Day 9: Suspicious

i need to be a little abnormal about hollow knight maybe. like. i dont know. does anyone remember playing it the first time. you talk to every character every single time. you dreamnail all your friends because you're curious. you learn that willow eats bugs and is considering eating you. quirrel disappears and you freak out. you find tiso dead. maybe cloth helped you fight traitor lord. maybe she didnt. how did you feel? it was either she died, right there, or she sat up in dirtmouth bored and waiting for something. what was more worth it? bretta loves you. bretta stops. maybe you fight zote [but weirdly buff] ten times and she thinks youre cool again. cornifer is a friendly face wherever you go and then you can't talk to him again.

i don't know. it was something to me how it was always better in the middle. it was the best when you got to have everyone and before they were all taken from you. and beyond the story left behind in the death of everything, i think that was its own little tragedy. that you just lose them by virtue of letting them continue on their journey.

how many of you played again and refused to talk to quirrel when he waited by the lake? how many didn't let tiso go to the coliseum? how many didn't save cloth until after fighting traitor lord - or just didn't bother to fight traitor lord at all?

like. you get it right. freezing them in time, to keep them all safe, kept forever immortal because you don't want them to die. do you get it

the dreamers ~

Drawing Hornet everyday until Silksong comes out - Day 262

Request by anonymous!

yes 👍

they are going for a walk

One thing that bothers me is how people treat Hollow Knight characters somehow separated from in-game context or ideas. I'm going to be using the Pale King as an example, so this post is Pale King-centric. Like, people usually make out the Pale King to be a complete asshole (which I mean, I do not disagree), but portray him as acting asshole-ish, especially in ways that are very much not how he'd do so. Which is alright with comedy, but a lot of people have a very fundamental misunderstanding of a LOT of Hollow Knight characters. I totally think it's okay to make a character OOC and there is a lot to be argued on what counts as OOC. But going back to the Pale King, there's a few things I think people miss about his character pretty often.

He feels incredible shame over his mass infanticide from the moment he had to do it. Does this excuse it? Absolutely not. But people do not ever seem to grasp the context of which he does this, in which case there are more bugs who will die than the amount of children that would die. He created the vessels as an absolute last resort and felt he had no other choice than to do so. Again, this does not excuse the cruelty, but he was in a situation where (even if he can be argued to be at fault for causing it) bugs were going to and currently were dying, and he had to stop it.

The White Palace has a nursery, likely intended to be his and the Pale Lady's child. It uses the theme of the Knight's shade, but much happier sounding. It has a chair where the White Lady likely sat, as well as a crib. Yes, this would be her room, but it isn't incredibly hidden (unlike what the Path of Pain hides), but considering it was not greatly hidden, this means he likely did not feel it needed to be more hid than the rest of the White Palace and possibly that he wished or hoped he could have had normal children.

The Path of Pain exists solely to hide a single shared memory of the Pure Vessel and the Pale King. You can interpret it in many ways, but the two of them clearly are sharing a moment and look at each other. It is very easily inferred that the Pale King is what "tarnished" the Pure Vessel by instilling an idea and causing it to view the Pale King as a father. Considering he hid this memory so deeply within the White Palace, but it is there in the first place, it likely had great significance either as an event or emotionally. The moment is not exclusive to the Pure Vessel. It is the Pale King who looks at the Pure Vessel first. It's very likely he cared for it, even if he did not want to. This makes it even more cruel, because he had to have treated it (to the best of his ability) as hollow and empty, despite the fact that it wasn't, not entirely at least.

There is a LOT to be said about him and the Radiance that I don't think I could easily get into. I do think that he did things that were cruel to her and inevitably had a butterfly effect to causing the Infection. (I am trying to be neutral here, but I am definitely a Radiance sympathizer.) And, again, this doesn't excuse it, but contextually, it is down to his very nature as a Wyrm to draw bugs into his thrall and create societies/kingdoms. This nature of a Wyrm is repeatedly emphasized as if its to them as breathing is to humans. As a Wyrm, he must bring bugs into his thrall.

There are many, many other things I could mention. But as a whole, I think he is a really good example of how many people heavily mischaracterize or misunderstand Hollow Knight characters. I don't think it's inherently wrong to do so, but many people who are doing so are not doing it on purpose. There is a great level of nuance and much context to (many) Hollow Knight characters. The Pale King, like I explained, is incredibly nuanced and, in my opinion, is a very morally grey character. Many of those in Hollow Knight's world operate on moral ideologies or functions that do not fit ours and cannot fit ours, but I think people try to apply to them anyways. Not really sure what the point of this post was other than it bothers me.

a plentiful harvest

Drawing Zote every day until we get Zoteboat: day 22

@silksongeveryday October prompt list-Day 10: Thorns

Hollow Knight - Bundled Up

Do ghosts get cold? Do shadows? Do little pieces of the void feel the chill?

guys we’ve been here before