Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being an insufferable reactionary post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal critical theorist Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man Fox News boomer. No one yet has guessed a scholar, or multiple people. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
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.
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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.
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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.
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?
Part 1: What Is This Post About?
This is a book review (of sorts) for “Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis, a PDF version of which can be found free here. More specifically, this is for the audiobook version included in the C.S. Lewis Essential Audio Library, which can be bought on Amazon here. First published in 1952, this book is older than most of the Motte audience.
Even so, and to put the bottom line up early- I recommend “Mere Christianity” for anyone with the time to listen, be it during commutes or chores, to an exceptionally articulate Christian try to express his view of what Christianity distills down to at its most common shared elements. This is the ‘mere’ Christianity that specific denominations build from, but which is also distinct from non-Christianity. It also has a lot to say, albeit accidentally and indirectly, about the modern culture war.
I recommend it to practicing Christians who might appreciate a reminder of the sort of commonalities that are/used to be seen as common despite doctrinal disputes. I recommend it to non-practicing ‘cultural’ Christians who might appreciate a reflection on what parts of their culture are influenced by Christian thought, and what parts are not. I recommend it to non-Christians as a glimpse into the Christian mindset by a theologian deliberately trying to communicate that mindset to an audience that is assumed to not share it. I even recommend it to atheists, who C.S. Lewis engages with specific consideration. He is certainly familiar with many of the older anti-theist arguments, and even if you do not find the counterarguments as compelling as he did, you should at least know of them.
Most of all, I recommend “Mere Christianity” to The Motte, for its commentary on culture war issues and human dynamics that are so applicable in the present despite being written with the mid-last century in mind.
This is also an endorsement for the audio library version especially. Having both read the text and listened to it, I can attest that this is a work where a good narrator elevates the material. Mere Christianity uses a great deal of metaphors and personal engagement with the audience to make its argument, and this works far better with a skilled narrator than someone trying figure the intended tone of unfamiliar text. Given Lewis’s frequent techniques of leading the listener down a train of thought before doubling back to some part of it, the verbal context can make it clearer than powering through the text might.
This is not surprising, as Mere Christianity started as a radio lecture series during WW2. During the German Blitz bombings of England, C.S. Lewis was brought onto the BBC to talk to the British public about faith. These audio-lectures were recorded and adapted into text, and in this text was adapted back into audio. Given how the transition from verbal to written communication inevitably loses some nuance, something that was inevitably lost is in a sense regained with the re-transition to audio. This is poetically appropriate for the subject matter.
Finally, this endorsement will encourage you to not think the price tag is onerous. While it may feel hard to justify a bit over $40 USD for a single (old) book you can get for free, the broader audio-library is a bit under 40 hours and includes other C.S. Lewis works like The Screwtape Letters, The Problem of Pain, and other works. At roughly $1 an hour of listening and post-listen contemplations, this is a better money-to-time-entertainment that most.
And with that overly long endorsement out of the way, on to the review.
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Part 2: What Makes “Mere Christianity” Recommendable to The Motte? (And With What Caveats?)
The parts of Mere Christianity I think the Motte in general would most appreciate, regardless of their stance on Christianity, is the exceptional and self-aware use of non-technical language to communicate, the significant emphasis on virtue ethics in regards to the timeless human condition, and the appreciation of a clearly intelligent person providing a position with charity for those who would and will disagree. If Lewis was living contemporary, he would be the sort of writer that- if not a member of the Motte- would probably be the sort of writer Motte members would likely regularly rise in discussion as expanding understanding through insights.
These endorsements come with the caveats of an arguable (though deliberate) use of metaphors rather than technical language, some unquestionably anachronistic/dated views, and of course a lack of materialist proof of God. (He does engage the topic. I won’t claim you will find it convincing.)
I caution this caveat by advising against approaching this with a determination to discredit. In the Mottian sense, engage charitably. Lewis has some relevant words on how the meaning of words shifts over time and how mentality shapes perception, and he is being charitable enough towards the skeptical audience to warrant charity in turn. That said, charity with Lewis’s takes does not require Gellman amnesia of the parts you may strongly disagree with towards the parts you know less about.
On to the merits.
As both an author and a speaker, Lewis is incredibly aware- and honestly up front- about the subtle shifts that come with careless or deliberately misleading choice of words.
Lewis makes clear and distinct arguments about how semantic contexts and insinuations have changed meanings over time. He makes the distinction between ‘a good man’ and ‘a good Christian,’ of how the common understanding of various virtues and sins have changed over time, and so on. Given that he was writing in the mid-20th century from a perspective formed most by the early 20th century, the language games he raises from nearly a century ago remind us of even greater drift since. Lewis is very clearly trying to not argue by insinuation, and at many times will variously pre-emptively clarify against potential misunderstanding, or circle around to how something could be misunderstood.
Lewis also makes deliberate and effective use of metaphor rather than technical/doctrinal language. This can come to a point of feeling like overreliance, but this is part of the deliberate effort to not rely on technical terminology or language only the already familiar will understand. Part of the why Lewis makes as good use of metaphors as he does- but also why it may feel over-leveraged- is that he is consistent and clear that the metaphor is a limited tool, not a literalism or last word on any doctrinal issue. If the metaphor feels like it’s undercut by some context of the metaphor, he freely and proactively encourages you to disregard it. This is positive in the sense that Lewis is making limited arguments more carefully but can be negative if you feel he’s not committing to a specific position enough, especially on controversial topics. This is expected, and he warns against it in his preface. Engage charitably, and it works better as the tool of understanding the point he is trying to make.
The second basis of endorsement is the emphasis on virtue ethics and the human condition.
Starting with the latter, Lewis speaks from a position of intellectual, and moral, humility. He is not appealing to his own credentials, or any sense of dogmatic or moral superiority. He may believe he is right, but he is not making an argument to ‘prove you wrong.’ Agreeing with Lewis is not a precondition for engaging further with the text. He is up front with the sort of personal and moral failings he talks about. He confesses easily to his own temper when he makes a point on the shortness of others, of doubts and questions, and so on. He is never resolving a point in terms of ‘this is so because Christianity says so.’
This is because, as much as religious ethics are associated with deontological ethical systems (duty-based, often derived from God), Lewis speaks far more in terms of virtue-ethics. Under virtue ethics, a trait can be virtuous in moderation but become a flaw in excess or deficiency. A classical, more secular example is how bravery can be cowardness in shortage, but foolhardiness in excess. However, Lewis makes the point of how even virtues can be this way, where an excess of virtue can become twisted into something more, and worse, even as the person doing so feels they are all the more virtuous for this Christian virtue. Humility to the degree that one knows they are so humble can become a source of poisonous pride over those less humble and more overtly proud.
This is where Lewis begins to speak on timeless human nature in ways that we would recognize as tropes of the culture war today. He does not use the term ‘virtue signaling,’ but you will recognize it. He does not use the term ‘march through the institutions’- a march that in the American sense began in earnest after his writings- but you will recognize his points about how changes in social norms and institutions have twisted meanings and understandings to allow new preferences. He does not speak of political tribes, but you will recognize when he speaks of political self-righteousness, and how hatred of that self-righteousness in others can spawn it in oneself.
Lewis does so with the sort of meta-framing awareness and metaphors to illuminate this that would be familiar with anyone familiar and/or moved by Scott and the broader rationalist-sphere luminaries should recognize. This may not be a coincidence. For example- in Scott’s classic I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup, Scott makes a metaphor about how an Emperor gets no religious merit points for tolerating gays, transgenders, and so on when the Emperor has no issue or objection to them. Lewis makes a similarly structured, but secular-focused, metaphor on the merit of not-burning witches if one does not believe Witches pose any real harm to people. Both share similar concerns about how people approach moral principles, the intents they do so with, and the difference between a difference in principles and a difference in claimed facts. However, Lewis’s version was penned a good half century earlier. I don’t know if Scott was aware or influenced by it.
The point here is less about Lewis on the culture war, or even Christianity, and more on how Lewis approaches metaphysical structures and meta-context of organization. Lewis is writing from someone who may not have had the same words as the current audience for describing social structures, but he would recognize the discussion on social tensions, and efforts to change social norms one way or another. Some of the terms that he use may seem anachronistic of even quaint- Lewis does seem to believe in a literal entity we call the Devil/Satan as a corrupting force, as opposed to the far more rationally justifiable / observable / attributable villainous actors of the Cathedral / [Progressive/MAGA] movements / etc. Clearly, we are wiser and better informed of the context in our current era.
But more importantly Lewis- however imperfectly, and however imprecisely- has thoughts on dynamics that are often of interest on The Motte. Even if you don’t agree with him on the specifics of the conclusion, he can provide them charitably and interestingly enough to be entertaining.
On the demerits. What to say that’s not repetitive?
Lewis’s use of metaphors is a double-edged sword, to use one more. It can greatly assist with understanding a point he is trying to make. They are generally well constructed and appropriately used with limited scope. They are used in the way that good assumptions are used- clearly, purposely, but with the willingness to abandon them if they are unhelpful.
It may result in a sense of there not being enough there. The plus side of Lewis not arguing from the Bible as an ultimate authority is that it can come off as a delightfully constructed but questionably hollow sophistry. Not ‘sophistry’ in the sense of manipulation and misdirection, but rather a delightfully complicated model that builds off itself, but theory that one can doubt will survive reality, or even reflect it. Even if you find the arguments interesting, they may lack the sort of citations or tie-ins to real events and real denominations of Christianity that would normally bolster such claims.
I do believe this is to some degree unavoidable based on design constraints, as opposed to an unintended flaw of someone who didn’t think of them. Lewis is open- at least in the preface which is admittedly retrospective to the initial publishing. He was working under certain structural limitations that are reasonable to have, which can reasonably frustrate people who wish he didn’t. Lewis is not speaking about any specific denomination of Christianity, so he is not citing from any specific denomination. Lewis is avoiding the most controversial and friction-point disputes of doctrine in order to not distract from his points, and so he is not taking a position on controversial and frictional points.
But there are also points where you listen to what Lewis says, and as with any position from a century ago, it will reflect biases and views which may be worse than anachronistic. When you read or listen to these, and feel they are very clearly wrong, you may rightly wonder what else he is wrong about. This is fair, within reason.
A more benign example of this anachronism is his view on patriotism, of which a good number of people nowadays have a far more negative view then he, which is clearly a (measured) positivism. Given the selection bias for Lewis being selected to make this in the first place, this may not be surprising but may be disappointing. A more cringe-worthy view of this is his characterization of Christian marriage, including an expectation to a wife defer to the husband. I won’t defend or justify it- he tries to enough, given it is his longest chapter- but I will say I felt it was also his weakest chapter, not least because he is clearly speaking on it from the perspective as an outsider (a lifelong bachelor at that point in his life, i.e. never married), as opposed to something clearly had more personal experience with (morally imperfect human nature).
I will reassure (or disappoint) that Lewis does not drop any racial slurs or outrageous cultural prejudices in his work. He is not exactly expressing contempt for other religions or unbelievers either, like some Crusader / Conquistador / Zealot stereotype. He is not preaching the white man’s burden, the civilizing impact of European Christianity on non-Europeans, justifying imperialism, or weighing in on eugenics / geopolitics / AI. While he undoubtably had / would have had views on some of those, they are not the subject of Mere Christianity
This is a more measured point that Lewis- despite being so well measured in his language and topic material in other respects- is going to inevitably discomfort people. Some of that discomfort is the subject matter. And some of that discomfort is a result of speaking from the internalized aspects of someone of his time and place and history.
That time and place, in turn, was the tail end of the British Empire.
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Part 3: The Meta-Context of “Mere Christianity” – Why It Is What It Was When
“Mere Christianity” is a product of its author and its time, which is to say the product of both World Wars.
C.S. Lewis is most known in retrospect for his literary career. He was a contemporary- and personal friend for some time- of J.R.R. Tolkien. Between the latter’s Lord of the Rings and the former’s Narnia, both published in the 1950s, he was part of the mid-20th century Christian-influenced literary fantasy movement that shaped a fair deal of modern fantasy literature. The Christian influences of Lord of the Rings are sometimes less known than the influences of LotR on the broader fantasy genre since, or the Christian influences in Narnia. Still, Lewis could be considered one of the more successful and influential authors of the mid-20th century ground just on the ‘mutual influence on and of fellow writers’ grounds alone. Of course, Lewis did more than that and is more broadly known as a specifically Christian writer and thinker in ways that Tolkien wasn’t… even though Tolkien actually had a hand in C.S. Lewis’s conversion to Christianity.
This is because a less-known part of Lewis’s history is that he was an atheist for the first half of his life. Born in 1898 and dying in 1963, Lewis was part of the World War 1 generation. He had his 19th birthday in the trenches of the Somme Valley, albeit the year after the 1916 battle of the Somme, and in 1918 he was wounded but survived a British artillery shell that fell short and killed two his companions. This remarkably unlikely event was a traumatic and influential part of Lewis’s life, and is recognizable in elements of his later writing, particularly Screwtape Letters. It is not, however, what triggered his conversion.
Lewis converted to Christianity in 1933, 15 years after his what some might have called his ‘miraculous’ survival. In reflections- including a few allusions in Mere Christianity- he references his eventual conversion as something that was grudging and resisted. Rather than view his experience at the time as a clear act of God and the basis of conversion in a ‘no atheists in a foxhole’, Lewis spent the next decade and a half dealing with it as a self-described temperamental atheist. From his later writings on his earlier mind set, one can imagine- though he does not specifically claim- that he would have bristled at someone of faith trying to tell him that he should feel grateful or religious because he survived when two others died beside him. Lewis’s eventual conversion was despite, not on the immediate basis of, that wartime experience.
Despite the experience and the self-professed anger, this is not the same as saying Lewis was disillusioned by World War 1 per see. Or at least, not in the way some might expect. As a product of his time in various ways, one of the anachronisms that separates Lewis from a more modern speaker is his frank and even meritorious view on nationalism. Lewis was not part of the generation that became disillusioned with nationalism entirely by WW1, in the way that some people now view it as a character flaw to feel. Rather, Lewis approaches nationalism in the sense of virtue ethics, where the moderation of an aspect is the key for it to be virtuous rather than a sin of excess or deficit. Lewis remained a moderate nationalist. When WW2 began, he volunteered to join the Home Guard auxiliaries despite his age and scars. He later declined a position in the British Honors System offered by Winston Churchill, due to concerns of perception.
This context matters because it probably helps explain why C.S. Lewis was selected to speak on BBC to the British public during WW2, the radio broadcasts of which are the basis / original form of Mere Christianity.
During the second world war, the British society was well into the gradual secularization from a strongly Christian nation to what we would recognize as more common today. According to a C.S. Lewis historians on the BBC approach at the time, the BBC wartime audience was roughly 1/3rd embracing religion, 1/3rd hostile against it, and 1/3rd neutral. It faced not only the challenge of a divided nation in terms of people’s views on religion, but also the issue of having a speaker who could speak to all of them at once. When higher-ranking, more senior, and more experienced of the Clergy were brought on, they struggled to connect with the audience, not least because they spoke in more theological/doctrinal/dogmatic terms that variously did not make sense or were viewed more negatively by the audience.
This is the sort of problem that Lewis was brought in for to work through. A former and self-described irritable atheist who understood the perspective that was hostile to religious pressures. A more junior layperson not inclined to the sort of doctrinal and technical sophistication that lost the casual or uncommitted audience. But also a believer to appeal to the other believers to come together and pull through in terms they would respond to. And, of course, a nationalist enough to still volunteer to serve, despite first-hand experience with the horrors and tragedies of WW1.
A cynical perspective is that the person or committee making the selection to Lewis could have these cynical considerations for selecting Lewis for what is, in crudest forms, a propaganda role. There is no requirement, or claim, of their own belief in God one way or the other, anymore than there is a requirement that they had to like or respect Lewis to put him on the podium.
But there is also little argument that ‘their’ cynical motive, if there was a ‘they’ like that in the first place, imposed itself onto Lewis’s stated views/
There are no serious arguments I am aware of that Lewis’s views expressed in the broadcasts or Mere Christianity were false or influenced or dictated by propagandists with him as the mere mouthpiece. While there were editing changes between adaptations from audio to text, there were no major post-war retractions of major arguments. Lewis’s views in the broadcasts that became “Mere Christianity,” while useful to them, were by all accounts his own. While you certainly could poison the well by believing everything he says is mere wartime propaganda, this would be the sort of lack of charity that avoids rather than engages with the argument.
The wartime context does, however, go some way towards explaining why Mere Christianity is organized as it is.
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Part 4: The Structure of Mere Christianity
Mere Christianity is organized to be easily broken down into short periods of engagement, not something you need to- or should- do all at once.
As a consolidated book, the PDF provided earlier is a modest 108 PDF pages, with the preface- the first real words from Lewis- starting on page 6. The just-over 100 pages of content are broken down to across four books of distinct themes, each book broken into distinct chapters of narrower topics. At 34 chapters across four books, 35 if you count the preface, you are averaging less than 3 pages a chapter. ‘Average’ does a lot of work here, since there is a good deal of variability on specific chapters, but this is something that can easily be a bit of bedtime reading.
As an audiobook, Mere Christianity is around 7 hours in total at normal speed, with each chapter averaging about 12 minutes. Again, average is doing some work here, but mostly in the favor of manageability. The longest chapter, “Christian Marriage,” is 21-and-a-half minutes. The next two longest chapters, the last two of the last book and the culmination of the series, are just over 20 and 19 minutes respectively. Everything else is shorter, and so feasible for even a short 15-minute commute.
After the preface, the four books in turn are build on four general themes. These themes provide a general arc from justifying why the audience should give some consideration to what follows, characterizing Christianity as a religion, Christian behaviors, and Christian purpose of what these are building towards.
(These are not the exact terms that Lewis himself uses, but consider this the review trying to reframe / rephrase for the Motte audience.)
The following books, and their chapters, will be elaborated more in the following section. What follows is just the structural organization.
The preface serves as both establishing context and as a series of disclaimers. Lewis’s first concern is to clear misapprehensions about what the series is not, chief of which is that it is/was not to convert the listener.
Book One, Right And Wrong As A Clue To The Meaning Of The Universe, is five chapters. The purpose of this book is to establish a basis of believing in God, even if not specifically the Christian God. It engages with some of the limits of a purely materialist world view.
Book Two, What Christians Believe, is also five chapters. The purpose of this book is to characterize core / common doctrinal of Christian tradition in general, distinct from other religions. It is a book where specific Christian denominations may take issue with specific parts in the sense of ‘this is not how we’d put it,’ but concede it as a bootstrap for others to start understanding Christianity.
Book Three, Christian Behavior, is twelve chapters. The purpose of this book is to characterize more specific aspects of what Christan tradition and what advocates in terms of practical beliefs and values. This is also the book where Lewis touches the most on human nature, and in ways that’d we recognize in relation to the culture war.
Book Four, Beyond Personality: Or First Steps In The Doctrine Of The Trinity, is eleven chapters. The purpose of this book is to introduce Christian Theology, in the capital-T sense of ‘the science of God.’ This is the conclusion, and the argument about how Christianity provides a practical, practicable, and reproducible process for becoming like God. (Or- Christ. See again books two and three.)
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Part 5: The Book 1 Review
Oh dear did I really do this
This section is a summary-review of the first book of Mere Christianity. It is not exhaustive but is intended to give a sense of the opening chapters and Lewis’s framing efforts. I include this mainly to illustrate Lewis’s ability to pursue both direct arguments and meta-argument in parallel, which becomes clear by chapter five. Also, Lewis has some good line drops I wanted to call out.
This also comes with the giant disclaimer that this is all my interpretation / understanding / summary, and that if you feel I missed some significant part of Lewis’s point… okay! Omissions are already admitted, as well as reorganization for the sake of summary and context. I am also using terms and characterizations other than his own words, so if you read this and then listen to it, don't be surprised.
Additionally, and hopefully it wouldn’t need to be said, I am trying to characterize, not endorse, the arguments that follow.
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Preface
The preface serves as both establishing context and as a series of disclaimers. Lewis’s first concern is to clear misapprehensions about what the series is not, chief of which is that it is/was not to convert the listener.
This section was written after the war broadcasts and is in some respects a response to feedback Lewis received after them. In it, he elaborates his intent on how he approached this. At the same time, this is a retroactive characterization the initial listeners/readers wouldn’t have had. It is useful to know this going in for your first time, but recognize that if you read this, you won’t have the same first impression someone else might have. (Then again- you won’t be listening during a German bombing campaign.)
Lewis makes clear that he is not taking a position on any specific denomination of Christianity, or any specific political topic. He views it as distracting from the point of the book but asserts it should not be interpreted as any position, for or against, any other position. Nor should it be viewed as omitting because he views the subject as too important, or not important enough.
Lewis spends a surprising number of words on how words lose value due to semantic drift. He specifically talks about how ‘good person’ and ‘good Christian’ are not the same thing, and how the conflation makes some words lose value in the sense that saying someone is not a good Christian can be perceived as a character attack of saying they are not a good person. This is a clear-minded distinction between a theological sense and a moral sense of ‘good,’ and his analogy to the transition of the meaning ‘gentlemen’ overlaps with the concept we’d call the euphemism treadmill.
Lewis makes a metaphor of Christianity to a house with many rooms but a shared hall. He places his own work- the Mere Christianity- as the invitation for people to come into the common all hall, but not to live there. He has Words (gentle but cautionary) on people who are undecided on which room they enter for reasons of personal taste rather than Truth.
Quote of the Chapter:
It is very difficult so to dissent from them that you will not appear to them a cad as well as a heretic.
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Book One: Right And Wrong As A Clue To The Meaning Of The Universe
This was summarized earlier as-
Book One, Right And Wrong As A Clue To The Meaning Of The Universe, is five chapters. The purpose of this book is to establish a basis of believing in God, even if not specifically the Christian God. It engages with some of the limits of a purely materialist world view.
This book is not an argument on materialist grounds god exists. It is instead a series of arguments that collectively challenge the premise of a purely material view of the universe and people. It works on grounds that may or may not be compelling for abandoning the pure-materialist view in the first place, but more strongly challenges any attempt at compromise.
In other words, it is structured as an anti-motte and bailey argument in which it attempts to cut off a retreat to a potential motte.
Structurally, it treats pure-materialistic world views as the advantageous/expansive bailey which serves to discredit / ignore God. It starts by establishing the existence of a “Moral Law” that people recognize / appeal to on non-materialist grounds. It attempts to defend this position against materialist-based counterarguments of evolution or social convention. From there, it explores the implications of non-materialist law in the material universe that exists but does not obey the normal conventions of material laws of nature. It concludes by cutting off a retreat to syncretism- of a hybrid materialist-spiritualist world view that might be a nominal motte-compromise of ‘well, some of what you say may be true.’ This retreat is a… not trap, but rather the basis of a renewed argument thrust. If Moral Law is true and a part of the universe from a non-materialist source, it reveals implications that Humans can only respond to.
If you want to know how to defend your (dis)belief against this line of argument, the defense works by not conceding the Moral Law premise in the first place. This will most likely to be done by adapting the materialist counter-arguments on grounds of evolution (what he discusses in terms of a biological evolved herd instinct) and combining it with social evolution to argue that societies evolve values, rather than the values having a non-materialist source.
Or this is all what I would say… if there was not a trick revealed in chapter five, making all the above points about ‘winning’ the argument meaningless.
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Chapter One: The Law of Human Nature
This chapter advances a claim that humans have an intrinsic sense of right or wrong that- even if they claim it doesn’t matter when it comes to them- they recognize others of violating instantly. This knowledge is in turn broadly applicable across time and cultures, with variations in morality being differences of emphasis, not type. Even when people disagree about whom is in the wrong, they all broadly have a sub-strata mutual agreement about the general nature of right and wrong. The differences are in degrees (what is emphasized or not), not in kind (no society or human instinct valorizes treachery against the society).
The existence of this shared understanding is not just akin to a law of nature, but is a law of nature in an original / older sense of the term. Like other laws of nature, it applies without having to be taught. People do not have to be taught a sense that others have wronged them, any more than gravity has to taught to the object it applies to. It is in the nature of the thing, even if various specifics (what the sense focuses on) are cultural.
However, the law of nature of human morality, or what he later calls moral law, is distinct from other laws of nature. It is a law of nature that does not work purely materialist grounds. People can choose to disobey, in ways they cannot choose to disobey gravity or thermodynamics. Disobeying is a choice that is not rooted in purely materialist grounds, any more than the existence of the shared understanding of wrong that exists across time / cultures / prior agreement.
These two points- that a moral law exists as a natural law, but that people can break it unlike purely material natural laws- is the starting point for establishing a non-material premise to the universe.
Quote of the Chapter:
But the most remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him, he will be complaining "It's not fair" before you can say Jack Robinson.
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Chapter Two: Some Objections
This chapter is Lewis anticipating some arguments against the premise of the moral law.
One counterargument is that the moral law impulse is merely an evolved herd instinct, a biological impulse. Lewis does not dismiss that a herd instinct exists and does align it with things like maternal instinct. Lewis disputes that the moral law is an instinctual impulse- rather, he asserts it is the factor balancing instincts, the element that helps people know which herd instinct to suppress, and which to elevate, such as when someone is faced with persona danger to themselves, but also to another. The moral law is the judgement about which impulse to follow, not the choice of which to follow. In is the outside-context force that establishes what the ‘good zone’ of virtue ethics is so that no one herd instinct is taken to extreme, not the instinct or even decision itself.
A second counterargument is that moral law is just a social construct instilled into people by education. Lewis disputes this, in terms that can dispute a bit of contemporary post-modernism, everything is social convention.’ Part of his disputation is that the differences in the social construct disputes- what is formally educated by specific cultures- is very small between cultures and times, not very large, and thus the social construction angle is of marginal input.
The other, larger, argument is that a comparative judgement of better and thus worse moral systems has to be comparing them by some standard outside the claimed system itself. In order to say Nazi morality is wrong, despite Nazi morality saying itself was right, you have to be comparing to a more objective idea- a more ‘real’ morality. But if you embrace absolute moral relativity- not that this is the term he uses- then you have no argument to say the Nazi morality is objectively wrong. Objective moral denunciation requires an objective standard, outside of a social construct, for the social construct to be measured by. Once this concession is made, all moral systems- even those claiming to be the right one- can be tested by this outside-the-structure measure.
Quote of the Chapter:
For example, one man said to me, "Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?" But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things.
If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather, surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did. There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.
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Chapter 3: The Reality of the Law
This chapter assumes success of chapter two in defending chapter one to advance the implications of the existence of the moral law.
This chapter advances the distinction in the purely materialist natural laws, where only facts (of physics) matter, and the moral law which has both facts (how people behave), but also something else (how people ought to behave). This non-purely materialist distinction is furthered by how people know how they ‘ought’ to behave even if they don’t.
Similarly, this ‘fact of what is’ and ‘fact of how ought’ is advanced by the difference in (not necessarily taught) moral instinct when the same action is done to you under different contexts, or even if the violation helps you. The person who accidentally trips you is a greater offense than the person who tried but failed to deliberately trip you despite the greater material impact. Additionally, the traitor who betrays the enemy in your favor is still triggering a moral instinct of wrongness, despite their utility. Moral law defies pure materialist predictors of instinctually endorsing material gains or condemning material costs.
Lewis also disputes that consequentialism alone is sufficient to explain this moral instinct. ‘Be unselfish because it is good for society’ begs the question of why ‘good for the society’ is not wrong, but is circular. The ‘why’ of a duty to be unselfish- the classic deontological question of ‘duty to whom?’- must come from outside to break the circular reasoning. This outside is the law of nature- the nature of the thing of what ‘ought’ to be, which is neither constructed by or even necessarily taught to humans, but which appears across time and cultures and social constructors.
Quote of the Chapter
Consequently, this Rule of Right and Wrong, or Law of Human Nature, or whatever you call it, must somehow or other be a real thing— a thing that is really there, not made up by ourselves.
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Chapter 4: What Lies Behind the Law
This chapter advances the implications of the existence of the moral law on the rest of the universe by contesting pure materialism, and even hybrid materialist-spiritualism.
After reviewing key points so far- about how a non-material rule of nature exists and acts differently by being subject to choice to disobey- Lewis does a brief review of a purely materialist world view. Action and consequence all through history. However, Lewis contests materialism by noting the limits of materialism.
One of these is that accurate scientific observations can only record what is observed at a time in place- it must infer what is not observed. We can theorize that A is a consequence of B, but Science (the objective, testable, verifiable sort) does not claim to prove to have seen B. The overreach of science to things not actually claimed by observable / replicable science is dismissed as the more pop-cultural/fanciful (what we would deem political) use of science more by people other than professional scientists than actual scientists. Science also does not assert why what was there was there in the first place, i.e. why did the big bang originate into the universe. Science cannot observe it. If there was some actor responsible, it would still have to be inferred, or else inform the observer in another way.
Lewis makes an additional, longer, and harder to summarize series of arguments about the nature of observing the creation of universe from within the universe. This includes the difficulty of observing an outside-universe from within the boundaries of the universe. He uses the analogy of observing an architect from within the architecture he built. He concludes to a point that one of the ways to reason there is another actor is if it interacts and acts upon you in distinct ways. Say by establishing a force of nature that acts upon humans in way distinct from other, purely materialistic, forces of nature.
This ‘force’ is not claimed to be the God of Christian mythology, specifically. This is the ‘a god,’ not ‘the god’ stage of the argument. It is, however, as close to a mind as any other metaphor Lewis will use, because it seems interested in both establishing a non-materialist sense of right, and making people feel a sense of wrong.
Lewis then ends by promising you that you’ve heard to much about a nice and pleasant God for too long, and that you should be uneasy about what he’ll say in his next issue, helpfully titled “We Have Cause To Be Uneasy.”
*The chapter then breaks for a post-script subject on the merits, or weakness, of trying to synthesis pure materialism against pure religion. Lewis raises what was presumably more popular at the time, variously called creative evolution / life force philosophy. These entertain a spiritual origin to the universe to cover the gaps of materialism, but without the deliberate presence, purpose, or requirements of God in the religious sense. Lewis is not a fan.
Quote of the Chapter:
One reason why many people find Creative Evolution so attractive is that it gives one much of the emotional comfort of believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences.
When you are feeling fit and the sun is shining and you do not want to believe that the whole universe is a mere mechanical dance of atoms, it is nice to be able to think of this great mysterious Force rolling on through the centuries and carrying you on its crest. If, on the other hand, you want to do something rather shabby, the Life-Force, being only a blind force, with no morals and no mind, will never interfere with you like that troublesome God we learned about when we were children. The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen?
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Chapter 5: We Have Cause To Be Uneasy
This chapter begins with a not-quite apology to readers who feel they been tricked into a religious sermon, and that they were only listening to Lewis as long as he had something new to say. If all Lewis has is more religion, that already failed, it’d be like moving a clock back. Lewis counters this in three ways.
One is that going back the way you came is sometimes progress. Progress is going closer to where you want to be, and if you find yourself going the wrong way, progress is turning course even if that means turning back. The sooner one does, the wiser and truer they are to progress. (Yes- Lewis makes an argument that a reactionary can be progressive. Culture war of a different century.)
Second, Lewis reiterates that he is not yet arguing for the Christian God, merely a somebody or something beyond the moral law. Things can be inferred from the consideration of the moral law, since it counterbalances what can be inferred from the creation of the purely material universe. The universe may be a beautiful creation, but the material laws of nature are also pitiless and merciless to people. The moral law is the counterbalance, as the moral law creates the duty, and the discomfort, to make each other’s burdens easier (the practice of morality) in the pitiless material plane.
Second-point-five, this God described to date does not have to forgive you for your failures- and violations- of the Moral Law.
Lewis makes a distinction here between the construct he has said up to date- a creator force that dictates morality- and the Christian claim/interpretation. What Lewis is describing is the implications of a power behind the moral law, but not necessarily a personal god to have a personal relationship and- especially- forgive failure.
This is root of the implication of a moral law that is supposed to make you uneasy. If there is a force- a mind- behind the moral law, which again is a premise of a natural law that intrinsically is a part of you and that you know of, it doesn’t matter if you intellectually disagree with it or rationalize your excuses. Part of you- the natural part- is siding with this creator against yourself regardless, because that part innately agrees with the condemnation of greed/cruelty even if you’d rather it made exceptions for your own.
In this context, you are thus entering the crux of existential terror and nihilism (though Lewis doesn’t use those exact words). If there is no non-materialist moral law in the first place, for there being no creator or non-materialist purpose, then there is in turn no greater purpose to appeal or take solace in. It is moral relativism all the way down in a merciless material universe with no claim to an objective right and wrong. If, on the other hand, you do concede there is a creator who cared enough to create moral law, then you begin to concede that you are making yourself Its enemy through every failure and opposition. Facing judgement is Not Fun.
Third, this entire chain of reasoning does not exist to convince you that it is true. It exists to put you in a Christian frame of mind, so that the chapters to follow will make sense.
Lewis breaks flow, not character, to make an assertion on why people do not understand what Christianity is. (Remember the context- WW2 where 2/3rds of Brits were opposed or neutral on the topic.) People who do not think about the creation of the universe- not just how it functions in the present but before the observable parts- do not think in terms of the formation of natural laws. People who do not think in terms of natural laws may not think in terms of natural moral law. People do not think of natural moral law in turn may not think in terms of what it means if there is a creator behind that moral law. And people who are not thinking about the creator of a moral law, are probably not what it means to that creator when you choose to break it.
Lewis is not claiming that Christians think all of these things either. He is not even claiming indisputable correctness of these facts. What he is claiming, however, is that it’s hard to convince people of a need to repent if they don’t believe there was a transgression against something (moral law) or someone (the creator of said moral law) that they need to repent for.
The point does not hinge on if you are convinced by Lewis’s argument for a moral law and its creator. The point is that it will be hard to understand Christianity if you do not understand how these premises combine to form uncomfortable questions that Christianity claims to answer.
Understanding this connection is key to understanding Lewis’s portrait of Mere Christianity. It was also the sort of the purposeful combination of direct and meta-argument for illustration that convinced me to write this review.
Quote of the Chapter
Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness. It is after you have realised that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power—it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk. When you know you are sick, you will listen to the doctor.
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Conclusion
And… that’s the end of this book review, of sorts.
Going any further would not capture Lewis’s work well and my failed attempt to is a lot of time well spent but that I’m not getting back. Also, it would take too damn long. This review is already over 8,000 words. Any further and you might as well read or listen to it yourself.
Which, to be fair, is the point of this effort-review. If any of this has caught your interest, consider this your invitation to go get that audiobook. There is a lot to enjoy there, it makes good commute listening, and it doesn't demand a lot of time even as it gives a lot to think about. If you are the sort who comes to the Motte to build your understanding, Lewis is a person to build off of. Even if- or especially if- you disagree with him.
The C.S. Lewis Essential Audio Library is a bit over $40 USD on Amazon.
(Now, do I really want to try to review The Screwtape Letters...)