The Old Map At Bar Neely's....

James got a letter. From a dead person. Oh dear.

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Joseph
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Re: The Old Map At Bar Neely's....

Post by Joseph »

Monster wrote: Given what I said above, we could imagine that a previous James has simply traversed that portion of the path in reverse, recording information that was relevant to himself in ways we can't know, then died at bar neely's, where our James benefits from the info recorded by that James.
The basic proof this theory doesn't work is that the person letting notes behind refers to the one who hid the wrench at the park as "his patient".
James is not a doctor and even he was, he did not work at Brookhaven, that's for sure.
What's more, why would they do something so freakin' complicated? They could have just let the idea vague for other people to interpret (that containing ideas as yours, but I told you what the basic flaw of it is).
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Re: The Old Map At Bar Neely's....

Post by WelcomeToNowhere »

alone in the town wrote:There are several major problem with the idea that James is leaving himself messages.

1. He would have to know, beforehand, that he would re-live the experience repeatedly.
2. Armed with that knowledge, you'd expect that the information he leaves behind would be more frequent and informative. Also, he would be able to pre-guess the outcome, and the delusion would not withstand that knowledge.
3. It would also involve backtracking to the locations where the info is left, because if he knew beforehand that he would have to go to the Apartments and Pete's, he would always know beforehand every time events repeated, and the act of leaving maps would be unnecessary.
4. Everybody else in the game must either be trapped in the same loop, or are figments of his imagination.
5. There would have to be some causative factor for events repeating.
6. Such repetition would essentially render the entire adventure meaningless.
Well, how about this: he has no idea he is being forced to relive the events over and over, but each time he doesn't succeed (i.e. dies), the corpse is left where it dropped.
Each different James made different decisions and so reached a different milestone:

James dead in the street decided to take notes, but went a little crazy. He found a different James' (dead at the bridge) note for whoever lived in the trailer and was on his way to the bar and ended up getting gored to death by a monster.

James dead in the alley found the key to the apartment but got trapped by the StraitJacket in the alley because he never got the wooden plank, and so he got partially eaten.

James in the apartment, the gun room, found a back way into the apartment but, after getting the gun, began seeing bugs all over the walls, tried to shoot all of them, ran out of ammo, and barricaded himself in a side room, presumably getting eaten by the bugs in there, too.

James in the apartment, the clock passage room, also made it into the apartment through a back way, but reached a dead end at the clock. He said "fuck it," set down the key he found on a shelf, pulled up an armchair to the TV, turned it on, and Pyramid Head smashed his face into the TV for giving in. This signalled the other James to come find him.

And the last Dead James had a map listing all these places Mary might be. She wasn't at Rosewater Park, but she might've been at the Hotel, or even at the Bowling alley! He made it to the bridge, but was cornered by some LadiesLegs and pummeled to death.

(I might've missed a few, sorry)

Each James' successive choices, discoveries, and actions accumulated until James was finally able to make it to the Hotel without dying.

...Well, that's my theory, anyhow.
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Re: The Old Map At Bar Neely's....

Post by The Adversary »

>each time he doesn't succeed (i.e. dies), the corpse is left where it dropped.<
The first time I played SILENT HILL 2, I died in the abyss' "bug room." I never saw a dead body in there anytime I played after that.
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Re: The Old Map At Bar Neely's....

Post by Monster »

The first time I played SILENT HILL 2, I died in the abyss' "bug room." I never saw a dead body in there anytime I played after that.
The bugs ate it, or a monster dragged it away and ate it in a dark corner somewhere, use yur imagination, GOSH. :roll:
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Re: The Old Map At Bar Neely's....

Post by WelcomeToNowhere »

Goddamn, it's a game about hallucinations and insanity, I'm sure his worldview isn't that fucking consistent if he can delude himself into forgetting he killed his fucking wife, AURGHHH!!!!
*head asplodes from rage*

Okay, I'm done. =)
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Re: The Old Map At Bar Neely's....

Post by alone in the town »

WelcomeToNowhere wrote:...Well, that's my theory, anyhow.
Unless the players' deaths factored in this, I don't see what the point is.
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Re: The Old Map At Bar Neely's....

Post by WelcomeToNowhere »

alone in the town wrote:
WelcomeToNowhere wrote:...Well, that's my theory, anyhow.
Unless the players' deaths factored in this, I don't see what the point is.
The point is, it's a fucking plot device to move the character forward through fhe game.
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Re: The Old Map At Bar Neely's....

Post by alone in the town »

Which, I guess, would be of some use if James was so profoundly stupid and incompetent that he couldn't cross the street without getting killed by something, since this idea requires that his adventure has already killed him, like, a hundred times, in what is ironically the Silent Hill game with the easiest and least-aggressive monsters.

The idea is overcomplicated to the point of absurdity, and the fact that James is suffering from delusions does not automatically make every idea ever plausible.
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Re: The Old Map At Bar Neely's....

Post by ClaudioBlanco »

My post have some major spoilers, so think twice before reading it.
PRIME_BBCODE_SPOILER_SHOW PRIME_BBCODE_SPOILER:
I quite disagree with the theory. To start, James was traumatized by the -maybe recent- experience of killing his wife, so there's no further reason he would guide himself to something he unconsciously doesn't even want to know.

Let's take the letter: we don't know where it came from, we don't know how James got it, but we do know it summons him to the town— to later disappear, as James slowly awares himself from the truth.

What I mean is that the letter, the clues, even the encounters with other persons, are meant by that sort of power in Silent Hill. A power that can reify the darkest part of our souls against us, surely can materialize simple messages and clues— in this case, to guide James to the truth he denies from the beginning.

So in that case, Baldwin has little to do on this. He could even have been a plot from town to guide Maria into her true goal: to make James suffer. The whole game is about that in my opinion: a town that delivers unconscious rendezvous with troubled people to make them suffer about their sins.
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Re: The Old Map At Bar Neely's....

Post by SHF »

Baldwin is able to communicate to James because James is in the Otherworld. To back this theory up, compare the red messages and the memos such as the " Letter and Wrench".
They all have similarities such as the color they are written in, but more importantly the fact that they directly address James.

How could Baldwin possibly know that James " isn't going to the same place as Mary" ( this insinuating Ernest knows about James' secret). How does he even know James?

Since we know that Ernest is
PRIME_BBCODE_SPOILER_SHOW PRIME_BBCODE_SPOILER:
dead
and we know that James is in the Otherworld, we can assume Ernest is in the Otherworld ( not necessarily James' Otherworld, but perhaps his own) because not only is he directly communicating with James, but he is communicating with Maria, which is only existent in James' Otherworld.

In conclusion, Ernest has much to do with the encounters and memos in the game.
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Re: The Old Map At Bar Neely's....

Post by WelcomeToNowhere »

alone in the town wrote:Which, I guess, would be of some use if James was so profoundly stupid and incompetent that he couldn't cross the street without getting killed by something, since this idea requires that his adventure has already killed him, like, a hundred times, in what is ironically the Silent Hill game with the easiest and least-aggressive monsters.

The idea is overcomplicated to the point of absurdity, and the fact that James is suffering from delusions does not automatically make every idea ever plausible.
James is CERTAINLY that stupid.

He sticks his hand in many questionabe openings (and the occasional diarrhea-clogged toilet) to obtain items, jumps down possibly bottomless holes based on nothing but "Hmm, now what if I...", and got all up in the business of not one, not two, but THREE different crazy people, at least one of whom was a murderer, at least one was a repressed psychopath, and at LEAST one whom was imaginary.

It's safe to say he could have died in many different ways, and COULD'NT be THAT smart.

I'm not saying you're wrong; I'm just saying James was probably a moron.
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Re: The Old Map At Bar Neely's....

Post by mikefile »

^ James' insertion of limbs into openings is representative of him sticking his dick into the wrong whole.
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Re: The Old Map At Bar Neely's....

Post by SilentRobert23 »

WelcomeToNowhere wrote:
alone in the town wrote:Which, I guess, would be of some use if James was so profoundly stupid and incompetent that he couldn't cross the street without getting killed by something, since this idea requires that his adventure has already killed him, like, a hundred times, in what is ironically the Silent Hill game with the easiest and least-aggressive monsters.

The idea is overcomplicated to the point of absurdity, and the fact that James is suffering from delusions does not automatically make every idea ever plausible.
James is CERTAINLY that stupid.

He sticks his hand in many questionabe openings (and the occasional diarrhea-clogged toilet) to obtain items, jumps down possibly bottomless holes based on nothing but "Hmm, now what if I...", and got all up in the business of not one, not two, but THREE different crazy people, at least one of whom was a murderer, at least one was a repressed psychopath, and at LEAST one whom was imaginary.

It's safe to say he could have died in many different ways, and COULD'NT be THAT smart.

I'm not saying you're wrong; I'm just saying James was probably a moron.

James is insane. This is established at the very beginning of the game. Your point is moot.
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Re: The Old Map At Bar Neely's....

Post by alone in the town »

He sticks his hand in many questionabe openings (and the occasional diarrhea-clogged toilet) to obtain items, jumps down possibly bottomless holes based on nothing but "Hmm, now what if I...", and got all up in the business of not one, not two, but THREE different crazy people, at least one of whom was a murderer, at least one was a repressed psychopath, and at LEAST one whom was imaginary.
Which is a funny argument when you consider that reaching into some holes, jumping into others, getting pushed off roofs and crashing through concrete ceilings simply cannot kill James, or that he must complete some of the most difficult tasks in this game without any clues provided by dead older versions of himself.

Even if you wanted to stretch plausibility far enough to allow for James having an infinite lives code thanks to the Otherworld and that he leaves behind clues every time he dies, the fact that he doesn't really leave behind that many clues, and that almost all of them are at the beginning of the game, still make the idea sound more than a little silly because he makes it through the majority of the game without needing any, which means that there is a point (completely unnoticeable in the game) when James suddenly transforms from someone who can't walk ten feet without getting killed by something into a hyper-competent master of the alternate universe. And pardon me if I think that's ridiculous, but it totally is.
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Re: The Old Map At Bar Neely's....

Post by Monster »

Alone, I think you are neglecting imagination where it suits your distaste for the idea. And that's fine, you dont have to like an idea that isn't officially expressed by the game anyway, I don't think it can be proven or disproven. They aren't telling us what happened, they're only giving us something to use our imaginations with, which is what we're doing.
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Re: The Old Map At Bar Neely's....

Post by alone in the town »

An idea is posed. Someone else examines he idea and finds that it cannot work either because of logical flaws or contradictions. This is the point at which effort is better spent on ideas that might actually lead someplace.

If the purveyor of the idea insists on defending it, then clearly, they believe in it, until we run into that intellectual deadend that is "you can't disprove it".
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Re: The Old Map At Bar Neely's....

Post by mikefile »

No matter of how abstract Silent Hill is, you still need concrete and solid proof to sustain something.
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Re: The Old Map At Bar Neely's....

Post by WelcomeToNowhere »

^True. But Everything i've said so far is pretty much hbullshit or hearsay. Or wishful thinking. Or the power of imaginaaaation. I'm not being serious. I'm not even trying to make sense. I'm just trying to have a little fun with ideas. :) Deal with it. Sunglasses, activate! 8)
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