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October 2, 2025 • 16 mins

When one gets to the end of a game like Silent Hill f, one has many thoughts and questions, especially about the messaging around women, conformity and marriage.

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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
I'm welcome to stuff I've never told you, a prodiction
of Iyhart Radio, and welcome to another edition of Happy Hour.
Whatever you're choosing to do, we hope that you're doing
it responsibly. Are you doing everything responsibly, Samantha, Yes, sure,

(00:32):
I just got back from a trip and I did.
We tired.

Speaker 1 (00:35):
I am very tired. It takes it out of you.
But yes, I'm doing well and I'm doing it responsibly.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
And you, yes, I'm also very tired. I was dog
slash house sitting for Samantha well while you were gone,
and it's not that it's particularly exhausting, but I don't know.
When I come.

Speaker 1 (00:57):
Back when you're not at your own house feels tiring.
It does.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
And Peaches and I, you know, we just I try
to I try to make her have fun and so
she's not so sad and so we do a good job.
Oh thanks, Well, that is related because today I'm going
to spoil the heck out of Silent Hill. F Okay,
if you do not want to be spoiled on that game,

(01:25):
which just came out on September twenty fifth, twenty twenty five,
I got it. Delivered to some mass place my PlayStation five, which,
if you know, is not easy to move around. Because
I love Silent Hill. I have loved it since I
was quite young and probably way too young to be
playing it, and so I just had to. I had

(01:47):
to play it there, even though I get so scared there.
It's not my house.

Speaker 1 (01:51):
Funny, it's funny.

Speaker 2 (01:53):
Yeah, it was a risk, I have to admit. I
was like, this might be a really foolish thing that
I'm I'm gonna do. But it worked out. It worked out.
I beat it while I was there, Okay, and there.
It's not a sponsor. I just will say that, but yes,
I am like sometimes I'm like light spoilers, but no,

(02:14):
I'm going to spoil this all way, okay, because all right, Well,
first off, I think I should say most Silent Hill
games are set in a fictional town in America that
is Centralia, Pennsylvania's based off Centralia, Pennsylvania, because that is

(02:37):
where the underground coal fire has been burning and burning
and burning, and so like the road just splits apart,
like ashes come out and steam comes out of the roads,
and it's like ten people live there now, and everybody
who lives there is not allowed to pass their property
on because they can't get the fire stop. So most
of them have been in America, even though they're Japanese.

(02:59):
Game like, that's a Japanese company that makes them. This is,
to my knowledge, the first one that takes place in Japan,
and it takes place in nineteen sixties Japan. So that
being said, I don't know a lot about Japanese myths,
and I feel like there's a lot of stuff in
there that I was thinking, you know, if I knew

(03:20):
more about Japanese culture, I probably get this, but I don't,
so I might have missed some of that. But what
I can tell you is that in this game, you
play Hinoko, who's probably like, I don't know, freshman high
school equivalent age. And I thought, because we're on this show,

(03:45):
sometimes I'm like, am I reading too much into this?
Because it feels like the entire message of the game
is don't get married women because it's a trap in
me that it turns out that no, that was pretty
much thesa. I looked it up the next day just
to make sure I wasn't, you know, my feminist brain

(04:05):
wasn't putting messages that weren't really there. Nope, that was
pretty much the message. So you know, you're playing as
this character and she The way Silent Hill kind of
works is usually you're being punished for something or you

(04:26):
think like you have a lot of guilt about something,
so you're in your hometown or whatever, and then you
go to Silent Hill, which is kind of purgatory, and
you have to face these trials and eventually face the
thing you're trying to avoid, of a guilt. So every
time she goes into Silent Hill in this game, there's

(04:46):
this guy in a fox mask who is following her
around and it's just sort of like, in my opinion, creepy.
Another friend of mine was like I could see being
into that. I was like, he's a creeper. But anyway,
he's like he's guiding her through these trials, and as
you play her, you see her like say things that

(05:10):
I thought were very unsettling, like oh, when I hold
his hand, I don't have to think about anything and
I just follow what he does. It doesn't nothing else matters.
This is happiness, right, like all of these things, and
she goes through this strange ceremony, like he cuts off
her arm, which some people think is like you give
your hand in marriage, but she does get a cool

(05:32):
hulk arm out of that. I have to say, but yeah.

Speaker 1 (05:36):
He made.

Speaker 2 (05:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (05:39):
Plus I guess yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:41):
And I also have only beaten it once. It I'll
talk about the ending of the second, but there's five
different endings, and I'm given to understand that more about
this fox mask guy is explained, But it is like
he's trying to get her in a marriage because for
some reason, she's from a like special bloodline that was

(06:03):
born on a blue moon. It has all these things
and he wants to control her power, but he's using
marriage to do it. And it turns out you had
your sister Junko. She was like the perfect kid in
your abusive family and got married in an arranged marriage,

(06:24):
and she keeps popping up with all these like didbits
of uni to decide what you want? And you're reading
through Henako's the main characters journal, and she just didn't
like these stereotypes and things she was supposed to conform to.

(06:45):
She was very much like a tomboy. When she got
to middle school, like every her whole friend group changed.
And I have to say her friend groups sucks, but
they changed and she didn't get it. She was like,
I don't get why they they all wantays now, I
just that's not my thing. So the ending I got

(07:15):
is that this boy she was who was a really
good friend of hers name, she was giving her these
pills that had not been tested to help with her
stress because her dad was abusive and her mom. She
didn't like her mom either, because she was mad that
her mom, I guess, didn't stand up for herself. So

(07:39):
she was giving her these pills and she is getting
trapped in this arranged marriage that her dad was like
trying to force her into, and she went on to
mask her and killed everybody. It's called the arranged marriage massacre.
And she one must assume she's institutionalized because the ending

(07:59):
was so oh. I was so confused at first that
I didn't even know she was still alive because they're
talking about her. You overhear all of your friends talking
about you like you're dead, and so I thought maybe
she was in a coma. I actually had died. And
she does go through this whole ritual where she does

(08:20):
she kills her friends. But I mean sat Hills like
that where you're always guessing the reality of what you're seeing.
But from what I read online, note she is alive
and she just killed people at her wedding and his
pills that she was taking still affected. So yes, it's

(08:43):
pretty Harrow's home. This whole marriage thing, and the way
you like read her journal, she does see it as like,
you know, her sister got married and then was taken
away from her. Her mom is in this marriage where
she's being abused and all of all of these things
and just all these fights and they're in debt and

(09:06):
like not a good relationship. And also the kitchen comes
up a lot because he's always yelling. Her dad's always
yelling at her mom about I don't like what you cook,
and she's always like you, well, then you should cook,
which I related to because I got into that with
my mom too. I was like, why do you If
they don't like what you cook, then they can cook,
you know. So I saw that. And then she's got

(09:30):
kind of her this guy's shoe who is her partner,
and that's what they call each other when they were
best friends and they had this game that they played
all the time, and her relationship with him made her
other friend Rinko super jealous to like, I might I
might murder you jealous and probably does in another ending

(09:52):
I'll find out. But you've got him and he's like
the quote nice guy in the real world that was
giving her these pills. And then you've got the Fox
guy who's sort of the dangerous let me cut your
arm off guy. But they both they both treat her differently,
and she comments on it, like several times, like, don't

(10:17):
talk about me like that. They like Fox guy says,
she's really delicate, Like they have all these things where
they're trying to protect and control her choices, and it's
made pretty clear that she sees it as in the end,
like she has this battle between the woman who's trying
to take her over and the woman she wants to be.

(10:37):
And it's clear that, like in the in the bad ending,
you lose who she was and she gets married and
she loses her identity and she becomes his identity. Oh
my gosh. And then yeah, just the whole kind of
friend groups fracturing and uh, especially between her her female

(11:02):
friends even though she yeah, also not great, but her
friends and her that you can read, there's a part
where you can see in their minds and see what
they actually think of you, and it's so terrible. But
it's things like, you know, you don't realize she acts

(11:24):
like she does it she's not one of the girls,
but she doesn't realize how pretty she is. And now
she's she's with Shoe and she's just leading him alone.
Like all this is really negative, like stuff that a
lot of us have heard like in middle school. Is
a very tumultuous time. Yeah, I'm glad it. Well, I'm

(11:45):
glad it wasn't this tumultuous for me, but yeah, you
do have I remember thinking that too, but I was
more in terms of, like I don't get everybody suddenly
wants to date now and there's all this drama around it.
But it was a very it was a very interesting game.
I was not expecting such a message about marriage being

(12:07):
a trap, and you know, from what I read, like
the other endings, I kind of felt validated, both because
people had written about it. It's not just me thinking this,
but also I feel like in every ending, if you
get married, that's the bad ending. There's not a good

(12:29):
You don't want those dudes, right, you don't want those dudes,
and you know, we always say on here, happy marriage,
equal marriage, equitable marriage. Great, that's fantastic. But it was
so interesting and especially given the time because it's set
in the nineteen sixties, that it was just interesting that

(12:52):
it had this message of that and her being so
resistant to it and not wanting to really like she
just really hated because you can read her journal as
she goes along and it gets she gets angry and angry.
It's like, that's not who I want to be, that's
not what I want to do, And who am I?

(13:14):
If you get the good ending, she's like, I'm this
is who I am. I remember my name, but if
you get the bad ending, she forgets her name and
also like changing your name. But anyway, I really enjoyed it.
I'm excited to get a different ending. I haven't. I've

(13:34):
like looked up generally what they are, but I don't know.

Speaker 1 (13:38):
We kind of spoiled herself.

Speaker 2 (13:39):
Well, I well, just because I wanted to know, how
do you even get the second ending? And I'm glad
I looked it up because you can't every other ending.
You can't take the red pills that you because the
red pills you find them around and they heal you
a little bit. So if you're dying, you take the
red pills, and there's a ton of them. If you
want to get any under indo, you can't take the pills.

(14:01):
So I know that at least, and I'm almost done
beating it a second time, so okay, I'll report back.
But the fifth, the fifth and true ending, I think,
is the one where you learn about like the gods
that are fighting in the town, like the ancient gods,
and you learn the truth of the fox Masque, which

(14:23):
is all they call him, so I yeah, but and
then you learn the truth. I'm pretty sure. In the
good ending, she it's both of her live like she
becomes kind of the the one with the fox arm,
the whole arm, but also she has the version. She
has the version in Silent Hill and her hometown, so

(14:46):
we'll see. Yeah, I was bad at it, though, Samantha
got my kid. Well it's hard, it's like purposely hard.
You can only use melee weapons. But also if you're
not you're not used to the new controls, and they'll
kill you fast. All right, all right, I've gotten much better,

(15:09):
but I'm embarrassed because I had friends over like the
first two hours I played it talking. Oh no, not
at all, not at all. Well anyway, are youse listeners
have any thoughts about this? If you've played it, please
write it. I would love to hear from you. You

(15:30):
can email us at Hello at stuff I Never Told
You dot com. You can also find us on blue
Sky at mom Stuff podcast or on Instagram and TikTok
at stuff I Never Told You for also on YouTube.
We have new merchandise at Cotton Bureau and we have
a buck you can get where we get your books. Thanks,
It's always too our super produced Christine next Sector Produce
and a contributor Joey. Thank you and thanks to you
for listening Stuff I Never Told You. Expection my Heart

(15:52):
Radio for more podcast In my Heart Radio you can
check out the heart Radio app. I have a podcast,
or maybe you listen to your favorite show

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