Hollow Knight is a 2D Metroidvania-style video game released in 2017 by Team Cherry. The game, set in a world where everyone is some kind of anthropomorphic bug, centers around the journey of the player character, who is not named within the text of the game but is referred to by the developers as The Knight (and who I will be referring to for the rest of this page as Ghost) through the ruins of the fallen kingdom of Hallownest, drawn there by a mysterious force, as the player slowly pieces together what exactly happened to the once-prosperous kingdom and the narrative of religious and family trauma (though in this particular case they're kind of the same thing) surrounding the royal family, which Ghost is revealed to be personally involved in.

I first became interested in Hollow Knight in summer 2019. I was 15 at the time and very recently processing trauma related to my father that I'd rather not get into in too much detail here. Hollow Knight was something I became very attached to because the central narrative of the player character who is textually genderless/nonbinary (I am also nonbinary and identified as agender at the time) defying the purpose they were created for by their father who was the king and also essentially God in order to get the "good ending" of the game was very cathartic for me personally. It is also the specific influence I credit with getting me interested in bugs in general, which has been a huge part of my life and identity from that point forward.

For people who aren't familiar with the story, a detailed explanation can be found here (this is the transcript for a Mossbag video which can be found here.)

Hollow Knight essentially is a game about seeing the purpose you were built for and actively choosing to spit in its face and make your own destiny. The Dream No More ending, which I believe is considered the "true ending" or "best ending" of the game, requires Ghost to acquire the King's Brand and both halves of the Kingsoul (it's worth noting that to get the second half of the latter they have to literally knock the Pale King's dead body off his throne and pick it up from his body), essentially inheriting the Pale King's legacy, and to deliberately eschew it in favor of accepting the void that is a part of them and the circumstances of their birth. It is made fairly clear by the narrative that the very concept of a vessel being able to truly be hollow is fundamentally impossible from the get go because the Pale King was wrong about the nature of the void; it is not inert and it does inherently have a will of its own that, when it's "portioned out" into smaller pieces of itself, can form into distinct consciousnesses with unique personalities.

It can be assumed that what the game rewards you for doing or encourages you to do is what Ghost is choosing to do/they want to do because there is no indication that the real world player has any influence on the events of the game in a fourth wall breaking way; Ghost does have a will of their own and when the White Lady says to them that she believes them to be a truly hollow vessel she is wrong. Progressing through the story of the game requires Ghost to be making conscious decisions about what to do based on the information they have and going "off track" from the directive that the Pale King intended for them. (Credit to ganymedesclock on Tumblr for writing several posts about this line of thought that sum it up better than I do.)

I feel like it's fairly impactful that accepting the circumstances of their creation means accepting that they were born because of a needlessly cruel plan that the Pale King carried out that uncountable numbers of their siblings did not survive, and that they don't have to feel responsible for their father's actions or be defined by them. There's also the fact that Ghost is one of the vessels that was essentially discarded by him and left for dead because they couldn't fulfil his expectations, and they're proving that they have worth and are a person despite his judgement that they aren't.

When I first became interested in Hollow Knight, I was very angry at the Pale King because I was very angry at my own father and I viewed him as basically a one-dimensional cartoon villain. Over time I've realized that the story is more complex than that. I think the Pale King legitimately believed that his plan was going to work and that it was a necessary sacrifice to make for the sake of his kingdom when he didn't see any other options, and ignored any signs that his fundamental assumptions about how the void worked that were crucial to the functioning of his plan were incorrect, because he was full of hubris about tinkering with forces that he didn't understand and also didn't want to even entertain the possibility that he was wrong or that the Hollow Knight wasn't actually hollow because then he would have to confront the fact that he'd doomed thousands of his own children to death in service of a plan that was fundamentally impossible from the start, and that was something he refused to consider. The Abyss, where the terrible actions of the vessel plan took place, is sealed off with a notice that describes it as the "refuse and regret of [the Hollow Knight's] creation", so evidently the Pale King felt some degree of shame about what transpired there and didn't want the evidence of these actions to be on display. When we find his body in his throne room, there are void particles present, and being void-stained is thematically tied to having deep regrets about something, so it seems to be implied that at some point before his death he became consumed with regret about what he had done; it's unclear whether this regret is related to the fact that his plan failed and was always going to fail or the fact that he had done something unfathomably cruel. He did something truly terrible, and he doesn't have to be a unilaterally fundamentally evil person or even his actions intentionally malicious for him to have done something truly terrible that his children don't have to forgive him for. I feel like this maturation of my opinion on him parallels how my feelings on my own situation have grown and changed over time as well.

I feel like it's somewhat of a bittersweet ending that he's gone and Ghost has refused to carry on his legacy and goals as king and the world can move forward into a new age without his influence as ruler, but also because he's gone, his surviving children will never really have closure about his motivations for making the choices that he did, what he thought and felt about it, and how he justified it to himself; him being dead means anything related to his internal thoughts and opinions will forever stay a mystery. I feel like it would feel unrealistic and "too clean cut" of an ending for the characters and the audience to really fully know these things.

I am very much a fan of the fact that Hollow Knight has two canon gay couples in it (Sheo/Nailsmith and Grey Mourner/Traitor's Child) and a canonically genderless player character. Additionally it's made clear that all vessels are in fact genderless as a trait inherent to them and Hornet as the sole sibling that does have a gender identity is notable enough that she's referred to in dialogue by other characters as "the Gendered Child". (It's a somewhat common fan interpretation that Hornet is referred to this way because she asserted that she was a girl at some point in early childhood when most insects and arachnids don't have any visible indication of what biological sex their adult form will be until they reach adulthood, and that she's a trans woman.) There are even development notes from Team Cherry stressing to not refer to Ghost or any of the other vessels with gendered terms because it's very important to the lore that they don't have genders. I appreciate that they included queer themes in their game in a casual way as if to emphasize that being queer is just a natural part of life and society. They also stated in a Reddit AMA about the game that they are supportive of players interpreting Ghost as nonbinary and are glad that nonbinary players feel empowered by this. I enjoy this attitude towards these topics and it's another reason why I feel personally connected to the story of this game.

There's a whole lot about the world of Hollow Knight that I love and it would be impossible to touch on it all. This page is meant to serve as an explanation of and monument to the primary narrative thread of the story that drew me in initially and that I find most personally meaningful and resonant.

Here's a random list of things related to Hollow Knight that I feel like sharing:

• I am the reason Mossbag knows what Lemmquirrel is (I wrote the wiki page he's reading in this tweet)
• Lemm's voice actor had to re-record his voice lines because the first try didn't sound annoyed at the player enough (the original recordings were used for the Nailsmith) [Source]
• There's actually no canon answer regarding what happened to Quirrel after he's last seen ingame, Team Cherry said in an interview with Kotaku when asked directly about it that they don't know what happened to him [Source, 36:38]
• Team Cherry stated on Twitter that the reason Dung Defender has fur on his crotch is because "Ari refused to animate his genitalia"