prokopetz
Honestly, the best thing about Hornet is that she’s basically a particularly intense nine-year-old girl’s first OC played utterly straight. She’s a princess and she’s a knight. She has three moms, and all of them have committed war crimes. She’s half mortal, half god, and half eldritch abomination, and yeah, that adds up to three halves, but it makes sense because shut your stupid face. Her kingdom fell and she’s gonna stand vigil over the ruins and be sad about it for a hundred years (a vigil that takes place principally in and around a shattered metropolis called the City of Tears, where it never stops raining, because subtlety is for suckers), and if anybody asks her what the hell she’s doing, she’s gonna be super cryptic about it, and you just have to deal with it.
@beerbatteredbooty replied:
the fuck did i miss?
Yeah, the game’s lore is nearly as cryptic as Hornet’s monologues, so it’s easy to miss the particulars, but the short version is:
- You know the three Dreamers you have to kill in order to open the Temple of the Black Egg? Each of them demanded a boon of the Pale King in exchange for serving as the lock on the Temple’s seal; the boon demanded by Herrah the Beast, matriarch of Deepnest and certified eldritch abomination, was the Pale King’s child.
- The game’s lore isn’t terribly specific about how that worked, being as they’re wildly different species, so presumably Divine Shenanigans were in play. Whatever the case, the Pale King fathered a child on Herrah the Beast, and that child was Hornet. Herrah then undertook the ritual and became a Dreamer – that’s mom #1.
- (The astute reader may note that this means Hornet later helps the player character murder her birth mother. The angst fuel just doesn’t stop!)
- The infant Hornet was taken to the Pale King’s court and raised by the King’s consort, the White Lady (actually a sapient colony of parasitic fungus, and probable power behind the throne). That’s mom #2.
- It’s also during this time that the Pale King and the White Lady experimented upon their own biological offspring in order to create the Vessels, which means that Hornet is technically half-sibling to both the Hollow Knight and the player character; however, it isn’t specified whether the Hollow Knight’s upbringing occurs before or after Hornet leaves the Pale King’s court to receive training in the art of battle from…
- … Hive Queen Vespa, the queen bee whose ghost the player character later encounters in the ruined honeycomb at the base of the cliffs at Kingdom’s Edge. That’s mom #3.
So, in brief: Hornet is the daughter of Herrah the Beast (by birth), the White Lady (by fosterage), and Hive Queen Vespa (by martial lineage), elder half-sibling to both the player character and the Hollow Knight (via their shared father, the Pale King), and may also have been raised together with the Hollow Knight (but not the player character) depending on certain unspecified timeline details.
Make sense?
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