#i guess i won't TAG Cassandra cause ffffuck it idk how much the Greek myth and Silent Hill fandoms overlap

[wahbegan]

Angela Orosco and the Prophet Cassandra

So, this is something i’ve yet to see any youtube scholar cover. Oh this post is mostly about violent rape and incest by the way so y’know

So Cassandra, in case you’ve ever heard someone reference her like they assumed you knew what they were talking about and you had to awkwardly laugh along, was a Greek priestess of Apollo who was given by him the power to see the future, but the curse that no one would believe her. Reasons for this vary, as they often do in Greek myths, but the main one is that she promised Apollo love but went back on her word.

She was also, less known to pop culture but bafflingly much more well-covered in art and sculpture, because i guess depictions of rape have gotten men off as long as they’ve existed, brutally raped by the Greek uh “hero” Ajax in Athena’s temple, while she holds on to a statue of Athena and begs for her protection.

She is then, even less known than the Ajax bit, taken as a sex slave by King Agamemnon, one of the biggest pieces of shit in Greek myth which is really saying something and impregnated by him, giving birth to twins before he returns home and his wife (who had taken a lover by that point he’d been gone a long time politics blah blah blah) promptly killed him. And Cassandra. She killed both of them, in spite of the fact that she was his victim.

So here we have a Trojan Priestess who nobody ever believed because she refused a God, was violently raped, was made a sex slave by let’s face it ages are sketchy but uh a man old enough to be her father, and then was murdered by her rapist and enslaver’s wife.

In Silent Hill 2, Angela is a character who has been raped repeatedly and her whole life by at least her father, and if we’re considering other bits canon, her brother as well. This is something her mother, even though she’s clearly the victim, inexplicably blames HER for. Her backstory along with how defensive she gets when she thinks James doesn’t believe her about something implies to me that this is something that she’s tried to speak about before, but has never been believed. 

And more importantly, there are at least two very notable times in the game where she just out and spoils the fucking ending of the game she’s in.

First, she accuses James of wanting his wife out of the way and heavily implies that he killed her himself. This is treated like the rambling of an incredibly traumatized young woman lashing out as James because he’s a man but is, of course, true.

Next is her final scene, wherein she accepts her past and her murder of her father (and brother?). She asks James to give her back the knife she left him earlier, to which he refuses because y’know giving suicidal people sharp implements is often considered a faux pas, even in circumstances such as this. She looks darkly amused by this and asks him: “Why? Saving it for yourself?”

This is treated as the broken and despondent final words of a woman who has decided she can only find peace in death but is, of course, true.

Well, okay, it’s only true for one of the possible endings but it’s often considered the canon ending and shut the fuck up i’m trying to make a point.

The point being i have made jokes aplenty on this blog before about how Angela’s lines can act like an Always Sunny title card set-up, but when i first learned of the Prophet Cassandra’s history of sexual victimization and being murdered by a woman who blamed her for it, something seemed to click inside me.

I feel like the choice to have Angela accurately predict the end of the game before it happens was a conscious and deliberate choice on their part it’s Cassandra i think Team Silent was doing Cassandra all right i’m not in the mood to be eloquent i’m in a hurry someone tag the uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh gaming muse or someone else who does SH analysis on youtube for a living idk