Silent Hill Heaven

A couple of nights ago a friend and me were playing Silent Hill 2 just to get the bad vibes, but failed to
We were in the labyrinth.

When I arrived in the room Maria behind the bars. I thought of the symbolic meaning of the room, since almost EVERYTHING in Silent Hill is symbolic.

Take a look around the room, and tell me. What could be the symbolism in the room?

James' crime.

That Maria is a butterfly, once in a cage, killed by a moth, which leads to Room 208.

Sullivan, Walter wrote:James' crime.

Yeah, that's a pretty good and direct one.


This one may be a little...figurative...It's just my take on things:

Maria offers sex to James, if he rescues her. But she can't do "anything" behind those bars, which implies that the bars were Mary's prison of sickness.

I think this also represents for James, an inward lament of James' own inability to rescue Mary from her sickness. This is shown when Maria is found dead on the bed. He once again deludes himself, and it also pretty much shows his sexual frustration, and also his overall general frustration at losing his wife the way he did. If a miracle had happened, if James had somehow been able to save Mary, or she had magically healed, James would have had full freedom with his wife, sexually, and in every other way.

But instead, he finds her dead, (we assume it was Pyramid Head who did it)
It's just another way of James' psyche saying "Hey James, you killed your wife, you're going through this underwater maze and labyrinth to find Mary, but she's already dead"
It's almost as if the Maria promising him all of this stuff is him promising himself a reward for finding Mary. After all, Maria is at least partially a projection from James. The Maria we see behind the bars the first time is James in denial, promising himself a reward for rescuing his wife...The Maria we see when he comes in through the back is the reality of the situation presented to James, from the James in the back of his mind, that knows the truth.

It's all kind of a metaphor for James' search for what in reality is in his car's trunk. A metaphor within a metaphor? Maybe. To open a cell, you need a key. Sometimes a key is a metaphor for truth. James' journey through Silent Hill is very long, and also very zig-zaggy...Instead of just opening the door to the truth (yeah, this is a metaphor for the prison), James has to literally go all the way around, and then come through the back way.

the Adversary wrote:That Maria is a butterfly, once in a cage, killed by a moth, which leads to Room 208.

and what is this Room 208? In the hotel?



Thanks guys for the amazing replies and explaining. Thanks.

The apartment building. The rooms you go through there, despite never crossing to the Otherside, hold a lot of meaning in the story.

From this photo it looks like they're both in prison not just Maria.



We know James was a naughty boy.

^Hold on, there wasn't a bed behind James was there?

No. That's a promo shot of it, altered long before the game was released. It caused much speculation before the games release--now, though, in the final version, there's only a stool on James' side.

Stool? I remember a small stack of those small chairs.

I think that the bars are very symbolic, moreso of James just being unable to get to Mary.. to Maria. Or atleast the struggle to do so. And Maria is very, erm.. permiscuous in her actions towards him, further casting her into Jame's idealized Mary mold. -shrug-


I'm pretty sure the only thing on Jame's side is the stool...

Arthemesic wrote:Stool? I remember a small stack of those small chairs.

Those small chairs = stools. Well, here they're called that. I'm not sure if they have another name elsewhere.

Perhaps he meant piles of turd?

Hah! I was thinking that too.. and couldn't stop giggling as I made the post.

Cherry Bomb wrote:Perhaps he meant piles of turd?

That's the one I meant