#rukamemes

[rukafais]

Honestly the fact that hornet has so little chill that she refuses to take a minute even when she's actively dying makes the fact that she's constantly telling other characters to rest and take it easy SO much funnier. Perhaps Doing As You Say And Not As You Do Would Cause Less Despair, My Liege?

rules for thee but not for me, says hornet

[rukafais]

I've been seeing a lot of people posting about cut content from silksong lately and within that a lot of people complaining about how the original version of the "coral forest" area wasn't in the final game... and it just stuns me every time how much those complaints are almost wilfully missing the point? like, yes, sands of karak isn't the gorgeous colourful coral reef we saw in older trailers. the design of the place is overwhelmingly dusty and desaturated, and all we get to see of the original reef is locked within a memory. out of reach. this is all so very obviously meant to serve a narrative purpose though! it feels like every time i see someone complaining about how the coral forest is gone they never acknowledge or even seem to consider how incongruous it would be to the wider storyline with pharloom, and it just bothers me so much. i kind of hope team cherry don't add a memory version of it in a future dlc or something at this point, i feel like regardless of how well they handled it there would just continue to be a wave of people who somehow didn't pick up on the barely subtextual messaging of the coral forest becoming the sands of karak. honestly at this point i think it'd feel kind of voyeuristic to have that kind of access point to such an idealised past as well. we can't go back and we can't preserve it in a bubble - the memorium already proved how futile of an idea that is.

Yeah like I get wanting the coral forest area back because it's pretty but like...I think what they settled on as a storytelling device is REALLY GOOD, is the thing, and I don't think it suffers from being technically cut content at all. There's such character to the environments in this game and especially the ones that are shattered and gone, broken by Pharloom's greed -- it kinda feels like complaining that we don't get to see the 'real' White Palace or how Hallownest looked before it fell in a sense? The melancholy and sense of loss is the point, no matter how much its people longed for it to come back, there's no power that can do so - not even the power of a god, or an empire (stares at the memorium), not even if you dive deep into the dreams of the dead can you really bring it back.

Something I REALLY like too about the one area we do get to explore (Lost Verdania) is Hornet's comments on the palestag:

Myth made real in memory. The creature seemed completely at one with the flora around it. Did it ever truly exist as I have seen it?

Just, like. Acknowledging the inevitable unreliability of memory, the ravages of time. Even if you have someone who can remember it, it's still an idealized version as you say - a temporary, fleeting thing that exists only in a dream. Karak would be the same. It's so painful and so fucking good, it's SUCH a good way to convey the nostalgia and wistfulness and loss of a real place that is simply Gone Now, and not just gone but brutally destroyed for a god's ambition.

Like auuuughhhhh the symbolism!! The story choice!! It's so good!! I LOVE IT, i'm glad they cut it and then decided to reintegrate it back into the world in such a melancholy, fun way!

[rukafais]

It is not too much to ask, do you have... new cat pics? I remember a very old pic of your cat with ... pink nose! (im aware your cat is sick and i do remember fondly whenever i see your blog!)

I HAVE MANY NEW CAT PICS ESPECIALLY SINCE TOBY WENT ON HOLIDAY THE SAME TIME AS US AND WE GOT MANY UPDATES

Behold him

[rukafais]

I can see the sense behind "the Pale Kings plan was doomed from the start because creating a perfect pure vessel was never feasible" but I have a hard time letting go of the tragedy of the idea that it was because he, in the end, couldnt fully abandon his humanity and remain personally cruel/cold enough to the Hollow Knight to see it through.

Frankly, that's what damns him to me. He had a flawed premise, he slaughtered hundreds of thousands of children on that flawed premise, and then when he found out that it wasn't going to work, and as the entirety of the game shows, it would never have worked (though who knows if he realized this), he doubled down on it and went through with it anyway. Love was not enough to stay his hand. No amount of love, perhaps, would have ever been enough. I have talked a little about this before, but in sealing the Abyss and leaving these words behind:

Our pure Vessel has ascended. Beyond lies only the refuse and regret of its creation. We shall enter that place no longer.

In a game where 'being forgotten is the only death that matters'? In a game where the Pale King temporarily defeated his greatest enemy and rival god by having everyone forget her and never again acknowledge her existence?

He gave his hundreds upon hundreds of dead children the same fate as he gave to Radiance, his rival and enemy; to be condemned, forgotten. The ultimate death, never to be acknowledged or mourned.

(and just like radiance they all came crawling back out again lol)

And it was for the love of his kingdom that others were subjugated and made subordinate to it, after all! Love is a neutral emotion, its results can be good or bad. In PK's case it generally did turn out badly.

Tragedy certainly exists in the narrative, but not a lot of it belongs to the Pale King, I feel. If anything he's more pitiful than truly tragic to me.

[rukafais]

god everything about karak, bilewater, hunter's march, verdania is so perfectly upsetting... honestly there's probably more small places like this that i couldn't name off the top of my head, but it just has been driving me nuts for the last like 20 hours of gameplay how much damage pharloom's citadel did to everything inhabited even remotely within travel distance of it. like i think it really set in with bilewater because the place is grim to get through (and you get a lot of time to ruminate while walking back to groal for the 5th time that afternoon) but like. the mournful lamenting tone of the music in there, the lore tablets vowing bitter revenge against the citadel, the connection to phantom and the quiet, discarded, hopeless drudgery of their post in the exhaust organ... the whole place made me so sad i couldn't even summon up any spite for most of the area no matter how many times i died. I'd say it's uniquely upsetting but honestly karak made me feel just as mournful for something both i and hornet would never get to see. anyway pharloom is genuinely horrifying in a way I've wanted to see from a game like this for years. silksong gets to a certain point and just stops pulling any punches at all with how evil it wants you to know the systems and societal structures of pharloom are.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL STORYTELLING IS SO TRAGIC AND HEARTBREAKING AND GOOD. Like god!! The environments are characters almost and you WILL weep for what an utter wreck has been made of them as you climb through them and reflect on what's lost. Like no wonder the most ravaged areas have such beautiful music - it was beautiful, once, but that time has passed. Now there's only the city on the hill, choking and strangling everything around it.

And the Memorium really only makes it worse. Like they really thought these tiny glass terrariums would be an acceptable remembrance of the whole environments their empire devoured and sacrificed. The entire world is a monument to Pharloom's greed but the closer you get to the Citadel, the more you really see the pain and price of that greed and it's SOOOOOO sooo sosososo chilling and good. The attention to detail in the names even is so wild - like Karak and Verdania are names that don't match the naming scheme because their cultures, their people, they've been lost to time and devoured by the empire. Skarr's name has been lost in a sense; they are no longer a united people with their own lands, just a scattered collection of what once was.

Like argh! It's just so fucking fantastic and gutting. I want to chew on it. I've never wanted to kill a god so bad.

[rukafais]

I dont really hate pk either I just people focused waaaaay less on him (AND STOPPED TRYING TO SAND AWAY HIS FLAWS)

But the weavers make me. Insane. Everytime I think about how they were a fractured group united by a deep-seated trauma that drove them to create great and terrible things I start pacing in circles

I wish people focused less on inventing connections between pk and hornet and and instead join me in coming up with all the weird drama that must have undergone between the weavenests during their rebellion against their mother, because you cannot tell me those ladies didn't get into some pretty heated arguments during such a high intensity situation, and how their experiences from the rebellion might have influenced how the deepnest weavers interacted with hornet

(Some weaver: "we've already prepared a curriculum for her, and we predict she'll be a fine engineer and tactician by the end of the season."

Herrah still tired from laying hornet's egg, midwife still tending to her: "...she.. hasnt even hatched yet??")

Sorry this ask got long, I cant help but ramble whenever the topic of weavers comes up

I think what makes me lose it (positive) is like, the fact we had so many weavenests and they were SO FAR APART, like. Oh my god the fucking drama that must have been going on. The factionalism. No wonder Herrah just handed her kid to Vespa instead. The infighting must have been fucking NUTS.

In conclusion anon you are SO correct, I need more Weaver drama. Inject it into my veins posthaste

[rukafais]

Go off monarch atp you have every right to be pissed

I'm so tired that Silksong places so much importance on Hornet's mothers and her ancestral connections with her birth mother's side of the family and the lessons she learned in connecting with the Knight, and yet somehow people will drag in PK's dead corpse and flog it to talk about how narratively important it is to Hornet

[rukafais]

There's something incredibly interesting and tragic about how Pharloom seems to be much more alive than Hallownest ever was. Hallownest is seeing a Kingdom long gone but Pharloom is just watching it slowly go on a decline.

Like when I was playing Hollow Knight I had a constant feeling of "Damn I really can't do anything to save everyone because most of them are dead. I guess I'll do what I can and beat up God"

With Silksong I had the constant feeling of "Oh god everyone in this Kingdom is *doomed* and alive and I am only one person doing what I can to stop that doom."

Just something about how Silksong is a kingdom that isn't dead but isn't exactly alive. The citadel is a hostile place, the Sands of Karak are wilting, the Mosshome settlement is gone, there are only 2 conscious workers in the Deep Docks, just. *Everything*.

It could have been great. It probably was if you don't look deep enough. And now we hear people talk about how great it was and kill themselves over trying to reach something that faded long ago.

Yeah while Hallownest is dead, Pharloom is like, too alive, terrifyingly so. There's the sense that if you don't stop whatever the fuck is happening, everyone you've talked to, everybody you care about, is just going to get devoured by this mysterious force literally snaring people to service. They seem fine and normal and then they start walking the road and their minds are just Gone. It's such a different kind of fear to Hallownest; Hallownest was a silent, dead kingdom where noise usually meant that people were there and alive. In Pharloom people sing and talk and chatter and walk and hunt, but that doesn't matter if they're haunted, they're just marionettes going through the motions. A grotesque parody of life.