I’ve had this idea in my head for a while; and I’m still extremely surprised that I’m the only person I’ve seen thus far to do vessels stridulating. Come on HK fandom, these are bugs! If they can’t talk normally, let them stridulate instead! XD
(I would have put the stridulating structures on just the cloak, like with cricket wings- but I couldn’t figure out how to pose that and thus went for a more grasshopper-like approach instead, with some of the structures on the proximal/ventral surface of a limb.)
I WAS JUST THINKING OF KADIDADS AND HOW THEY JUST RUB THEIR FUCKING WINGS TO SCREM TALK-
That one song from “Prince of Egypt”… “The plagues” But It’s Radiance as the “God”, the Hollow Knight as Moses, and PK as Ramses.
Since you refuse to free my people All through the land of Egypt(Hallownest) I send a pestilence and plague Into your house, into your bed Into your streams, into your streets Into your drink, into your bread
Upon your cattle, on your sheep Upon your oxen in your field Into your dreams, into your sleep Until you break, until you yield
I send the swarm, I send the horde Thus saith the Lord(Light)
Doesn’t this just scream Radiancevibes?
If only I could gather a whole choir and orchestra to make a HK cover for that song from Prince of Egypt! xDD There could be a slight change in a couple phrases here and there and this will be so perfect.
For example the phrase
“Once I called you brother Once I thought the chance To make you laugh Was all I ever wanted”
It can be pretty much like this
“Once I called you father Once I thought the chance To make you proud Was all I ever wanted”
As for PK lines like this
“You who I called brother” change for “You who was my child”
This stings me so good…
I always loved that song but damn… The way it fits for these three and now I love it even more!
Now where this one line “Let my/your people go.” is a bit tricky but maybe “Shewon’t ever let go”??? with the accent on “won’t”, hmm…
Honestly PK’s relationship with the void is actually kind of interesting when you consider Radiance’s implicit center-of-worship/base of operations was on top of a mountain as far away from it as possible, she calls the void her Ancient Enemy and greets it with the implicit assumption none of the vessels are individuals or even pawns of the wyrm nearly as much as they are pawns of said enemy which has been trying to destroy her all along.
PK, conversely, seems profoundly and personally obsessed with the stuff, possibly even to personal detriment. I’m reminded somewhat of the fate of Marie Curie whose fascination with radium led to great insights, but also left her massively overexposed to it.
He built his palace as close to the abyss as you’d get; his honor guard as well as some flying novelties (?) or service drones that propagate throughout his castle are effectively just great volumes of void wandering around. That the Abyss itself contains a great lighthouse that was personally attended by a royal retainer as well as a small personal office overlooking the great abyssal shore adds almost a quieter note of personal tragedy to the far greater horror that went on down there- that even to PK’s flawed worldview, the Abyss was not a place of great dishonor before he enacted the vessel project there. He liked it; he wanted other people to come down there and see it. In one of his writings he calls it “power opposed” but specifically in the context that he was sure he could get some pants on this thing somehow and put it in society.
PK is… thoughtlessly callous in many ways and one of the big ways is this belief of a civilizing force, that for him, the nicest possible thing he thinks he can do for anyone seems to be fitting them into a perfect, tailored box where they do exactly the work that is good for them and good for everyone forever. There’s a reason that Hollow is subtextually the Favored Heir, the inheritor of the kingdom to whom PK literally left all of Hallownest when you look at the message attached to the Worldsense bench- and they were literally a martyr being sent to spend the rest of their life chained inside of a seal as a sacrifice. A King without a throne or a crown or any political sway. And that up to a point, PK convinced himself this was not only the right and proper thing, but that he himself was… breathtakingly unprepared to grieve Hollow. Like it did not occur to him this might actually be a bad thing even when previous steps of it had horrified himeven.
So I think it means a lot that PK has this notion of civilizing the Void. That it could belong in his big divine order that everything fits in. It’s foolish, and, from the POV the game takes- that of his own voidborn children- it’s immensely cruel, that Hollow who was offered A Place and A Meaning was no happier than others, and we see the Collector who also seems to have been born and shaped to PK’s design only to be reshaped by someone else’s- the noble who Kept them in the Tower of Love- resulting in a being that has deeply warped ideas about safety and protection and what it means to love someone else.
Like as the inspiring post said, PK absolutely has no illusions about the void’s ability and willingness to destroy him. But his fascination with it- before his other issues get involved- is almost one of the most ‘innocent’ things in his personality.
‘PK is… thoughtlessly callous in many ways and one of the big ways is this belief of a civilizing force, that for him, the nicest possible thing he thinks he can do for anyone seems to be fitting them into a perfect, tailored box where they do exactly the work that is good for them and good for everyone forever.’
.
Okay, I know the focus on this post is on PK’s relationship to the Void, but I just gotta leap onto this line because this is something that I’ve been thinking about as a recurring theme in Hollow Knight for a while- the concept within Hallownest that one bug’s life is made to fulfill one purpose, and once that purpose was over, life had no meaning for them. This shows itself most blatantly in the Nailsmith’s questline, where he believes that his life is over after he forges the Pure Nail- something that he’s been working towards for likely centuries, an impossible ideal that he has just now met. And because he has met that goal, because he thinks that his assigned task is done with, he is fully ready to die. He seems to think that is the proper way of going about things, and the only way to get the happy end of his questline is to deliberately go against this standard of Hallownest (which, VERY notably shows Ghost making a conscious choice instead of following an order, as a hollow vessel would) to spare his life. This, of course, fits very neatly into the major theme of the game focusing around finding oneself and rejecting the mistakes of your predecessors, but imo it also points to one of the Pale King’s many flawed, black-and-white philosophies, as it also corresponds with his actions and how he is presented in the game.
The Pale King very notably does not have a name, or some alternate name that is not an equally dispassionate title- this is starkly different from the Knight, who starts off as nothing more than that but quickly accumulates a variety of different nicknames or titles as they interact with more and more people in the ruins of Hallownest, acting in stark defiance of the task forced on them upon birth. They come to be known as wanderer, friend, ghost- all sorts of things beyond just ‘vessel’ (and we don’t know where they got the title of Knight either- it could have been them who gave it to themselves after they fell from the ledge in the Abyss, which in turn points towards how they view/conduct themselves, and the fact that they see themselves as far more than just a vessel). By comparison, all PK has for alternate titles is the name the Pale Wyrm, which is just as dispassionate and characterless as 'Pale King’. It does not affirm anything about his character other than his species- just as the title tells us only what his job is. There is nothing else, because there is nothing more to be said. That is all that he is, and that is all that is considered important. What he does, not who he is.
This in combination with the Nailsmith’s quest, and the fact that Ghost has to actively defy their father’s will to break the cycle of agony of the Sealing, points very strongly to that concept of one having a singular life task as one that ties directly back to the Pale King. It also fits in with his actions, and the extremes he was willing to go to save Hallownest, despite he himself clearly suffering some sort of pain from it. He was fully willing to sacrifice all of his own children to the void if it meant that Hallownest stood eternal- because he was the King, and it was the King’s job to keep their civilization standing. What he felt about the matter did not matter, because who he was did not matter as much as what he did. That he loved the Pure Vessel did not hold as much weight as what he believed that they must do, and he was wholly unprepared to deal with his feelings in the matter. As you said, it did not matter that the steps to creating and training the Pure Vessel horrified and pained him, because that was what he had to do to ensure that his people were safe. That was his duty as King. Likewise, he was fine with sealing away the Pure Vessel despite his love for them, because to seal the Radiance was the task that the Pure Vessel had been created for, so denying them that would have been unfathomable. And then, of course, when they failed and it became clear that Hallownest would fall, he sealed himself away in the White Palace to die, as there was no point in being the Pale King without a kingdom to rule over anymore. The Nailsmith believing that his life was forfeit was not just some bullshit ideal that the society of Hallownest placed upon him, it was a life philosophy that the King himself followed, and what ultimately damned Hallownest in the end.
For such a morally grey character, it really is fascinating how black-and-white the Pale King appears to be. His mind is one of extremes, with no in-between: it does not matter that there are clearly other civilizations out there, Hallownest is the only true civilization because it is the only one that fits his qualifications. To be alive is to serve a singular purpose until you die, or to die anyways if you have failed. The Radiance must be sealed away within a vessel of void- there is no other option. The Hollow Knight must be pure. There is no cost too great. To witness secrets sealed (oh no, emotions and flaws and evidence of impurity), one must endure the harshest punishment. Purity is paramount.
Idk- it’s a small thing, but it’s one that most certainly defines the tragedy of his character. And perhaps it plays a part in his fascination with the void, because of all the things we meet in Hallownest, the void is consistently the most mysterious, rule-defying substance out there, with no one purpose or element that it seems to rule over besides nothingness. For someone whose mind seems determined to neatly label and compartmentalize everything into orderly, predictable functions, I’m sure that sort of empty chaos would have been just as deeply compelling as a fresh toilet paper roll to a particularly overzealous kitten, even if all of his attempts to grasp its nature would have been about as effective as attempting to grab water
Okay@ruthlesslistener I promised I’d get you back for the good meta so, Pale King emoting and body language headcanons, here we go! This is just sort of a disorganized ramble but I didn’t want to make it a bullet list due to its long-windedness.
I think he ends to leave an extremely aloof/deadpan impression on people thanks to his monotone whisper-voice that only very rarely cracks into a genuine emotion,
(and it does crack when he does that; he just does not have a smooth voice. Though, uh, hesitate to rush to make fun of it because part of why it’s so rough and echoing and bizarre is because wyrms use sonar. He can kill a mundane bug and stun a large creature at close quarters by ‘shouting’)
but his actual poker face is, ironically, terrible. The fact that he has basically no experience with wyrms or ex-wyrms and little self-awareness of what wyrm physiology or quirks tend towards means that he basically only hides his emotions by a fortuitous combination of that he tries to shame and/or rationalize himself out of having them in the first place (thus, suppressing his body language as much as possible) and that his social cues are alien to others.
When I’m writing him, I tend to take a lot of inspiration from a cat in terms of facial expressions. He stares a lot, often without obviously blinking; he has a notable prey drive that even if he’s not hungry or intending to hunt means he tracks fast objects and his response time is nightmarishlyswift.
Since anatomically he’s almost nothing but spine all the way down, he’s extremely bendy and even kinda compresses by settling onto himself most of the time; his canon sprite is small but he can stretch out or periscope up on his coils to about Lurien’s body length. Pre-fall of Hallownest PK finds this absolutely mortifying and limits himself extremely to highly constrained movements any time he’s not in a life-or-death fight; both “not king yet” PK and RFR-timeline postgame PK do it a lot more, especially the latter after he cuts his robes and basically gives up on keeping his weird shrimp body out of people’s attention.
His face is almost entirely a rigid, inflexible plate. His eyes can blink and squint and such but even so, some of the way they blink is unsettling; he has three separate eyelids. I stand by the headcanon that his actual ‘mouth’ and jaw (complex pedipalps/mandible array with lots of rasping blades and little sharp stuff) is tucked under the point of his ‘face’. Opening his jaw fully means that his eyes are stuck pointed up at the ceiling and away from whatever he’s biting, but his wyrm self had the same problem basically all the time. His mouth assembly is highly dexterous and can operate by feel just fine.
Because of this whole de-emphasized face, he’s actually a lot easier to read if you know the tricks to look for. He talks with his body language more than anything facial and the former recontextualizes the latter. Squinting can be like a happy blink from a cat- “guard down, I’m comfortable,” or it can be an expression of contempt, and that contempt can be passive smugness or it can be “you are seconds from death”.
Happy blink PK is going to be otherwise relaxed and usually won’t have his face/eyes pointing straight at whatever he’s with; if he’s super relaxed he’ll unspool from his tense posture and spread out bit by bit, like how a very relaxed hamster will go flat as a pancake. Pretty much the only person who has this privilege reliably is White Lady, where half the time they’re together and not busy he’ll just be somewhere in the same space as her either with his back facing her or completely sprawled out somewhere near her “feet” (where her roots meet the ground- he likes to feel the pulse of energy flowing around there, it soothes him instinctively)
Preening/arrogant PK tends to have his head lofted; he’ll also relax there, but stay upright and the relaxation is basically patronizing whoever he’s talking to rather than a gesture of trust. His body is more tense and able to respond; which works as he is often arrogant in combat.
A pissed off PK is distinct from the others in that his head stays down the entire time and tends to make very unbroken eye contact with whatever the source of his anger is. If he’s sitting straight the hostility is still theory and not ‘practice’; if he’s hunched forwards towards a more horizontal / (all ‘sixes’) pose then he may or may notactually be about to follow through but he is probably thinking about what your entrails would taste like.
Progressively in RFR PK’s body language opens up a lot more and he starts making more casual gestures with his posture and with his hands especially. He also starts using face journeys as a form of communication (e.g. making eye contact with someone, looking at a second person, and then back to the first with a fractional eye-widening = ‘get a load of this guy’).
He does all of this without thinking about it and actually is mortified to have attention drawn to it long after he’s entrenched this as a habit. Now all of Hallownest knows you have feelings, shrimp. You have failed.
(yo@ganymedesclock, I heard you were wondering about what a wyrm’s defensive behaviors would look like, so I decided to just write up my thoughts on that in a separate post rather than a simple reply)
To be a wyrm is to demand a great territory lush with enough foliage and animal life to sustain the ever-growing body of a massive magical organism, and to be ever-growing is to eventually demand the ascension into godhood so that an individual’s power and life is not wholly dependant upon the land for its continued survival. As such, an adult wyrm would not just demand a territory that can reach hundreds of miles in length (be it across the surface or underneath the earth), but would also require territory suitable enough to fit both its needs, and the needs of sapient bugs capable of worshiping it. I personally view wyrms as being well suited for going long periods of time without food or water, being able to sustain themselves on the raw magical energy of the Wastelands, but the fluctuating currents of said magic are not dependable enough for continuous survival, so claiming a territory and eventually ascending into godhood is an inevitable necessity in the life of a wyrm. This, of course, means that resource scarcity is always a threat, and that competition is extremely high. As such, wyrms are highly territorial, aggressive creatures that have no qualms to resorting to cannibalism and very little problems with hounding out anything that dares to threaten their status as the top god of the region, which in turn means that their defensive behaviors are highly varied to match different levels of aggression, and to potentially neutralize dangerous situations if they know that they do not have the chance to survive.
(The claiming of such lands and the continuous aggressive drive to maintain territory also serves to create small, magic-calmed oasis-like areas of safety on the Wasteland’s perimeter, preventing its growth and encouraging an abundance of biodiversity within the pocket that are capable of retaining minds not scoured away by the wild magic of the Wastes. This in turn allows for smaller Higher Beings to propagate in addition to the wyrm’s own young, but that whole cycle between a large, powerful Higher Being magically terraforming a pocket of land to be more suitable to civilian growth is an entirely different topic from wyrm defensiveness altogether. It more just shows how wyrms offset the massive calorie count they require.)
Aren I greatly cherish this metapost but I think by far my favorite part is the fact that we seemingly independently settled on the conclusion of Startled Artichoke PK.
[image id: the knight/ghost from Hollow Knight stares up at a statue of the Pale King in front of a well-style fountain, with the words “A true servant gives all for the Kingdom. Let Hallownest’s Pale King relieve you of your burden.” over it.]
HOW IS THIS NOT SOMETHING I’VE SEEN A MILLION TIMES BEFORE?!?
Like, yeah, it’s a wishing well, donate to the kingdom to keep it running and all. Except then it asks you “Drop all geo in fountain?”
Which, like.
In the context of friggin’ “No cost too great”!?!!!?!?!
My brain skipped right over the ‘getting donations for the kingdom’ interpretation and straight to ‘the Pale King is speaking in third person and referring to how he’s going to do something terrible to save his people and he’s also specifically being the one to do it so that they will not have to carry the burden of having done whatever horrible thing it may take to end this plague themselves, and also referring to how a ruler is meant to be a servant to their people and-’
(screaming because either I’m once again reading way too into things (because English major and literary analyst) or Cherry Team subtly galaxy-brained us again.)
