before I was diagnosed with “gender dysphoria” and “transsexualism” I got a hysterectomy. this was not easy— medical misogyny exists and I had to assert repeatedly that i didn’t want children and I was married with a spouse who didn’t want children and that I had tried a “less invasive” solution first. all this sucked. it was paternalistic and condescending and led to me suffering for years for zero reason.
however. if I hadn’t gotten the hysterectomy back then and was trying to get one now, it would be harder. after becoming recognized as trans in medial systems, legally I would need two separate psychiatric professionals to write letters affirming I’d been under their observation, that I was mentally stable enough to know I wanted the surgery, and that they also believed it was necessary. and I would need to find a surgeon willing to operate on trans people.
like this is the difference. the literal procedures involved in medical transition are not exclusive to trans people. the difference is that these procedures are gatekept from us.
that’s why all the laws banning trans healthcare (in the US, I haven’t read legislation elsewhere) are framing it as only banned when someone has a “gender dysphoria” diagnosis. the point isn’t to stop performing the actual procedures, the point is to deny trans people healthcare because we are trans.
saying “trans people don’t need surgery” is like saying “cis people don’t need surgery.” like obviously not every cis person needs every surgery. but cis people have the right to surgery. and trans people deserve the same right.
I have done everything I feel drawn to do in Hollow Knight, maybe I'll chip away at P5 over time but for now I'm satisfied. I said I had finished Hollow Knight a while back after beating the game at 108%, but I couldn't tear myself away. Literally any free time I had that I wasn't with friends or watching something I was pulled back into Hollow Knight. This is a new all time favourite for me so I wanted to give some of my final thoughts before I move on to Resident Evil or Clair Obscur like I said I would like a month ago
(full spoilers 112%)
Beating Steel Soul was such a great epilogue to my first playthrough because I could appreciate how far I'd come and it felt cool plotting out my own route through the game from memory and figuring out what order I wanted to take on challenges and where I could scrape together extra boosts before bosses. I barely used Compass which felt great, I'd learned Hallownest and it felt good.
It feels redundant to say I recommend Hollow Knight because I mean, It's Hollow Knight, everyone knows it's an indie legend and everyone has had it recommended to them. But damn if you were like me and unsure if you would like it, give it a go!
The boss design in this game is absurdly good! Incredibly fun and almost all of them feel finely tuned. They're also brimming with personality and punctuate exceptional area design as well. That being said I think Grey Prince Zote was the only boss that was frustrating and never became clear to me, I got frustrated on other bosses but they all gave me this great moment where I figured out where my approach had gone wrong and suddenly they clicked (still required practice and execution, but they felt intelligible). But Grey Prince Zote never gave me that, I practiced and practiced his fight and it always just felt clunky and like the best I could hope for was good rng on his moveset and to brute force my way, his patterns just never became intelligible to me. Skill Issue? Maybe. But he's the only boss I truly disliked.
After having beaten P1 - P4 here are
My Favourite Bosses:
9. Dung Defender / White Defender - His personality is just electric, it's so hard to have a bad time with these bosses and he's a welcome relief in the nightmare that is Royal Waterways. The White Defender fight also expands the tragedy of his backstory and I just love that.
8. Mantis Lords - A phenomenal early game challenge that is so finely tuned that it really raises the bar of quality once you get to them. The whole Mantis Village area is so exciting to explore and marks the point in the game where you feel the devs letting you go out on your own.
7. Hornet Sentinel - Perfect escalation from the first fight, relatively simple but keeps you on your toes really well. Epic arena too, the atmosphere and place in the story the fight has makes it really hit!
6. Watcher Knights - This is a sharp change in opinion from my first times fighting them where I really disliked them. But facing them again in Steel Soul and P4 really made them grow on me! I put them off as long as possible in Steel Soul because I was scared, training in Godhome against them I really struggled with them. But once I beat them in Steel Soul I appreciated their design. Firstly, just a really cool arena and concept, the swarming radiance fireflies pouring into these empty shells strewn through the arena to animate them against you is just awesome. You have a continuous gauge of your progression and you can even use environmental observation to take one of them out before the fight even begins. Really awesome and so much fun to fight!
5. Broken Vessel / Lost Kin - Firstly, what a potent story beat. Everything about the first encounter with this thing has stuck with me, the guilt of putting down a fellow vessel and perhaps the freedom from the Radiance I'm giving to it. Bittersweet. The move-set is a mirror of the Knight's own move-set so mechanically it feels like a true 1v1 between equals! Then facing Lost Kin... exquisite. First playthrough I was utterly destroyed by Lost Kin, I tried to face it far too early but when I came back and learned to fight it I had one of the best experiences in the game. Fighting it in P4 over and over it never once felt like a slog, I love fighting Lost Kin!
4. Soul Master / Soul Tyrant - The Soul Sanctum is such a brilliant little area and it's capped off by a tricky boss with a very unique move-set. The Soul Master keeps his distance from you most of the fight, teleporting around causing you to be on the offensive most of the time while having to move through his attacks. There isn't really anything else like Soul Master in HK and that's somewhat a shame because I enjoy fighting him so much, but also great because it just makes the Soul Sanctum stand out that much more despite being relatively short. Then Soul Tyrant takes everything I love about the base boss and dials it up to become a genuine threat against a late game player. Thrilling fight!
3. Troupe Master Grimm / Nightmare King Grimm - What can I say?! Literally PERFECT boss design, phenomenal music, and both variants have incredible (and very different) atmosphere. The Troupe are all incredibly compelling characters for what little time we have with them, but Grimm himself is just oozing with flair and personality. I'm compelled to bow my head to him as the fight begins to share in his gesture of respect. The fights themselves are thrilling and feel like choreography which is perfect for the theatre setting with onlooking crowd, Grimm and I are dancing though each other's moves and when I'm in the flow it feels like we are locked in an elaborate routine. A real highlight of the playthrough! My first time facing NKG I thought there was no way I would beat him, I knew his reputation and I died in seconds but I powered through and because the fight is so perfectly designed I began to understand it all, it became that dance I described. I have never felt better beating a boss than beating NKG. Surpassing what going into the game I simply hadn't thought I'd ever even touch. I thought for sure these optional challenges would be beyond my capabilities, that I'd be satisfied just facing the base game, but NKG showed me I could beat the hardest parts of Hollow Knight. There wasn't an insurmountable skill barrier, I just needed perseverance, I finally believed I could 112% HK. That's what the best games can do to you!
2. The Hollow Knight - The final / penultimate battle of Hollow Knight is a masterpiece. It's not particularly challenging if you (like me) obsessively complete all the side quests and upgrades before you go in, but it's still an incredibly engaging battle that evolves over the course of the fight. Blade to blade combat giving way to infection spewing desperation. That is where the strength of this fight lies, rather than being intensely challenging or requiring dance-like precision and learning of patterns, The Hollow Knight fight is mechanical story telling!!!
As the fight progresses the Hollow Knight begins fighting internally with the Radiance for control and we see this all play out and affect its attack patterns. Watching the vessel desperately stab at its own chest before spewing fourth a round of infection, slowly losing the use of the Pure Vessel's nail arts training in favour of the infection puppeteering the vessel against us. It's absolutely incredible visual storytelling and use of mechanics to tell the story! Proving Team Cherry are genius designers, not just of engaging and balanced fights but of making those fights tell a story!
1. The Pure Vessel - Maybe it's recency bias because I just finished Pantheon of the Knight as my final challenge in HK before writing this post. I spent a couple sessions learning this fight and dying over and over, beating it and then facing the Ascended fight over and over so I could feel confident going into P4. The rest of the pantheon is so enjoyable I didn't mind going over it again and again, learning which bosses posed the biggest threats to my play style and working on my weaknesses until I could consistently make it to Pure Vessel. Today I faced P4 maybe 10 times before I finally beat Pure Vessel and the elation i felt-!!! (Followed by the dread seeing the cutscene after and not being sure if I was about to have to fight Radiance lmao)
Pure Vessel is another dance of a fight, but unlike NKG where by the end I felt like I could probably do the fight hitless if I really wanted (and honestly facing him Radiant is probably something I will do), Pure Vessel still very much scares me, I've learned its attacks and have my strategies but that only got me to the point where it felt like a fair fight, like I was facing someone with a similar skill-set who was better than me. It feels like a true rival battle. Mechanically I ate the fight up, an excellent remix of most of the HK's move-set with some extra skills mixed in. It truly does feel like facing off against the HK at its peak.
Visually I love the Pure Vessel's design and its arena in the Pantheons. The way it shatters its armour to face us. Then there's the music, once again stunningly good! Overall, I cannot heap enough praise on this fight!
I've talked a lot about the bosses but I really should talk about the area design too! Being a Metroidvania the world is very open and interconnected but the way exploration flows feels so good. The areas blend together so incredibly, like the transitional spaces between distinct regions blend so well, under-appreciated aspect for sure.
There are so many secrets and little challenges spread through the world that it's a joy combing through areas you've been before when you get a new ability. The map has some excellent features that help with this. First of all when you first enter an area you don't have a map, forcing you to immerse yourself in your surroundings and in some areas forge deep inside without a clear idea of just how big the area your exploring is until you find Cornifer. The map is well designed so even without Compass you can often deduce where you are by room shapes and this creates a great incentive to take Compass off now and then on your first playthrough (especially when backtracking).
If you find something you can't access quite yet or you want to come back for you can mark it with colourful pins and this can jog your memory later when you find a new skill. Picking up a new ability and remembering a distant corner somewhere that looked impossible to reach and going 'wait, I can go there!' is consistently exciting and is arguably the best part of the genre so it's great to be able to say Hollow Knight is full of moments like that!
Each area also has beautiful depth, they each have an identity and a history you get to uncover as you explore and it's largely conveyed through the environment and enemies themselves. The artwork is gorgeous and the use of foreground and background to add depth is always brilliant. Then of course the music! I could go on and on about the music. I responded to a mutual's post with my favourite game soundtracks before playing HK and I regret that happened before I played this because WOW this would have made the cut!!!!
The Abyss. Everything about The Abyss. Playing through the birth place / king's soul scene and seeing my fellow vessels falling around me before reaching the top and watching Pure Vessel leave with the king and plummeting back down.. . I cried. I felt the rejection, the abandonment, and coming to understand that very feeling is why I wasn't good enough to be the Pure Vessel.
No Mind To Think, No Will To Break, No Voice To Cry Suffering.
every description of 60s doctor who: doctor who started life as a educational children's show, teaching families about history and science in a fun way! ❤️❤️
60s doctor who:
It's strange to think how many stories, laughs, tears, and unforgettable moments can fit into one world, and somehow still leave room for more.
120+ hours of drawing later (which is only about 30 episodes of Critical Role 👀) here’s my tribute to the world of Exandria. 3 campaigns, all guest characters over 10 years of streaming and a moon full of villains.
annaxmalina
origamiaround
vaporwave
areudirty
snowghoul
izzy806
prguitarman
discoholicmusic
gummygunk
