[Analysis] What Silksong tells us about the Larger Setting
act 3 spoilers
So in the first game we only really saw one place in the larger world, and its so remote and isolated that the ppl there thought they are the only big civilization, so one of the main things we got from Silksong is a general idea of what the larger setting is like, especially since much of what we're told is relayed by unreliable narrators.
At some point they're going to have to name the continent/planet/world or whatever.
Of course with the 1st game they didn't know there was going to be another, but at this point they're setting up a larger myth arc with recurring elements like the Everbloom, the abyss civilization, lifeblood, the "steel assasins" all of which might be explored further in future games. etc.
What we can clearly say is that Hallownest is not the only large civilization - rather, its simply at the ass of the world. It's probably the only civilization in a large radius, but there are tons of them alluded to in all the Weaver cages in the cradle.
The "city of Steel" sounds like where Steel Soul Jinn and the steel assasins might me from.
I don't think it was deception or arrogance, just ignorance - Hallownest is just at the ass of the world. The memory wipe plains might be the edge of the world in the same way that Abyss is its bottom. And the King came from the memory wipe plains as a Wyrm.
My HC is that he has the same-ish backstory as the actual Demiurge myth hes vaguely based on in that he has no clue where he came from & thus assumed he was the first & only thing ever just cause it would be neat & add some nice irony (He built his Kingdom to shelter ppl but his actions lead to Ghost clawing their way through the memory wipe plains as a child, unwittingly repeating history)
I'd like to add that he wasn't too invested in maintaining such a fiction, however, given that he had an outsider like Ze'Mer in a high position, he was more accepting of outsiders than the mantisses.
But either way there is actually a lot of little pockets of civilization. In the Cradle you can see evidence that the citadel captured surviving weavers from tons of different places - in one case someone was napped for being one 8th(!) weaver.
However they DO seem to be super-duper scattered, and the surface is mostly a wasteland with tiny populations - I would assume that characters such as Zote, Cornifer, Cloth and Tiso come from places a lot like Dirtmouth or the the small surface village atop Pharloom.
For all the capitalism jokes none of the societies we see are actually capitalistic in the sense of being organized around private companies.
Hallownest itself is feudalist (the upper class are aristocrats, oaths, concepts of honor etc) and mercantilist (the rulers decide trade - the Silk trade happened not because some enterprising weaver came & sold it, but because Herrah struck a deal with the Pale King) - similar to real life medieval countries.
The semi-independent territories around Hallownest seem to be organized as tribal societies, the Mantises and Deepnest. They have titles like "Queen" and "lords" (probably to sound equal to their mighty neighbors) but they function more like chieftains.
Some, like he Hive & the Mushrooms are too "phantastic" to have real life equivalents - they're sentient eusocial insects and a Hive Mind, respectively.
Pharloom is very centralized & functions as one single country with an unified culture, architecture style & leadership. It has multiple large cities whereas in Hallownest there is only really the capital and everything else is a village. (Also, Pharloom's centralization was very much not a peaceful process, as we find a lot of evidence that it once had a lot of unique quirky biomes, groups of people, smaller sub-cultures etc. that Grand Mother and her hench-bugs made desolate ruins of.)
Organization wise, it's a command economy, like most Bronze Age societies - think Ancient Egypt or Summeria etc. . Everything is decided from up to to the smallest detail by a priest caste up top that tells the workers exactly what to do & what to deliver, & it's all justified by religious authority.
but whatever its organization form, the place sucks.
Hallownest was not without its flaws (there was clearly some inequality - guady nobles, disadvantages ppl like the maggots, border tensions, concerns of tech making jobs obsolete) etc. but for the most part is was a prosperous society with many advancements & amenities, considered a "land of wonders" - although this is probably in part owed to its remote location at the edge of nowhere, surrounded by wastelands or small villages. Its inhabitants thought it the fanciest civilization ever but it was just the fanciest civilization in that area. Very much a "big fish in a small pond" situation.
It came & went like a short blip compared to Pharloom.
Pharloom, however, is a hellhole. The upper half of the map is just one war crime scene after another. You could say that Hallownest is a failed/Fallen/imperfect Utopia while Pharloom is a very sucessful dystopia. It's hell because the system is working exactly as intended.
The history of Pharloom can be divided in 3 distinct eras: Before Grand Mother (she defeated previous rulers, erased their societies & destroyed the environments - the snails have been there since that era), the Weaver Era (from which the old weavenests come and which attained a lot of futuristic tech - the weavenests seem an entirely separate set of cities/settlements before the current ones), and then the era after the Weavers' rebellion, and then modern pharloom as we see it.
It seems that during the Weaver's era the non-weavers would have worshipped them, judging by the effigy relics, the reverence of the citadel bugs & First Sinner's assertion that Granny called them "holy", but after their falling out (that one rune harp says the weavers were fleeing "servitude", so the falling out seems down to Granny Silk's controlling tendencies - First Sinner maybe lead the rebellion?) - in any case she went all Noah's flood on that era, and in modern Pharloom, weavers rather seem to be rememberd/seen as scary monsters. ("scary stories for children", Shakra says.)
The citadel seems to already have existed in the first era of Granny Silk's rule - they're still "programmed" to serve weavers, and the citadel is stashed with trophies & zoo exhibits of the fallen kingdoms.
Let's now consider how the timelines for both Kingdoms might line up.
Pharloom is definitely older than Hallownest, since they built downwards to find the weavers already there, having fled & joined with Deepnests's previous lord (his subjects were maybe the shapeshifters? Nosk & those "distant villagers" guarding Herrah's entrance, maybe mask maker, left over from the ancent civ days? Unsure)
Maybe the era of the weavenests would then be roughly concurrent with the Radiance's reign. In any case there used to be this whole second set of settlements that are now empty, save for poor poor Eva.
The survivors who fled came from the weavenests closest to the bottom ("she overlooked down here") - Herrah & co may have come from the moss grotto one or the abyss one.
In any case, what's really interesting is that underneath Pharloom, you find the remains of the same ancient void-worshipping civilization that you find in Hallownest. The ones who used Arcane Eggs.
Meaning that these people once had a giant sprawling empire next to which Pharloom must've looked as puny as Hallownest looks next to Pharloom.
Sort of in keeping with the general motif they have that there was always something bigger, always something older etc. now matter how grand something might seem.
The question of what killed it comes up.
When we thought it was only Hallownest, most assumed that maybe the Radiance got them, since they have beef ("ANCIENT ENEMY"), but offing this whole sprawling empire seems above even her capabilities. Maybe just the Hallownest-specific portion of it?
The empire as a whole though... "destroyed themselves through their hubris" is always a fun candidate. In any case it seems like something to build on in further installments to the series. It might be interesting to get a mortal protagonist next just since we've had a god and a demigod already.
Finally, on the greatest, most "cosmic" scale, we get some first hints at a creation myth for the setting:
When the White Lady pulls out the Delicate Flower/Everbloom ("In Case of Godess Disposal Mishap, Break Glass", lol), she calls it "The First Light".
We know that:
a) The flowers somehow ward off/repell the void
b) They're said to give off a "faint pale light" (similar to how stuff vaguely related to the Pale Beings tend to be described)
One might imagine that in the beginning there was only the void, & then somehow these flowers arose & first made it possible for anything outside the void to exist by parting its sea and that's why they're "the first light" & then the 'Primal Source' gods or at least the first batch of them somehow arose from that & sparked the existence of everything else.
Higher Beings we see can be roughly split in 3 categories - sort of nature-associated ones (Unn, Nyleth, etc.), Essence Based (Grimm & The Radiance - these don't seem to have physical bodies by default / exist in the dream realm. The spooky red thing/Father of Flame thing in the Wisp thicket also seems vaguely related/ essence adjacent, looks rather similar to nightmare realm stuff), and then the Pale Beings - the former being more chaos aligned & the later more order-aligned. (Not necessarily nice order; It's suggested by Hornet that the case of Grand Mother Silk just showing up & subjugating shit is not unusual. Although in context the 'Destruction or Devotion' comment seems a bit of self-hate/frustration tinged where the Big Mishap brought up some insecurities about sharing her father's qualities, toward the end of the flashback scene it doesn't seem like she really sees, say, The White Lady (or even her father, really) as as some intrinsically irredeemable monster. Grand Mother absolutely is a monster with countless attrocities under her belt, even she's not, like, without feelings. Not to mention that plenty of ordinary mortals have pulled similar tyranny without a need for any intrinsic evilness. She's just more easily get away with it due to her godlike power & the fact that she won't just be removed by old age. (also true of typical tyrants, might just have money or connections to let them get away with it) The previous protagonist hasn't shown much of an intrinsic drive to subjugate either - although they're of course a less typical example because void, though that's generally described as an even scarier force. )
There also seem to be other similar powerful beings but with the white variety being extra powerful. (eg there's other Roots, and it's mentioned that there were other Wyrms though we haven't directly seen any yet & they're said to be largely extinct.)
We only have few data points for each so this is extrapolation, but it seems the "nature based ones" usually have regular names, the essence based once use "concept names" ("The Radiance", "The Nightmare Heart") and the Pale Beings don't really use names but descriptive titles. (when you think about, 'The Pure Vessel' might actually be seen as a fairly typical Pale Being name. Had the King not been forced to dip them in the forbidden soy sauce, they'd probably just have been called something like 'White Knight' or 'Pale Prince', or something what they'd have been the god of - which probably wouldn't have been 'Silence' or 'Nothingness' without their connection to the void.)
The Pale beings seem to be connected to "primal sources" of things, like Grand Mother is said to be the primal source of silk. (Maybe the Pale King would be the Primal Source of intellect? Or he was, back in his Wyrm form - maybe he would've been a lot more powerful then, he was supposedly near death when he transformed into his smaller form.)
It's also possible that "There was a flower & then we all sprung from it & created everything else" is just the story that the Pale Beings themselves tell and you'd get something different if you asked, say, Grimm about the beginning of the world.
Even so, one definitely gets the sense that a larger Myth Arc is being set up & that more installments in the series might follow.
We really need to call the larger setting something. "Scattered Lands", maybe, like in that line from the Nightmare King? Because it seems to be mostly insular enclaves surrounded by wastelands on the surface.
ADDITION:
I just remembered that the lowest weavenest contains a "depiction of void given form" so it's possible that the height of weaver civilization overlapped with the shadow worshippers, which out them waaay further in the past. Alternatively, the weavers may have excavated the shadow worshippers & turned to some shadow worship of their own.
It's also possible that Weavenest Absolem wasn't a formal part of the weaver civilization but rather a splinter group that escaped underground to run away from Grand Mother.
In any case, Weavers seem to generally be considered "extinct precursors" outside of Hallownest (Pharloom considered Hornet to be "last of that line", but last time we knew there was at least Midwife & that one un-infected Weaver Ghost runs into.
Midwife's dialogue suggests that the population's been on a tailspin (due to infection taking the brood before they can hatch, so that "few have required her services" - indeed a lot of the enemies you fight in Deepnest are described in the hunters journal as infected weaver children - I think the creepyness/sadness of that is generally underappreciated) ) - but it doesn't sound like there's no one at all left, either, more like there was some remnant of ppl still trying to breed relatively recently.
We know that when the infection first returned, a group of weavers from deepnest fled back to Pharloom - we can safely assume they all died horribly, unless some ultimately went elsewhere than Pharloom. I'm surprised there wasn't one of them among the cages in the cradle or some relic referring to the group of returnees, although maybe I missed it?
We also see a lot of dead weavers laying around with last thoughts/ dreamnail dialogues like "For Herrah!" or "For the Princess!" so I wonder if some civil war preceded the exodus or how exactly the settlement collapsed.
The weaversong charm suggests more of a parting on good terms so most likely they just died fighting off their infected brethren (which at least suggests they liked Herrah & Hornet so much they didn't regret choosing to stay. High approval rating there. Herrah just seems to have been pure compacted awesomesauce all around. - though well. MIdwife says her trade "cost the nest dearly" (probably in the sense that he absence of her leadership during the plague's return was direly felt) But it's not really on her that the plan failed. That's on the Pale King being wrong about the way the void worked.
That said, interestingly much of the new shadow worshipper lore we find in Pharloom's Abyss seems to suggest that it would work the way he thought it would. "CLEANSE US VOID", "NO MIND, NO SELF" etc. That might just be what they believed. The ppl who get whacked with it in act 3 don't seem all that mindwiped, but then again, thats not not the 'pure' void but the effect of it mixed with Grand Mother's mind control thread. If he found similar artifacts & texts in hallownest, he might have got his mistaken belief from there. )
Assuming there ARE some survivors, team "remain/ stay & fight" really won out in the long run.
