Heather/Cheryl Is So Cool

I heard they improved her face in the new PTB? Or was that Cybil.

Oh man I love the entire story arc of Heather. I could talk about it all day and still not be out of things to bring up. The cool thing about Silent Hill is that despite the fact that Silent Hill 3 brings back the cult it still has a lot of influences from Silent Hill 2 in the concept that the town is a living entity that has a will of its own.

(Spoiler alert.)

With that in mind Heather is a 17 year old girl, with a lot of the cliches and tropes of women that age alongside it. She's in a spot where she's mature enough to act as an adult, but still young enough that she still desires independence, yet still depends on her father for emotional supports. Heather also gets these wild bursts of emotion and acts impulsively. In other words, at the time this game was released she was an atypical horror protagonist especially when it came to video game horror. When I first played Silent Hill 3 I too was a young girl, and Heather seemed a character I could relate to (And at the time I thought she seemed way more adult than me. As an adult I realize how immature she really is.)

When her Father dies she resorts to rage and a desire for revenge, even when she's offered a breadcrumb trail about being told the circumstances of her birth she disregards all of that because she doesn't need all these adults trying to get in her head. At her core, she's a woman at the most confusing point of her life and she's trying to understand what is going on as the entire world is collapsing all around her.

Even the town takes some malicious glee in tormenting her as a teenager. Showing her distorted images of herself, getting letters from 'stalkers' or unwanted calls from strangers, and even the theme of the cult (Trying to forcibly impregnate her) are very real fears that could apply to anyone at a point in Heather's but magnified tenfold. She doesn't know who she can trust, the only family she knows is dead, and she still manages to fight these literal monsters from hell, cut through the bullshit of a cult that drank way too much kool-aid, gain inner strength from her own resolve, kill a literal god (that she was forced to birth, even if Claudia finished it) and still move on with her life with the only adult she learned she could trust through all of this (Douglas.) She is a very strong and likeable character not only despite her flaws but also because of them.

Side note - I'm surprised that PTSD was not in her storyline in the DBD 'After Silent Hill' Lore, and instead she turned to help people. It seems a bit uncharacteristic of her to want to help others, but to be fair we don't really know that side of her since they really didn't make character models of people who weren't severely plot relevant (Silent Hill does love their limited cast) and there wasn't a lot of time to get to know her. Since, at the start she's running from a man she doesn't know who said he's been following her, then monsters form, then her father gets brutally murdered by the cult, then revenge and hate time.