i feel bad for asking but i'm in desperate need of help. i have several disabilities that makes living alone or getting a job impossible for me. my room is often covered in filth and the majority of my clothes are falling apart. i have no way of getting enough money to eat regularly beyond applying for disability benefits. until i can get those it'd be of great assistance if you could donate to my partner as it's planning on moving in with me this year to help care for me before my health deteriorates further. it's also doing pet portrait commissions if you'd like something in return. thank you for reading, here's my cat willow.
given the current climate this pride especially i feel i must mention that i love my trans friends, i stand with trans people in the fight against transphobic legislation and those who would enforce it, and this blog is not a good place for you to be if you do not vibe with that
lace who is isn’t normal about the concept of consequence. lace who does not allow herself to be forgiven until she is punished.
lace who slips up and errs, and has to endure hornet’s repeated insistence that she will not suffer on account of something that was hardly a slight. meanwhile lace is slowly going insane. because hornet does not understand that she is not yet absolved. does she just want her guilt to fester? does she hate her? want to see her squirm? is that it?
lace ending nearly every argument with “then hit me 😊” and hornet never does and inside of her mind lace is pulling her apart with the teeth she doesn’t have
i feel bad for asking but i'm in desperate need of help. i have several disabilities that makes living alone or getting a job impossible for me. my room is often covered in filth and the majority of my clothes are falling apart. i have no way of getting enough money to eat regularly beyond applying for disability benefits. until i can get those it'd be of great assistance if you could donate to my partner as it's planning on moving in with me this year to help care for me before my health deteriorates further. it's also doing pet portrait commissions if you'd like something in return. thank you for reading, here's my cat willow.
Hey there. Sorry to bother - I just came across your baba style image correcting common hollow knight and silksong misreadings (which is also on your pinned and very tasteful) (i get it's more than misreadings, I'm trying to stay brief)
I was curious about one of those, and my guess is, I just don't frequent same parts of fandom and haven't run into this issue. I promise I'm not here with malicious intent and want to learn your point of view.
Lace... seems like a child to me, at least metaphorically. She gets called a 'child' by the protagonist almost the whole game, including when her true nature was revealed, iirc "You always had a scent, child." Her big character arc moment was going against her mother for the first time - kind of separation a preteen would go through. She is seen as somewhat of a parallel to Hornet, who got raised and nurtured by multiple mother figures, opposed to Lace who was created to look and act like a child, and wasn't property raised or nurtured. She might have lived for centuries, and seem like a mature being, but was she ever allowed to grow up mentally?
Please, I'd love to know what I have missed in the game, or why do you oppose this vision. No pressure if you don't feel like it or don't want to, though.
Thanks in advance
I appreciate that you're not here with hostility. I'll try to explain things as clearly as possible. (I'll be putting it under the cut because it gets long, but TL;DR: Lace's story is meant to be a metaphor for the infantilization of disabled adults in abusive environments, and taking the "child" stuff at face value deeply misconstrues the core of the Hollow Knight narrative as a whole.)
The Nuance Behind Being Called "Child"
Yes, there is dialogue referring to Lace as "child," but in most cases, it's meant to represent her status as "the Monarch's child" rather than her age, whether physical or mental. Hornet in particular uses "child" to show that Lace doesn't intimidate her, at least at the start of their interactions ("Your threats are worthless, child").
Caretaker gets quoted a lot in defense of calling Lace a child, but there's a few things a lot of people seem to forget:
The Caretaker has never actually met Lace. What he says is a comment on her behavior, which he's only observed at a distance.
The Caretaker is a liar. Act 3 is started because he leaves out key details about how the Soul Snare works, therefore lying about its safety. He's no stranger to lying and telling half-truths for his own benefit.
The part everyone quotes isn't the full quote. What the Caretaker says is "Look of a child and a mind to match, but her's been up wanderin' this Citadel longer'n most. Even in its long silence, way 'fore you came and roused its ire." This shows that Lace has been around for an incredibly long time, which means that even if she was shaped as a child, she no longer is. Regardless of whether GMS managed to keep her the same physically, it's simply not possible to stop someone from maturing mentally. As my friend Savvy put it, a lot of people arguing that Lace was created with the mental maturity of a child tend to equate "mental maturity" with lived experience. Lace doesn't exist in a stagnant state of being "born yesterday," so to speak. (paraphrased from a post by @the-valiant-valkyrie, read what she said here)
Now, Lace also has her own dialogue about this, but she doesn't call herself a child. Instead, she says she was "shaped to act as a child." The deliberate use of the phrase "act as a child" illustrates that childhood is a role Lace is meant to play, not an accurate descriptor of her as a person, and we can infer it's a role she hates based on what she says about herself in this same scene:
"Life? You're too generous! This weak, wasting existence. This was not life, just a husk shaped to act as a child. [...] Head on. Climb up, up and away. You've earned your audience with the divine. Face the holy mother who would fashion so cruel and crude a daughter as me."
This shows us that Lace is failing to fulfill this role of a perfect little girl, and as such, views herself as worthless. After all, if she can no longer be what she was made to be, then that would mean she's nothing at all.
We can also draw a parallel to Hornet—another adult character who spends a large part of the game being referred to as a child, both in term of being mistaken for one (Shakra calling her "a child barely hatched" in their first meeting) and as a denotation of her status as the child of a god (Mister Mushroom calling her "Wyrm child," or the White Lady calling her "Gendered child" and "Spider's child").
Neglect and the Disability and Abuse Allegories
In addition, Lace is described as being dependent on silk. Her full entry in the Hunter's Journal says "Much Silk would have been needed to see her sustained." This would make her dependent on her Mother, and as we know, her Mother was almost entirely absent from her life. Lace begs Grand Mother Silk to acknowledge her in her needolin dialogue ("See me cut! See me serve! See me, your knight… See me, your daughter…"), and yet her Mother never gives her so much as a passing glance until the moment of her rebellion.
All of this paints a deep parallel to disabled adults in abusive homes. They're unable to leave because they depend on their abusers, and often, their disability is used to treat them as lesser and make them easier to manipulate. In the cases of neurodivergent people especially, people tend to constantly hover over or police their actions, simply because they're neurodivergent. Neurotypical people are held accountable for their actions when they make poor decisions, but of a neurodivergent person makes a poor decision, suddenly "they weren't thinking straight" or "they don't know any better." (As a neurodivergent adult, I've had both of these used against me.)
All of this is to say, disabled adults (especially neurodivergent adults) in abusive homes are deprived of agency because they're seen as "lesser" for something completely out of their control.
What We Hear vs. What We See
Another thing I wanna bring up is that the Hollow Knight series is very heavy on show, don't tell storytelling, especially in the sense that what we're told is often different from what we're shown.
Going into Hollow Knight completely blind, you're shown early on that the titular Hollow Knight is not quite what you're told it is later. The City of Tears memorial says that the Hollow Knight allowed Hallownest to stand eternal, but you've clearly seen that the kingdom is crumbling. The Abyss memory scene tells you that the Pure Vessel had no emotion to allow Radiance back out of the seal, but you can see that the Infection has ravaged the land worse than ever before (and the Path of Pain cutscene outright shows us that the Hollow Knight loved its father, meaning the plan was doomed to fail from the beginning).
In many ways, it's the same with Lace. You're told by the Caretaker she was made to be a child, and you're also told by Lace that she was made to act like a child, but you're never shown that she's a child. Instead, you're shown that Lace resents the role she's made to play, and that she wants to be seen for more than what she was created to be.
Becoming What You're Made To Be vs. Choosing Your Own Path
The bad endings in both Hollow Knight games involve following the path you're told to.
In Hollow Knight, the bad endings involve Ghost taking the place of the Hollow Knight, perpetuating the cycle of temporarily sealing Radiance—an action which we know will inevitably fail because there is no true "pure vessel."
In Silksong, the bad endings involve Hornet either fulfilling the desires of the Weavers and taking the place of Grand Mother Silk in Weaver Queen, or being consumed by a parasite and birthing a far worse threat in Twisted Child.
The good endings of both games involve choosing another path. Ghost can only defeat Radiance by embracing its true nature, defying the idea that it's meant to contain a threat alone, and instead destroying it with the help of its siblings (Hornet and Hollow in Dream No More and all of the Siblings in both Godmaster endings). Hornet can only free Pharloom by choosing to defy the desires of those around her and forging her own path.
Lace, too, breaks free from the role she's told to fill! By directly rebelling against Grand Mother Silk, not only does she finally make herself seen, she definitively refuses the role of "subservient and loyal child" that she's been forced to occupy for untold centuries!
The series as a whole places a strong emphasis on the idea that what you're told to be isn't your only option. Nobody's locked into being one thing forever. Even if the odds are stacked against you, you can choose your own fate.
I think the thesis statement of the series is best illustrated by Herrah's dialogue in the Red Memory:
"Those are their desires… not your own. Certainly not mine… Only if you resist them, you might see it, another hope… beyond…"
