ghost in a half shell

with the new information we have from silksong about the weavers' fertility issues (with confirmation from hornet that herrah had these fertility problems and that hornet has them too), we are presented with the strong possibility that herrah telling the pale king that she would only become one of his dreamers if he could give her an heir was her giving him what she thought was an impossible condition. if that's the case, that makes her letting him try to prove her wrong even worse: rather than simply letting deepnest's longtime nemesis have her vagina to end the infection/fulfill a personal desire for parenthood, that would imply she did so to prove her point and make the pale king give up and leave her/deepnest alone. if the latter is the scenario we are looking at, then the pale king successfully impregnating her and herrah safely carrying hornet to term was unexpected, as was the pale king therefore laying claim on herrah's life for his hollow knight plan. but herrah doesn't renege on the deal - she calls it fair bargain and holds to her word.

and whatever the scenario we're looking at with hornet's conception and birth, herrah adored her daughter. in hornet's flashback, herrah is the first one to tell child hornet that everyone projecting their own hopes, dreams, and political goals onto her can go get bent; herrah is one of the few people in hornet's life who supports her personhood and agency. throughout the dreamers' appearances in hollow knight, as monomon and lurien argue about what's to be done about the seals, herrah is off to the side thinking "i literally do not care about any of this as long as hornet is safe" and her final thoughts, should the player use the dream nail to read them, are about her willingness to sacrifice everything for her daughter.

hallownest does not call herrah "the beast" because she's a dumb brute. they call her "the beast" because she is a spider - and because hallownest looks down upon all the other bug nations in the area as uncivilized savages.

similarly, the poem "pharloom's folly" that's presented as an epigraph to silksong calls grand mother silk a beast. there are many reasons that a casual observer who's made it through the game might agree: pharloom is as much of a nightmare state as hallownest - and much more obviously so, as none of their neighbors were able to successfully fight back. third era pharloom as we see it is deep into late stage capitalism, class stratification, and industry and has completely stripped all its neighbors for natural resources. and while the great machine of silk harvesting and implementation continues in third era pharloom to keep the cradle's lullaby going, third era pharloom inherited these systems from the second era's weaver rulers, who in turn had repurposed the form of the state that grand mother silk had originally created to privilege the weavers over all other bugs in pharloom's first era.

beyond this, grand mother silk is, notably, The Failmom Ever. the structure of pharloom already paints her as a great player of favorites, one of those migraine-inducing karen mothers they call "monster parents" in japan. at the same time, her failure to mention to the weavers that she created them from pharlids - essentially that they are adopted, and not literally sprung forth from her very own loins - and her creating lace to look and sound eternally neotenous suggest that she's the sort of parent who specifically wanted babies and children to coddle, and was not really prepared for or even interested in having teenage or adult offspring.

grand mother silk lost the weavers' trust starting with her not telling them the truth about their origins, leading to their estrangement and the weavers' eventual betrayal. from her reaction said betrayal seemingly caught her entirely off guard - either the weavers never felt comfortable confronting her about whether she actually wanted them as children or as servants/a personal ego boost, or they tried to and like many a real life failparent grand mother silk did not understand how serious this was for them. the second era of pharloom was defined by the weavers' attempts to unmesh themselves from grand mother silk and their mass emigration came from them realizing these attempts had backfired and era 2 pharloom still revolved around their mother regardless.

grand mother silk very much loves lace - "i want a daughter to love and who loves me; it doesn't matter if she's disabled or insane or short-lived," says grand mother silk of lace's birth in the relevant silk heart sequence (paraphrased into plain speech). she goes on to spend all of act 3 fighting with all her power to save lace from the void even though lace just betrayed her and cut her arm off, and actively sacrifices herself to get hornet and lace out of the abyss in the sister to the void ending.

hornet remarks in act 3 that the wound she inflicted on grand mother silk was already mortal, that grand mother silk is doomed regardless, and that the only reason she fights back is to protect lace. in response to the snail shamans' shock that grand mother silk has managed to resist the void for so long, hornet explains how grand mother silk is using her defensive cocoon as a stopgap, and that "even as the dark eats its outer [layer], she will spin its silk anew. the effort would be immense and it will strain her soul thin, but what other choice remains? this is the desperate act of a dying god."

but despite how grand mother silk herself feels, lace is anxious of and jealous for her mother's attention, fears abandonment, and is bitter to have been created with such a fragile and delicate body. some of lace's frustration comes from her suspicion that hornet has been brought as her replacement, and some may also stem from her mother's inability to actively parent her from within the prison of the cradle, but lace's neuroses are certainly also rooted in seeing what's happened to her sister/sibling phantom - who was also created by grand mother silk but is never mentioned by her in-game, and who has seemingly been swept into the margins to do the literal dirty work of expunging the citadel's exhaust where the underworks meet the bilewater, and left there to rot out of sight and out of mind as their body literally falls apart.

in addition to all this, silksong goes out of its way to put into words what makes "pale beings" - the white higher beings the pale king, white lady, and grand mother silk - different from other higher beings such as radiance and unn. pale beings, says hornet, are possessive and controlling and entitled; as half pale being hornet mentions recognizing these tendencies in herself and actively avoiding acting on them, and she says out loud with her mouth while trying to comfort green prince, "devotion or destruction… these are the only fates my kind allow." we learned in hollow knight that this sort of behavior out mr "no blazing kin" the pale king informed his monstrous treatment of his neighbors and ultimately doomed hallownest in his inability to leave radiance and the moth tribe alone; here in silksong we see not only pharloom's monstrous treatment of Its neighbors, but grand mother silk losing her whole ass mind at the weavers' betrayal and going full scorched earth on them.

but "pharloom's folly" does not address grand mother silk's tyranny or her bad parenting. it doesn't talk about her pale being-typical walking red flag tendencies. "pharloom's folly" is conductor romino remarking that everyone has forgotten grand mother silk is dangerous because she is asleep, but if she ever wakes up everyone is doomed, because she is a spider.

and hornet herself? we know her intimately after two full games. we know her fierce intelligence and her strength of character, we know the kindness she continually downplays - constantly offering advice and assistance to various characters in pharloom, saying "ok if it's on my way" while accepting severely out of her way errands, yet protesting to pilby and flick that all the wish-granting is also for her own benefit. we know her sense of duty and refusal to run away from her responsibilities, we've used the dream nail to see her grieving for herrah and worrying that sending ghost to murder radiance and end the infection might be the wrong choice morally. i will not sacrifice my life, says hornet over and over, because my life was too expensive. she refuses to let the snail shamans weasel out of their responsibility in the void trying to eat pharloom in act 3. if she must take the lives of the old hearts to save the pharloom region then she will do it personally, honorably; afterwards she speaks of karak, karmelita and her ants, nyleth and seth, and verdania with a deep respect. she gives ghost their name.

if we get the witch crest, on the way we watch hornet power through the aftermath of greyroot raping her and forcibly impregnating her with the parasitic twisted bud - an event whose implications only get more horrific in light of hornet's mention of having outlived several romantic partners and her knowledge of her weaver fertility problems; she has tried to have children many times in her past and was unable to. it's a particularly cruel echo of herrah's circumstances; while herrah consented under duress, that's still a far cry from what we see happen to hornet. and that's not even getting into mad doctor yarnaby's no-sedative-nor-anesthesia back alley abortion, performed with a drill fit with metal spikes that have "hardly begun to rust" according to crull and benjin.

and on the other hand, through the hunter's journal we discover that hornet can also be very silly. if a creature is furry and soft-looking, hornet wants to pet it; the bigger the better. she wholeheartedly condemns the citadel's zoo the memorium and its attempts to alter the native wildlife… except for the massive moss grub, whose pointy spines she wishes the citadel had bred out to maximize its huggability. as a child she hoped she would one day sprout wings like her father's, and envied the bees and mantises for their flight and their natural weapons. as an adult, she says, she has learned to accept the limitations of her body… by which she means supplement generously with tools. she refuses invitations to play games because she's busy… until she's offered rewards, and proceeds to have a great time. she has a dry sense of humor which she deploys to devastating effect ("your cellar seems to have an ant problem").

she backhands grindle, nuu, and yarnaby for overstepping her boundaries; she can do a little dance on sex pest flea kratt's head… and can also do one on nasty victim blamer bell hermit's shell, once you get to act 3. if you take her back to shakra's mother's final resting place and use the needolin, she'll play the requiem shakra taught her. she loves her mothers and hates her father and insists to lace that lace is a person like any other because lace's inferiority complex reminds hornet of what hallownest did to the hollow knight. her love of hunting she got from herrah; her love of tinkering, despite everything, is from the pale king.

various people throughout the pharloom region refer to hornet as a beast.

this is not a commentary on her personality or her behavior.

it is

because

she

is

a

spider.