rabbit den

it drives me a little insane that i havent seen anyone really cover the politics in hk. theres so much to unpack especially in regards to colonization and imperial rule and it doesnt...get talked about, from what ive seen so far? it feels surreal to me.

like ive seen ppl joke abt the pale king being british and. thats about as close as ive seen anyone mention the pale king being a colonizer, and a brutal one at that, with a very clear supremacist ideology that's present within all of hallownest. from proclaiming that accepting his rule grants a bug higher mind, calling the bugs ALREADY on the land savages, even the fixation on hallownest being the first civilization on that land (completely erasing mentions of the ancient one) and the visible attempts at expansion (seemingly what it means to make hallownest eternal). it stinks of the same supremacist ideology i learned about that fueled the spanish and american colonization of the philippines, and im sure the british were the same with australia.

also deepnest denizens being referred to as beasts, when they themselves never refer to themselves as that, is pretty fucked up. seems too close to how hallownest denizens refer to "unenlightened bugs" as savages (see: elegy of hallownest). reminds me too much of the spanish and american colonizers calling the local filipinos savages and used their "savagery" as justification for expansion

also also i keep thinking abt kingsoul and how it contains "limitless soul within". we know what souls are, it's confirmed in soul sanctum that souls are extracted from other living beings, specifically bugs, at the cost of their lives. why does the pale king and white lady just have a charm that contains limitless soul? where is the soul coming from? quirrel mentions that the city uses soul, is that something they learned from the pale king? has the pale king led a [insert a very specific very bad violation of a certain convention]. worms eat dead bugs after all.