I didn’t want to start this blog with a wild fan theory. I really didn’t. But alas, the idea gripped me today and I have to write about it.
This article relies upon the fact that the reader is aware of *the* BIG REVEAL of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. If you are not aware of this, go away, play the game, come back. I’ll also chuck in spoilers for other games, knowing me – probably Silent Hill and Silent Hill 3. However if you don’t know the stories of the original games and you’re on a Silent Hill fan site as a fan then you need to seriously question your life choices.
So, let us proceed.
Poke around the internet for any amount of time reading about Silent Hill and you’ll see that Shattered Memories is largely considered to be non-canonical and in a different game-universe to the rest of them. It makes sense, on the surface; it is, after all, not depicting “real” events. All the events take place in Cheryl’s head. Harry died years ago. Cheryl is seeing a psychiatrist. We know that these things didn’t really happen and SM was largely marketed as a “re-imagining” of the first game. A “what would have happened if…” game. It clearly isn’t canon, despite what the producer of the game might try and tell us.
Ah, but what if it is?
Let’s start with the dates. According to the widely accepted chronology (I will create a timeline with sources later), SM takes place in 2008 and Cheryl is 25 – meaning she would have been born in 1983, the year that the first game was set and Heather was “born”, in the original chronology. Dr Kaufmann tells her that Harry died in a car accident 18 years ago – 1990 – and that Cheryl has been denying it since. You might say that this is where the theory falls down and the dates don’t hold up; Silent Hill 3 took place in 2000 and Harry was alive and kicking enough for Heather to talk to him on the phone, and for her to be shocked at his death later on in the game. Douglas sees the body, Claudia admits to killing him – we can pretty safely assume that he was alive. Therefore he can’t have died in a car crash in 1990 and therefore Shattered Memories cannot be canonical.
Ah, but what if it is?
We are told in The Book of Lost Memories that in 1988, Harry killed a member of the Order who had tracked them down. He was acquitted, they moved towns and changed Cheryl’s name to Heather. He kept his own name, though, which always struck me as stupid. Unless some more things happened between SH and SH3. If one member of the Order could find them, who’s to say another couldn’t? And what better way to get some brainwashed religious cult to stop chasing you than by faking your death…say, in a car accident? It wouldn’t even necessarily have to have been a separate incident, who’s to say Kaufmann didn’t get the years wrong? Or perhaps it took a couple of years for the plan to fake his death to come together?
So, the dates work out, albeit with a little imagination. But does the story itself? After all, we know Heather/Cheryl. We know that she knows what happened in SH because she read the book her father gave her in SH3. She at least knows perfectly well who Dahlia Gillespie really is, even if Harry didn’t mention Lisa or Cybil when he wrote about the strange events. She knows Harry never slept with Dahlia; she knows that Harry is, now, dead and certainly not running around Silent Hill with a smartphone; she knows damn well that he doesn’t have a 7 year old daughter to run around after even if he was alive. No, no one in their right mind would believe any of the events of Shattered Memories if they knew what Heather knew.
Unless, of course, they had gone mad.
It’s generally given that the “Good” ending to Silent Hill 3 is canon, as in Homecoming there is a reference to Douglas outing the Order after the events of that game. But f**k Homecoming. Besides, there’s no reason why Douglas couldn’t have outed them posthumously, via notes or something. He was, after all, a detective. No, I think the “Possessed” ending is rather more realistic, although I don’t think she’s possessed. I think she’s mental.
Let’s look at the facts, shall we? For a start, she’s made up of three separate people, Alessa, Cheryl the first and herself. She’s just “awoken” these thoughts and memories. She is a 17 year old girl with 31 years worth of memories and those memories are weird. That would be bad enough, but let us not forget that her father’s just died, murdered by a childhood friend of one of her “personalities”. She’s had to fight her way through the horrendous Otherworld and its monsters, and just to help matters Vincent plants that seed of doubt in her head…maybe they’re not monsters. Maybe she’s just killed hundreds of people. She’s had to abort a God and then kill it after she watched someone eat the foetus and give birth to it.
So what is really more likely? That she comes out of this ordeal grinning, spouting that “blondes have more fun”? Or that she snaps and murders the person he fractured mind perceives as having started the whole nightmare – Douglas, the down-on-his-luck detective who picked up the wrong case at the wrong time?
I choose the latter. This is a game of the horror genre, after all, not an action adventure where the good guys are all good, all the time.
Even without the “Possessed” ending, it’s pretty likely that Heather went mad and what’s more, it’s fairly likely that she got locked up. She “buried” her father in her bedroom then left the corpse behind to take her revenge in a town miles away from anywhere. By the time she got back, that corpse is pretty ripe and it’s possible a neighbour has called it in. If not…what exactly is Heather going to do with the body? She could go to the police but how does she explain not doing that in the first place? “Yeah I had to go and take my revenge on the people who did this. Well, the people who ordered the monster to do this. Yeah if you go to the church at Silent Hill, you’ll find Claudia’s … well, he clothes. Oh and Vincent’s body.” She can’t exactly pass it off as a natural death…the Missionary spilled enough blood to trail all the way from the front room to the roof. So she…what, disposes of the body and no one questions why Harry Mason has disappeared?
Well no. Because Harry Mason died in 1990 in a car crash, according to the world at large…
Even if none of that happens…even if the “Good” ending happens and Heather leaves Silent Hill smiling and gets away with Harry’s body and her fingerprints aren’t found near Vincent’s body…I still say that there’s a good chance she went mental. The three separate entities within that have just been awoken would be enough to drive anyone mind, regardless of the traumatic events surrounding it. There is no reason why Heather’s fractured mind didn’t go ahead and create a new person in her head…Harry.
And Kaufmann? Well I think Dr Kaufmann is our same Dr Kaufmann. He was a member of the Order and in the canon ending of the first game, he is dragged down to some abyss by Lisa. But hey, Lisa’s a “good monster” and Kaufmann had just made steps to redeem himself by chucking the Aglaophotis at God. Trapped in Alessa’s Otherworld they may have been but it’s entirely possible they survived in a kind of limbo…the events of Silent Hill 3 setting at least Kaufmann free. After all, in Silent Hill (1983) he is 50. In Shattered Memories (2008) he is 58. So if the events of Silent Hill 3 in the year 2000 set him free…
Obviously, this is just another fan theory in a sea of many…Silent Hill fans do like their theories. It does all seem to fit though and I do like Shattered Memories an awful lot – why not have it as part of the canon?
Silent Hill Essays 