I Kinda Love The Fact That You Cannot Interact With The Pale King In Your Playthrough.

I kinda love the fact that you cannot interact with the Pale King in your playthrough.

You cannot get more dialogue from dream nailing him, his spirit is not there when you arrive to the end of the White Palace, and you are able to see a brief moment of his past only in two scarce occasions. Instead, you can only dethrone his withered corpse and complete Kingsoul with the half-fragment he was hiding to finally unite with your siblings and find peace in the Void.

Whatever you make up of him is entirely up to you and the storyline you choose to believe. And yet, somehow listening to the bugs that offered their stories about the kingdom, the pieces of lore tablets placed and hidden by the bugs in their territories, the lingering souls that still wander through the emptiness of Hallownest, and the corpses you can dream nail that would ask for the King, wondering why he left them to rot under the infection, almost cannot compare to the realness of seeing your sibling, the King's hand-crafted and favoured child, tragically chained and sealed away within their imperfect self, failing to fulfill the only duty they were created for: saving the kingdom. You can see them trying to fight, the great Hollow Knight, stabbing themselves to try to stop the infection from making them hostile and attacking you. The imperfect Vessel, ruined by the attachment to a King, a father, that only had one thing in mind: no cost too great.

But after all, the infection won over. And the Pale King has no more say in the story.

He cannot try to redeem himself, he cannot try to explain his course of action, what beliefs did he have that would justify the cost of it all. Instead, we just see his corpse cowardly hidden in an unreachable place and the rotting fruits of his mistakes: a kingdom that demonstrates that every single thing that could have gone wrong actually went wrong. And I am so, so obsessed with it.