Hi Skyen since you've been playing and having interest in Silksong, what's your take on the lacenet (Lace x Hornet) ship? It seems to be somewhat controversial.
Lace sometimes acts immature, bratty, and entitled, and Hornet calls her a child (after Lace calling Hornet a child herself), but Lace also seems to be quite old (if aging even matters for the physiology of a bug spun from silk). It seems like she may also have a whole cocktail of issues stemming from her upbringing, regarding her behavior?
not me deciding to step on a discourse landmine on purpose but like... we've had this argument so many times before about so many other pieces of fiction and i am so tired
If you play Silksong and encounter Lace and you read her character as a child - a person who is physically/mentally/spiritually a child - then shipping her with Hornet is shipping a child with an adult.
If you encounter Lace and you do not read her character as a child, but as a bratty and immature adult, then shipping Lace with Hornet is not shipping a child with an adult.
The story never out-and-out confirms anything about their age or gaps between them, or the extent to which a romantic relationship between them may be appropriate or inappropriate within the context of the world or their species' biology. Therefore, this is a matter for your interpretation as the reader. It is your job to determine how these characters interact and relate to each other, and what kind of dynamic you think it is. It is, explicitly, left ambiguous.
Hornet and Lace meet, they attempt to violently murder one another multiple times, and in the end Hornet nearly kills herself trying to save Lace from deep existential despair. If Lace and Hornet have a romantic dynamic, would it be abusive on Hornet's part to engage in it? Interpret the text, consider the various possible readings, and think on it.
Building one monolithic reading of an explicitly ambiguous text and denouncing any other reading of the text as stupid or immoral is anti-intellectualism.
It also tends to tip over real fucking fast into moral puritanism, wherein anyone who does not share your belief that Lace is clearly an adult must be a feeble-minded reactionary prude, or anyone who doesn't see that Lace is obviously a child is to be declared a pedophilic child-abuse apologist, and wherein any concession to ambiguity or uncertainty is an admission of personal moral weakness. I don't think that sh*t is ever meaningfully helpful to anyone, and I don't think it does any good in the world.
Personally, I read Lace as as adult, in the sense that she is a fully grown person with personal agency and the ability to make decisions for herself and understand the world. But she is also a deeply traumatized adult, stuck in a particularly brutal form of arrested development, and suffering from severe mental instability and a tendency towards self-harm that dips into the suicidal.
A romantic dynamic with Hornet could very, very easily be abusive and exploitative. Hornet would have extremely outsized power in that relationship, and Lace almost certainly does not have the emotional literacy to successfully navigate a healthy romance, nevermind that she has absolutely no support network outside of Hornet, and depending on how you interpret the lore of the story she might even be mortally dependent on Hornet, the Last Weaver, and her Silk to even continue to exist. Hornet would have a million ways to take advantage of or abuse Lace's vulnerabilities, whether she means to or not; a romantic dynamic between them would be monumentally fraught and could cause incredible damage to both of them. Which is not even getting into the risk of physical abuse! Lace is shown to very easily lash out with violence when confronting emotional difficulty, and Hornet has a deep capacity for brutality in her as well, which she tries to keep an absolute iron grip on, because it could easily slip.
Their dynamic, as it is presented, has all the components of compelling toxic yuri, in other words, a genre which also often plays with problematic age and maturity gaps (c.f. ten billion lesbian hornyposts about much older women taking painful advantage of you).
Of course, you can also see it the other way, that Hornet's iron self-discipline and personal moral compass is exactly the kind of partner that Lace most needs in her life to give her time and help her find herself. Hornet, too, is the experimental life form daughter of parents who created her to fulfil a purpose, and who saddled her with unspeakable burdens and trauma. Hornet found a way to navigate through all of that and become a whole person, she might be quite literally the only other being in the world who can help Lace do the same.
There's a lot of potent hurt/comfort dynamics there. There's a lot of opportunities for healing - a binding of wounds, if you'll forgive the pun.
Which dynamic you believe in is a matter for your interpretation.
prguitarman
tangentwithtanner
germansingergirl
dailybridgerton
vaporwave
andulkaphoto
pixelskylines
baratheonpilled
