#there is no good enough you have to know and be certain
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.’
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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
