Chairman of the Dead Autists Society. Secretly a 12 year old boy wearing the skin of lightly roasted almond. she/he Lacenet gave me permanent brain damage adulty mcadult face animation degree final year let's all die
A customer contacted our team with questions, and then finished their email with: "I am daunted by the complexities and unknowns." I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since.
this was initially intended to be a brief, maybe 3 sentences long post, but i had entirely too much to say about the subject and it turned into an entire essay. Welp
CONTENT WARNING for all of the canon-typical everything in the Hollow Knight series (colonialism, genocide, racism, child abuse & toxic parenting, parent loss, rape & unwanted pregnancy).
This essay also involves SILKSONG SPOILERS THROUGH ACT 3 AND THE TRUE ENDING.
ALSO AS USUAL: I read Hollow Knight 1 as an anticolonialist text. If you did not see these undertones in the series, or only saw Silksong as being particularly critical of empire, some of the contents of this essay may be challenging for you. Please be responsible in your choice whether to engage with this content, and also, be respectful here or wherever else you’re discussing this essay. Thanks.
LETS GET TO IT:
wherefore art thou beast?
the term "beast" in the hollow knight games is used to describe the bugs/creatures who aren't sapient, the ones who are considered animals.
when the insect characters refer to arachnids as "beasts" what do you think they mean by it, with that context?
herrah's a weaver - we don't know if she's among the first generation of weaver refugees in deepnest or if her parents were one of the lucky weaver couples who were able to have children and she was born in deepnest. but her people come from the single most technologically advanced civilization we've yet seen in the hollow knight setting.
herrah is literally spider cinderella - she went from ordinary commoner to queen when she and the deepling king fell in love. then she outlived him because weavers have disproportionately long lifespans compared to other bugs, and spent a significant part of her adult life thwarting hallownest's various attempts to invade and conquer deepnest, which obviously would have required incredibly high levels of political and wartime savvy.
herrah is so intensely beloved by her citizens, deeplings and weavers both, that there are deepling heavies who call themselves her devouts: this level of approval requires skill with statecraft and public relations. she is depicted by those who knew her and in her few personal appearances in both games as brave, wise, and loving.
with the new information we have from silksong about the weavers' fertility issues (with confirmation from hornet that herrah had these fertility problems and that hornet has them too), we are presented with the strong possibility that herrah telling the pale king that she would only become one of his dreamers if he could give her an heir was her giving him what she thought was an impossible condition. if that's the case, that makes her letting him try to prove her wrong even worse: rather than simply letting deepnest's longtime nemesis have her vagina to end the infection/fulfill a personal desire for parenthood, that would imply she did so to prove her point and make the pale king give up and leave her/deepnest alone. if the latter is the scenario we are looking at, then the pale king successfully impregnating her and herrah safely carrying hornet to term was unexpected, as was the pale king therefore laying claim on herrah's life for his hollow knight plan. but herrah doesn't renege on the deal - she calls it fair bargain and holds to her word.
and whatever the scenario we're looking at with hornet's conception and birth, herrah adored her daughter. in hornet's flashback, herrah is the first one to tell child hornet that everyone projecting their own hopes, dreams, and political goals onto her can go get bent; herrah is one of the few people in hornet's life who supports her personhood and agency. throughout the dreamers' appearances in hollow knight, as monomon and lurien argue about what's to be done about the seals, herrah is off to the side thinking "i literally do not care about any of this as long as hornet is safe" and her final thoughts, should the player use the dream nail to read them, are about her willingness to sacrifice everything for her daughter.
hallownest does not call herrah "the beast" because she's a dumb brute. they call her "the beast" because she is a spider - and because hallownest looks down upon all the other bug nations in the area as uncivilized savages.
similarly, the poem "pharloom's folly" that's presented as an epigraph to silksong calls grand mother silk a beast. there are many reasons that a casual observer who's made it through the game might agree: pharloom is as much of a nightmare state as hallownest - and much more obviously so, as none of their neighbors were able to successfully fight back. third era pharloom as we see it is deep into late stage capitalism, class stratification, and industry and has completely stripped all its neighbors for natural resources. and while the great machine of silk harvesting and implementation continues in third era pharloom to keep the cradle's lullaby going, third era pharloom inherited these systems from the second era's weaver rulers, who in turn had repurposed the form of the state that grand mother silk had originally created to privilege the weavers over all other bugs in pharloom's first era.
beyond this, grand mother silk is, notably, The Failmom Ever. the structure of pharloom already paints her as a great player of favorites, one of those migraine-inducing karen mothers they call "monster parents" in japan. at the same time, her failure to mention to the weavers that she created them from pharlids - essentially that they are adopted, and not literally sprung forth from her very own loins - and her creating lace to look and sound eternally neotenous suggest that she's the sort of parent who specifically wanted babies and children to coddle, and was not really prepared for or even interested in having teenage or adult offspring.
grand mother silk lost the weavers' trust starting with her not telling them the truth about their origins, leading to their estrangement and the weavers' eventual betrayal. from her reaction said betrayal seemingly caught her entirely off guard - either the weavers never felt comfortable confronting her about whether she actually wanted them as children or as servants/a personal ego boost, or they tried to and like many a real life failparent grand mother silk did not understand how serious this was for them. the second era of pharloom was defined by the weavers' attempts to unmesh themselves from grand mother silk and their mass emigration came from them realizing these attempts had backfired and era 2 pharloom still revolved around their mother regardless.
grand mother silk very much loves lace - "i want a daughter to love and who loves me; it doesn't matter if she's disabled or insane or short-lived," says grand mother silk of lace's birth in the relevant silk heart sequence (paraphrased into plain speech). she goes on to spend all of act 3 fighting with all her power to save lace from the void even though lace just betrayed her and cut her arm off, and actively sacrifices herself to get hornet and lace out of the abyss in the sister to the void ending.
hornet remarks in act 3 that the wound she inflicted on grand mother silk was already mortal, that grand mother silk is doomed regardless, and that the only reason she fights back is to protect lace. in response to the snail shamans' shock that grand mother silk has managed to resist the void for so long, hornet explains how grand mother silk is using her defensive cocoon as a stopgap, and that "even as the dark eats its outer [layer], she will spin its silk anew. the effort would be immense and it will strain her soul thin, but what other choice remains? this is the desperate act of a dying god."
but despite how grand mother silk herself feels, lace is anxious of and jealous for her mother's attention, fears abandonment, and is bitter to have been created with such a fragile and delicate body. some of lace's frustration comes from her suspicion that hornet has been brought as her replacement, and some may also stem from her mother's inability to actively parent her from within the prison of the cradle, but lace's neuroses are certainly also rooted in seeing what's happened to her sister/sibling phantom - who was also created by grand mother silk but is never mentioned by her in-game, and who has seemingly been swept into the margins to do the literal dirty work of expunging the citadel's exhaust where the underworks meet the bilewater, and left there to rot out of sight and out of mind as their body literally falls apart.
in addition to all this, silksong goes out of its way to put into words what makes "pale beings" - the white higher beings the pale king, white lady, and grand mother silk - different from other higher beings such as radiance and unn. pale beings, says hornet, are possessive and controlling and entitled; as half pale being hornet mentions recognizing these tendencies in herself and actively avoiding acting on them, and she says out loud with her mouth while trying to comfort green prince, "devotion or destruction… these are the only fates my kind allow." we learned in hollow knight that this sort of behavior out mr "no blazing kin" the pale king informed his monstrous treatment of his neighbors and ultimately doomed hallownest in his inability to leave radiance and the moth tribe alone; here in silksong we see not only pharloom's monstrous treatment of Its neighbors, but grand mother silk losing her whole ass mind at the weavers' betrayal and going full scorched earth on them.
but "pharloom's folly" does not address grand mother silk's tyranny or her bad parenting. it doesn't talk about her pale being-typical walking red flag tendencies. "pharloom's folly" is conductor romino remarking that everyone has forgotten grand mother silk is dangerous because she is asleep, but if she ever wakes up everyone is doomed, because she is a spider.
and hornet herself? we know her intimately after two full games. we know her fierce intelligence and her strength of character, we know the kindness she continually downplays - constantly offering advice and assistance to various characters in pharloom, saying "ok if it's on my way" while accepting severely out of her way errands, yet protesting to pilby and flick that all the wish-granting is also for her own benefit. we know her sense of duty and refusal to run away from her responsibilities, we've used the dream nail to see her grieving for herrah and worrying that sending ghost to murder radiance and end the infection might be the wrong choice morally. i will not sacrifice my life, says hornet over and over, because my life was too expensive. she refuses to let the snail shamans weasel out of their responsibility in the void trying to eat pharloom in act 3. if she must take the lives of the old hearts to save the pharloom region then she will do it personally, honorably; afterwards she speaks of karak, karmelita and her ants, nyleth and seth, and verdania with a deep respect. she gives ghost their name.
if we get the witch crest, on the way we watch hornet power through the aftermath of greyroot raping her and forcibly impregnating her with the parasitic twisted bud - an event whose implications only get more horrific in light of hornet's mention of having outlived several romantic partners and her knowledge of her weaver fertility problems; she has tried to have children many times in her past and was unable to. it's a particularly cruel echo of herrah's circumstances; while herrah consented under duress, that's still a far cry from what we see happen to hornet. and that's not even getting into mad doctor yarnaby's no-sedative-nor-anesthesia back alley abortion, performed with a drill fit with metal spikes that have "hardly begun to rust" according to crull and benjin.
and on the other hand, through the hunter's journal we discover that hornet can also be very silly. if a creature is furry and soft-looking, hornet wants to pet it; the bigger the better. she wholeheartedly condemns the citadel's zoo the memorium and its attempts to alter the native wildlife… except for the massive moss grub, whose pointy spines she wishes the citadel had bred out to maximize its huggability. as a child she hoped she would one day sprout wings like her father's, and envied the bees and mantises for their flight and their natural weapons. as an adult, she says, she has learned to accept the limitations of her body… by which she means supplement generously with tools. she refuses invitations to play games because she's busy… until she's offered rewards, and proceeds to have a great time. she has a dry sense of humor which she deploys to devastating effect ("your cellar seems to have an ant problem").
she backhands grindle, nuu, and yarnaby for overstepping her boundaries; she can do a little dance on sex pest flea kratt's head… and can also do one on nasty victim blamer bell hermit's shell, once you get to act 3. if you take her back to shakra's mother's final resting place and use the needolin, she'll play the requiem shakra taught her. she loves her mothers and hates her father and insists to lace that lace is a person like any other because lace's inferiority complex reminds hornet of what hallownest did to the hollow knight. her love of hunting she got from herrah; her love of tinkering, despite everything, is from the pale king.
various people throughout the pharloom region refer to hornet as a beast.
this is not a commentary on her personality or her behavior.
it is
because
she
is
a
spider.
when hollow knight characters refer to a sapient person as a "beast," it's a pejorative.
The context is in studying animation and for our final evil we have to pitch a film and mine is about a heron named Poobum (in the files). Set in Regents Park, and is an ecological horror. I've got two images up here, and the rest is under the cut, including a coolfun rough animation I've made :P
I've gotten to the stage of hyperfixation where I can't even look at fanart anymore without genuinely losing my mind. I start shaking. I have the fattest deadline on Thursday and all I'm doing is rotating my stupid baka Yuri in my head.
God you get me about whole "child" petname(??) people continue using post canon while shipping them
I'd make sense before Hornet and Lace would bond... but afterwards? No
People love to explain this choice by Hornet being superior in every way so Lace would never be equal to her; being called a child in their setting is often synonymous to lack of experience
"Lace needs to be reminded about her previous lack of agency and being created for one purpose even in romantic dynamic with hornet"™
Hornet is not goody two shoes but i cannot imagine her pushing boundaries & making someone uncomfortable on purpose if she knows them. It's not like she cannot simply use Lace's name after they'll properly introduce eachother
Yeah like. Apart from the fact that its a weird af petname to be using in a romantic context (though ig you can argue that calling people 'baby' is just as weird, if you really think about it), I think what a lot of people fail to realize isn't that it's just a cute weird quirk of speech that Hornet has, it started off as an insult at first before morphing into Lace's title when Hornet realized the truth of her heritage. Hornet, though patient, curious, and kindhearted, is still very much the scion of a Higher Being- she has a strong sense of pride, the experience to justify it, and an innate drive for dominance that underlies all of her behavior. When Lace first meets her in Deep Docks, she implies that Hornet is better off letting her kill her because she's too weak to survive the trials up ahead, which is a direct insult to Hornet's capabilities. Hornet responds in turn with the 'child' insult to both Lace that she's not naive and to put her in her place. This happens again at the Citadel gates when Lace incorrectly assumes that Hornet has no concept of Higher Beings or the games that they play with mortals. Hornet calling Lace a child in those instances is essentially pulling rank on her by outright saying 'I have more experience than you' while also making a jab at Lace's behavior- all with one word.
And then- the reveal. Turns out that Lace didn't protest Hornet calling her a kid because LITERALLY the entire purpose of her existence is to play as the living baby doll for a cruel god who's just as willing to discard her as she is to nurture her. This is when Hornet shifts to using it as a title, because Lace doesn't have an official one to give otherwise and 'Child of the Pale God at the Heart of the Haunting' is a fucking mouthful to deal with. Idk if anyone else noticed, but Hornet spends a lot of the game avoiding using people's names directly unless she's comfortable with them; she defaults to titles above all else, which I believe to be a respect thing in the world of Hollow Knight. These societies place a lot of worth on a bug's place in the world, so formally referring to them by that place affirms their worth and pays them respect, whereas using their name alone implies a more casual, intimate relationship akin to friendship (something that Lace and Hornet notably did not have throughout most of the game). I don't think that it's a coincidence in the slightest that Higher Beings seem to lack names entirely- they rank above all else and thus are to be referred to exclusively by their title to afford them the respect that they deserve. 'Child,' then, is the appropriate title to use in this case, as being the child of GMS is not only Lace's most important feature, it's also her place in the world. Any other iteration wouldn't have worked- 'White Knight' is a descriptor that doesn't quite fit what Lace's actual role is, whereas 'Pale Child' applies to both of them. Hornet was kind of at a loss for anything else she could use there. I can also imagine that a Higher Being like GMS would not take kindly to any title being placed on her daughter that would have ranked her as equal to or potentially above GMS herself.
Now that GMS is dead, however, that title is no longer accurate, and so I cannot see Hornet sticking to it for much longer after their escape from the Void. Partially because it doesn't fit Lace now that she's been cut free from her mother's binds, but mostly because Lace has made it very clear that she despises what she was, and Hornet- though capable of great cruelty- is not a cruel person. I also cannot imagine that Lace would tolerate it either, as it seems that the reason why she didn't put up a fuss to Hornet calling her 'child' previously was because she's an absolute mire of bitterness and self-loathing underneath all the cute giggles and gleeful sadism.
Remember kids: the appeal to Lacenet is the fact that Hornet understands and treats Lace as a person worthy of respect, not because haha cute lesbians have funny banter and funny nicknames. That's part of why they work so well, yes, but really the main appeal to them as a ship for me is the fact that Hornet understands the trauma that Lace went through as another god-daughter who survived a god-driven zombie apocalypse + sees Lace as a person despite her synthetic origins, and has tolerance enough to handle the aftermath of Lace's abuse while also not being enough of a pushover to just let her get away with anything she wants when she's in a bad mood
so today a public health official guy came into my class to give a lecture on disaster awareness and he was talking about house fires and mentioned that the reason people most likely die during a house fire is because they refuse to leave their pet inside or they go back to get their pet. and right when he said this my friend immediately turned his head and looked at me and in that moment I had the most complete and genuine acceptance take over my body. I would 100% in front of my family and Jesus himself walk straight back into some raging inferno that was once my house to go get my fat cat. I nodded back
the best part of this post is reading all the tags from animal people who would also go back to save their pets. like no hesitation. walk backwards from heaven straight back into hell. someone even said they would go back for their fish. amazing
If you are a person who would walk into a blazing inferno for your animal, and your pet has free movement around the house, here’s a training exercise that could help save you both:
1) Set off your smoke alarm or play the sound on your phone (if your home has no smoke alarms, pease get some!)
2) stand BY THE FRONT DOOR to hand out treats
Do this a couple times and then keep it up NO EXCEPTIONS. Accidentally set the alarm off cooking? Treats by the door. Smoke alarm sound on TV? Treats by the door. Changing your smoke alarm batteries twice a year like you’re supposed to? Give them a test run and your pets get treats by the door.
Most dogs and cats will clue in VERY quickly that hearing that specific sound means go to the front door and wait for treats.
If there’s an emergency and even if you leave by another way, you will still know the most likely place your pet(s) is and can direct first responders to help.
You can also do this for any other kind of emergency alarm. My friend had both her cats trained to go to the front door for a tsunami siren.
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