Hollow Knight: Authoritarianism and the Individual
How Hollow Knight presents different authoritarian ideologies and their conflict with the individual.
The following contains spoilers for Hollow Knight.
Hollow Knight is a game made of sweeping and gorgeous landscapes filled with the melancholic dreams of now lost denizens. It is a game that focuses on the ways in which a solitary warrior travels through a ruined kingdom to uncover the source of an unknowable corruption.
Hollow Knight is a game about apocalyptic beauty and the struggle between authoritarianism and the individual’s right to exist.
We begin with a premise — not everyone can escape the beautiful desolation that the end will bring.
Hallownest, the setting of Hollow Knight, is in most ways the character around which the game is framed. It is a beautiful place, a world that spans from windswept vistas, to rain-soaked cityscapes, to overgrown gardens, and even desolate underground wastelands. It is a world full of dangers, mindless enemies that are trying to destroy a solitary figure that walks it. Hallownest is a dead world, akin to that of a zombie apocalypse. It was once a flourishing kingdom, home to countless species of very slightly anthropomorphic bugs. Now however it is a crumbling ruin, the cause of which is slowly revealed across the course of the game.
At some point in the past, before the arrival of the playable character the Knight, a sickness swept through the kingdom of Hallownest and turned almost all of the population mindless. The Knight arrives from the outside world, an ephemeral and unknowable place where several characters come from, but which is never explained in even the slightest. The climate is that the world has ended, and there is no hope it can be restored.
This is the landscape of Apocalyptic Beauty — a return of nature, the conquest of the manufactured by the natural, and the slow erasure of society. It is a reclamation of what was taken by society, and it evokes the beauty and romance of nature and forgotten times while retaining the horror and bleakness of a post-apocalyptic world. It is both natural and artificial, destruction interlaced with regeneration.
The region of Queen’s Gardens is the most obvious example of apocalyptic beauty in the game — it is an overgrown sanctuary, its inhabitants are a melding of plant and bug, some even becoming shrubs. Thorned vines twist through the landscape, old mechanical platforms can be found, the carved stone paths and columns of a once civilised garden is now a forested wilderness.
In other places, such as Crystal Peak, the mechanisms of the society bugs had created looms much clearer only to have been abandoned all the same. Mining equipment and conveyor belts line the tunnels and caverns, the crystals they were carving from the mountain are left scattered alongside helmets and picks.
There is a moment in the game where, as you delve deeper into Hallownest and uncover the City of Tears, that you come across a monument sitting in the heart of the city. It dwarfs the Knight, they are nothing compared to it, the daunting edifices of the city surround it and the society that created such things are now long dead. It is a monument to a central, heroic figure known as the Hollow Knight.
The Hollow Knight, as one might guess, is an important character in the story of Hallownest. Long ago they were sacrificed to seal away an ancient threat which once held the bugs of Hallownest in its thrall. The Hallownest we see is a result of their failure, their sacrifice was not enough and so the threat has all but won.
This threat, known as the infection, renders bugs mindless. Almost everything in this world from the lowly miners and indentured servants to the nobles and the soldiers that protected them are mindless. Only a handful of individuals have escaped the infection, now they live in the wake of an apocalypse.
The game’s story itself takes place in the aftermath of Hallownest’s downfall, no timespan is given for how long it has been in ruin, but some time seems to have passed since society ceased functioning. Once a thriving kingdom made of many different species of bug working together in peace and relative harmony, it is now united only in its opposition to the Knight and the other bugs still with a mind. The Knight encounters many of them as they travel across the breadth of Hallownest from the vicious and territorial mantis tribes of the fungal wastes to the bourgeois nobility in the city.
The scattering of sentient bugs that the Knight encounters in their travels are not always friendly but they are rarely aggressive. Each has their own personality and motivations; they share stories about their desires and memories about the previous era. Free from the infection, they are fearful of it — outright calling it an infection, regarding it as unnatural. This is for a reason.
The primordial nature of bugs is to hold agency, to be thinking beings.
Hallownest has entered a phase in its existence where the individual is no longer welcome. It no longer flourishes as a collective of individuals, it finds ruin as it returns to a previous era — to a hive mind. It is revealed throughout the Knight’s travels that Hallownest has existed through many eras and it has been torn between two cosmic forces from the very beginning.
The Kingdom of Hallownest was itself built upon the bones of a much more ancient civilisation now forgotten to time but whose relics can be found across the Kingdom. The bugs of this ancient civilisation pre-date the arrival of the infection and can be said to have had free-wills and minds. What is known is that they worshipped a cosmic force known as the Void, a chaotic swirling darkness that holds no finite form. They were the first, and they disappeared either upon or before the arrival of the other cosmic force — the Light.
With the arrival of the Light came an apocalypse, something which all but erased the precursor civilisation from Hallownest. It appeared in the form of the moth tribe who were born from the power of a god-like being known as the Radiance. The Radiance offered to the bugs that would form Hallownest unity and an end to conflict at the price of their minds, effectively creating a hive-mind. There is no indication that the Radiance created anything new, it simply instilled order by erasing the minds of the bugs that fell under its sway. It remained this way for untold time. The Radiance was a being within the spiritual realm and with no direct way to interact with the physical realm except through an intermediary plane known as the Dream.
The Dream is where the physical realm and the spiritual realm intersect, a place where both Light and Void can exist and exert influence. Here the physical and spiritual bleed together, and it is where the Light holds most sway over the physical. It is the means by which the Light may influence the physical realm.
The Radiance would not rule forever however, as another god-like embodiment of the Light arrived to challenge her rule — known as the Wyrm. Unlike the Radiance, the Wyrm existed in the physical realm, and even had the ability to reincarnate into a body akin to the bugs living in Hallownest. This new form was known as the Pale King and freed the bugs from their hive-mind. He offered them eternal prosperity if they worshipped him as a god-king, and so the bugs turned away from the Radiance.
The end of the Radiance brought another cycle of apocalypse, but one which led to the creation of the Kingdom that the Knight journeys through, and by extension it is the Kingdom that crumbles to ruin and another cycle of apocalyptic beauty. The Pale King, despite urging the citizens of Hallownest to forget the Radiance, held no power over their dreams. Over time the bugs were infected by the Radiance’s through the Dream and began to drag them back to the hive-mind she had once enforced.
But, as a physical being, the Pale King could work with the Void, manipulating it to create vessels to contain the Radiance. The only one deemed capable of containing the Radiance and halt the infection was the Hollow Knight. It was to embody the Void, an entity with no thoughts for the Radiance to intrude and take over, however it had a thought instilled upon it and thus became infected.
This flaw is not one in the Hollow Knight but rather it is a systemic one of the society that the Pale King formed and presents to us the major dialectical struggles present in Hallownest — while the Void and Light are oppositional towards each other, Light is also oppositional to itself. The Light is presented as authoritarian and authoritarianism comes in two forms in Hallownest — the Radiance’s authoritarianism where the individual is erased for the betterment of society, and the Pale King’s where the individual is venerated as heroic and aspirationally sacrificial to society.
This dialectic struggle between two incompatible ideologies is the reason why Hallownest crumbled, in a battle between the very right for the individual to exist opposed by the individual elevated to a sacred concept to be exploited.
Under the Pale King, the edifices of the world are etched by symbols and iconography evoking the Pale King, there are statues raised to heroic figures that act as gateways into the City of Tears, the bodies of the significant fallen are entombed in stone. Those few sentient bugs that remain all share thoughts about their own deeds and the deeds of others, some share history about long dead heroic figures and one sings songs they grew up listening to. The individual is glorified and romantic, there is an entire colosseum built to showcase those seeking glory.
Those who have escaped the infection are universally dismissive of, horrified by, or pity the mindless. They fear losing their own minds, but risk that fate to pursue their own destinies. Even the wandering cartographer Cornifer speaks of his explorations as if they are a destiny. And those who speak about the infection regard it as a literal infection, but it is much more than that. It is a disease on the world itself, spreading and overrunning the world with physical miasma and cysts. At a certain point in the game, it overwhelms the very first true zone the Knight ventures into — the Forgotten Crossroads. It is here that the Hollow Knight is locked away, struggling to contain the Radiance as her power bleeds out into the physical realm through the Dream. Bugs become vessels of the Radiance’s power, mutating as more and more seeps through and slowly erases even the physical individual forms of the bugs and their monuments to their cult of the heroic individual.
The warm, orange palette of the Radiance consumes the cool blues and blacks of the Void-coloured physical realm. This is important symbolism to keep in mind while playing the game, the world is very much colour coded for your convenience. The world is dark, some areas are pitch black, everywhere in the physical realm is muted. The Light is divided between the demure, warmer tones of the Radiance whose primary colours are orange and yellow, and the harsher, colder tones of the Pale King whose primary colours are white and blue. As one dominates, it erases the other and brings about yet another cycle of apocalyptic beauty — a reversion to nature as defined by the dominant force.
This is where Hollow Knight as a text positions the conflict between the individual and the authorities that be. A conflict of survival caught between a manipulative Pale King and an eradicatory Radiance. It would seem obvious which is the greatest threat — the Radiance who wants to destroy everything.
This is indeed where the game places you as the player, on a war path against the Radiance to stop them. For what ends though? When taken into consideration what lengths the Pale King was willing to go to in order to maintain his own power paints him as anything but benevolent. If he was the lesser of two evils is largely based upon the perspectives of the audience — if peace and unity are worth the sacrificing of the self, and to what extent.
The reason the Pale King’s iconography can be found across the entire length and breadth of Hallownest is because he ordered its construction. He offered prosperity for worship, becoming a god-king over the citizens of Hallownest and rewarded those who worshipped him. The nobility that you encounter still sentient are obsessed with the Pale King, as are the heroic knights that served as guardians for the kingdom. His kingdom functioned off of the cult of personality surrounding himself and those heroic sacrificial individuals who benefited him.
This can be seen most strongly in the character of the Hollow Knight — a being originally made from the void to be a mindless slave, without voice or thought or will. The memorial in the centre of the City of Tears is the only monument made to the sacrifice of both the Hollow Knight and a group known as the Dreamers.
It is the heart of the city and depicts the central and glorified figure of the Hollow Knight surrounded by three diminutive and somewhat reverential figures facing them — all cloaked and masked, insignificant even upon the sole monument made to remember their sacrifice. Though the memorial is for the group, it is devoted to a singular being — the Hollow Knight.
It is the Hollow Knight who stands central, uplifted upon a flower — a symbol of some significance I will explain shortly — and surrounded by the Dreamers who are lesser figures. As the only relic remaining of the Hollow Knight’s sacrifice to the greater public, it is both a testament to the heroic cult that the Pale King brought to Hallownest, and to the disdain for those who do not live up to expectations.
While the Pale King’s influence is felt everywhere, including literal churches to his honour, those who he sacrifices are left behind the moment they no longer demand respect or attention. The Hollow Knight was flawed, there were made as a way to contain a disease and when they failed to do so they were put aside to become nothing but memories.
The motif of forgetting and memories is an important one in the Pale King’s ideology. It was his urging for the bugs of Hallownest to forget the Radiance that led to the Radiance’s infection — they had grown angry over being forgotten and lashed out through the Dream. It was the forgetting of the Hollow Knight that led to the erasure of such an important piece of Hallownest’s history and why the Radiance eventually breaks free. The Knight too was ignored and forgotten when they did not live up to expectations, discarded deep below Hallownest only to escape and return once the kingdom had met its fate.
Even the Pale King himself has been relegated to memories. His palace is not on the physical map, despite it having existed there. His only appearance in the physical realm is in memories, and his body is only found by entering the Dream. The only way to see him outside of passing memories and ruined architecture is to enter the Dream through one of the many guards laying upon the palace grounds where the palace once stood.
In the game the Knight obtains a tool known as the dream nail, and when used upon a bug, living or dead, their thoughts are revealed. Some are strong enough to pull the Knight into the Dream with them, or they allow the Knight to enter the Dream through them. Within the dream of a dead guard is the White Palace, or a memory of it. There the Pale King’s corpse sits upon his throne and will tell you himself what his ideology entailed.
No cost is too great.
He repeats this in the memories of him that you encounter. Others who remember how he was in life refer to this. To the Pale King, no cost was too great, and that cost appears to have been absolutely everything. Everything is gone, even the most powerful amongst individuals is destined to disappear and be forgotten. All that is left is relics and monuments, and vestiges of his ideology slowly dying out as the Radiance consumes them. The Pale King’s ideology is like a delicate flower.
There is a side quest that can be completed if you are masochistic enough. It involves transporting a flower from one side of Hallownest to the other. However, to complete it the flower cannot be damaged, which means that the Knight cannot take damage while carrying it. It is innocuous at first, but it ends up being the grounding symbolism of the place of the individual in this world.
The quest is given to the Knight by a mourning woman known as Ze’mer, she gives the Knight the flower so that they can place it upon the grave of their deceased lover whom she was never allowed to be with in life. She has an infinite supply of them, and so if you fail the quest and ruin the flower you may return to gain another.
The flowers are extremely fragile, and if you detour to take them to other characters they will remark on its beauty, its purity, and one will even go so far as to compare it to the Pale King. It is said to hold power in its fragility, and that it is precious. If you place it upon the grave as asked, Ze’mer disappears and leaves the flowers behind. The flowers are infinite, frail, precious, pure, beautiful, they are the individual and the Knight is the society.
Ze’mer is in fact a member of a group known as the Five Great Knights, once the protectors of Hallownest. By the time the Knight arrives there is only two remaining — one has drifted into memories of past glories and Ze’mer long ago surrendered to the sorrow of her lost love’s death. Both are the greatest remaining individuals of the realm, unable to prevent the destruction that befell Hallownest, both are emblematic of the reason the kingdom fell.
Ogrim, who now spends his days defending the Royal Waterways, was the most loyal of the knights and continues to serve unthinkingly. Ze’mer put aside her duty to tend to flowers when her lover was forbidden from being with her and died without her. Ogrim is a fanatic of a dead ideology, Ze’mer is a victim of it.
The delicate flowers that Ze’mer now grows are symbolic of how the individual is under this ideology. Fragile and beautiful, easily destroyed by the world and must be protected by those with greater strength. They only have meaning when offered one, as a symbol of love, purity, memories or dreams. Flowers are steeped in the iconography of the Dream, and this is no coincidence — the Dream is literally rooted in the world through plants that flash with white glyphic floral patterns when you strike them with the dream nail. The dream nail itself is symbolised by this same floral pattern, one which shares the same petal pattern as the delicate flowers Ze’mer offers.
Flowers reclaim, they are part of nature, they overgrow and erase the artificial edifices of civilisation. They grow in the Light, and the Void seems averse to all plant life — none grows near it or within it. The Dream, as the space between them, is where the individual is rooted. It is the realm of the mind; it is where the threads of consciousness go when a bug dies and those threads do not vanish from the physical body but are part of it.
The individual is a combination of both the spiritual and the physical — it is Light and Void.
There are those, the Dreamers for instance, that exist almost purely in the Dream. They sacrificed their waking lives to enter an eternal slumber that would seal away the Hollow Knight. Their bodies remain but are entombed, and their minds are completely within the Dream. By comparison, the Radiance lacks a physical form outside of the Dream and Void manifestations seem to lack a mind until it is given to them.
So, there is a dichotomy that forms — the physical realm of Hallownest and the mental realm of the Dream both torn between the Void and the Light. Hallownest forming the primary battleground of the two forces trying to dominate the Light, and both offer conflicting but tangentially aligned solutions to the same problem.
The individual is fragile.
The Pale King sacrifices the individual to protect the society. The Radiance protects society by sacrificing the individual.
The Light is embodied by the relationship of the individual to the society, it is represented by two authoritarian powers imposing their own will upon others. However, it is also the source of the individual, it gives them their mind. The Void is embodied by a collection of manifestations, by a swirling and entropic darkness that consumes the minds and bodies of those it comes in contact with. These beings have no minds of their own, there is no true individual amongst them until they are given a mind. Yet it is through the Void that we are given an answer to the oppression that the Light offers.
The Void offers revolutionary violence.
This is what the Void represents more than anything, freedom from authority. It gives the power to destroy gods. It is also however a force of entropy as opposed to the order of the Light. The Light is controlling and creative, it may provide the mind, but it also erases the individual. The Void is liberating and destructive, it is mindless raw power with no concept of either society or individual. It does not view the individual as a delicate flower to be protected, it only sees chitin and bone, and apocalyptic beauty. It regenerates the world to its natural state while the Light imposes itself and creates the artificial.
Hallownest is the result of two separate gods imposing their visions of the world upon the natural, taming it and controlling the natural state of bugs. Both authorities brought peace and unity in different ways, it erased the true primordial nature of the bugs and that can only be undone by the Void and its violence.
The individual is a flower, but one with thorns. Something that begins pure and loses itself as it endures the world. Even the strongest may break when faced with the challenges of the world — things like bigotry and death, the loss of their hopes and aspirations, the end of civilisation itself. Some may seek to destroy themselves to be part of something greater, and others will attempt to destroy something greater to save themselves. Dreams never die however; they remain even in death — memories are held by those the individual knew and loved. With enough determination, a single individual can overcome a kingdom to save a society from annihilation.
Not everyone can escape the beautiful desolation that the end may bring, but they live on as part of something greater — the memories and dreams of now gone civilisations.
Hollow Knight is a game about the individual’s right to exist in the face of authorities that seek to erase it, and the only way this can be achieved is by revolutionary violence — the destruction of the authorities is the path to the salvation of the individual.
