to help me argue this i will bring up Angela. To us, the outsiders, we can understand from her story that she was abused by her father. But she seems almost unaware of that fact, or at least, under the idea she is guilty for what has happened and for killing her abuser. Now, to us, this seems an absurd idea because of course it wasn’t her fault and of course we all feel righteous about the execution of a rapist. But that’s not how her mind and soul experience it. She is wrecked with tragedy and so she is trapped in an ever-burning silent hill and she will only ever be free when she can come to terms with this.
We are inside James’ mind. What we have throughout most of the game is the fact he misses mary and he loved her and he wants her back. Even if he says that he hated her, how much of that is even true? How true is the fact he killed her, even? I don’t wanna be one of those people who thinks Absolutely Everything is up to interpretation, but we only have his version of the facts to rely on and he’s shown himself to be quite the unreliable narrator. Regardless of what he did, or what motives he had for doing it, the fact is he thinks he did it, and silent hill probes his subconscious and unconscious mind to make him feel the consequences for having done it.
As i said before, and will repeat now, i think his action is from a dogmatic point of view (and this is my little noob law student self coming out to play for the first time lol) a bad one. But from a zetetic point of view we may wonder, and question it. I think humans are far beyond black and white definitions. I believe good and evil are constructed within social groups and serve social purposes, but social groups vary and thus the social purposes vary as well. So while i think by definition killing your wife when she is sick is a statement that reflects an obviously bad fact for us, it didn’t occur in a void. Yes, men get away with horrible things, and it is so easy for a man to commit a horrible action against women without much scrutiny. But still, men are (and i know this is hard to believe lol) still human people, and suffer the consequences of the evils that come with their privilege. James was caring for his wife for a long time. She was terminally ill and he was not prepared psychologically to handle it. He hated what she had become and the fact the disease had stolen his Mary from him, his life from him, her life from her. He was sickened to see her change like that, he had fallen ill himself in a different way. Now, yes sure he should have sought therapy, but this game is not about trying to argue what he should have done. It’s barely trying to state how bad or good he is as a person, but more trying to understand what are the circumstances that lead someone to sin and betray themselves? How much does killing another person impact your mental state? Does it matter if it was a righteous murder or not? What qualifies something a righteous murder, is there such a thing?
In my opinion, James was as much a victim of the disease as mary was, and frankly i empathize with him because as much as i try to be an ethical person i am sometimes morally unsure. I do not find myself feeling morally superior to him at least because i feel like i would also not know how to handle seeing my young wife be killed by a disease that would steal her away from the world. I don’t know i would have the mental stability to stay by her side but i know leaving would be terrible as well. Im not saying i would kill her, but i am also not saying i wouldn’t break under the pressure of being the one person responsible for her. of having my plans torn at the seems right in front of me. of having a tragedy unfold before my eyes so devastating i would rather it ended. I have been in the position of having to deal with people’s pain and suffering and i am not good at it, i value my own well being too much and that makes me a bit unfit to handle people when they are in pain as i see that affect me as well. I would like to think i am not a bad person, though i struggle with this.
What i mean, i think, is i don’t think he should have killed mary, and i don’t think there are any excuses for it, but i think i understand why he did it and why he felt that way about it all. I keep throwing the word tragedy around, but it’s because it all reminds me a lot of a greek tragedy. the fates orchestrate the lives of mortals and immortals, and though sometimes we can bend the fabric a little bit, sometimes the horror is already written at the start and there’s nothing that can be done about it but to withstand the suffering and go through it.
Which brings me to my last point. This is a bit of an unpopular opinion, anon, but i don’t even personally feel that James is even still alive during the events of the game. it is my opinion that James is dead, and that silent hill (since it is indirectly inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead, from being inspired by the move Jacob’s Ladder, as well as all the influence of Jungian psychology) is a bardo state wherein James is the soul of a dead man, which has to come to terms with his life’s actions, his regrets and his guilt, the things he loved and the things he desired, and accept them, stop clinging to them and stop fighting them, in order to be free from this life and be able to move on.
Throughout the game we see corpses of James. we even see messages scatted about left for him from who is probably himself. This implies a loop to me, of failed attempts at trying to go through to the next stage. The Leave ending is, to me, the ending where he can remember what he has done so that he can understand it, come to terms with it, forgive himself for it, and let go of it as it is done and over with left behind in an unchangeable past. People are morally gray by nature, a horrible person may do good deeds often and a good person may make a terrible, unspeakable, deadly mistake. And yet, both of these people, according to many philosophies, will have to face themselves eventually, in order to improve or to move on, to change.
Back to Angela, she did nothing wrong, right? But she has killed someone out of hatred and self defense. Is that enough of a reason to absolve herself from it? Does it matter why she killed him? She still has to come to terms with it because obviously her mind hasn’t yet. James killed his terminally ill wife, who barely wanted to stay alive herself because of the pain she was going through and inflicting on others. Does it matter?
This story is not about what was done. Whether we want to absolve him or not. It’s about whether one can absolve oneself or not. Whether we can forgive ourselves. When i read Crime and Punishment i was left with this thought. SPOILERS FOR AN OLD ASS BOOK but Raskolnikov is imprisoned for his actions. But that wouldn’t change a thing if he didn’t process the wrongness of his actions in his own mind as well. He would never be reformed, reintroduced to socialization if he didn’t forgive himself through acceptance and understanding beforehand. We cannot reincarnate before we tie up all the lose ends we have to tie and untie all the knots we tied in life.
The fact James killed Mary in her most vulnerable state speaks of the patriarchy, of the violence against women, of the ways in which men have been and will continue to be perpetrators of horrors. But James is still human, and humans aren’t that simple to read and understand. He is a man, that is part of the big picture. But in the small picture, he’s also James, a sole person, who suffered from caregiver burnout and made the worst mistake of his life which he would forever regret because he was a man and he was unfit to face his emotions before it was too late.
In sum, i don’t think james is a bad person, i don’t think single actions define us. I really don’t. I think he is a murdered and a tragic character who acted in hatred and violence and misogyny yes as a consequence of his social place in the world. But i don’t think he hated his wife and i think he loved her and the only reason he suffers so much in silent hill is because he considers what he did a mistake, so much so he doesn’t even want to accept it at first, since for most of the game he has blocked out the fact that’s what happened. Which only makes it so much worse that he felt so chummy with violence that was what he felt was available to him.
Like i said im a beginner law student, and last week in my introduction to law studies class we read the case of the speluncean explorers. if you’re not familiar with it, it’s this story about some people who go spelunking and get trapped for many days and resort to sorting out and killing one of the members of the group for food. The whole book is about justice trying to decide whether they are guilty or not given the fact they killed for survival, but it was still a murder punishable by death penalty in the state where it occurred. I had already worked a bit of it in my civil law class before but as my professor pointed out, this was different because in civil law we tried to provide what was the correct argument for the case by trying to decide in our own whether to punish them or not and why. But like i said before, that’s dogmatic thinking. My intro to law studies is more zetetic. The idea is to see there are many sides to the story, the law will never know truly what happened and what where the intentions of the people because the only people who will ever know in any given case are the ones directly involved. We can only understand that everything is up to interpretation, and that the truth is not always as obvious as it seems.
James is a criminal, but is he evil? I don’t think so.
I don’t even particularly think he’s a good person. I think he’s just a person (and for me people aren’t good or bad they are just people who commit actions with good or bad effects to each other in society), who has done some something cruel and impulsive and this makes him an excellent character to study the ways in which we process emotions, trauma, and face the consequences of our actions.
Anyways, this is what i think of it :) you’re free to share your thoughts further if you want and im so sorry for writing so much i just really love this game and this topic and honestly i could have written a lot more haha
Then would I still be me? Or would there effectively be two versions of me? In which case, you'd have effectively created two versions of me which would put you on the GROUND
I SCREAM
SCREAM TO THE CLOSED GATES OF THE SKY AND PROCLAIM:
"WHY DO THY WEEP WHEN I PRAY"
AND THE CLOUDS ANSWERED, DILIGENTLY:
"FOR THOU ART LOST IN FALSE BENEVOLENCE
SHANT MY HAND TOUCH HELLS KINDRED SOULS FOR I'D TOO BECOME LOST"
SO THEN I RESPOND "BOTH MORTAL AND DIVINE HANDS TIED TO HELLS WILL"
THE ANGEL, CLOSING ITS EYES, RESPONDS:
"I LIVE NOT IF ONLY FOR GODS WILL SOLEMNLY TRUE"
"WHAT TO SERVE IF NOT TO GUIDE FALSE HOPE"
i got vaporized by heavens light beam for trying to comprehend
The name's Gabe, He/They, 18
Portuguese artist trying to find out what he wants to do with his life
Married to @thousand-toasts , go check out their art!!
