Silent Hill artist Masahiro Ito is getting tired of some of the fan theories about the series, lamenting that he occasionally needs to "deny the fuckin ridiculous headcanons."
Spoilers for Silent Hill 2 and its remake are below, as well as mentions of potentially upsetting topics like sexual assault.
Silent Hill is a series that inspires a ton of fan theories. When you're dealing with the occult or unreliable narrators in a town that has been shown to be able to shape itself to specifically target people's trauma, there's no doubt a lot of interpretations that can come to be. A developer from Bloober Team – who developed the Silent Hill 2 remake – even said they spent hours looking up fan theories during the remake's development.
While some of these are extremely out there – like a theory/debate on whether Silent Hill 4's Walter Sullivan is circumcised (yes, really) – some of these are more realistic than others. There was a long-standing theory that James Sunderland had his dead wife Mary's body in the back of his car, which was confirmed by using the camera out of bounds in the Silent Hill 2 remake. Plus, a theory of the game taking place in a time loop due to series' art director Masahiro Ito saying that every Silent Hill 2 ending is canon seems to have been hinted at in the remake.
However, despite being a proponent of some theories, Ito is seemingly tired of them. Ito posted a tweet showing artwork of the Silent Hill 2 boss, Abstract Daddy, which is theorized to be a monstrous manifestation of the character Angela Orosco's trauma after she was sexually assaulted.
While Ito has previously confirmed that the version of this monster that James sees is different to what Angela sees, a fan asked Ito if James had also been a victim of sexual assualt, which would trigger his response to the boss. Ito asked why this had to be the case and said that the fan in question should "listen to their own thoughts without listening to famous headcanons."
Ito later doubled down on things in response to a fan saying the theory "has no merit at all" by saying, "but 'low IQs' believe the insane theories and spread them. I occasionally need to deny the fuckin ridiculous headcanons." I imagine it has to be exhausting being any prominent game dev on Twitter (see: Hideki Kamiya's mentions being filled with vitriol after he said he felt bad Assassin's Creed Shadows was criticized so much), so it's no wonder Ito is starting to get a bit annoyed with the amount of theories he receives almost daily.
A developer on the Silent Hill 2 remake recently revealed that he was "afraid there might be no good way" to rebuild the game.
