Mein Liebe, mein Welpe

#1 Sunk cost fallacy

Ppl got invested in the pre-game fanon version of her, & then explained away everything in canon that didn't fit with it.

This goes beyond just the child issue, her entire character, personality & motivations get deadass ignored & replaced.

It's the same effect you see in the "auction 100 dollars" experiment where ppl will keep bidding even past the value of the 100 dollar bill because they don't want to lose what they bid/ bet so far.

Somewhere along the way there might also have been some ppl might've seen actual potential in the arguments that started out as flimsy ship justifications

A disabled adult who is stuck with a controlling, infantilizing parent could an interesting story, it's just not the story that is being told with this particular character in canon.

(also, wouldn't Phantom or Eva be much more fitting characters for this?)

It's one thing if ppl want to explore that scenario while being aware they're doing an AU / interpretation - like the person doing those comis where they team up with a surviving Green Prince, cause ultimately one of the function of art is to project your own feelings onto it. They just wanna tell a particular story prolly cause it's their own story, and that's ok, it's how art works.

But it's preposterous to argue that it's canon/ the canon intention. Like - there's supposed to be a big major theme in the story that never comes up in dialogue at all? All the arguments for it are flimsy, contradictory & transparently agenda-driven.

This wasn't even meant to be a mystery, nobody questions it or changes their mind about it, including Lace herself.

The story does make distinct points about her in a proper storytelling manner with lampshades, thematic pondering, etc - that she's a real person with worth and that despite what she thinks her evil is more down to nurture than nature. As well as a general point that "children aren't obedience machines" that you're arguably missing if you argue the only way she's not an obedience machine is if shes an adult.

I'd argue that GMS isn't even infantilizing, just plain controlling.

She doesn't want weak offspring, she explicitly wants strong & tough (but doesn't grok how that's incompatible with 'obedient'/ wants obedient more & is always gonna chose that), that's why she prefers the Weavers & while Lace has such a raging inferiority complex over her supposed "weakness" in the first place - because she's been told from the first that she's a consolation prize.

It's like when someone wants their inbred pug to look & act a certain way - the person doesn't want the pug to be sickly in a munchausen kinda way, they just don't care / don't think about it due to egocentrism. She wants obedience; Frailty & sicklyness are an annoying side effect of obedience.

It defo has that "abusive parents blame you even for the effect of the abuse on you" thing going on

She's also distinctly more on the neglectful than the smothering side (as reflected by Lace's desire to be seen & noticed, rather than, say, be allowed to do things on her own. She's free to roam Pharloom & do to the pesants whatever she likes. )

#2 Shipping-centricness of fandom - ppl are just not interested in anyone they aren't interested in drawing porn of

Or indeed barely interest in the source material at all, just plopping the same tropes.

This might be a symptom of how the media landscape these days is obsessed with remakes & reboots while there's a hostile environment for new stories. Ppl who really want to write some original romance novel but think no one will care slap on currently fashionable names.

#3 Disdain for young people/ ageism.

"She can't be a kid, she has feelings & interiority", "She can't be a kid because that would contradict the point that she's supposed to be her own person", dismissing the plight of an abused child (one of the most powerless groups there is) as inherently less complex or less interesting or "superficial"

Same ppl probably say hateful disdainful shit about youth generally.

To state there is no evidence in Silksong in reading Lace as a disabled individual stuck with an abusive caretaker is not true. There are several lines of dialogue that imply this. Most notably are the Exhaust Organ needolin dialogue, where Phantom describes GMS as creating them and Lace to be "spun [...] to fade, spun [...] to break", and Lace's Cradle dialogue, where she refers to herself as a "weak, wasting existence" and "a husk shaped to act as a child".

Both show two things: a conscious awareness that GMS made their bodies weaker than other bugs', and that both siblings feel distress over this. We know that Lace and Phantom's weaker bodies require silk from GMS to live and being denied of it leads to a "slow decline". It is also heavily implied that GMS wanted obedience from her children most of all, not physical strength. Why would she— given the opportunity to create a perfect daughter of her own composition— make her physically weak and dependent if she did not want her to be so?

Regardless of GMS' intention, the fact is that Phantom and Lace cannot live normal lives without silk, and she is the only source of it. It is not incorrect to say Lace is disabled and requires full-time care from someone who neglects her at best, and abuses her at worst. It is what happens directly in text. Assuming that such readings are only for ship reasons or are "transparently agenda-driven" (what agenda? the agenda of the disabled?) is a bad faith argument and misses textual evidence that can be pointed to said reading.

As for "[Lace being a child] wasn't even meant to be a mystery, nobody questions it or changes their mind about it, including Lace herself," this is only the case if one takes Silksong's text at face value and doesn't do thematic analysis of it alongside the rest of the game.

One of the very first characters the player meets is Shakra. She mistakenly calls Hornet a child. Hornet corrects her, but Shakra insists on referring to her as one until Hornet proves herself to be an adult in Shakra's eyes by completing her sidequest. Silksong opens by establishing that people will assume a character is a child when they are not, and will only change their mind after having been proven otherwise. This is important because Hornet is Lace's direct narrative foil.

It is outside characters— those who don't know Lace at all— that refer to her as a child. Hornet and the Caretaker don't know who she is at all. They make assumptions, and as shown with Shakra earlier, assumptions about maturity being wrong is established within Silksong by the time the player meets Lace. Hornet is not a saint and has to actively work to be a more empathetic person to achieve the Sister of the Void ending. She is not above making unflattering and degrading assumptions. When the only mentioned evidence comes from dialogue in a game where characters being wrong about ages is an established trend, it is hardly definitive.

Now, as for Lace calling herself one, she only refers to herself as a child in a negative sense. She puts herself down with the term, and continuously associates it with words like "broken", "ailing", and "pathetic". She sees her body as something that fails her because her mother made it to be something that requires care and dependence (as we see with Phantom, a silk creature cast out by GMS who is visibly falling apart). Childhood is an actively demeaning concept for her that she repeatedly expresses contempt for. She hates herself, so she calls herself something she hates.

Nothing in your argument actually gives any proof that Lace is a child. It only gives evidence for Silksong being a game about child abuse, and that Lace was subjected to it. A character not being a child and having experienced child abuse are not mutually exclusive, as the original Hollow Knight also addresses regarding the titular Hollow Knight. Assuming people think she's an adult because they don't care about children makes duplicit assumptions about strangers and ignores the fact that many adults were abused as children.

You have to actually ACTIVELY unlearn all that shit. You can actually be trans AND hold TERF and racist beliefs, it is in fact very easy.

"on the wrong side of 40" "huh, which side is that?"