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Posts tagged: tw: parental abuse

yourfavisneuroatypical:
“[image of a man in a green button up shirt standing in an old abandoned building. the wall in front of him is torn apart to create a big gap. on this image is a title reading “Positive Representation for Neuroatypical...

yourfavisneuroatypical:

[image of a man in a green button up shirt standing in an old abandoned building.  the wall in front of him is torn apart to create a big gap.  on this image is a title reading “Positive Representation for Neuroatypical People”]

Silent Hill

While this blog is primarily about fan interpretations of characters as neuroatypical, I thought it would also be good to share examples of canonical representation for neuroatypical people. Silent Hill is a series of survival horror games which are well known for how frightening they are: but what many don’t know is that this series also represents neuroatypical people in a very good way.

Most horror stories show asylums as creepy places with those weird dangerous “insane” people out to get you - but in Silent Hill, it is the doctors, nurses, and institutions which are evil.  The patients are almost always seen positively, and if they aren’t it isn’t because of their illness.  Stanley Coleman, for instance, is a patient who is portrayed negatively because he stalks and terrifies women.

In every instance in which this series includes a hospital, the game touches on the abuses and violence neuroatypical suffer.  Silent Hill is all about justice - and these games heavily imply that the town punishes or has punished ableist, abusive neurotypicals.  

Brookhaven Hospital is a powerful example when you examine the notes left by both doctors and patients.  Patient notes are sympathetic, frightened, upset, fearful.  Doctor’s notes are abusive, dismissive, and violent.  These levels frame the stories in ways that look kindly upon neuroatypical people, and condemn abusive doctors and nurses violently.

This culminates in Silent Hill: Downpour, where the game moves from oblique subtle references to all out in your face condemnation.  St. Maria’s Monastery is a place where neuroatypical children were left by their parents to be “fixed”.  Notes in the level show how violently evil the doctors were, and how much the children suffered.  The level includes ghostly children crying about medicine that makes them feel bad, and hospital beds shaking as you hear a child scream.  One note literally has a doctor say that it is time to give an autistic child (who she calls horrific things) a lobotomy because he annoyed her.

This game also includes Araidne Johnson, and the story of how her horrible mother murdered her because she was autistic and was “tired of caring for her”.  This revelation is shocking and framed as being just as horrific as it really is - and given the town, it’s likely Mrs. Johnson never made it out alive.  Some of the monsters are screaming women who latch onto the main character’s back and weigh him down.  Given other themes of the story, this woman can be seen as relating to abusive mothers, perhaps even Mrs. Johnson.

These are not happy games.  They are violent and horrifying, but what is good about them, is they are true.  They show the reality of how these institutions work, of how bigoted doctors and nurses treat neuroatypical people, what neuroatypical people suffer, how they are abused and killed for being who they are.  It is highly upsetting and triggering - but also very refreshing to see such a candid representation of what is a very real problem in many places the world over.