Heaven's Night: A Brief Analysis of Silent Hill Porn

Silent Hill has long since been my favorite video game series out there. While the stories of the later games have been really hit or miss for me, they're still close to my heart. But sometime recently when viewing this post about Animal Crossing porn I was struck with how unusual an idea it was. I wanted to try my hand at looking over and graphing scandalous fan art. When thinking which series I'd like to try first the answer was immediately obvious: Silent Hill.

I've done things a bit different than in the post, mostly, by searching for more than simply which characters were the most prolific. I set up six items I would check when viewing each image. First off, I would see which characters were in each image, but then go on to quantify whether they were in a "gay" or "straight" scene. It was also important to see whether the character(s) were "gender swapped" as it seemed some characters continued to show this pattern. If there were monsters aside from Pyramid Head, Valtiel, The Butcher, or Nurses then that went into the "Other Monsters" category. Then I had to make room for the "pictures" quantifier, which basically meant the character in the fanart was alone and simply posing. Lastly, there is a section for "crossover" which is for all the times characters from different fandom showed up in the predominantly Silent Hill art.

Continue reading to see the data I collected.

Here's some of the data I collected in a more pretty form

Immediately viewable from just this image are many trends I found while searching. For one, Pyramid Head had by far the most occurrences despite only canonically being in Silent Hill 2 and then kind of Silent Hill: Homecoming. "Original" Pyramid Head design was used most often though the Homecoming/movie version showed up as well. James was the character most often shown with a male partner aside from Pyramid Head, but unlike Pyramid Head James only had gay occurrences. There was only one piece of fanart for James depicting him with his wife. 

Possibly due to the nature of the community, many female characters had only a handful of images. Most had 10 or under overall representation. Predominantly, representation of female characters was done in either straight or "picture" fashion. Gay scenes were even more of a minority.

 Pyramid Head was far ahead of the rest of the pack with 267 overall depictions. Various nurse characters came in with 81 overall. The nurses were frequently of the Silent Hill 2/3/movie variety. There were no Silent Hill nurses (the ones with giant growths on their backs). Heather had 63 images featuring her and Maria follows with a close 52. After that, James had 44, Eileen had 33, and Henry had 20. Most other characters did not have much showing, as was viewable by the Least Overall Fanart pie chart. 

From the top characters, I made bar graphs to show how often they were presented in artwork. 

This data was already presented on the original image, but I feel is simpler to read this way. Especially because the other top characters have graphs like this so it makes for easier comparisons. Pyramid Head had the most instances of gender swapping, only one higher than nurses. Despite the fact that Pyramid Head is very connected to certain monsters in the Silent Hill world, artwork did not reflect this very much. With Pyramid Head being the unofficial figurehead of the series it makes sense that he was the ambassador between Silent Hill and other things (Resident Evil, etc). 

Nurses had the highest instance of gender swapping although most of those images were solely of the nurse. As stated before, these were all basically nurses from 2, 3, and the movie. 1 and 4 nurses were left out of the picture completely. Unexpectedly, nurse on nurse action was very low. 

Heather is 17 years old which is just about "legal" age in many places. Whether or not that factors into the amount of art for her is unknown however. Her status as the main character for Silent Hill 3 is probably a much bigger reason as to why she has so much art. While completely lacking in the gender swap category, like most characters, she does have a higher proponent of lesbianism than any other female characters. Often she was depicted with monsters and disembodied body parts. Despite her connection to Valtiel, that was only depicted once.

Maria was always a rather sexual character so her prevalence makes about as much sense as Pyramid Head's does. Most art depicted her and Pyramid Head, which again makes sense, but none with James. Given the sexual tension between the two characters it is odd that nobody chose to explore it. Along with straight artwork Maria was shown time and time again in solo images. Apparently the top women in the Silent Hill world are Heather and Maria. 

Despite James being strongly connected to two women in Silent Hill 2 the fandom instead pushes him into everything except those relationships. Much of his art sticks him with Pyramid Head, which at least could be slightly canonical (as Pyramid Head goes after much of anything). Aside from Pyramid Head, James is often paired with Harry for some unknown reason. Harry at least has much more going on for him in the personality department than any of the other male leads. 

So, after all that there's not much to say. I was pleasantly surprised to find there were no child Walter pictures and only one instance of Laura art. The strangest crossover I saw was that of Pyramid Head and Ron Weasley of the Harry Potter universe. Silent Hill 2 and 3 are by far the most popular games for fanart. There was no fanart I saw for Origins and only one for Homecoming. Even Silent Hill 4: The Room was severely lacking in anything much else than Eileen. 

It was an interesting study of sorts and maybe I'll do one again. It's a lot harder than it looks though, damn.