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A Broken Model of The World
The American visa rejection was delivered with the bureaucratic indifference characteristic of empire in its senescent phase. No California, no Texas, no opportunity to temporarily escape to the land of my dreams and do Rationalist Things. Instead: India. The eternal return. Air conditioning as opposed to indoor heating, and dogs who hadn't yet learned that unconditional love is a dangerous thing. I didn't intend to disabuse them.
But of course, and here's where the reptilian cortex asserts its dominion over whatever higher functions medical school was supposed to cultivate, there were women. Specifically, women who might conceivably miss me, which is to say women whose neural architecture had been sufficiently damaged by prior exposure to my personality that they'd developed something like Stockholm syndrome, except with worse texting habits. I didn't have the time to cultivate new relationships, nor was I prepared to go through the rigmarole of setting up a dating profile to local tastes. Old flames could be fanned out from the embers instead.
Near the top of this list, glowing with the phosphorescent intensity of a bad decision that knows it's bad and has made peace with this knowledge: Her. The Model. You know the one. Hot as hell, but her head is held aloft by a mixture of helium and bad decisions.
I'd dated her very briefly before fleeing to residency, that period of psychiatry training designed to teach you about antidepressants and then teach you more about which ones you've come to need (all of them). She presented, in the phenomenological sense that Heidegger might have recognized had he spent less time with Nazis and more time on dating apps*, as the eternal feminine victim: doe-eyed, helpless, perpetually buffeted by the cruel winds of toxic masculinity, which is to say every man she'd ever met, perhaps excluding me.
She'd been reaching out at semi-random intervals during my Scottish exile, something my brain's tired pattern-recognition systems had correlated with relationship turbulence, usually accompanied by marriage proposals that made me feel simultaneously desirable and like I was being offered a role in a particularly depressing regional theater production. Very ego-syntonic, as we say in the trade, which is professional code for "it made me feel good in ways I'm not too ashamed to admit."
Then: radio silence. Months of it. I'd interpreted this through my characteristically solipsistic lens as evidence that she'd found stability, or at least a nice man in the neighborhood, which turned out to be partially correct in the way that a broken clock is correct twice daily, accurate in its specifics while missing the larger horror entirely.
She had technically just reached out. Just a few days before I was due to fly in. Just a perfunctory "hey" on Insta, which I had genuinely not seen for days because, well, psychiatry doesn't make for very exciting day-in-the-life posts. At least not without trouble with the GMC.
I'd landed back in India and reached out. Nothing. I began contemplating that I was being ghosted, or that I'd outlived my usefulness to her. Maybe she had found a nice Punjabi boy to grow fat with. My daydreams were each more psychologically sophisticated than the last, which is what you do when you've spent too much time learning about defense mechanisms instead of developing functional ones.
The truth was stupider: she didn't check her DMs. She'd always been a bit shite about that. Well, self_made_human, that's the pot calling the kettle black. The solution, obvious in retrospect, required abandoning digital mediation for its older, more aggressive cousin: I called her.
Two rings. Then:
"Oh my god! You're back?"
The voice hit me like a familiar drug: breathless, pitched at a frequency that triggered some deep mammalian subroutine, laced with an enthusiasm that I knew was performed but which worked anyway because evolution has programmed male brains to be very, very stupid about certain audio frequencies. It was the auditory equivalent of those supernormal stimuli ethologists use to make birds try to mate with volleyball-sized eggs.
"I am," I said, attempting to maintain the facade of being a person with boundaries. "I thought you were ignoring me."
"No! Never! I just don't check my phone, I swear." A statement that would have been disqualifying if I were capable of learning from experience. Women and their phones are inseparable at the hip. "I missed you so much. We have to meet. Tonight? Please say tonight. I need to vent."
Reader, I am a man of medicine, of science, someone who has spent years training to make rational decisions based on evidence. I am also a man who hears a pretty woman say she needs him and immediately becomes a golden retriever who's been told there might be treats. I tell myself I'm only going out of a curdling combination of curiosity and boredom, but my tail wags nonetheless.
(The charitable explanation is that I have a genuine drive to be helpful and derive satisfaction from being nice to people. Less charitably, I crave mild amounts of drama in my life, preferably when I'm out of the immediate blast zone. The truth can be found with a Monte Carlo simulation, namely throwing darts at me.)
I arrived at her workplace, a boutique where she moonlights in sales, effectively selling insecurity to women and delusion to their husbands. Local traffic made me late, which meant I missed seeing her in her element, which was probably for the best. Some illusions should be preserved.
She drove. I rode shotgun. She was competent behind the wheel, which I noted with the mixture of surprise and guilt characteristic of men who've internalized certain stereotypes while remaining theoretically opposed to them. The other drivers, less conflicted, shouted helpful commentary about her driving that had nothing to do with driving and everything to do with living in a society that's still working through some issues around women operating heavy machinery.
It's an interesting dichotomy. Male drivers face less verbal abuse, mostly because they're a physical threat. Female drivers bring out the peanut gallery, but they're not really at much risk of having someone lay hands on them in such a public setting. But I digress:
She needed to park. I needed something to do with my hands. I bought her a soft toy from an overpriced Japanese store, that particular species of useless consumer object that somehow carries totemic significance, a material manifestation of affect that short-circuits rational gift-giving in favor of pure aesthetic stimulus. Women are suckers for these, which is a sexist observation that's nonetheless empirically correct, which is why sexism persists: it works.
After an interval calibrated to maximize anxiety without quite tipping into actual worry, she returned. She loved the gift. Then she began talking, and I realized I'd made a terrible mistake, which is to say exactly the mistake I'd intended to make.
The story was long. She'd warned me it would be long. She wasn't lying, which may have been the only thing she wasn't lying about. Or perhaps she's excessively honest with me, I seem to be a safe space, a person she can unload all her cares on without much concern. The lies were for the rest. Regardless, I took my glasses off and buried my face in my hands so many times I lost count, performing exasperation for an audience of one while that audience performed innocence for an audience of me.
The situation had evolved. The roster of suitors had expanded.
There was the Poor Nice Guy (who lives with his parents and won't move out, who I'd previously dissected with the detached interest of an entomologist pinning butterflies to cardboard). There was the Toxic Ex (who cheats), but as far as I could tell, was now out of the picture. And now, there was the Rich Guy. He's new.
The Rich Guy. Precisely as advertised. Distantly related (third cousin maybe?) far enough to avoid the genetic problems, close enough to carry social weight. He'd proposed marriage multiple times. He sounded, even to my determinedly cynical ear, like a reasonable choice. But she couldn't commit.
The reasons were familiar: he lived with his parents, lived below his means. But also (and here's where it got good) he had dogs, and her OCD couldn't handle them.
I couldn't relate. Shortly after I had landed in the country, my puppy had just destroyed my best shoes and my comfortable slippers, and my response had been mild scolding undermined by my complete inability to maintain anger at something with floppy ears. But I'm not the protagonist of this story. She is. Or maybe the dogs are.
She has OCD. She hates the dogs. She claims it's hygiene, but we know the diagnosis: Narcissism cannot tolerate a rival for attention, even if that rival licks its own ass.
I feel like an ass just saying that, I'm not The Last Psychiatrist, even if I'm more cynical than a certain Buddhist-Sufi-Lite Namebrand alternative. Don't listen to me, she does actually have OCD. Sees an actual shrink for it, not that that lady sounds like she's competent.
"He said he'd give them away," she says, pulling back to look at me with those wide, imploring eyes. "He said he'd get rid of them for me."
Pause.
This man is willing to exile two living creatures that love him unconditionally, loyal beasts that rely on him for their survival, just to secure access to her. But he won't move out of his parents' house. He is willing to sacrifice the innocent (the dogs) but unwilling to sacrifice his safety net (Mommy and Daddy). It might also have been filial piety, who knows. I had complained that Poor Guy had a stick up his ass, whereas this gentleman could use such a prosthetic as a spine.
"So let him give them away," I say.
"No," she pouts. "I can't make him do it. Then his parents will hate me. Then he'll resent me."
Then came the bombshells, delivered with the casualness of someone ordering coffee. One, she was still seeing Poor Guy. Two, she wanted me to commit fraud.
She'd convinced herself that the solution was a forged medical document stating she was deathly allergic to dogs. She'd already tried this gambit with Rich Guy, but he'd pointed out (with admirable attention to empirical reality) that she'd played with his dogs before without issue. Now she wanted me, as a doctor, to make it official.
"Write me a note," she says. "Say I have a severe allergy. If it's medical, he has to get rid of them, and it's not my fault. It's doctor's orders."
She wants the result (no dogs) without the cost (guilt). She wants to outsource the moral culpability to me.
I have many moral failings. They are numerous and well-documented. But I enjoy having an unblemished record and no medical board investigations, so I declined, explaining this in terms I hoped were clear even to someone whose relationship to truth was essentially fictional.
She escalated. She offered sex.
"Come on," she says, pressing against me. "I'll make it worth your while."
Let me pause here to note the cosmically insulting nature of this offer. Sex as payment for fraud. Sex as the universal solvent for moral reasoning. Sex offered with the bland confidence of someone who's learned that it usually works, which is the most damning indictment of men as a category that I can conceive.
Been there, done that, I told her. Which was true. Which made me complicit. Which made this whole scene a kind of recursive nightmare where everyone's crimes implicated everyone else's.
She changed tactics: Would I help her decide between Rich Guy and Poor Guy?
Finally, a question I could answer. My reply was nigh instant, the answer was obvious.
"Go for Rich Guy," I said. "He's sensible. It's better to be with someone who loves you, than someone you love (if you can't have both). And I know you. You couldn't adjust to a lower standard of living if your life depended on it."
She blinked. "But won't Poor Guy become rich when he marries me? He could take over what my dad built!"
I sighed the sigh of a man who's realized he's explaining addition to someone who's still working on number permanence. "That's your own money, returned to you. If you marry into wealth, you have twice the money. Use that pretty head. Think."
Her face scrunched up in an adorable display of revelation. She told me that she'd never considered this. Twice the money sounded good. Almost twice as good, accounting for diminishing marginal utility. The fact that she was treating marriage as a financial instrument while simultaneously maintaining that she wanted true love, this contradiction didn't seem to register. Cognitive dissonance requires cognition.
But wait: Poor Guy worked in her dad's field. Rich Guy was adjacent: leather tanning, not textiles. Who'd run the family business?
I suggested that maybe Rich Guy could learn. She seemed unconvinced. I offered to make a SWOT analysis, because apparently I'd become the kind of person who does strategic planning for other people's romantic clusterfucks.
I reached for my phone and its rarely used stylus. "Let's be logical. Let's do a SWOT analysis."
Strengths. Weaknesses. Opportunities. Threats.
I started drawing the grid. I was outlining why the Rich Guy was the strategic play. Strengths: Money, Devotion. Threats: The Dogs.
"See?" I said. "The Rich Guy is the move. You just have to deal with the dogs."
"I made a list too!" she chirped.
She pulled out her iPhone and shoved the Notes app in my face. (Why do women love Apple's default apps? This is a genuine mystery to me, impenetrable as quantum mechanics.) "Great minds think alike!"
Fools seldom differ.
I looked at her list. It was a chaotic mess of emojis and bullet points. Rich Guy and Poor Guy were neck and neck.
But there, buried in the text, was a note she had clearly forgotten was there:
Still sleeping with [Poor Guy]. [Rich Guy] doesn't know, haven't slept with him yet.
She was showing me the evidence of her own infidelity. She was handing me the smoking gun. And she didn't even realize it. She was scrolling past it, pointing out that the Rich Guy buys nice purses, completely oblivious to the fact that she had documented her own moral bankruptcy.
I looked at her. "Are you fucking insane? What if Rich Guy finds out about Poor Guy??"
She startled. "When did I tell you their names?"
I pointed at her phone. The blush that overtook her face was the color of shame, or possibly arousal, or possibly both, because at this level of dysfunction all emotions blend into an undifferentiated psychic sludge.
I laughed. It was absurd.
"What?" she asked, smiling blankly.
"You're amazing," I said. "You're really something."
I grabbed her hand. I deployed a metaphor about masturbation and bushes that I'm not proud of but which seemed apt.
"So you'll write the note?" she asked. "You're a liberal guy. You understand. You should just marry me."
"Liberal."
She uses that word like a get-out-of-jail-free card. To her, "liberal" doesn't mean "politically left-leaning." It means "permissive." It means "you are too smart to have boundaries." She thinks that because I listen to her stories without vomiting, I approve of them. Maybe I've internalized too much, it's worth reminding myself that in my personal life, I can just get up and walk away. I've done that before, with her, when she'd called me out on a date and then broke down into tears and asked me to drive her to her ex’s place.
"How long are you staying in Scotland?" she said. "Why won't you just marry me? Things would be so much simpler!"
Previously, this plea had made me feel significant, wanted, like Captain Save-a-Ho riding in on a white horse. Now I felt something closer to disgust. Not an immense amount of disgust, I've long since abandoned the pretense that I hold all the moral high ground. Mostly the aesthetic disgust of watching someone dig their own grave with manicured nails until those nails chip and bleed, and then mild, incipient rage at the idea that she saw me that way, as a convenient solution to all her problems. The kind, thoughtful doctor who actually listened, didn't judge too much (to her face, an anonymous audience is different, or so I say). I was her idea of a BATNA, a man without an ego, willing to tolerate stodgy in-laws, the kind who wouldn't tell his wife to stop dressing like such a slut the moment the marriage pyre went cold.
The safe choice. I resented this, I do have an ego. I do have standards, even if I'm too polite to throw that in someone's face when they presume that they meet them.
But disgust and rage are just other forms of engagement, and I was too deep in this to extract myself cleanly.
So I tried reverse psychology.
It was then, that I played the card I'd kept up my sleeve for exactly this moment.
I told her I'd come around to marriage. (True.) That I could be convinced to marry her. (Highly Debatable.) She demanded to know when I'd be back permanently.
Two years minimum, I said. Probably more. She deflated immediately. Too long.
So I flipped it: "Come to Scotland," I said.
I said it with the gravitas of a romantic lead in a period drama. Leave this all behind. Come with me. That wasn't a lie, technically. A proposition can't be false. But I said it with the confidence of someone who knew exactly how she'd respond.
I only said it because I knew with 100% certainty she would decline.
It was a zero-risk bet. She has her "career" here, her parents, her tangled web of dysfunction. She wasn't going to Glasgow. But by offering, I get to be the Savior. I get to be the "One That Got Away." I get the credit for the gesture without having to buy the extra plane ticket.
She blanched. Scotland? Doing her own laundry? Cooking? Cleaning? Not cool. She'd grown up wealthy. She told me she couldn't adjust. She didn't seem to be the least bit ashamed of this.
"I can't," she sighed, exactly as predicted. "It's too complicated."
"I know."
I pointed out that I'd grown up similarly and adjusted fine. That First World life wasn't so bad. I explained that even my salary was enough to allow for a decent existence for a young couple. The more I pushed, the more she retreated, exactly as predicted.
Excellent. My model of human nature, or at least her particular neural architecture, remained accurate. I'd convinced her that I wasn't an option by making her convince herself. The lies you tell yourself stick harder than the lies others tell you. So does the truth. Nothing I'd said was a lie, after all. This is why advertising works. This is why democracy fails.
"Will you wait until you're back to marry me?" she asked.
I laughed. "You won't wait two years."
"You're right," she admitted.
Throughout this conversation, she kept flinching, looking out the windows (but hadn't asked me to remove the arm I had around her, or the other on her thigh). I asked why. She said she was worried one of the men might be in the neighborhood. It was midnight. They lived elsewhere. I pointed this out.
"Wait! I can check." She opened WhatsApp. Rich Guy, it turned out, was insecure and demanded she share her live location constantly. Every few minutes, down to the meter. No wonder she'd chosen this café, it was close enough to home to explain, far enough from anywhere else to avoid detection. A prisoner's exercise yard.
To his credit (which is very little), he reciprocated by sharing his own location. The panopticon didn't have a one-way mirror.
She messaged him asking him his plans. His reply was terse but quick. Business meeting, too tired to visit, going to bed. Her paranoia subsided.
Then came the detail that broke me: he'd offered to get rid of the dogs. Kicking out his elderly parents? A step too far.
Where did she find these people? My dog had destroyed my shoes and I'd merely scolded him. This man was willing to dispose of two loyal animals for a woman who felt nothing for him.
Psychiatry teaches phenomenology, empathy, understanding. It never quite conveys that some people are mentally alien. If I had to choose between a woman and my dogs, I know which bitch I'd be showing the door. Both my dogs are male.
More conversation. More coffee. Then beer, she told me they secretly sold it, just hid the menu to maintain a veneer of family-friendliness, which felt like a metaphor for something but I was too tired to figure out what.
She looked exhausted. Grey hairs emerging. Still gushing about her nephew, the Indo-Italian baby who'd break hearts someday, she exulted over my observantion. Feminine solidarity is nothing next to evolutionary psychology.
More terrible ideas sprouted like mushrooms after rain. Could I present as her psychiatrist and talk to Rich Guy? I said I'd talk to him in a personal capacity only, mostly from morbid curiosity about the kind of men she attracted. Maybe I'm trying to understand myself.
"Why can't I be happy?" she asked.
"Because," I said, with clinical detachment, "you are a dumb bitch."
I didn't say it with anger, even if I felt it. I said it with the flat affect of a clinician delivering a terminal diagnosis. It was cruel. Very uncharacteristically so for me, I still feel bad about it, but she'd pushed me to breaking point. It was also a diagnosis. She teared up.
"You're mean!" she sobbed. "I'm trying so hard! Why are you calling me names?"
No she didn't. That would have been easy, given me the option to stonewall in the face of bluster and crocodile salt-trails. Instead:
She stayed quiet, head lowered, hair cascading down to hide her tears. This made it much harder, she was self-aware enough to know of her flaws. I decided to relent, and attempt an explanation.
I explained that her misery was entirely self-manufactured, a boutique artisan suffering. "You are crying because you don't like the mirror," I told her. "Look at what you're doing. You have a guy who wants to marry you. He is rich. He loves you. He is willing to give up his dogs for you. And it's not enough."
"It's not perfect!" she wailed.
"That's your problem," I said. "In the search for perfection, you are turning down 'good enough.' You are creating chaos because you are terrified of settling. You cheat on the Rich Guy with the Poor Guy, you cheat on the Poor Guy with the Rich Guy, and you try to cheat on both of them with me. You are miserable because you refuse to make a choice."
She looked at me, mascara running, eyes wide.
"But I just want to be happy," she whispered.
No, she doesn't.
She wants to be admired. Happiness requires compromise. Happiness requires you to live in a house with a mother-in-law or a dog you don't like. Happiness is tolerating unhappiness today in the hopes it'll pay interest tomorrow. Happiness is boring.
She doesn't want boring. She wants the drama. She wants the crisis. She wants to be on a couch begging a doctor to commit fraud so she doesn't have to feel bad about making a man kill his dogs.
I told her the juggling act would end, the plates would smash on her pretty face, and I would not be there to sweep up the shards.
She didn't disagree.
Eventually it was late. I was out of useful things to say. "Go back to the Rich Guy," I said, standing up. "Marry him. Make him give up the dogs. See how that feels."
"You think I should?"
"I think you deserve each other," I said.
She took this as a compliment.
He is a coward who betrays his loyalty to his pets. She is a narcissist who betrays her loyalty to her partners. They are a match made in hell, and they will be perfectly miserable together in a very nice house, once the parents and the dogs die of old age.
She kissed me goodbye, carried off that kawaii rabbit with a spring in her step, turned the corner to her gated compound. I gave in to impulse and bought a cigarette.
I didn't smoke it.
The visa was declined. My winter in California is gone. But as I stepped out into the humid Indian night, I realized I didn't need the Pacific Coast Highway.
Here's what I think: everyone in this story should kill themselves. Except the dogs. I'll include myself if they get a pass.
The dogs are the only innocents. The rest of us are complicit in whatever this is, this performance of intimacy masquerading as intimacy, this simulation of care that exists primarily to confirm our worst suspicions about ourselves and each other. We're all playing roles in a production that should have closed years ago, but we keep showing up because what else are we going to do? Be alone? Be honest?
I get roped into this shit because I'm bored. I relate to the claim that the worst thing a man can be is useless. Perhaps I am minimally complicit, as it goes, but my hands are hardly clean. They probably still smell of her perfume.
Better to keep performing. Better to keep pretending that our patterns aren't patterns, that our compulsions aren't compulsions, that our inevitable trajectories toward mutual destruction aren't already written in every decision we've made since we were old enough to know better.
The dogs, at least, love honestly. They destroy things because they don't know better, not because they're trying to avoid knowing better. There's something almost sacred in that.
As for the rest of us? We're just apes with pretensions and smartphones. Millions of engineers work tirelessly to make them capture accurate renditions of reality, millions more work to meet market demand by creating filters to reduce reality to something more palatable, more Insta-worthy. Some of us are stumbling through the dark, convincing ourselves that the lies we tell ourselves are somehow more sophisticated than the lies others tell us.
The standard literary thing to do would be to protest that they're not, that all lies and sins are made equal. I'm not so far gone as to believe that. No, I think I've put in a reasonable amount of effort into giving her the best advice I could. She never listens, but isn't patient autonomy all the rage?
The head is a hot air balloon.
But remember: the balloon only looks like it's flying. It's really just at the mercy of the wind.
Stop blowing.
*Confession: I haven't read Heidegger, unless a Wikipedia summary counts. I both refuse to read Continental Philosophy on principle and happen to be new to the whole pretentious navel-gazing literary style, please bear with while I calibrate the signal.
This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
I decided to post it here because it got long, and also because I use either real-world identity or a very transparent one on the book review sites. Unfortunately, we are now living in the times when people are getting murdered for saying unpopular things, domestic terrorists openly put bounties on people, and I see a significant part of the industry this book concerns and I belong to being completely fine with that - of course as long as "bad people" are getting hurt. I suspect many of them might classify me as "bad people". I don't really expect my stupid book review to really be seen by enough crazies for anything to happen, but there's no reason to take the additional risk. Pseudonymous publication is safer. I could also not publish it at all, but if I already bothered to write it, I might as well let others read it.
I am not sure how to describe this book. On one hand, it is a fascinating account of what happened in Facebook from a person who was right in the middle (or rather at the top, as the global public policy director, working directly with the CEO and COO) of it and is certainly worth reading if you want to be educated on what was/is going on (it ends in 2017 when the author had been fired). On the other hand, the sheer blindness of the author to her own role in the events and her limits is impressive. Facebook is now trying to retaliate against Sarah Wynn-Williams (that's the author) for violating various NDAs, which she most likely did, but given their response to it is so far "we don't do that anymore", one could infer at least some of the juicy stuff is actually true. The trick would be to know which parts. All of it, some of it, a little of it? One of her coworkers says "definitely not all of it". Others agree. Wynn-Williams herself in the interview to Business Insider declared that the question of factual accuracy is not the one that matters and witnesses contradicting her claims are "a distraction". Which in my book means "some of it" is the best we are getting.
To get it out of the way, the cases of workplace harassment she describes are horrible. I do not know how accurate the descriptions are - we heard only one side there, so I can not assess any aspect of the veracity of the claims - but if they describe real events at least to some degree, it is absolutely unacceptable and should not have happened to anybody. I was a bit put off by the cavalier attitude with which she approached the Kavanaugh affair in the epilogue, treating the fact the somebody could even stand besides Kavanaugh during the hearing as the ultimate sign of moral degradation (surely everybody knew the verdict before hearing any testimonies, and it was supposed to be just mere formality?). Thus I suspect the matters aren't so black and white and she is not the most reliable narrator. But even with that, what she described per se is totally horrible. That's all I have to say about that.
Moving on to the other parts of the book: if we look at what had been happening, the author literally inserted herself as the main person to drive and shape Facebook's international growth and engagement with top international politicians. If introducing 21st century informational technology into societies that aren't ready for it is dangerous and prone to disasters, she is the person who enabled, engineered and performed the deed. Probably because she was sure with her at the top, it will be alright (spoiler: it wasn't). And it's not some random "caught in the flow" thing - she literally came to Facebook to do just that, and she did. Pretty successfully, given the amount of praise she received from M.Z. and his subordinates. The essence of her complaint is that she did not have enough power to do it exactly like she wanted, and that's why it often turned out wrong. If only she were an all-powerful dictator (or at least, if all the power were given to people who think exactly like her) everything would have been much better. That was her conclusion at the end - wrong people were censored, wrong people were not censored, an all that because they didn't listen to her.
The parts where she describes how she stayed for a long time in Facebook because she otherwise wouldn't have healthcare are quite hard to believe. First of all, there's COBRA, and she is married, and there are ways to buy health insurance without being employed by Facebook. Sure, it's expensive, but I have trouble believing a person who was at the top of Facebook since such early days and speaking to people like Zuckerberg and Sandberg all the time didn't have at least some money going to them. Surely, maybe not fabulously rich like M.Z. himself, but at least solid middle-class level? Even if she were hopelessly naive and saintly unbothered by money concerns, she could not find an hour during all these years to talk to a lawyer and a financial advisor who would explain here how to navigate such things? In Silicon Valley, where these matters are discussed in every second coffee table at every second coffee shop? And being on the top of FB, literally rubbing shoulders with heads of state and personally engaging their closest teams, and having NZ Embassy and Oxfam on her resume too, she had absolutely no prospect of other employment whatsoever, besides Facebook? Utterly unbelievable. What is entirely believable though is that the author found it hard to give up all that shmoozing with heads of states and fixing the world for the rest of us, and trade it for some boring office job where you don't even have a chance to see Xi Jinping once, and don't get to laugh about how insignificant the president of Guatemala is.
Complete lack of reflection and realization of author's own biases permeates the whole book. A lot of the second half is dedicated to the death of the democracy in the US, also known to some as the (first) election of Donald J. Trump. Of course, half of the country voted for him, but what to that? They were sure a bunch of evil people, or fools misled by evil people, and never would win any elections if not for their dirty tricks. The fact that the Clinton win had to be a prescribed, normal way of events is ingrained so deep that the latter campaign is never really mentioned in the book, maybe hardly once. All the evil tricks Trump campaign supposedly played with Facebook are described in detail, but how Clinton campaign used social media at all? And if they did not - why? What were they doing all that time? Why nobody from the right thinking people in Facebook reached out for them if they for some weird turn of events forgot about social media, despite the fact that Obama campaign used the social media very actively and had been publicly on record bragging about it?
These questions are not even asked, never mind answered, because these question only matter if there were a competition between two equal teams. The author never admits the thought. There is the normal turn of events - Democrats win, the power is in the hands of The Experts (TM), people vote for whoever they are told to and behave how they are told to behave, for their own good - and when it happens, there's nothing to discuss, it is as it always should be. Well, maybe let's talk about how to make it even better. Only the departures from the normal events - like people voting for the wrong candidate, clearly because they were deceived and are too stupid to realize that - deserve discussion. And to think there actually were evil people - including inside Facebook! - who thought it was a good thing! They actually talked about some policies they might like, something Trump may do that would be good - as if the Coming of The Antichrist is some kind of normal political event! Imagine the gall, the sheer audacity of not recognizing the suffering of all the right thinking people and not subjugating their own views to the demands of the moment! How do such people even exist? If one were religious, that would be a good moment for the protagonist to have a crisis of faith - but fortunately there's nothing like that in that universe.
This is the quality that is present in the whole text, every discussion of every question concerning any policy or decision. The author never argues for a certain outcome, as one would have in a debate, never presents any deliberate reasoning or substantiation. To do that would be to recognize there could exist multiple opinions on the matter, and people with wrong opinion may need to be convinced by way of logic and reason. That's not how it works, not in this book. There is a normal, obvious, correct and proper opinion or decision, and every normal, proper and decent person already knows it. It does not need to be argued or proven. It does not even need to be pointed out - like if you notice a baby around, you don't need to be told "don't eat the baby!" - you already know the babies are not to be eaten. So the author just describes her own shock and horror at realizing that people in front of her are monsters - if they do not actually follow the proper way. Rarely it goes beyond that - and almost never to actually have a proper argument. Because what's the point arguing with monsters anyway? How would you convince a person who wants to eat a baby that it is not good, and why you are talking to such a person at all?! This is how this book handles most of the controversies.
What the book described about Zuckerberg changed my opinion about him a bit. It looks like he indeed had been the autistic startup techie who just wanted the product to grow, and initially had no interest in wielding the emerging power for anything but improving the service. He seems to indeed have had that libertarian streak in him that many other tech founders had and lost (he lost it too, of course). Wynn-Williams and others successfully convinced him he has to play with world powers, and become a world power himself. That of course would change any person. But looks like the most of the problems with freedom of speech at FB originate from the likes of Wynn-Williams (quelle surprise!) rather than from M.Z. himself, at least initially. That said, as a corporation FB exhibited the typical psychopathic approach most of major corporations now exhibit - be woke on the outside, do anything to expand and profit on the inside, including making deals with most horrible individuals and regimes, if it pushes up the numbers, all while proclaiming high-minded ideals. This part of the book is one that is the most believable because I can observe it from the outside, both in FB and in many other companies. The company as a whole and top persons in particular are all colossal hypocrites - that part I totally believe. That, of course, does not exclude the director of global public policy too.
The author proclaims in multiple places that all the wrongs and evils Facebook did could actually have been avoided, if only. But the "if only" part is regrettably shallow. The author hints she knows what is the right thing to do, and possesses the recipes for fixing of all modern ails of social media - from teen addiction to genocide in Myanmar - but she never actually tells us, what exactly should have been done, and why she thinks it would have worked. It's not that her argument is bad - but here again, she doesn't even see the need to make a proper argument, mere proclamation "you should have done it differently!" is enough. It may be acceptable from a random layperson, but not from somebody who had been the top policy maker for Facebook and is actually writing a book about it! If you say it had to be made different, spend some time on proper argument of how and why it's better! If you think it'd make the book too long, you can drop some episodes like you being bitten by wasps or such, I am sure it was a profound experience for you but I am equally sure the reader could survive without it.
So, is this book worth reading? It was for me. I am by nature and nurture a skeptical reader, and an unreliable narrator is not something I am afraid of, if there's substance to chew on. This book has the substance. It would be a good book if it didn't also have the numerous flaws I described above, but such as it is - I end up with the same I started with - I do not know how to describe it, even though I do not regret having read it.
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Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
I've been pushing lately to fix up some of the giant outstanding code issues that made it hard to work on this. In no particular order, the codebase now has 70% code coverage and all routes with at least some coverage, Python has been updated to 3.13 (from 3.10), and all the packages have been updated, which probably fixes some security issues.
The last thing on this list was to get Postgres from Version 12 to Version 17. This, unfortunately, I screwed up a bit, thanks to a few dumb decisions and also discovering that one of my backup solutions was no longer working after I needed it. The end result is that we've lost some data; I'm not quite sure how much, but it should at least be under 24 hours.
Great apologies if anyone lost an effort-post.
The bad backup solution has been fixed, and better monitoring put in place so I'll know if that happens again; also, while I may literally never use this, I now have a better postgres update checklist that avoids this issue in, like, literally three separate ways, not counting the better backup validation.
Hello everyone. So, as the title would suggest I have recently been prescribed Zepbound for weight loss. I won't go too far into my long history of struggling with my weight as an adult, but suffice it to say I have been fat for basically my whole life. High school, fat. College, fat. After college, lost some weight, gained it all back, and wouldn't you know it, as a young professional, fat. You can therefore hopefully imagine my excitement and hope when I heard about these things called GLP-1s, and how they were something of a miracle drug for weight loss. Sure there were a bunch of other neat effects that some papers started reporting on, but frankly I did not, and do not, give a shit. I thought that the Motte might get a bit of enjoyment out of reading a weekly post about how Zepbound is effecting me. Call it a case study, though it'll probably be more of a blog. My current plan is to post on Fridays, injection day, and take notes throughout the week. Ideally. We'll see how that goes. At some point I'll probably switch to one post a month, simply because I'll be on a full-scale dose and the week-to-week changes will likely be minimal. Per the manufacturer's instructions, I'll be rotating the injection site weekly, and I'll include that in the biodata section below for your consumption, though frankly I don't know if I have the guts (hah) to inject into my stomach. I might just alternate thighs. If you have questions, comments, concerns, criticisms, whatever, let me know. If these do well or if there is clearly an appetite (hah) for more, I'll keep posting. If the obvious vibe is "shut up fatty nobody cares" then I won't. Please do say so if there's something you think I'm leaving out that I'd like to mention.
Bio-data
Sex: Male
Age: 29
Height: 71.25"*
Starting Weight: 278.0lbs**
Current Weight: 273.5lbs
Goal Weight: 200lbs***
Starting BMI: 38.8
Starting Dose: 2.5mg
Current Dose: 2.5mg
Injection Site: Right Thigh
* Yes I lie on dating apps and say I'm 6'.
** At my weight, daily fluctuations in the 2-3lb range are pretty standard. But 278.0 is what the scale said on Day 1, so that's what I'm going with.
*** Technically still in the middle of the "overweight" BMI range, but the idea of being 200lbs is as foreign to me as the idea of being thin. So we start with a nice round number, and see how it goes from there.
Day One
Notes: I'm incredibly excited about starting. I get off work, drive directly to the pharmacy, and pick up my prescription. Fortunately (well, ish) because I am a Level 3 Fat (Obese Class II) insurance covered it, and Eli Lilly has a manufacturer's coupon, which together brings the cost down from the extortionate $1500 a month to an affordable $25 a month. I get home, and pretty much immediately pop open the container, read the instructions, and inject the first pen. It stings a little, though honestly it's not as painful as I'd feared.
Effects: None noted
Day Two
Notes: I notice that I'm simply less hungry throughout the day. I know that the 2.5mg dose is not really supposed to have that much of an effect, it's mostly to get your body adjusted to the drug so that when you ramp up to the real effective dosages (5mg-15mg), you're less likely to suffer adverse effects like nausea and diarrhea. So I'm wondering if this is placebo effect, but I'm not going to question it. Less hungry = eating less food = less calories = weight loss. Placebo effect or drug, as long as the number on the scale goes down I'm happy.
Effects: Appetite suppression
Day Three
Notes: I again note that I'm less hungry throughout the day, and realize I probably should start actively logging my food intake, both for calorie counting purposes and to see if I actually do trend down in terms of consumption. I resolve to start this. Today I ate one 8" sandwich (lunch and quasi-dinner), 8oz of potato salad (lunch), one almond croissant (evening), and one hot chocolate (evening). I've added the approximate caloric intake to each day's log. I was planning on eating the entire sandwich for lunch, but felt absolutely stuffed after only eating half. I saved the other half for a few hours later, and ate it then. Around 7pm I felt moderately hungry but not that hungry. Out of what I now think was pure habit I went out and got something to eat, the aforementioned croissant and hot chocolate. After consuming both I feel grossly overfed, and a bit nauseous. Was it too much food? Or was it the processed sugars? Is this what a normal person eats in a day? I try to temper my expectations and keep from getting too hopeful too fast, but I can't remember the last time I've eaten this little in a day.
Effects: Appetite suppression, increased feeling of satiety, nausea(?).
Caloric Intake: 1850 calories.
Day Four
Notes: First day back at work since I started. I read that most people experience side-effects 1-2 days after the injection, so I made sure to do it on Friday hoping any issues would crop up over the weekend, not while I'm at work. If my company ever needed to worry about my loyalty, the fact that the insurance I'm getting from them covers Zepbound should reassure them mightily. I noticed lowered appetite suppression today, but still increased feelings of satiety. I wanted to eat more, but I felt absolutely stuffed after eating about 2/3rds of my lunch (rice, sweet potato, beef). Perhaps most importantly, I was able to actually stop eating when I felt full. This is something I've struggled with my whole life. If there is food in front of me, I want to eat it, and I rarely felt full before finishing everything in front of me. This is two days in a row when I have felt completely full before finishing my food, and actually been able to stop eating. It sounds dumb, but this actually is a serious behavioral change. Dinner was a bowl of cereal.
Effects: Lowered appetite suppression, increased feeling of satiety.
Caloric Intake: 1800 calories.
Day Five
Notes: Continued downward trend of appetite suppression today, but a similar "eyes bigger than stomach" effect vis-a-vis increased satiety. I had a chicken sandwich and fries for lunch, and while I ate the chicken breast, the pickle, the tomato, and the fries, I left about 2/3rds of the bun un-eaten. I finished eating lunch around 12:30pm, by 5pm I still felt full. Not my usual level of full where I think "oh I could probably eat something if I wanted to, but I just don't really want to" but "if I eat anything larger than an apple I am going to hurl it right back up." Not quite nausea, I didn't want to throw up, but certainly uncomfortably full. I think getting used to this increased satiety is going to take me a little while. I'm going to try making a conscious effort to slow down my pace of eating, in hopes of noticing I'm full before I actually feel full. While this isn't quite nausea, it's certainly not that pleasant either.
Effects: Lowered appetite suppression, increased feeling of satiety.
Caloric Intake: 1500 calories.
Day Six
Notes: No appetite suppression at all today, I was angrily eyeing the clock by 10 wondering when I could reasonably eat my lunch, and I was already hungry when I got home. That said, I still ended up eating my lunch in two parts (half at noon, half at 2pm). So still some increased feeling of satiety, just not to the same effect as yesterday or Monday. Not surprising in the least, lowest dose of the medicine and the first week of taking it, honestly I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did. Overall I'm very pleased with the effects so far, I just wish they'd lasted longer but I'm sure that'll happen either next week or when I step up to the 5mg dose.
Effects: Less feeling of satiety.
Caloric Intake: 2000 calories.
Day Seven
Notes: Nether appetite suppression nor increased feelings of satiety today. Still, I was able to maintain some good habits, like slowly eating my relatively healthy (fish & rice) lunch. I'm assuming I'll more-or-less revert to form tomorrow, but overall this has been a very successful first week.
Effects: None
Caloric Intake: 2000 calories.
This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
Particular thanks/congratulations this month to @Rov_Scam, who double-tapped two weeks and the Main Motte category this month, carrying nearly 20% of the total report. Some of you may recall that one of the ways I whittle down the list is, if you have multiple QC nominations in a single month, each comment included in the final report weighs against including an additional comment in the report. Nevertheless, the primary driver of the AAQC report is community feedback, and of the dozen or so comments @Rov_Scam had nominated, every comment included here was in the top ten posts of the month.
Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
Contributions for the week of October 27, 2025
Contributions for the week of November 3, 2025
@clo:
Contributions for the week of November 10, 2025
Contributions for the week of November 17, 2025
Contributions for the week of November 24, 2025
- "So I finally finished The Years of Rice and Salt by KSR by recommendation of @self_made_human and my 15-year-old self."
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
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In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
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In which Dean spends sick time writing a bit too much about a game about bugs.
TL;DR / Spoiler Warning: It is good, real good, and if you have any interest go play it for yourself before reading this. Spoilers ahead, and you’ll lose a great deal of the charm of the first-time experience if you read into this meta-analysis before playing and trying to figure things out for yourself.
Are you still here? Anyway, get a drink, kick your feet up, or pay less attention at work. This is one of those long ones.
///
Introduction
So, in case you were living under a different rock last month, an indie sequel has been disrupting the video game industry recently.
Hollow Knight: Silksong came out at the start of last September, and made waves like few games do. The sequel of the independent developer Team Cherry’s breakout hit Hollow Knight, which released in 2017, the nearly decade-long wait for Silksong was so long and had so little news that the wait alone became the subject of memes, putting it in the same sort of forever waiting room as Half Life 3. Given how Hollow Knight itself sold over 15 million copies, putting it in the top 10 of indie games sold on steam, Silksong had high expectations.
Which, going by the player metrics it has been setting, it has been. In the first days after release, Silksong had over half a million concurrent players on steam- an exceptional showing for almost any game, but particularly for a game which did not send advance review copies to gaming media to build pre-release hype. In fact, the game only announced its release date 2 weeks before it actually released, announcing its 4 September release on 21 August. Even on such short notice, multiple indie games delayed their planned releases to avoid losing the overlap in the day one hype. While the game has its blemishes- or rather, the game is already notorious for its difficulty compared to its prequel, which itself has drawn more than a few comparisons to the infamously hard Dark Souls series. This is somewhat expected when games with deliberately steep difficulty curves hit more widespread audiences, but even then the difficulty is somewhat ‘priced in’ for a major commercial success.
So, all of this is establishing that there is a bandwagon around Silksong, and Hollow Knight as a franchise more generally. But why is there a bandwagon in the first place?
My position is that Hollow Knight’s success goes beyond the similarities it has with Dark Souls, but that it has natural thematic synergies with the classic metroidvania format mechanics of exploration, mystery, and limited lore that build upon the fact that this is ultimately a game about gods, civilizations, and bugs. The crawly kind, not the glitches. Plus, it is tied together by impeccable storytelling design that, while minimalist, effectively drops lore tidbits, uses environmental storytelling, and ties it together with exceptional use of song.
/
Part 1: What is Hollow Knight, as a Game?
Hollow Knight is a metroidvania that combines platforming, exploration, and mysteries. It is also a game about bugs. This later aspect has a surprising amount of natural synergy with the tropes of the metroidvania genre.
Mechanically speaking, Hollow Knight is a metroidvania series, whose 2d platforming and exploration format draws more from the early console Metroid and Castlevania series than the more modern 3D games like, well, Dark Souls. Metroidvanias tend to be characterized by large, 2-dimensional, and maze-like maps of rooms connected by vertical and horizonal passageways, rather than separately loaded zones or linear corridors. These passageways tend to require a mix of platforming and combat to get past dangerous obstacles and enemies. The passages can be any sort of biome from traversing cave tunnels, climbing towers, trying to cross large bodies of waters by jumping between rockets, and what have you.
Hollow Knight works with this format by virtue of taking the typical 2-dimension conceit of a metroidvania, where complex 3-dimensional areas are 2-dimension solely for the sake of gameplay, and working within the real-world format of an ant farm, a common inclusion in many a natural history museum or child’s education center. These colonies present a nearly two-dimensional ant colony format by virtue of how the narrow looking pane serves as a wall constraining horizontal growth. Even though Hollow Knight practices the same premise of its levels being a small slice of a broader world, it does so with a framing that is both familiar and nostalgic to even non-gamers unfamiliar with the metroidvania genre.
Thematically, the metroidvania genre is also associated with exploration, isolation, and mystery. These themes owe some of their longevity to the eponymous early games that defined the genre, but these themes have stuck in part because of the natural gameplay synergy.
The theme of exploration is one of the most obvious, since most of a metroidvania is trying to find the parts of the map you need to get to in order to unlock the victory condition. These intermediary objectives may be where you find keys or rewards, but they are just as often the location where you get upgrades in tools or abilities that let you pass otherwise impassable routes. Since every metroidvania exploration starts with an unclear direction, unsure which fork to take, a large part of a blind playthrough is trying to develop a map, identifying the dead ends, identifying areas that look like they are passable but not yet, and trying to find the abilities that make those temporary obstacles into new branching paths.
This is a theme that is also, for better or worse, associated with bugs and insects. Like them or loath them, the ability of insects to move in ways that no human can, to places no human would be able to on the same scale, works well in the framework of a metroidvania. They unfailingly seem to hunt out and find rewards for them, even if it’s trash or rubbish to a human. Insect capabilities, such as exceptional jumping, limited flight, or climbing on walls, all make for analogous exploration mechanics. And insectoid hazards, such as pools of water, can present credible obstacles that a human would be able to swim through.
The theme of isolation is also a common one in metroidvanias. This is often because the nature of a large world puts the scale of the protagonist into a context that makes them feel literally and figuratively small. And the nature of a maze of corridors filled with enemies provides a literal and social sort of isolation. While metroidvanias can have areas of civilization and non-playable characters, these are by the nature of the game the exceptions rather than the rule. They are small havens of safety, not living civilizations. And since the gameplay of exploring often artificial passages or structures implies the prior existence of civilizations to build them, a civilization which is not here now to guide or protect you through the gameplay dangers, there is often a sense of civilizational isolation as well. Whoever built these structures is not here anymore, and it is often unclear- and thus unsettling- what convinced or compelled them to leave.
This, too, is a theme that works well for bugs. Bugs are amongst the smallest creatures we recognize as creatures, and many of them live solitary, isolated lives that are dangerous, small, and short. And while there are species that are hives of activities, these swarms of drones are just that- drones- such that the idea of thinking individuality would still be alone even when surrounded by an un-like things. These fragile and lonely lives are surrounded by dangerous and often dead past examples of bug life- the insect hives rooted out by predators, taken by blight, or overwhelmed by forces of nature and acts of gods, be they the flood-sending sort or higher beings like humanity that variously ignore bugs or exterminate them on grounds of inconvenience.
Finally, a classic metroidvania theme is the theme of mystery. Like many of the genre’s mechanical tropes, this theme’s prevalence derives from that idea of exploration. When you are building a game around exploration, you have a natural format for springling in secrets or surprises in those uncountable end-ways. If the story is to have a plot, it has a natural set of obstacles and known ways to overcome these obstacles that allow information to be doled out selectively and at a pace of your choosing, each no earlier than the unlock requirement that enables it to be found. Even though metroidvanias are by their nature exploration games, and exploration games allow the freedom of choice to try and make their own path, a metroidvania format lends itself to leveraging secrets, such as what causes the hostile isolation of the prior theme.
This, too, is a theme that works well for bug protagonists. As the ultimate underdog, and as protagonists not associated with free will or independent thinking, bugs are a natural starting point for an unaware protagonist. Bugs, with their literally small perspective, cannot see the bigger picture. They cannot at all times perceive the nest or nature of the place they are in. And even the format of the genre invites questions- why is this bug, specifically, a protagonist? Why does it think or act with will, when the tropes of bugs at large are to, well, not do such things?
So on reflection, a metroidvania about bugs makes a certain sort of sense, even if you know nothing about bugs and only a structural familiarity with the metroidvania genre.
It is not necessarily an obvious insight, and so it remains an example of creativity and imagination you might not think of unprompted, but there is an alignment of themes. The tropes of a metroidvania, and the associated aspects of bugs that transcends specific cultures, provides a… if not universal basis for embracing the game, at least an intuitive way to appreciate and relate the experience with other games and concepts the audience has a level of familiarity with.
But Hollow Knight works on a story level too.
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Part 2: What is Hollow Knight, as a Story?
(Biggo spoilers here. For reals, last warning.)
Hollow Knight is a minimalist dark fantasy about how the conflict of higher beings worshipped like gods is ravaging the hive that is the central civilization. Naturally, being a game about bugs helps here as well, making it into an example of the low fantasy genre as well.
To start with the end and work backwards, and using some very broad- and thus disputable- definitions that I will source from Wikipedia for simplicity…
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Low fantasy, or intrusion fantasy,
Low fantasy, or intrusion fantasy, is a subgenre of fantasy fiction in which magical events intrude on an otherwise normal world. The term thus contrasts with high fantasy stories, which take place in fictional worlds that have their own sets of rules and physical laws. Intrusion fantasy places less emphasis on elements typically associated with fantasy and sets a narrative in realistic environments with elements of the fantastical. Sometimes, there are just enough fantastical elements to make ambiguous the boundary between what is real and what is purely psychological or supernatural. The word "low" refers to the familiarity of the world within which fantasy elements appear and is not a remark on the work's overall quality.
Hollow Knight is an low fantasy akin to Watership Down, the story about rabbits trying to find a new warren that is a well-known for its rabbits-eye view of the human world as it is for a surprisingly disturbing animated film that possibly traumatized children unprepared for how dangerous the world can be for a rabbit. Which, conveniently, is how a lot of the themes and mythical structure of Hollow Knight works- a world of fragile, very mortal bugs who die to stronger, more dangerous things.
Which is where the low / intrusion fantasy works its way into the setting. There is a mundane world of bugs and nature, where bugs are dumb and act off of feral instinct. Then there is the world of bug civilization, where there is a kingdom that knows itself to be the kingdom of Hallownest, the self-proclaimed last and only civilization. While it is not in fact the only civilization of thinking bugs, hence the epithet of ‘last’ which implies a ‘first,’ the sapience of bugs is itself the magical intrusion into the world. It is as much an intrusion into the ‘normal’ as the other forms of magic, magic of the soul or dream of void, which exists in the setting.
That is because Hollow Knight is actually a story (stories, with Silksong) about species uplift. Its societies are societies that were brought up from bestial instinct by external intervention, in service of the desires of higher powers beyond their comprehension. The world of talking bugs who build societies, streetlights, songs and art- these are not the natural state of the world. These are the uplifting gifts of powers who relationship with their subjects, and each other, drive the plot.
But more on that later. Hollow Knight is not just a low fantasy, but also a dark fantasy.
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Dark fantasy, also called fantasy horror, is a subgenre of literary, artistic, and cinematic fantasy works that incorporate disturbing and frightening themes. The term is ambiguously used to describe stories that combine horror elements with one or other of the standard formulas of fantasy.
Dark fantasy is a notoriously difficult definition to agree upon, and it’s not automatically obvious that Hollow Knight would qualify.
While Hollow Knight’s art style often leads towards the gothic, or at least stylistic, at least for the architecture, it’s character designs lean far more towards the cute and adorable, with soft, smooth curves and uncomplicated faces (that are literally masks). While there are bosses designed to be more intimidating, [this is also that same boss in its vulnerable state](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/hollowknight/images/e/eb/Screenshot_HK_False_Knight_04.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1000?cb=20200103200805]. Hollow Knight is a series that treats even its enemies as cute character fodder, compared to the far more horror-movie monster vibes of the Dark Souls series. When one thinks of an eldritch abomination that haunts dreams, you typically think more Cthulu and less this. Hollow Knight doesn’t even try to lean into arachnophobia per see to unsettle you- this is their spider tribe.
But make no mistake- Hollow Knight is a dark fantasy, and it deals with themes that are just as disempowering and unsettling to humans as they would be to humanized bugs. To list just three: the matter of sentience, caverns of skulls, and the question of a justifiably wrathful god.
A Matter of Sentience
As was raised in the low fantasy section, hollow knight does not have a sapience-normative setting. This is actually a plot twist of sorts, as the player’s first introduction in Hollow Knight’s opening presents society and civilized bugs as normal, and the violent / feral bugs as the aberration. There is (deliberate) incongruity at this that can be passed off as cultural chauvinism at first- an early monument claiming Hallownest as the last and only civilization- but the hostile bugs are presented as sickly and succumbing to an infection that drives bugs mad. Even as we’re told bug civilization is rare, the presentation of the early game is that these bugs would be civilized as well, if they weren’t the victims of a mysterious orange infection. The framing is that these bugs have been lowered to a more bestial state. As you go across the story, you meet talking bugs, thinking bugs, very human-like bugs with amusing and understandable motivations. They are so human, and empathy is encouraged as you can identify with them.
This is a misdirection. Not just civilization, but sapience itself, is artificial. While there are bugs that are naturally capable of thought, others are not, and the degree of thought we witness is the reflection of a deific intervention by a higher power. A more magical bug called a worm, whose size was so monstrous that it is scenery setting in its own right, reincarnated itself into a being known as the Pale King, whose influence alone drew bugs to him like, well, moths to a flame as he brought the aspects of civilization like treaties and kingdoms and education.
But this uplifting was limited in space, for if a bug strayed away from Hallownest, their sapience diminished. To be sapient was a gift dependent on staying in the Pale King’s influence… and his desire was to be influential in many ways, as much political as spiritual. The Pale King’s ambition was to rule and be venerated by the bugs. The Pale King may have been a welcome uplifter, but it was as much an imposition on the natural order as the political order, not the natural state of things… even though that is how the Pale King wished it to be remembered.
But then this, too, is revealed to have been another sort of misdirection. Before there was the Pale King, there was another higher being who dominated a part of what would become Hallownest. This higher being, known as The Radiance, was worshipped by a tribe of moths, and in her era those under her influence were part of a hive mind, linked to her via dreams. But even the radiance was not the first. Just as the Pale King’s civilization and individuality followed the Radiance’s tribe and hive mind, the Radiance followed an even older, unknown ancient civilization. She was as likely to have pushed them out as she was herself pushed out… and as she is pushing out the current paradigm?
And that infection mentioned earlier? The one that robs bugs of their sapience and reverts them to bestial aggression? That is the Radiance re-emerging and re-asserting herself through the dreams of bugs, even as she remains partly trapped and certainly mad. Sapience is being subverted to a hive mind by outside will, as much as sapience was imposed in the first place.
Hollow Knight’s setting, in other words, isn’t just a setting where Kingdoms build upon the bones of prior civilizations. It is a setting where individuality, as we, the audience, know it, is a coincidental nature of how a metaphysical struggle for dominance plays out. The capacity for individuality and choice was a result of a proud king’s desire to be chosen over all others.
Your capacity for thought, in other words, is not special. But it isn’t even normal either.
Cue existential dread.
Caverns of Skulls
A second theme of the Hollow Knight games is whether the ends justify the means.
Again, this will focus on Hollow Knight rather than Silksong, though both have this theme. Both games present the ruins of civilizations that indisputably had culture and sophistication, organization and purpose. But both games grow increasingly blunt and brutal about how the societies they present, as sophisticated and civilized as they might seem, are figuratively and literally built on the foundations of those who were sacrificed to advance the social vision of the civilizational leaders. Bug Civilization is Not Nice.
In Hollow Knight, the original game, this discovery is part of what undercuts the established buildup of the Pale King as the father of civilization, sapience, and all that seems good in the bugs of hallow nest. In a setting where those who refused to join are presented as tribal, bestial, and violent- absolutely the sort of people to place skulls on spikes to mark territory- Hallownest is a place of treaties and laws and commerce. When the infection- the mysterious illness that players are initially introduced to as a mysterious force robbing bugs of their natural sapience- began to emerge, the Pale King nobly worked with sages and scholars to find a way to contain it, for the good of the Kingdom (and its people).
In truth, the Pale King’s plan- and the rise of the Pale King in the first place- were built on the sacrifice of others, including his own children. To quote his only line in the game, from a flashback-
No cost too great. No mind to think. No will to break. No voice to cry suffering.
That’s him referring to the child he needs to enact his master plan that already failed before the game started. As for the children who did have a mind to think, will to break, or voice to cry suffering…
Remember that description about how Metroidvania levels can be any sort of biome or structure?
Yeah, each one of those broken masks represents a discarded child thrown to be forgotten in an abyss. There is an entire level where you are traversing over the corpses of your discarded siblings.
So yeah, the Pale King of Hallownest- who if you haven’t gathered by now has more than a few thematic parallels with the Warhammer 40k Emperor of Mankind- devised a plan that required breeding the perfect tool to basically serve as a sacrifice. He abandoned untold numbers of his children in the process of finding the one he could sacrifice, the titular Hollow Knight. But at least he built a memorial (that was cut/bugged content). A whole lot of bug blood, ultimately futilely spilled.
But it was to save free will and sapience, so its arguably for the greater good for the sort of moral ambiguity / necessary villainy that fans love to debate endlessly. Like Skyrim Stomcloaks versus Imperials, except with a threat to all sapience and civilization.
Except, again… the Pale King kind of buried the previous civilization through an act of godly unwilling sacrifice. To spoil / simply some stuff already raised, the infection that robs sapience is the re-emergence of the hive mind of the previous higher being, who lived through the dreams of a tribe of moths. Except this ‘living through’ is both literal and metaphysical- the higher being exists in the dream world and depended on the dreams / reverence of the tribe it was patron to.
So when the Pale King incarnated to become the Pale King, and proactively expanded Hallownest as far as he could, he converted that tribe as well. Who, in falling under the Pale King’s influence and individuality, forgot / abandoned their patron goddess, leaving her trapped and starving in the dream realm. Except- being a godly higher being herself- she was ultimately able to break through into the dreams of bugs, which is the source of the infection overtaking Hallownest.
Or, to put in other words- to build his Kingdom as the exclusive civilization of the region, the god-bug that was the Pale King sealed away a prior god-bug and doom it to death by starvation. Deific sacrifice, if you will.
And to reseal his prior victim, he bred and discarded a cavern of skulls of his own children.
And it didn’t even work.
The plot of Hollow Knight occurs because the Pale King’s plan failed. The Hollow Knight remains sealed, but the infection re-emerged. The Pale King ultimately fled, even as the infection tore down the intellectual (and sapient) scaffoldings of Hallownest.
Was sapience worth deific sacrifice? Was clinging onto that civilization worth countless child sacrifices? Would they have been worth it had the grand scheme not failed?
Is the subject of our existential dread, raised above, worth any cost of victimizing other, lesser, beings?
Cue ethical horror.
Justifiably Wrathful Gods
Hollow Knight has an interesting take on gods, or at least the higher beings that understandably worshipped as gods.
In the setting of Hollow Knight, all bugs are not created equal. It is not a particularly egalitarian setting. This is understandable as the variances amongst bugs far exceeds human divergence. Some bugs are small and fragile, others strong and massive. Some can think, some cannot even be uplifted. Some bugs are innately capable of feats of magic, magic of dreams or soul or silk, and others have no such gifts.
And then there are the higher beings, who are things apart. Capable of feats of magic no spell-casting bug could match. Capable of creating great and terrible things. But worst of all, capable of dominating the minds and will of the human-identifiable bugs around them. Even as they are beings that- in physical terms- a human foot could smash, they are also so far above the bugs around them that it understandable why they would be worshiped- and want to be worshipped- as gods.
Hollow Knight does not have a particularly positive view of such gods.
The best that is said of the Radiance, the old god of hollow knight, is that she was not malicious or expansionist in her era of bug tribes and a moth hive-mind. In the present, she is the source of a maddening and vengeful blight. The Pale King built a civilization, but the arrogance and self-gratification is shallower than the cavern of skulls, and that was before he fled and abandoned his followers to die. In Silksong, the kingdom of Pharloom is built around a religion both capable of great beauty and even greater cruelty, centered on the Grand Mother Silk who’s own daughters in spirit and silk betrayed her to seal her away in sleep and worse.
At no point in the series are you, the player, actively encouraged to side or align with the higher beings. There is no faction system, no secret ending, no alignment. Your ends may align, but only accidentally and never to a point of reconciliation. Higher Beings are beings that are- if not inherently harmful- naturally inclined to dominate others. They distort the world around them by their very nature, and those distortions- both by acts of will and by their absence- lead to great harm.
But the higher beings of Hollow Knight are not malevolent. They have understandable- if not acceptable- reasons for what they do.
Radiance acts for her survival. Her infection is both her reemergence and her revenge for having been sealed away without provocation. The Pale King acts for his kingdom. Having built a realm and civilization, he sacrificed his own family more than any of his subjects to try and end a collective threat. The Grand Mother Silk was betrayed by her daughters and sealed in her own silk by an entire religion. Her actions are to gain her own freedom, and understandable as her effort to reassert her agency and control after her trust was betrayed.
These higher beings, in other words, are very much ‘gods’ to the bugs beneath them, but if not relatable, at least empathizable to the human player audience. While human players are encouraged to identify with the lower bugs who most resemble the player characters and who most converse with us with human-like personalities, the reasons for the higher beings to affect the lower is understandably human as well. Even if their actions are morally wrong, they are understandable, in much the same way the harm they do the bugs is analogous to the harm the human players might do to bugs. Sometimes you stomp a bug out of malice, sometimes out of convenience, and sometimes merely as a consequence.
But this is where the incongruity sets in. Just as human players can associate themselves with the higher beings, we can associate with the lower beings as well, the sentient bugs with oh-so-human peculiarities and interests. And by analogy, just as the god-bugs are so far higher to the normal bugs we can understand why they’d dismiss or react angrily to those that wronged them… well, what about a higher-than-human being who is as high above us? What does it imply about us, if we are acting wrongly towards it? Would our loss be as dismissible as a cavern of skulls because we were so much lesser, or if it was for some grander cause? Or- worse- are we the targets of revenge for a wrong towards that higher being that we do not remember or understand?
Humans, as a species, do not appear in Hollow Knight. There are no direct narrative parallels between god-bugs and humans, or allusions to any sort of the Abrahamic God of an all-creator or morality-defining power.
But as a thematic parallel- something that can appeal to intuitive understandings without have to be explicit- Hollow Knight is tapping at something, crawling around in the back of the minds of people who would rarely want to confront what it means to make a higher power justifiably mad.
Cue theological unease.
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Part 3: Tying Themes Together With Minimalism and Music
This is the part of this review that makes me feel a little bad, because you can’t write a review like this without ruining the experience of a first-time discovery. Sorry about that, but you were warned.
Hollow Knight follows in the footsteps of the post-Dark Souls souls-like genre of having minimal direct storytelling, significant use of significant environmental storytelling, and using small amounts of flavor text or lore drops to flesh out a world through discovery. These aren’t directly related to the themes of bugs, but they do contribute to a broader community of fan engagement as fans compare notes and impressions to try and understand the setting.
For those less familiar, the Soulsborne genre pioneered by Japanese developer FromSoft was very influential in the industry in the 2010s, growing from the niche / cult classics of Demon Souls and Dark Souls to the AAA juggernauts of Bloodborne and Elden Ring. Aside from their notorious difficulty curve, proving there was an audience for higher game difficulty despite an industry trend towards lower difficulties in the name of accessibility, what FromSoft games also influenced was how the games delivered their narrative. For all that the original Dark Souls was once characterized to me as ‘The Legend of Zelda, except darker and hard-core,’ there were no companion character to explain what to do, no setting-establishing cinematics to establish elaborate geopolitical contexts, and no exposition dump characters to hand you the plot or plot twists as you progressed through the story. You could go through the entire game and quite reasonably not understand who you were killing, why you were doing it, or even if it was the right thing to do.
Instead, the Soulsborne series leaned far more into cryptic opening narrators, and more cryptic NPCs that had a few lines that established some aspect of characterization but not much else. Instead, the primary mechanisms of storytelling were environmental storytelling and flavor texts from discoverable items.
Item flavor text is often the most explicit narrator in these sorts of games, because the minimalist format makes them the most trustworthy of sources. In games where characters like Trustworthy Patches (he’s not) trick the player, or the meddling of gods are used to trick the populace (and the audience) as to their intentions, a lack of clear truth-teller often complicates the relative lack of information. Instead, items themselves become a narrative device, providing a bit of a lore. A trophy from a boss is a bit of insight into the boss, a mundane weapon may reveal some background lore of a nation that used it. Collectively, by tying together flavor texts that reference the same characters or places or key words used to related to shared concepts, these individual isolated pieces of information start to combine for a broader understanding. Due to how few words there are, you can often link even seemingly unrelated items if you can recognize the connecting key concepts whose words would otherwise not be used. This could be obvious, such as the name of a character or Kingdom, but it can often be more indirect, such as Hollow Knight rarely using the term ‘Pale’- especially when capitalized- except when referring to the Pale King. These [clusters] of key word usage are what organize and link lore tidbits.
In the FromSoft tradition, these flavor texts are basically always trustworthy, coming from an omniscient third-party narrator. While there is a good deal of Exact Words nuance, and what is there can feed a lot of theories, the nature of the medium is that most fan discussion falls apart if you don’t accept these out-of-setting descriptions as accurate. These are often the only sources of information, the primary sources if you will, and if you can’t accept them as a starting point, you can’t discuss much at all.
Hollow Knight… does not actually follow this approach, because Hollow Knight doesn’t have much of an inventory system. There are (extremely minor) item descriptions, but what Hollow Knight leans more towards in-universe lore stones, tablets or monuments carved into areas of the map to be read in-universe. For example, a public monument to the Hollow Knight in an abandoned city called the city of tears, where the monument in a dead kingdom praises the knight’s sacrifice for saving the eternal kingdom. In Silksong, there is a (now infamous) automated confession booth in a church which tells the petitioners that they must work for redemption. Such sources are filled with the explicit and implicit biases of the narrators, whether as obvious propaganda or raising personal opinions.
What these functions have in common, however, is how they tie the discovery of new lore to exploration and allow for the combination of small bits over time. In Hollow Knight, you can find monuments to the Pale King and his civilization heralding its glory, while on the untamed outskirts you can find the testaments of doubters and outsiders who either grudgingly accepted Hallownest’s domination, or refused entirely. Whether lore you find by looting an enemy, or lore you can only reach by pushing through enemies, both of these still require exploring and overcoming adversity just to get the preconditions of lore discussion.
Environmental story telling contributes something similar, but with even more space for (and burden of) interpretation.
In environmental storytelling, the positioning of key parts of the level architecture and characters / enemies in the game is used to provide non-verbalized narratives. This is something the Fallout series has long specialized in, using apocalypse logs and the arrangement of skeletons and items to convey the final moments of the apocalypse. Think of the skeletons of an adult and a child, with the adult having a 6-shot revolver with 4 bullets left. Or Elden Ring hiding a plot twist that the eponymous elden ring of Queen Marika the Eternal was not the first elden ring by hiding a mural behind an extremely late-game boss fight. No character or narrator actually verbalizes the actions or implications but leaves it to the player to find and recognize.
Hollow Knight doesn’t go into quite the extreme of Bethesda-style environmental storytelling, as it doesn’t have the sort of 3-dimensional set dressing or inventory medium to do so. This is part of why it uses the monument tablet style that it does, which is both lore-node and environmental story telling combined. The monument to the noble sacrifice of a knight whose sacrifice did not save the Kingdom has real Ozymandias, King of King, a lone monument in a place remembered as the city of tears, tells more than what the words say. A church who automates its castigations and demands for the faithful to toil says more about the callous exploitation of the leadership than just a dogma of virtuous redemption.
There is (far) more than these alone, of course. The stark disparities of the bug-filled wilderness and civilized areas tell their own narrative nuances. In Hollow Knight, the deep nest is a wild, untamed, and never truly settled regio that Hallownest at its peak never dominated. Compared to the wide-open hallways, large structures, and paved tunnels of the capital, the deep nest is tight, claustrophobic, and dark. Spiders cross skitter across the foreground and background, things never clearly seen or encountered. Ambush predators take the form of elsewhere harmless grubs that you seek to rescue, and massive centipedes crawl through the level as terrain obstacles in and of themselves. They are impervious to any weapon, show no reason, and both the literal and figurative enlightenment of the Pale King never reached here. Nor did civilization dominate the Mantis tribe, who fight out of pride and nature, but who go from dangerous obstacles to unthreatening observers once you earn their respect, even gesturing in respect as you pass but still accepting a challenge.
This is where Hollow Knights environmental storytelling shines (or darkens). What it lacks in that level of specificity of Bethesda body placement, or even FromSoft item descriptions, it more than makes up for in vibes.
And this is where we transition from not just narrative delivery, but sound design. Which I wish I had a better vocabulary to explain, but here we go.
Hollow Knight has a very good sense of song. Not just music, but song and poem in their written form, which is used in deliberate ways to build mystery, unease, and melancholy.
Take the opening of Hollow Knight, which delivers a poem. This is a first impression of the setting, meant to frame the player’s mindset as they start their path of discovery.
In wilds beyond they speak your name with reverence and regret, For none could tame our savage souls yet you the challenge met, Under palest watch, you taught, we changed, base instincts were redeemed, A world you gave to bug and beast as they had never dreamed.
With what I’ve told you already, you can see in it the allusions to the Pale King and his uplifting. It is the start of a poem that heralds and praises the Pale King (reverence), even as it sets the sets the somber undertone (and regret). It mythologizes and raises the Pale King above the lesser bugs, whose base instincts are ‘redeemed’- and thus somehow lesser- prior to the change and being tamed.
But the real hook- a foreshadowing of a conflict I already explained but a player wouldn’t begin to learn about for hours yet- is in the last line. ‘A world you gave to bug and beast as they had never dreamed,’ at first read, is a generous and magnanimous act. Upon (much) later learning of the nature of The Radiance, as a being who lived through dreams, and it takes a more sinister turn even if the speaker would not see it as such. Rather than ‘I will give you better than you could have dreamed of,’ as in surpassing dreams, the Pale Kings world replaces dreams. This is more explicit in the full version of the poem that can be found in the game files, but was never used in-game, whose later linens more directly allude to the conflict with between the Pale King and Radiance. (And, by being too obvious, give a bit too much of the plot away.)
This is the sort of deliberate two-impression approach, the initial first impression and then a new understanding after later revelations give new context, which characterizes a fair bit of Hollow Knight’s music. Hollow Knight is one of those series that supports an entire micro-genre of YouTube first reactions where composers do an (alleged) first-experience of music in isolation to try and identify the key themes, musical momentum, and tropes of the medium of music to try and identify artistic intent. And while I have a somewhat skeptical opinion of this micro-genre in general- it is hard to verify and easy for creators to fake- it is credible enough when it comes to Hollow Knight.
That is because the Team Chery composers were very deliberate with how they designed their music, just as they were deliberate with their written poetry or songs. Some of the deliberate uses of leitmotifs to build connections- including the background music linking the prior elegy to the Pale King even though he’s not identified by name- for non-explicit narrative links. The atmosphere of various ruins, such as the city of tears, is not just visual in terms of lighting or water effects but deliberately introduced by shifts in the musical instrumentation and transitions.. And then there are the [the different themes and compositional narratives revealed by the choice of boss fight chords and balance of instruments]( (https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOVEmfXEEAUB0YPkuVn1PGy0Mhdzwsrfa) noted in the musician-review genre.
But- and to tie it back together with some earlier points of interlocking themes- the music in Hollow Knight is not ‘just’ good music in isolation. It’s not like the use of classical music in space epics to give a sense of scale or majesty, but which has no real role or recognition in-universe. The role and rise of music in-setting has strong tie-ins to the themes of cultural sophistication and what elevates bugs from beasts. Art and culture are cultivated, not inherent, and the sort of music for ‘civilized’ foes often differs in vibes from the music for fighting madmen or beasts. This is background framing for most of Hollow Knight and the civilization of Hallownest but becomes even more explicit and even a major plot point of Silksong, which is a Kingdom built on song as much as with literal silk.
Music in the Hollow Knight setting, in other words, doesn’t just sound good. It is a deliberate, and exceptional, method of storytelling.
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Conclusion: Hollow Knight Is Good Because Its Elements Intuitively Reinforce
This will be a more rapid summary, because by god this is already long enough and I’m tired. In short, the various elements that have been discussed so far work as well as they do because they have non-obvious reinforcing synergies that make sense but won’t necessarily be obvious to most players.
In terms of pure gameplay, Hollow Knight’s use of bugs as the character medium works well with the tropes of the metroidvania genre. From the presentation tying to the familiar concept of ant farm, to small bugs having their own thematic parallels to the themes of exploration, isolation, and mystery, bugs are a suitably fragile protagonist for a suitably challenging game that skirts human-centric expectations.
As a low fantasy, bugs work well for much of the same reason as the rabbits of Watership Down, being small, fragile, and subject to powers beyond their understanding. The medium of bugs allows the link of a familiar and mundane world, that of bestial uncivilized bugs, and the magical hidden world, of magical bugs and god-bugs, which provide a contrast at smaller scale but not smaller stakes than a human-protagonist fantasy.
As a dark fantasy, the god-bugs as higher beings who both transcend the bugs humans are meant to identify with, but who have human motivations the players can understand as a fellow higher-sort of being, opens up non-explicit but troubling themes. By challenging the nature and value of sentience as a natural and even desirable thing, challenging utilitarian ethics by raising the great sacrifices of doomed efforts, and providing understandable if not righteous basis for higher beings (who humans can empathize with the desires of) to inflict suffering on lower beings (who humans are encouraged to identify with), the dark fantasy challenges a certain sort of human-centric assumptions. The darkness of the dark fantasy is in the existential dread, ethical horror, and the theological unease in a way few games do.
As a minimalist story telling narrative, Hollow Night uses exploration-based lore discoveries and non-explicit environmental and musical story telling to provide context it doesn’t do explicitly. While exploration-discovery and environmental story telling tie into the nature of the metroidvania, the environmental storytelling and deliberate use of music provides an indistinct style of delivery that encourages players to commune together and compare notes.
What makes Hollow Knight exceptional is not that it has any one of these elements, but that it deliberately uses all of these elements to lead into and support each other.
The character format of bugs leads into the gameplay of a metroidvania and the fragility of an animal-centric low fantasy. The low fantasy use of bug-gods leads into the themes of the dark fantasy. The elements of the dark fantasy are delivered by the exploration-linked minimalist lore drops and environmental story telling. The environmental story telling is supported, and in some cases linked, by the deliberate use of musical design and themes. The theme of music itself aligns with the theme of the civilized bugs who cultivate such culture, leading back to the low and dark fantasy elements.
It is good. It is deliberate. It’s attractively packaged together, and best of all to a casual consumer, it’s cheap, outperforming industry standards for a fraction of a typical sales price.
And I truly apologize if I have robbed anyone of the magic of experiencing it for the first time without preconditions, in case any of this review gave you a desire to try it for yourself.
That is all, and thanks for listening to my bug talk.
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This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
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Click here for your mood music for this review.
This is a recommendation for some low-stress, feel-good, nostalgic history to play in the background of your next weekend(s) chores or driving. Consider it your invitation to live vicariously through the heights of excellence that can only be achieved in children’s video games.
TL;DR: If you like your video game nostalgia and have time during a drive or when doing chores, play Summoning Salt videos like you would have a sports channel playing in the background. Mostly to listen to, sometimes to pay attention to for hype moments, and mostly pleasant ambience.
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Part 1: What Is This Post About?
This post is unapologetic nerd-out culture of video game speed runs.
I doubt anyone here is unfamiliar with video games. They may not be your thing, but you know of them, in the same way that someone who is not a sports fan can know something about football. You may even have seen or passed by a tournament playing out, where players face off in competitive games in a typical elimination format. You may even know a bit of e-sports, the professionalized gaming leagues typically done for team-vs-team shooters or real time strategy games.
Video game speed running is to e-sports what time trial sprints are to team sports. It is a fundamentally individual endeavor, with no outside interference. It is something one can solely do on their own. However, it is also extremely competitive. You may not be fighting with or interfered by a rival, but you are both in direct competition with not only others, but yourself, for beating the best record.
On an individual level, speed runs can loosely broken into four general phases. You select the game you intend to race. You select the rules you run within- rules such as allowing various types of glitches, or requiring only core story or 100% completion, and so on. You run the game, aiming to be as quick as you can. And then you track and record the effort, creating the timing and the proof which can be compared with others.
But collectively, speed running communities band together to do a lot more than that. What starts to make the community a community rather than a bunch of individuals is the degrees of collaboration and feedback that goes into planning a run. Fans will strategize and theory craft the best way to approach a run, such as identifying the critical requirements and in order to not waste time in unnecessary distractions. Forums of players will share the results of mechanics sleuthing, trying to figure out why an interaction in a game works some way and to see if a nuance can be turned into a few seconds advantage. And finally, of course, is the community tracking and cheering, trying to identify who is the best and getting the internet accolades when you do well.
Video game speed runs are old enough as a format to have started going through the orders of media coverage. Media coverage in this context isn’t in the sense of ‘mainstream media,’ but rather the degrees of separation from the act and how it is discussed.
A first-order speed run media is a recording of the speed run. It is not the act, but the presentation of the act without further discussion.
For example, Super Mario 64, a game that some readers may have spent dozens of hours on as a kid, can be beaten in about 6 minutes. This speedrun video is first-order speed run media.
A second-order media is media that discusses the recording. Given the nature of the medium, and how modern monetization model typically work in the Twitch.tv format where people can watch the runners make their attempts live, sometimes speed runners comment on efforts during the run itself. However, since speed runs often entail heavy focus, second-order media is often commenting on a recording.
For example, the Zelda game speed runner bewildebeest has videos where he inserts commentary over the video itself, sometimes elaborating and sometimes joking. This sort of media can provide insights in the difference between, say, a Majora’s Mask 1 hour speed run, and the considerable differences for a 6-hour 100% speedrun of the same game. The difference between these two speed runs is the rule set implications between ‘just get to the ending credits’ and ‘get to the ending credits getting all the unlockables,’ which creates 5 hours worth of playtime- and commentary- difference. It is the commentary that is second-order media.
A third-order media is media that discusses the discussion of the record. In other words, meta-discussion. This can be done seriously, such as critiquing someone’s critique of a speed.
(Well, maybe not so seriously. That specific clip is part of the memorable ‘Alpharad vs. Pchal Saga’, in which a youtube internet funny man went as far as an entire pokemon nuzlockee villain arc after one too many reaction videos by another youtuber, PokemonChallenges, a dedicated nuzluck reaction channel. Unironically good comedy if you’ve got time.)
But back to orders of speed run media, third-order media really does lean towards parody. Parodies don’t have to literally discuss other people’s commentary, but parody is, by its nature, a commentary on the coverage.
For example, the sub-culture of Nintendo speed runners was influenced in 2009 by youtuber ScottFalco’s animated parody, A TOTALLY LEGIT Wind Waker Speedrun Cartoon (WORLD RECORD). It is a silly cartoon parody of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, a game notable for its cell-shaded art style that allowed (and was used for) cartoonish comedic effect. The TOTALLY LEGIT speedrun cartoon is filled with the sort of animated absurdities and pop-culture references that passes for your totally not my humor. Even the name itself is poking fun at the then (and still) common speedrun trope of people posting speed runs with titles in ALL CAPS and insisting on legitimacy because, well, take your guess.
ScottFalco’s parody is just a silly little cartoon, until you realize that the parody actually does allude to real mechanics that look just as absurd when side by side. If you’ve ever wondered why someone would want to motorboat Link, and you’re not a degenerate, third-order media can explain why. Scott isn’t the only speedrunner animated parody either. Around the same time, youtuber TerminalMontage released the animated Something About Super Mario 64 ANIMATED SPEEDRUN. It is only 2 minutes, but when you compare it to the 6-minute real speedrun from earlier… well, it rings true.
(Disclaimer: TerminalMontage was my gateway to speedrunning communities during the COVID lockdowns. He has a host of animated speedrun parodies, to the degree that Speedrunner Mario and Speedrunner Link are reoccurring characters with their own mythos. If you need a way to waste some time, or amuse small children…)
Enter Fourth Order Media
Back (again) to orders of media, and the nominal subject of this post.
Summoning Salt is a fourth-order speedrun media creator. He creates media that discusses the media that discusses the media of the record. Or, discusses the discussion of the meta.
Or- to put it in yet other words- he’s a historian of sorts. He organizes, by topic and chronology, the history of speed runs. He makes his living not by doing the act of speed running (1st order), or commenting on speed runs (2nd order), or making silly parodies (3rd order). Hiss full-time job now entails researching, organizing, and presenting records of the records of video gaming.
Summoning Salt is not the first fourth-order video game commentator. One of the earlier examples was Andrew Growen, who wrote the Empires of Eve by Andrew Growen history series of the EVE Online MMO.
Which, tangent, is really interesting in its own right. For a MMO set around anarcho-capitalism IN SPACE, there is drama, intrigue, and interstellar wars for market share. There are international alliances between gooners and Russians against an authoritarian hyper-centralized centrally-planned economy ran by an American militarist as all compete for control over the keys to power. Which honestly sounds way more interesting than what I’m talking about here. If you want the short version, here’s the 50 minute public talk at EVE Fanfest 2016.
Which I realize may seem more exciting than something about speedruns. But I promised you some nostalgic feel-goodisms, and Summoning Salt provides.
But who is the youtuber who I’ve spent a 1000-word essay and a half not describing yet?
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Part 2: Summoning Salt History
Summoning Salt himself is a nobody to somebody YouTube success story.
Summoning Salt’s start on YouTube in 2016 was as a speed runner for the old Mike Tyson Punch-Out game. This was an incredibly niche and minor channel, with only a couple hundred subscribers. He wasn’t bad at the game by any means, but there’s only so much audience for a game older than the N64, which was the formative gaming experience for the first main YouTube generation. Given how the YouTube economics work, he was making nothing, and it was a strictly hobby experience.
Now, however, Summoning Salt is a 2-million subscriber youtuber whose videos reliably draw in millions of views within a year. This sort of scale is nothing compared to the titans of the platform, but it’s also enough for it to be his full-time job… which it is.
Summoning Salt’s breakout started with his first speed run history video, in January 2017. World Record Progression: Mike Tyson was the transition point where his videos went dozens or hundreds of views to thousands. At this time of writing, nearly a decade later, it marks a transition point between older videos that now have the fame-boosted level of sub-30k views, and the video game histories that routinely break 1 million views, now often getting a million within a year.
Summoning Salt has talked about his channel growth since, notably in his 1 Million Subscriber video back in 2021. He is open that he was inspired by another Mike Tyson speedrunner, Sinister1 (who had 4k subscribers to Salt’s 1 Million at the time), discussing the evolution for a specific character strategy during a stream. Sinister1’s video was just a face cam recording of a two hour stream, verbally relaying the history of records since the 80s. However, it lacked the video editing Summoning would use to condense two hours to twenty minutes.
Summoning Salt received internet kudos on forums and social media, which convinced him to keep trying. From 2017 on, the channel focused on what was initially called the World Record Progression series, focusing on classic games like Super Metroid, Mario Kart 64, and other games. This teething stage was undoubtably a bit of algorithm chasing, going for speed of more and shorter uploads, often with less quality and polish than more recent efforts.
In 2018, ‘modern’ Summoning Salt started. This was when Summoning started using the song ‘Home – We’re Finally Landing’, the song recommended at the start of this post, as his distinctive leitmotif. The opening chords, which are retro and thus appeal to those earliest days of video games, are sometimes called the speedrunner’ s anthem due to its association with him.
It wasn’t just the music that evolved. The naming scheme of videos gradually shifted from ‘World Record Progression’ to variants of ‘The History of [Subject] Records.’ Videos gradually became consistently longer, going from less than 30 minutes to over, reflecting more research. Editing likewise improved, even as the pace of updates slowed.
By this point, however, Summoning Salt had built momentum in the YouTube economy and in gamer pop culture, consistently growing. He hit 1 million subscribers around 2021, is in the 2 million tier in 2025.
At this time, Summoning Salt has published over 50 video-documentaries. While older ones are in the 20-minute range, more recent ones are easily in the 1-2 hour range. This makes Summoning Salt Videos very much something to listen to in the background, more as a podcast with visuals for when you want to see clips he’s discussing. Or as a sports channel you have on the TV.
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Part 3: What Helps Summoning Salt Succeed?
Rather than go in depth into any one video, I want to highlight five elements that might make Summoning Salt videos more interesting to the Motte Audience. These are more meta-context and mechanics of approach, if you like that sort of thing.
Element One: Combining History and Technical Sophistication
On a purely mechanical level, Summoning Salt does an impressive job in filtering large amounts of repetitive data into an enjoyable format.
On the history side, this is a necessity. You have to in order to distil decades of material into tens of minutes, but it is still commendable. As a communicator you have to draw the line between relevant and irrelevant history, and as a story teller you have to choose the entertaining stuff that is still accurate enough to give context. This also means knowing when to share information now, and when to withhold it for later.
What makes Summoning Salt more impressive than a mere historian is that he also has to convey a large amount of technical information as well. High level video game speed runs often entail identifying and applying incredibly niche game mechanical interactions for marginal advantages. We’re talking things like exploiting the angle of plane and movement interactions to shave fractions of a second on a run, or leveraging how a game internally tracks race progression in order to exploit reset conditions. A significant part of the world record progressions come from speed runners figuring out how to overcome some technical obstacle, or finally achieving a theorized mechanical opportunity before anyone else.
Summoning Salt successfully balances the needs of historical context and technical depth, and uses them to power the narrative for a constant sense of progression. While his videos are long, they are exceptionally well paced due to how he packages and presents the information for you.
Element Two: Research and History
Summoning Salt is making history in a most literal sense, in that he is making a historical record of things that would otherwise be lost to time.
Since his transition to video game historian, Summoning Salts has consistently improved in his thoroughness when conducting research in topics. This is partly prompted by his earlier algorithm-chasing history videos, where he made some embarrassing mistakes / misinformation in games he personally had no experience in. As his channel matured, he has spent more time looking for recording, conducting interviews with speed runners and building archives of screen shots, video clips, and graphics that he uses in his videos.
This is, unironically, Research in the sense of academic research, using the sort of techniques that graduate students might in a thesis or paper. It doesn’t have the style of ivory tower academia, and it isn’t bound to the same rigor per see, but this is absolutely a deliberate, purposeful, and structured pursuit of knowledge.
It is also a real contribution to the historical record. An irrelevant history, perhaps, but preserving irreplaceable things before they are lost. Many of the games that Summoning Salt publishes on are games where the oldest parts of the speed running community have been lost to time. Old players moved on, old internet archives degraded, videos lost for whatever reason. When these things are lost, they are lost for good.
This means that Summoning Salt’s videos may be the most enduring history of these speed running shenanigans when the primary sources fade with time. His videos, and the fact they are so popular relative to others (and sparked a similar genre), may be the primary (secondary) sources used in the future for anyone interested in this topic. Summoning Salt isn’t just writing about history, but preserving things- irrelevant as they may be- for the future.
Element Three: Music and Editing, and We’re Finally Landing
Summoning Salt found and popularized the perfect song for nostalgic video gamers.
As a video essay maker, Summoning Salt has gotten consistently better over time. In the history section, he referenced that his first history video was inspired by a streamer who gave in depth history during a live stream. That streamer never used any real editing techniques. Summoning does, and over time has gotten better.
Editing isn’t just about smoothing the delivery, but it can also be a part of a story telling medium. Summoning ‘gets this’ in a way many people don’t, for the same reason he’s able to parse overwhelming data on history and technical specifics to deliver a narrative. When you listen to a history of video as a pod cast, this means using the right kind of music for the right time of tone, managing the word tempo for cadence, and transitioning between graphics. But it can also mean making your editing go for the narrative pitch at a visual level, such as selective zoom-ins, strategic blur-outs to maintain a mystery from being revealed too early, and so on.
I won’t claim the video editing is out of this war, but Summoning Salt’s leitmotif, We’re Finally Landing, might as well be. I’m not a musically inclined person, so the best I can do is say that the use of synthesizer cord, rhythm, and artificial tinniness is what strikes me as ‘retro gaming.’ It’s the sort of thing you might associated with a 80’s era arcade, video gaming before modern 3D gaming kicked off with the N64, and so appeals to a retro-history before the history of many of the games he's talking about. We’re Finally Landing is pure nostalgia bait for people who enjoyed older games, and even for the people who don’t it gives the audio-thematic vibes of video game history that works so well in the story telling format. Its chords match what I’d associate with optimistic, successful, but also a bit tired- whether that’s because of age or of hard-won success.
And it is also distinct enough as a leitmotif that it has come to be associated with Summoning Salt’s speedrunning series. Which is a good parallel with the rest- it’s not that no other video game 4th-order video game writer uses video editing or even music, but few pair them as well.
Element Four: The Unapologetic Sports Narrative
I raised at the start a metaphor linking speed running to sports. This was not an accident, but a key part of why Summoning Salt’s narratives work. He is absolutely cribbing from the well-worn genre of sports documentaries.
Summoning Salts’ history isn’t delivering a mess of facts. It is organized to tell a story, and that story is of people competing to be the best. He uses many- though hardly all- the tropes of genre. He has challenger narratives, underdog stories of protagonists no one thinks has a chance, defending champions trying to hold their titles against the next generation. He shows people responding in real time to winning world records, the excitement and break between pure focus and celebration.
This, in turn, lets him use the rhetorical tricks and techniques to build audience investment. He will not lie, but he’s not beyond obfuscating some facts or framing to imply a level of emotional investment that the protagonist may not have felt, like a loser’s congratulatory message being a show of bitter-sweet good sportsmanship. He’s a particular fan of a sort of progression chart which is used to track speed run progression, and then zooming in make small gains seem huge. The horse racing of who’s ahead at the moment is central to, well, racing, and speed runs are a race of sorts.
One element of sports genre that Summoning Salts does not employ is toxic rivalries. Arguably the least realistic part of the narrative, but there are no villain stock characters in these stories. There are not sabotage campaigns or whisper narratives to disqualify legitimate winners. It’s all in good fun, the flame wars are glossed over in favor of compromise, and the speed running community is presented as a wholesome community, not a toxic one.
Is it totally unvarnished realism? No. But it’s not trying to be either, any more than it’s trying to deconstruct the characters. The embrace of the sports narrative is what it is trying to be, and that includes the sort of trite cliches and warm-and-fuzzies of inspirational quotes that make it a cheesy feel-good experience.
Which leads to the final merit-
Element Five: Unapologetic Celebration of Excellence
Summoning Salt’s videos are unreservedly positive about the people who contribute to the speed running community, and that above all else is why I think his channel took off. It is optimism in the face of difficulty, and overcoming adversity on one's own merits.
Speed running is obviously a contest of excellence on the part of the player. This is where it is most like the excellence of sports. There is excellence of control on the part of the player, the sort of minute motor control and timing that allow the player to control the avatar into feats of acrobatics or maneuvering. It is the excellence of the player’s ability to strategize, to recognize optimizations. It is also the excellence of managing or leveraging RNG, with world records often hinging on player RNG and the world-record holders maximizing the odds and minimizing risks that could ruin a world-beating run. This requires grit of its own sort, to sit down and keep trying after hundreds or even thousands of failures in order to get that best RNG.
But speed running is also a genre of collaborative excellence, in ways where it is a multidisciplinary activity in ways most sports aren’t. A football player doesn’t need to understand the theory of physics to learn to handle the ball, but world-winning speed runs often have to engage in exceptional code sleuthing to understand why mechanics work the way they do and how to leverage it. The player at the controls and the players theory-building, code-diving, and developing proof of concepts often aren’t the same people. In fact, sometimes the brute force approach of many people playing the same game uncovers things that the ‘elite athlete’ speed runners don’t know, but then adopt wholesale.
To get what I mean, there is a memorable sequence in the opening of ‘The Quest to Beat abnew317’, a Mario Kart 64 speed runner, in which a top tier speed runner is dominating the leader board. This is two decades after the game’s release, and so the speed run optimization is pretty much a solved problem that can only be marginal improved through player performance and RNG. Then, one day, a random no-name nobody had heard of sends a message claiming to have a new shortcut and asking how to send proof.
This is probably futile, the sort of claim made countless times and variously false or outdated and wouldn’t help… except this one is true. The provider is a tool-assisted-speedrun expert (someone who programs a computer to play the game with a precision humans can’t) wanting to share their find. The documentary shows the twitch stream of the speed runner’s expression change from skepticism, to confusion, to realization as a technique for a new world record pace is realized.
And then it happens again, the very next day, because someone watching the stream had discovered the same general technique twenty years prior when playing with their friends. They’d just never brought it up because they thought the speed running community knew about it already but had reasons not to do it. In a competitive context where world records can change hands by margins of a third of a second, a random casual contributed a shortcut worth 30 seconds.
Summoning Salts delights in searching for and sharing these sorts of contributions, commending all involved. Part of this is the sports narrative framing, part of this is his own past as a speed run passion player, but there’s a clear sense of joy that’s rare in [current year].
Summoning Salt videos are unapologetically happy about video games, and the people who play them, and the people who engage with people who play them. There are no snide jobs fat gamers, people without real jobs, or the childishness of playing or watching others play games from one’s children. There are no efforts to deconstruct the premise, to vilify or tear down people on a personal level, or engage Serious Issues.
There is, in other words, no culture war.
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Part Four: The Influence of Summoning Salts on the Genre
It turns out, a moderately successful niche youtuber and inspire emulators and copy cats. Who’d have thought?
Once you go down the speed running rabbit hole, you start to look at games differently. And once you start looking into fourth-degree media influencers, you start to see how they influence the community and shape the environment around them. As people become aware of media like Summoning Salts’ documentaries, it changes how they behave in the sort of things that might be in a speed run documentary.
In the speed running community itself, it’s hard to quantify the impact Summoning Salt has had. There are no good metrics I’ve seen to suggest he has had an industry-level shift in viewer engagements or what have you. There are anecdotal examples of people who claim to have entered speed running after seeing his videos, including allegedly at least one record holder, but there’s no real data and unlikely ever to be such. At best, Summoning Salts has raised exposure of the community more broadly, raising it from incredibly niche to merely still very niche.
What is more visible is the niche of video game World Record Documentary genre. In the last either years since Summoning Salt started taking off, but especially in the last four when he was already past the 1 Million metric, a host of other, smaller youtubers have tried to follow suit with similarly structured video essays. There is a World Record Progression playlist of such YouTube videos, and of various quality.
There have also been branching media from speed runs to less speedy challenge runs, where instead of racing for time, there are special conditions. Perhaps the most infamous is the five and a half hour documentary on the Mario 64 ‘A Button Challenge’, i.e. how little jumping it takes to beat Super Mario 64, a platformer game designed around jumping a lot. This is the challenge which has made memes of speedrunner Mario entering parallel universes, cloning, and possibly cosmic rays a part of the subculture lexicon. There has quite possibly been more graduate-level research and analysis put into how to pick apart this one challenge than went into creating the first 3D platformer of the N64.
Most broadly, Summoning Salt has helped normalize a sort of video game nostalgia / retrospective genre that certainly pre-dated him, but certainly has adopted elements of his exhaustive analysis since him. Whether it’s the 2CPhoenix Kingdom Hearts Breakdown that reviews levels in exhaustive detail at up to an hour a stage, retrospectives on The HALO Trilogy that include not just the game but corporate contexts behind games, there is a clear market- niche but there- for people interested in long-form essays on the sort of childhood games they no longer play, to a level of detail that goes beyond lore videos or so on.
But most recently, there’s been this endorsement to you.
If you’re still reading this… congratulations! You may be the sort of stickler for nerdiness and overly exhaustive detail that could enjoy a history of video game challenges. You might not even have known that about yourself, if you only started reading because of where this was posted or who pointed you to it.
If so, consider this your endorsement to start with Summoning Salt.
It’s free, there’s no cost besides opportunity costs of not watching something else, and let’s be honest- you weren’t going to be setting any world records on your games anyway. But that’s no reason you can’t enjoy other people’s triumphs from a good story teller, and this would make fine background audio on your drives or during your chores.
It’s not like you should be working right now anyway… right?
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).