Laylabean

So, I wanna talk about Silksong, not really in terms of the gameplay (that’s a whole other can of worms), but instead about the treatment of women/female characters. Specifically, I wanna look at Hornet’s gender, why the fuck the game keeps sexually harassing her, and the themes/presentation of gender in both games.

Hornet, compared to Ghost from HK 1, is explicitly female. She/Her pronouns, Princess of Hallownest, runs about in a goddamn red cloak/dress thing instead of being naked (like most bugs) or clothed in a long grey ankle length cloak (like most Vessels). She is Woman Character.

And so, as a Woman Gamer, I find it really unsettling how Hornet, the Woman Character, is getting harassed by the other characters in Silksong: Nuu, Kratt and the Flies of The Slab. Yes, each time it happens, Hornet gets a badass prison break montage (The Slab) or bitch-slaps them (Kratt and Nuu), but considering that it adds no narrative or gameplay value, I’m confused why it’s included at all and worried about the implications.

In Hollow Knight, the female characters are pretty much only mothers or wives, except for Hornet. Iselda (wife). Herrah (Hornet’s mother). The White Lady (mother, wife, strangely hyper sexual). Gruz Mother (it’s in the name). Queen Vesta (already dead, later retconned to be another of Hornet’s mother figures, and as a queen bee, she is also defacto a mother of all the other bees in the hive, thats how bees work).

Hornet is pretty much the only female character whose femininity isn’t the only aspect to her. She’s cool, mysterious, badass, right? Well…she’s also Hallownest’s caretaker, basically playing nanny to the Dreamers and Black Egg Temple and killing all the other Vessels that escape the Abyss.

This only gets worse when Hornet becomes the main character of her own game. The female characters in Silksong are a little more nuanced, but so many are still kneecapped by motherhood. Grand Mother Silk (it’s in the name). The Broodmother boss fight (the name). Characters like Lace and Shakra escape their fate of just being Woman Character in Video Game…

But in her own game, Hornet doesn’t.

This probably doesn’t seem terrible on the surface, but twice across this game, Hornet is stripped of her cloak/dress thing and left naked - when you get the Drifter’s Cloak upgrade, and during the Slab sequence (not that the Slab isn’t sick as hell). Why does Hornet need to be naked during these moments? Why does she need to be shown putting the cloak back on when she gets Drifter’s Cloak? When you get upgrades in Hollow Knight, like Mothwing Cloak, Shade Cloak etc, you don’t get naked. It just happens. So why does Hornet get naked when she gets Drifter’s Cloak?

Why, when she is captured and taken to the Slab, is the Main Female Character stripped naked and locked in a cage? Couldn’t they just have taken her needle and tools? Why did she have to get naked?

As well, Hornet gets weirdly harassed by both Nuu and Kratt. I’ll talk about Nuu first.

Nuu, the little pink sadistic hunter, is confirmed in game to be young, to not be a mature adult. She needlessly emphasises how Hornet is a mature adult, and how cool it is that Hornet hunts down all these monsters. Then she…wants to taste the juices of Hornet’s foes, and approaches her with a weird kissy face and tries to touch her. Hornet slaps her away, and Nuu seems decently chastised. Nuu, being young, gets a slight pass for being creepy, but not much.

With Kratt, it’s even worse. He offers Hornet access to his hot spring, and then tries to peek on her bathing multiple times, until the player slaps him away. He has the audacity to whine about her/us hitting him, insisting he was innocently doing repairs, but the entire scene is so uncomfortable.

(There is another instance where an NPC tries to creepily touch Hornet and she slaps them away, Grindle, but I can excuse that since he was trying to pickpocket her, not assault her)

I really just want to know: why? What do these moments add to the game’s narrative? What would we lose from not seeing Hornet’s body? What would we lose from cutting Nuu and Kratt’s harassment? Not a lot, since both of them are entirely missable moments, and literally don’t affect the game at all.

I just think it’s disappointing that, even today, we still receive games (as fun as they are) that have very weird attitudes towards their female characters, and very unpleasant attitudes about harassing those female characters and stripping them naked. It’s creepy at its most innocent and borderline sexual harassment at the most extreme.

We’re still telling stories to this day that frivolously include undeveloped female characters, and the female characters that are developed, are still treated like this. These moments of gendered discrimination and gendered stereotypes are really concerning. The moment with Kratt, and the escape from the Slab, smack of some serious internal misogyny and the casual attitude the world still holds about women.

A different version of that tiny doodle that's inspired by a panel of stressedchuck hehehehe