So, while perhaps mentioning that there is such an ending counts as a spoiler, I don't think it would surprise anyone to learn that Silent Hill 2's "good" ending (among many bad and a few very silly endings) is called Leave. I mean, the game starts with James arriving in this cursed-as-fuck town, and naturally a lot of horror stories end with an escape from the realm of terror. Wendy and Danny Torrance get away from the Overlook Hotel, Jonathan Harker gets out of Castle Dracula (though admittedly that's just one portion of the story - his own little mini-horror movie experience at the start of the novel). Ripley makes it into the escape pod and leaves the Nostromo (again, there's a subversion because the monster follows her, but once it's kicked off, she's ok until the sequel).
Hm. Guess that's several other spoilers, but surely all of these are well past the statute of limitations, right? And one could argue that Silent Hill 2 is old enough to also be in that category.
But I wanted to just put some thoughts out there about this ending to the game, which certainly seems, tonally and emotionally, to be the game's happiest ending. What if it's not?
Let's do a spoiler cut.
"Leave" has us face a transformed Maria as the final boss, though her transformation is not as visceral as I had thought it might be. She hangs upside down in a metallic frame mimicking the bed Mary had been lying on when James killed her. It's actually very reminiscent of the earlier Flesh Lip boss, though not as grotesque, unless there are some details that I didn't see in the frenzy of the combat. Maria, now "Her" (I think they call her that because in the Maria ending we actually fight Mary... maybe,) lashes out at us, enraged that James has not taken her on as a guilt-absolving replacement for his dead wife.
While there's no remake equivalent to it, the original game had an expansion pack (what DLC used to be called) that allowed you to play as Maria in a prologue, showing us that even if she's a monster created by the town, she's sentient and just driven by a profound, primal need to be with James. She's not, like, twirling her mustache and cackling about how she's going to destroy him - the town has just created her to be driven toward behaviors that will lead to his ruin, and instilled in her a deep emotional pain as a punishment for failing to do so.
There is no happy ending for Maria, as even when she gets what she wants, her copying of Mary seems to have also inflicted her with the same disease (possibly,) and in her quest to drive any feelings of guilt and responsibility out of James' mind, it's implied that if she does get sick like Mary did, he'll just murder her like he did to his real wife.
"Maria" does see James leaving the town with Maria, meaning that this creation of Silent Hill will, evidently, be allowed to travel beyond the town's limits, even if the dark implications of his callous "you'd better do something about that cough" line implies she won't live long outside of it.
This, however, does leave me a little concerned, because the Leave ending also has James leaving town with a person he met in the town.
I think the natural interpretation of Angela and Eddie as characters is that they are on similar paths to James - drawn to the town because of the violent acts they performed in their lives, to be tormented by the town's evil presence. Maria is a creation of the town. But Laura, the little girl whom James leaves the town with in this best ending, is a bit of an enigma.
Why the hell is this little girl here?
Laura's behavior as we first encounter her is bratty - she kicks a key out of reach when James tries to reach for it through a metal grate in the Woodside apartments. Later, she locks James in the room with the Flesh Lip monster in the hospital.
Now, I think the general consensus about her character is that she's just a normal girl, and as someone who is truly innocent, there's nothing for the town to latch onto in her mind. To her, the abandoned town is just a playground with no monsters to worry about. And James, acting as the protective adult, puts her off with his, to her mind, overabundant concern.
I will say that this interpretation is aided by her interaction with Eddie in the movie theater (or the bowling alley in the original game). That scene might, in fact, be designed specifically to reinforce that Laura is real.
But again, why the hell is she here?
To rebut the notion that her interaction with Eddie proves she's real, let's consider that James does see the bodies of the various "bullies" that Eddie kills - clearly manifestations of Eddie's torment. Likewise, James not only sees but fights Abstract Daddy, Angela's primary (maybe sole) monster. Each character's Otherworld can bleed into the others', which means that if Laura is part of James' torment, it's not unthinkable that Eddie would meet her as well.
But why do I think she's part of his torment?
Well, she does make things hard for him in the early parts of the game. Interestingly, his concern for Laura is one of the things that is admirable about James. Indeed, his interactions with Laura as well as Eddie and Angela are all meant, I think, to get us to think of him as a benign, generally heroic person, which makes the reveal of his murder of Mary all the more shocking - to us as well as him. This is a guy who clearly thinks he's a good guy, and tries to act that way.
I've heard a definition of trauma as something that disrupts our sense of self, our sense of identity. While the actual psychological consensus on things like repressed memory is a bit of a controversy, the hypothesis as I understand it is that memories might be repressed to preserve that previously-held sense of identity. This is almost certainly what is implied to have happened with James. But I can imagine that it wasn't just that last, brutal act that caused him to question who he was.
Mary was dying for three years - James misremembers it as if she died three years ago, but in fact, it was three years ago that she began to suffer from her terminal disease. One could read this very callously, as if James had already emotionally abandoned Mary the moment he knew he was going to lose her, thinking of this dying woman as someone other than the wife he had loved. But I think you could also read this as his inability to reconcile the way their relationship transformed. We don't really get any examples of it (except maybe the final corridor as we head toward the last boss) but it sounds like Mary did a lot of lashing out at James as she was deteriorating. This is 100% understandable - anger is one of the classic stages of grief (again, something that is a bit more pop psychology than academic). It was James' duty as her husband to be with her through that pain (the whole "in sickness and in health" thing) but that didn't mean that any of the anger she projected onto him wouldn't have an effect on him. That period, even if it was obviously harder for Mary, was also a trauma for him.
The two of them were young - canonically, James is 29 and Mary was 25 when she died. Now, I don't know quite how this math is calculated, like, if Mary got sick at 22, or if Mary actually got sick at 25 and would be 28 when the game takes place (and maybe was 28 when James killed her, as it's strongly implied that this happened quite shortly before the start of the game - her body is in the back seat of his car).
If we assume that they were in their mid-20s when Mary got sick, you can imagine that this disrupted what they assumed was going to be their next path in life: that's about the age that people start having kids (my own parents were in their mid-30s, which is true for most of my friends, but I know that lots of people become parents earlier than that).
We find out when we reach the hotel that Laura knew Mary. And, in fact, we find a letter in which Mary asks James to take Laura in, to adopt her and be a father to her, as Mary had intended to be her mother. In the Leave ending, James and Laura leave the town together, and one could interpret it that James intends to honor Mary's wishes.
But, like, what the fuck?
When? When the fuck did Mary meet Laura? How? When did she have the time to develop a relationship with this orphaned girl to the point where she was ready to adopt her? And in all that time, how the fuck would James have not known about her?
We do know that during her illness, Mary spent a lot of time in the hospital. She had essentially gone home for hospice care after the doctors determined that she wasn't going to get better, and it was during that visit home that James smothered her with a pillow.
But even though there is a hospital in Silent Hill, I don't believe this is the one where Mary was being treated - it was a psychiatric hospital. The only place in town that I believe has any significance to her or James is the Lakeview Hotel, where they took some vacation in happier times (maybe their honeymoon?)
How would Mary have developed a powerful bond with this girl, and when, and again, how would she have done so without James knowing?
Again, my stance is that the Leave ending is meant to be the good one - this is all just a theory that I'd honestly be pretty bummed about if it were true.
But what if Laura is also a manifestation of the town?
Again, we know that even if Eddie and Angela don't tend to see the same monsters or Otherworld as James, there are occasional overlaps.
Why does the town create Maria? If she gets her way, James still winds up leaving Silent Hill, only that he takes her with him. Does Silent Hill want to use Maria as some kind of seedling or spore, to spread its influence elsewhere? Would her presence (and maybe even especially her death) in some other location create another cursed place like the town? (I know that the recent Silent Hill f takes place in a totally different town in Japan in the 1960s, connected by the presence of obscuring fog as well as the White Claudia flower that becomes a powerful hallucinogenic drug in the earlier games.)
The story we get about Mary's intention for James to adopt Laura comes entirely from a letter James finds on his journey through the town, and through a dreamy vision after he defeats Maria in which Mary, from her deathbed, speaks to him and absolves him of his guilt, claiming that he didn't so much murder her as set her free.
Once again, emotionally, I think the most likely interpretation here is that this truly is Mary and that it is a good ending for James (even if one could reasonably argue that James doesn't deserve a good ending given what he did) and that his taking care of Laura is meant to be a way for him to live up to the image of the good man he thought he was. The apparent plot holes here might just be a decision not to get into every last logistical detail.
But if we want to lean into this, if Laura is actually a "spore" of Silent Hill's presence just like Maria, then that would likely mean that our final post-boss-fight conversation with Mary is also a product of the town.
It's interesting that when we beat "Her," Maria's walking metal cage has fallen backwards, and she is supine, begging for us to change course, to embrace her. She can't force us to, can't kill us anymore. To end the game, we need to hit her one last time to end the fight.
And the next moment, we're in that room with Mary sick in bed, in essentially the same position.
Before the final boss, Maria has taken on Mary's appearance, her blond hair with pink highlights now brown like Mary's, her clothes the more modest, conservative style that Mary wore instead of Maria's hot "night out on the town" outfit. Maria was already Mary's doppelganger, with the same face and same voice. The lines between them are particularly blurred there.
Maria's methods of seducing James into doing what she wants are multifaceted (there's a great breakdown on YouTube, though I sadly can't remember whose, maybe FatBrett's, that shows how she cycles rapidly through different stratagems to endear herself to him at Heaven's Night). But if we get this ending, none of them ultimately work.
Maria dies four times over the course of the game, though. Only once is James the one to kill her - the other times it's Pyramid Head (the death in the Labyrinth is a bit ambiguous, as Pyramid Head definitely passes through her cell, but she also seems to have died of her disease). But at this point, James "doesn't need" Pyramid Head anymore, accepting that he's the apex monster of this nightmare, perhaps his killing of her is no more permanent than all the times PH did.
And thus, what if the Leave ending is actually the most seductive, the most effective way for the town to win? James is allowed to believe that he's escaped its horrors, allowed to believe that he's on the path to redemption, allowed to think that if he doing right by this child is the proper task for his atonement.
I don't know how interested the folks behind the franchise are interested in revisiting this story - I'm given to understand that it has generally been somewhat isolated from the continuity found in the other games. But, 24 years after the original game came out, Laura would be in her early 30s (I also think that the game might actually take place in the mid 1990s, meaning that she could be in her late 30s or early 40s at this point). What life has she led?
It'd probably be folly to follow the story up, especially given its multiple endings. And the ambiguity here has value. I know some of the other games in the franchise connect with one another, but my understanding is that, aside from some dubious family ties, SH2 exists in isolation. The reception to Silent Hill f has also suggested that this is a fertile series for exploring many different stories, connected primary by the focus on psychological horror and the iconic fog (even the town isn't necessary, apparently).
I'm also sure that I'm not the first person to come up with this theory or some variant of it.
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