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Cheryl Mason |
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| Aliases | Heather |
| Canon | Silent Hill: Shattered Memories |
| Timeline | After Dahlia's car crash (midgame) |
| Gender | Female |
| Age | 25 |
| Species | |
| Crimes committed | (Attempted) murder, prostitution, resisting arrest, sexual misconduct, underage substance abuse, shoplifting, extortion, academic dishonesty, juvenile delinquency |
| Journal | callunaelectra |
| Player | Ethan |
Cheryl H. Mason is a fragile girl with a heavy - and I mean heavy - Electra complex.
Personality
Cheryl is, at her very core, a flawed girl. The loss of her father at an early age affected her in ways from which she'd never fully recover - she'd attempt to delude herself into his existence, calling empty numbers to hold conversations with a man she hadn't seen in years, visiting his old apartment, and creating stories about his life. Aside from her own delusions of cults, death and a heroic father who was never really more than an ordinary man, Cheryl - "Heather," as she preferred to be called - was a problem child in almost every way. She shoplifted, ignored her schoolwork, and went so far as to regularly sleep with a teacher in a desperate bid to raise her grades back up.
A large part of this can be traced back to problems with her parents. After a series of fights and an ever-dissolving marriage, Harry and Dahlia Mason ended up divorcing. Despite Harry's reassurances to young Cheryl that they'd both always love her, even if they didn't love each other, a rift was created, and Cheryl blamed herself for this fault. When Harry moved away from Silent Hill to Portland, Maine, a seven-year-old Cheryl went along with him - and when he died in a car accident, leaving his daughter behind, "Heather" stayed there on her own. She concocted a series of fantastic delusions inside her own head - that her mother, Dahlia, had been a crazed woman who gave birth to her before as Alessa. That her father had taken her reincarnated self and ran from the town of Silent Hill to Portland, escaping the witch and doing what he had to do in the process. An Electra complex began to develop - Cheryl fetishizing her father as some heroic figure, fighting to save her and do everything he could as a single father, and growing more and more hostile towards her mother and the town she grew in.
This idealization of her father - and sudden loss, obviously - grew into an unhealthy part of her life. She hung with the wrong crowd, got caught up in many things she shouldn't have been involved in, and ended up regretting it. By the age of twenty-five, she she had returned to Silent Hill and been enlisted in therapy with Dr. Michael Kaufmann at the Lighthouse Clinic. At this point, the way you play the game influences Cheryl's "personality." I'll be using the information from the game, some of the facts from Silent Hill 3, and Love Lost's canonical facts to develop Cheryl as a character - ideally, without too much of my own bias seeping in.
First, her problematic nature as a teenager has mostly abated as a young adult. What's left is a reclusive, quiet young woman, reticent and withdrawn. She wears almost conservative clothing, choosing to cover what she can of her body, and as of the Love Lost ending Kaufmann specifically tells her about her "abnormal sexuality" - as I played the game, and as I'll probably be playing Cheryl, this specifically refers to her habit of avoiding it wherever humanly possible, even going so far as to repress her own sexuality. This probably relates to some sense of shame, especially relating to her teenage life and escapades. Seeing as how she probably wasn't the most popular little fledgling - the "gossip" mission shows several other schoolgirls taking pictures of Cheryl and her teacher, Silent Hill 1 shows a profound sense of isolation on Alessa/Cheryl's part, and even Silent Hill 3 outright shows Heather eating alone in the mall. This loneliness, combined with her seeming lack of sexuality and Kaufmann's statements about her blaming herself for the dissolution of her parents' marriage, points to a heavy blame complex - just as her fantastic, make-believe past points towards a desperate wish to not have to blame herself. She's got a fantastic imagination, being able to create all sorts of delusions and fantasies for herself - Silent Hill 1 and Shattered Memories are proof enough of this. If she really wanted to, I'd guess that she'd be quite the writer or artist; however, as it is, she's retreated too much into herself to really try. No matter how you paint it, the normally acerbic Kaufmann comments on the picture with relatively complacent, if fake words; however, we won't be going with my game file for that, since i'm relatively sure painting the house with the Wiimote is all but impossible.
More than anything, though, she fears death. The death of others, her family, herself - she even denies its existence, when it comes to her father. Her father is immortal, a hero in her eyes - she refuses to acknowledge his death eighteen years ago until the very end of the game. Every time Harry should die in-game, he miraculously escapes - from his two car accidents to drowning in the swim to the lighthouse at the end, he is literally indestructible. If you die in the Nightmare sections, there is no reloading of saves - you simply wake up at the beginning of the section again. When Cybil pulls a gun on him, a nightmare section conveniently arrives to save you.
Finally, there's a heavy dose of escapism involved in her psyche - even if she does acknowledge in the end that part of the blame lies on her, she still tries to escape her past. From lashing out at her mother, to inventing a past where her father lived - Cheryl is constantly running from herself. After the therapy, she's probably started to try and confront her own past a little more, but she's still not quite ready to face herself in full. When Harry starts to make it to the lighthouse, Cheryl herself is the one to call him in a last-ditch effort to stall him.
Cowardice, denial, and delusion - three large elements of the girl named Cheryl. She desperately attempts to avoid placing the blame on herself, despite instinctively blaming herself for the divorce. She repeatedly attempts to deny the events in her past, coming up with more and more falsified stories until she actually believes her own lies. And, when faced with danger - just like Harry, in the game's combat system - the only option she can really take is running. However, underneath it all lies someone with potential for grand inner strength. She is able to confront her demons, letting her father retreat to the recesses of her mind and acknowledging that he died so many years ago.
Perhaps, given some time, reflection and more therapy, she'll be able to grow into her own self.