Thread by @PatStaresAt

So I gotta talk about Silent Hill: The Short Message. Shopping Vs Suicide is hilarious but I'm seeing folks dismiss the distaste for the game based on that joke, and ignoring that that is a symptom of a much larger series of criticisms. A thread 1/?

I feel like the order of events the game portrays the story to us helps hide it's true message. First of all, it's stated message, and the one absolutely intended by the developers, is that suicide is a regrettable and avoidable tragedy.

The game posits that the primary way to help prevent suicide is to reach out yourself if you are thinking about it, or be emotionally available for friends and loved ones in general if they may be struggling. The game goes so far as to post suicide hotline information.

The game starts and ends with messaging about going it alone being a sign of strength and that mindset can be dangerous. So far so good in terms of it's attempted message. Unfortunately, the messaging is so botched and muddled that it actually inverts that theme entirely.

The games sequence of events are as such. Anita, our main character, is a depressed girl who finds herself in an abandoned building that's a hotspot for suicide copycats. She laments the death of a friend of hers, Maya, a local talented artist and rising star.

As she travels through the building and either hallucinates or is cursed by Silent Hill magic nonsense, she consistently flashbacks to discussions with Maya about her art, and Maya keeps dialing up the suicidal ideation as a function of art to 11.

Anita and these flashbacks are also overwhelmingly covered in post-it notes of negative thoughts, such as ugly, loser, kill yourself etc. Anita reaches the top of the building and attempts to throw herself off, becoming trapped in a loop.

Through a sequence of these loops, you discover that Anita was in fact horribly jealous of Maya, as an artist and as a girl at school. She feels like Maya is taking her friend Amelie away, and bristles at art she discovers of Amelie, feeling like she will have no one left.

This is combined with a deluge of negative self talk via text messages with Amelie and Maya's ghost, and we find out that as a child, Anita was horribly neglected by her mother, culminating in the murder of her little brother which led to her mother being arrested.

It's fairly clear that Anita suffers from Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, in addition to the literal flashbacking (either mentally or enhanced by Silent Hills curse), she shows literally every textbook symptom you'd grab off a google search after searching for 10 seconds.

We then discover that Anita is in fact directly responsible for Maya's suicide. In addition to ignoring Maya's obvious cries for help, she in some way started a rumour or other gossip that caused a bullying chain reaction at their school, leading to Maya's death.

She then, *bafflingly* discovers that Maya *was* in fact her friend, and was planning on painting a mural of her in the future, prior to her death. The guilt over causing Maya's death and the trauma from her childhood combine into a monster made of cherry blossoms.

Maya's art features the blossoms heavily, "growing out of girls scars to show beauty", and they stay beautiful even in death, the core element of Maya's suicidal ideation. The blossoms are then mapped onto the avatar of Anita's physical abuse, her mother.

When she's running from the blossoms monster, she will occasionally apologize to her mother. It's a cool monster that acts as a synthesis of the issues Anita has throughout the plot.

Upon reaching the roof, Anita tells Amelie goodbye, and gets ready to leap to her death, at which point Amelie texts her over and over, asking to go shopping, asking Anita not to leave. The intended message is that unlike Maya, Anita reached out, and a friend was there for her.

The problem here is that it ignores the fact that Maya is shown begging for help and idolizing her own incoming suicide for days if not weeks. There are 4 or 5 separate flashbacks to conversation with Anita in which Maya is obviously going to kill herself.

Anita is too wrapped up in her own issues and can't see them for what they are, which shows that reaching out isn't enough, you also have to reach out to someone emotionally available to handle it.

MUCH more importantly, Anita IS the direct cause of Maya's problems. She started a chain reaction of events that caused Maya to kill herself because of her insecurity and jealousy about her friend Amelie. By the end of the game, she's succeeded!

Upon getting all the pieces of the puzzle and accepting events as they are, the monster (mother/maya) trauma simply stops chasing her, and her friend Amelie reaches out in desperation to keep the one friend still alive in her life.

But the reason she only has Anita is because ANITA CAUSED MAYA'S SUICIDE. The game wants to tell you to reach out if you need someone, but what it actually *shows* you is that if you're worried about losing friends, get that other bitch to kill herself.

Aside from going through a stint in Silent Hill hell, Anita essentially walks away from the incident with everything she wants. Childhood trauma mitigated, friend retained, and hey, now you don't have to worry about competing with Maya's fucking ghost on twitter for likes.

We're seeing a very strange thing with people defending this game, that people who dislike it merely don't care about a story centering around the angst of teenage girls, or suicide, or positing that even if it's clumsy, the overall message is positive and hopeful.

In reality though, the message isn't just clumsy, it's actively harmful, and it trades on the cultural cachet of teenage suicide for sympathy and *depth* while perpetuating harmful ideology that trauma can be an excuse for abusive behaviour towards others.

It reminds me of the Medium, which I suppose is fairly appropriate, in that it puts forth the idea that people abused in their youth will inevitably harm others as a result of that abuse. Medium says they have to go, whereas Short Message says any harm they cause is to be ignored