Roleplaying and an brief analyses on Silent Hill 3's Heather Mason

   I thought it was an interesting factor that one should imagine if not visualise themselves in the role of the character that they are writing for. When roleplaying was mentioned during the storytelling and scriptwriting workshop that was held the other week, I immediately thought back to my 'secret' little bit of research that I was a little too embarrassed to mention about here... which, I am finally about to do so, right this very minute.

   As part of my research (In a way), I decided to create an RP blog (That has been active since summer break) for one of my most favourite survival horror protagonists (And no, I will not be posting the link here). While there has been a huge increase in strong female leads (Especially in the horror genre) in recent years, at the time, characters such as Heather Mason were still somewhat of a rarity. 

   While there were indeed other strong female leads (Such as Jill Valentine and Claire Redfield from the Resident Evil series), I still find Silent Hill 3's Heather Mason to be one of the most realistic and believable protagonists ever featured in a horror game (I would also like to mention that she out of all the Silent Hill protagonists, and being the only female protagonist from that series thus far, is also given extra bonus points for being thrown into the most terrifying instalment out of all of them. Though, that is a discussion for another time... But seriously, Silent Hill 3 remains the scariest title out of them all). 

   Fatal Frame has noticeably more fragile but still nonetheless competent enough female protagonists when compared to the Silent Hill and Resident Evil series (And while it might seem that their femininity might be a little exaggerated, I have indeed seen many young Japanese girls that behave in the timid if not delicate fashion the protagonists of Fatal Frame do. Whether this is done merely to appear to cute to others is yet another question that will have to be answered another time...). 

   But, I once again find Heather to be a far more well balanced character when compared to them, as a female character, she is neither too experienced nor too fragile. She is just... your everyday teenager that you will almost always see at the shopping mall. While she doesn't necessarily know how to handle a knife or gun as well as our famous Ex-STARS, beret-wearing member, she is still able to hold her own pretty darn well. The designers have clearly put a lot of thought into their first major female protagonist, from her appearance, down to her amusingly sarcastic mannerisms (Just take a look at her idle animation if you ever get the chance to, her poses alone are able to express just how done she actually is with everything, especially when compared to James Sunderland and Henry Townshend).

   Heather also eventually begins to numb out most of her fear towards this nightmarish world that she is so abruptly thrown in as the game progresses, a believable defence mechanism for anyone that still has a goal that needs to be reached. The girl has not yet given up despite the fact that she has practically lost something (Or someone) dear to her and that her entire life has gone straight to hell. She does not give into her supposed fate , with anger as her weapon and love as her shield, she bravely enters the town of Silent Hill to avenge her father...

   Needless to say, after all these years, I find myself empathising with Heather far more than I really do any other female game character (Claire Redfield might be a close second, however, seeing how emotional she can still get despite her many attempts to remain brave in the face of danger). To this day, I still find her to be one of the most relatable characters out there and while I have seen quite a few characters that are most probably modelled after her in recent horror game titles, none of them have truly reached the same level of empathy or relatability as this blonde heroine here.